Re: Imaginary friends


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Posted by Peter H on December 20, 2004 at 14:29:01 from 81.131.138.211 user Peter_H.

In Reply to: Re: Imaginary friends posted by RichardG on December 20, 2004 at 12:14:44:

After the 'Their Own Story' failure, I've always felt that AR made a good move by latching Peter Duck onto the hyper-imaginative (and hyper-sensitive) Titty. It helps to make her one of AR’s most interesting and unstereotyped characters – ‘Dolls meant nothing to Titty’. Peter Duck was ‘not taken very seriously by the others’, but it is striking how John, in Chapter XII of Swallowdale, good-humouredly allows Titty to base her behaviour on her irrational belief in Peter Duck, whereas Susan just says that ‘Peter Duck’s only in a story’. At one point, I feel that John is almost the voice of AR himself:

Peter Duck was one of those things on which it was not safe to disagree with Titty. Anyhow, for John, he was very nearly real. He had become very real indeed in the story they had made up in the Christmas holidays.

Note that mention of ‘not safe to disagree with Titty’ – a strong hint surely of tantrums of some sort – well off-stage, and not included in the books. ‘Not safe’ reminds me of ‘It might have been a very near thing’ in SA. Phew! Disaster averted. There is quiet humour here, and it is surely why Ransome’s books also appeal so much to adults.

(Is Andy B really a sociologist? If so, that might explain a few things. I reckon it’s ‘not safe to disagree’ with a sociologist.)



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