Posted by Adam Quinan on January 07, 2001 at 14:58:08 from 24.112.158.236:
In Reply to: Re: Coot Club and other AR studies - a plea posted by Peter Roche on January 07, 2001 at 10:41:34:
I don't know what the Peters are getting so upset about. Ed Kiser found some aspects of the books that were interesting or puzzling and brought them to our attention. Ransome's selection of words could be interesting, why "around" rather than "round", probably it is no more than the way he spoke himself, not some deep Ransomite consideration about the difference between the two words. We would probably never have known that fact about Ransome without Ed's efforts. May be most wouldn't care but perhaps someone does. There is no harm done.
I don't think that the great TARS schism is going to be conjured up out of a dispute whether a typo in an American edition really reflects Ransome's intent. Even the so-called Wicked Bible that left one of the "nots" out of one of the Ten Commandments didn't cause Christianity to splinter any further!
I probably wouldn't have raised most of the obvious typos myself, but I would be interested to know whether an apparent typo was just that or was a real reflection of how Ransome wrote dialect.
For those who think that the Swallows and Amazons have been mined out of useful or interesting material, I don't have the time or the abilities to pursue literary and historical research but I am sure their is a wealth of good copper to be dug up about Ransome's journalistic career and fishing writing. Or is Ransome only to be remembered as a writer of much loved stories for children?