Posted by Duncan on April 11, 2002 at 14:34:04 from 205.188.197.43:
In Reply to: Re: Casual Elitism posted by alan truelove on April 11, 2002 at 02:37:57:
Oh come on!
I just can't agree with that! It was shocking to our heroes how easily Daisy could swith off her savage nature and make polite conversation on her parents' private yacht - although they managed it themselves, they never take such troubles with 'Friendly Natives' at other times in the books - Nancy is the very same Nancy with the Swallows as with her mother (and their cook, who incidentally is considered by all except the Great Aunt to be a suitable guardian, and who is spoken to in exactly the same terms and tone as any other adult character; being a Cook is her job in the same way being a doctor or a postman are other jobs in the semi-mythological rural society presented - she is The Amazons do not appear to go to boarding school - although I imagine they do go to the sort of private day-school to which you referred. But nobody is arguing that the characters are not middle class; nobody is arguing that they are self-denying, trail-blazing egalitarians... the question was about elitism, not about whether most of the main characters in the SA books are well off - they clearly are. I totally disagree that AR's heart was not in the 'working-class' characters (the closest to an urban working-class character is Bill, but his firm roots in sailing make even him unusual in this category). The D's are urban characters, but as children of a professor are middle-class (I would guess part fee-paying grammar school, but there's no way of knowing!). The Swallows are the only definite boarding school pupils and the combination of AR having been to boarding school along with the fact that children of high-ranking military officers (who move around a lot) have often been such, much more recently than the 20s and 30s and not just in the UK, ought to have much to do with that. 'Casual Elitism' would be present if working-class or lower class characters were depicted in a patronising manner or if they always performed a passive role in the plots - quite the reverse is the case. There are middle class characters who are no more than cyphers (the Missionaries in SW, for instance)while Peter Duck, Bill, Cook, the Billies, the Death and Glories, Jackie, Mary Swainson (and her woodman), etc, etc. all play important roles. What class is the Masterdon? It's never clear and the very fact that it's never clear suggests that while AR's native society is not egalitarian (although it is far more just than one suspects AR believed the real native world to be) the children's world, that imaginary, romantic world that is 'real life', is a 'classless' society (or relatively so). It does not have the occasional laboured worthiness of the similar type of society that E. Nesbit tried to conjure (largely because, for Ransome, class struggle is largely kept out of the native world as well) but it is in a similar tradition and is rooted in a similar polity. BS is the most interesting book on class, probably (although, in some ways, PP is the most interesting on labour). I'm not a fan of over-analysing the books, and I'm not suggesting here that AR wrote-in socialistic subtexts, or anything of that nature; I'm merely suggesting that AR's own world-view and instincts advise that of his characters and gently nudge his plots in certain directions. One might almost consider it 'casual anti-elitism'!! Duncan