Posted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on October 26, 2005 at 12:21:00 from 213.38.124.194 user ACB.
In Reply to: Bob Blackett posted by Fred Boynton on October 22, 2005 at 15:18:44:
I think that AR was writing for a generation of children amongst whom many had not known a father, save as a sepia photograph on the mantel of a man in uniform.
His readership were unusually familiar with dead fathers - every child would, at the least, have had friends who were fatherless, even if their own fathers had returned, or had been unable to join up.
The posthumous child of a man killed on the Somme, for example, would have been at just the age to read the first edition of SA when it was published.
By the date of CC, this was no longer the case.