Posted by davidm on June 24, 2007 at 12:07:24 from 62.194.15.45 user davidm.
In Reply to: What would Susan's story be? posted by Pam Adams on June 20, 2007 at 22:47:41:
Didn't Christina Hardyment make a point in Captain Flint's Trunk about Susan being a necessary pseudo-adult presence to allow a set of children (ages 7 to 12?) to camp alone, even in the liberated 30's?
As well as defining each moment of glory per character per book, it might be interesting to measure the amount of text, per book that they appear in, that AR writes from inside the heads of each character. From memory, therefore impressionistic, my ranking would be:
John,
Titty,
Dorothea,
Dick,
Tom,
Roger,
Younger coots (who appear to me to have a sort of collective character),
Bill (in PD)
Peter Duck,
Mastadon,
Nancy (an anomaly, because she dominates all her books in other ways),
Iain,
Susan.
Never: Peggy, Daisy (but she is very Nancy-like), Dum, Dee, Port, Starboard, all adults except Peter Duck.
I am not sure that this is an entirely fair ranking, because Nancy and Daisy have strong personalities which dominate their parts of the books, without AR writing from inside their heads. Also Port and Starboard have a large part of their one book just to themselves. Even so, this leaves Susan and Peggy as relatively thin characters, considering the amount of books that they appear in.
Has anybody analyzed this more formally?