Posted by Adam Quinan on February 10, 2012 at 02:31:45 user Adam.
In Reply to: Re: The sources for "Peter Duck" posted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on February 09, 2012 at 16:47:15:
Andrew Craig-Bennett wrote: It seems to me axiomatic that parents do not buy expensive childrens' books by writers who are not well known if the premise of the story is wildly eccentric or improbable, and Ransome wanted, and needed, to sell.
Interesting axiom, but not borne out in my life.
Who would buy an expensive book by an unknown author about a boy who finds he is a wizard and goes off to boarding school, not something that happens much in my neck of the woods.
Or to bring it back closer to AR's time, a book about a family of six inch tall people living behind the skirting boards (The Borrowers). Or a family who wander through a wardrobe to find a world perpetually in winter (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe).
In fact Peter Duck is is in quite familiar territory for children's authors. I never thought about it being too fantastic and not real enough when I read it and I doubt that many parents did. After allAR's realism "brand" was not really established at the time with it being only his third book.