Posted by Eric Abraham on April 10, 2002 at 13:56:46 from 199.240.138.102:
In Reply to: Re: Casual Elitism posted by Prue Eckett on April 08, 2002 at 21:50:31:
This is very interesting, all this "class" stuff. When I was reading Mr. Ransome's books, my father was a map draftsman for an oil company in Oklahoma. We lived on the "wrong" side of town - in fact, almost literally on the railroad tracks. What I wanted in literature were stories that removed me from the "reality" of everyday existence - I was reading L. Frank Baum's books, Hugh Lofting and had devoured all of Mark Twain plus other fantasy and adventure stories. At that time, since we lived on the wrong side of tracks, the kids I knew were too much into the real world for my taste. I enjoyed my fantasy world and still do. I don't think that Mr. Ransome was playing with the economic class thing as much as he was dealing with the adventures of children who were of a certain class which simply enabled them to do what they did.
Politically correct stories, I think, would be so utterly boring that they would languish on the library shelves, never to be read and eventually relegated to being sold at library uncirculated book sales and becoming props for bookshelves holding "real" books!
I think that Mr. Ransome's books would probably appeal more to children of the "lower middles" for supplying adventures which were unavailable to them. This was why the movies were so popular during the Depression and the War - they depicted the lives of the unattainables (the very wealthy) - which made these experiences attainable in fantasy - which in turn made our every day lives more bearable. We were great movie attenders when I was a child. "High Society" was just on PBS the other night - I hadn't seen it all the way through since 1956 and it was, even in the light of retrospect and knowing the background of the story, still very much a fun film!
So, yes, working class children would, in my opinion, be more attracted to these adventure stories.