Posted by Jock on August 16, 2007 at 12:57:40 from 87.105.81.146 user Jock.
In Reply to: Re: Reverse engineering the Blackett family? posted by Peter Ceresole on August 16, 2007 at 08:30:20:
Especially when you consider how class-ridden British society was at the time.
Hmm, interesting thought... . After his despatches from Russia, AR had been warned against writing any more favourable material about the Bolsheviks. I wonder whether he ever considered getting his own back in his first children's story. Did he originally conceive of the Amazons and the Beckfoot household as much closer to the Crossleys in character? This would have given us a novel where the Amazons were recognizably from a different class than the Swallows and 'the houseboat man' would have been their father not uncle. Does anything of this survive in the much revised final version? Perhaps it does? On my first reading of SA at the age of 10, I found myself hating the arrogant Nancy and her threat to the well-ordered world of the Swallows. [I am now an ardent Nancy-phile.]
In any case, the Amazons actually emerge to engage us as attractive and thoroughly modern role models, and Mrs Blackett and James Turner as the people that we would all love to have as our mother and uncle respectively. There is an interesting essay by AR here which gives one reason why he may have decided to introduce some big differences between the world inhabited by Ruth Blackett and Ruth Crossley. There is a clause about libel in agreements between authors and publishers, and when I read it carefully I did not like the look of it.
But in spite of the 'rewrite' [assuming I am right, that is] the social tension remains. But now, it's transformed into a struggle between the Swallows and Amazons combined and the GA. In SA the GA really is a monster. (Although AR softens the picture a tad by the time we finish reading PM.) The GA has retained her Victorian/Edwardian social conventions unchanged in spite of the Great War and the 'roaring 20's'.
The result is eminently satisfactory. The Amazons are much more approachable than the Crossley girls ever would have been. (Though a few Crossley traits and nearly all the Crossley 'toys' remain.) The GA is a great parody figure, who assists us in understanding much that was bad about class values in the 1930s. (Thinking of the GA I catch myself thinking in the same breath of Trollope's great creation, Mrs Proudie.)
I guess this 'extended essay' will infuriate all those who believe that the Russian revolution and it's aftermath somehow 'cleansed' AR of his political views by the time he sat down to write SA and its sequels. Tosh and balderdash.