Posted by Peter Ceresole on October 05, 2009 at 09:43:18 user PeterC.
In Reply to: Re: Writing in the first person posted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on October 05, 2009 at 09:26:00:
Ransome's juvenilia is dreadfully twee, which is why he suppressed it, of course, and these are the last vestiges of tweeness.
I think it was also pretty widespread, when writing for children, around the turn of the century. And those were AR's formative years. It doesn't make him at all unusual. Another author who could write in that style, and then changed it, was Kipling. Think of 'Many inventions', which is full of tweeness and which I always hated o my best beloved (although I suppose it also had a basis in the kind of stories he was telling) and the spare, action-packed 'Stalky and Co'.
I think that there was a change happening about then, coinciding with the change brought about by the first world war, the end of the Edwardian age, and AR was part of it.