Posted by Mike Dennis on May 21, 2013 at 08:25:00 user MTD.
I suspect this may have been discussed here sometime over the years.
In the past few weeks I have acquired various books about AR and children's literature, one of them is Humphrey Carpenter's Secret Gardens. It is a study of what is described as The Golden Age of children's literature at the end of the nineteenth century. In the edition I have acquired (1987) there is an epilogue - The Garden Revisited. Here he states in a discussion of AR & SA –
'...[the] work is characterised by a certain plodding predictability ... and it would be hard to make out a case for it equalling Milne and his great predecessors. It seems to be in the wake of a literary movement rather than part of it.'
Milne, of course, is A A Milne still best known for Winnie The Pooh and I wonder if the 'wake' reference is deliberate in relation to AR!
So it appears AR’s canon is dismissed in one sentence.