Posted by Duncan on April 07, 2002 at 18:23:35 from 205.188.193.44:
In Reply to: Re: Casual Elitism posted by Mike Dennis on April 07, 2002 at 16:24:38:
Hmmm... But the Death and Glories were some of his favourite characters. I'm not convinced there is a casual elitism in Swallows and Amazons - there is a far from casual notion of hierarchy and discipline (the use of rank and 'aye aye sir') but there is a rather romantic anti-elitism in ARs democratic tradition - the tradition of Morris and Ruskin - whereby a half-imaginary rural society 'works' and the lore and learning of a charcoal burner can make him wiser - in some ways - than that of an Oxbridge writer and adventurer who is naive enough to leave his houseboat unlocked. It might have been interesting to hear about an industrial working-class family thrown into the world of the Swallows and Amazons, but that would have been outside ARs experience and as such would be rendered purely fantastical. AR manages to avoid patronising or stereotyping his rural working-class characters because of his own familiarity with their lives and modes of speech, etc. Whether he could have been as successful introducing a family of dockers' children to the Walkers we don't know as he didn't attempt it, and probably quite sensibly too.
Though the books were trail-blazers in children's literature, I think you can place them partly in a Ruskinian romantic artistic tradition; realism rarely stumbles across class conflict (which, though AR was fully aware of its existence, was not really considered the business of art to deal with in that tradition) - there is at least one example of where that is not the case, however. There is just anger from the Death and Glories that it is them - and not the doctor's son - who are suspected of casting adrift visitors' boats and stealing shackles, even though they had nothing to do with the casting off of the Margoletta.
Duncan