Re: Reverse engineering the Blackett family?

Posted by Peter H on August 16, 2007 at 22:59:08 from 86.130.133.61 user Peter_H.

In Reply to: Re: Reverse engineering the Blackett family? posted by Adam Quinan on August 16, 2007 at 13:25:52:

Some librarian (or hostile reviewer) accused AR of writing for toffs. AR replied that his characters were ordinary children - sons and daughters of a naval captain, a doctor and a boatbuilder

I think this refers to a letter from AR to a Mrs Mary Fletcher in July 1943. A reviewer in 'The Spectator' had wondered whether AR's stories 'appeal to children who live entirely outside the world of nannies, cooks and private boat-houses?' Mrs Fletcher was a librarian at a girls' school and wrote in to the Spectator to say that AR's books were popular with pupils of all types and ages. AR's publishers sent him a copy of the letter.

AR wrote a letter of gratitude to Mrs Fletcher, in which he said:

'I should rather like to point out to the reviewer that it is cheaper to take lodgings in a farmhouse than to take lodgings at Blackpool, that boats are much cheaper than, for example, motor bicycles, . . . and that the children in my books are the children of naval officers, boatbuilder's workmen, doctors, farmers, teachers etc.'

AR went on to recall his experiences in Russia, where:

'Young devotees [of the Revolution] quite honestly believed that after 1917 literature must concern itself exclusively with the proletariat, and . . . must be written only by the proletariat. It was a sterile and short-lived moment . . . Within a very few years that movement became a memory and a joke, and the same thing will happen here.'

Great stuff.

(Info from Signalling from Mars, Ed Hugh Brogan, p. 303)

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