Enid Blyton and her readers

Amy Rosenberg writes in the Nation about Enid Blyton and generations of readers in post-colonial societies that read her books. I remember growing up reading Noddy and then moving on to the Famous Five and Mallory Towers. We could not relate to some of the strange foods that the kids ate like tongue sandwiches and scones but the idea of an adventure free from adult control was empowering for our imaginations.

What that means, of course, is that the majority of the kids reading Blyton in the second half of the 20th century were not British. In fact, most of them were the children of former British subjects. Life, for many of them, was something vastly different from the life Blyton portrayed, one in which childhood was a fun, glorious, liberated, comfortable, empowered experience. In his essay The Lost Childhood, published in 1947 – the same year that Ram Advani moved to Lucknow, Partition began the end of the British Empire, and Blyton published no fewer than 21 novels – Graham Greene wrote: “In childhood, all books are books of divination, telling us about the future, and, like the fortune-teller who sees a long journey in the cards or death by water, they influence the future.” For many of Blyton’s young readers in places far away from the author’s home in the south-west corner of England, her books created a future, forging in them a passion for narrative, for written suspense, for words; shaping early ambitions and providing models; and planting the seeds for complicated literary relationships with the West.

Her books, as you probably know (unless you grew up in the United States, where Blyton remains puzzlingly obscure), typically feature groups of four or five children, often accompanied by a preternaturally smart and much-cherished pet, who find adventure and suspense, overcome obstacles, and generally have a jolly good time in ancient castles, on the Channel Islands, on ships, at boarding school, on mountaintops, by the sea. Her most popular volumes belong to series – some with as few as three books, some with as many as 33 – in which recurring characters repeatedly engage in exploits that follow a formula established in the inaugural volume. There’s the Famous Five (21 books), for example, in which four kids and a dog get together when school’s out and set about becoming entangled in a mystery – not to be confused with the Five Found-Outers (15 books), in which five kids and a dog meet up on school holidays and become entangled in a mystery.

Other series place less emphasis on suspense and more on relationships among children, such as the St Clare’s and Malory Towers books, set at girls’ boarding schools. Some feature fantastic worlds, like The Faraway Tree series, about three children who climb to the top of a tree, where they find strange lands full of wizards and fairies, goblins and trolls. All of Blyton’s books have one key element in common: their child protagonists are free from adult interference. Though mothers, fathers, aunts and uncles appear, they’re usually too bookish and distracted (fathers and uncles) or too overworked and tired (mothers and aunts) to pay much attention to what their charges are doing.

In addition, almost all of Blyton’s books share a foundation in an idealised English childhood. Though some of her protagonists experience difficulty in their lives (mild poverty, parents long dead, peevish guardians), their stories have happy endings (treasure is found and restored to its rightful owners, usually the children’s families; parents thought to have been killed in plane crashes turn out merely to have been stranded on deserted islands), and their days are filled with carefree picnics in the woods, holiday feasts, school competitions, visits from fun-loving cousins. Blyton’s children are so happy that their eyes are constantly described as “shining”. In other words, though her protagonists often find themselves in challenging, potentially dangerous situations, they generally lead safe, fulfilling, structured existences, where there’s plenty of food, a place to call home, and the general benevolence and care of grown-ups.




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Again, most of Blyton’s readers led, and lead, lives very different from the ones she portrayed. This is particularly true of her legions of readers from former British colonies. In the 1960s and 1970s – just as Blyton’s work was beginning to come under attack in Britain for its casual racism – kids across the faded empire were eagerly discovering Blyton’s superlative vision of childhood. Today, those no-longer kids are happy to testify to the pure joy that vision gave them. Dozens of blogs from India, Pakistan, Australia, the West Indies, Nigeria and elsewhere mention Blyton at great length; others are completely devoted to her legacy, including Up the Faraway Tree, a site run by an Indian woman living in Singapore, and Heather’s Blyton Pages, run by the 27-year-old administrator of a small software company in Australia. Nairaland Forum, a Nigeria-based website, maintains a running Blyton thread full of comments like: “Dame Enid Blyton was the best. I lived to read her.” A post on Aangirfan, from Pakistan, implores concerned readers to “note well that Blyton’s books do not encourage kids to overdose on heroin or commit gang rape”.

Hundreds of comments posted by international readers of these blogs confirm that Blyton’s books were a consistent source of happiness throughout her readers’ childhoods, beginning with Noddy when they were four or five years old and moving up to the Secret Seven by the time they were 12 or 13. Many, probably most, of the people attesting online to their nostalgia are in their thirties or forties; they read Blyton in the late 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s, before television arrived in their countries, and well before it became available to middle- and lower-middle-class families. Scrolling through, you can practically see their shining eyes.

Of course, stories for children have been around as long as children have, and some postcolonial countries were producing juvenile literature before Western Europe even dreamed up the printing press. In India, for example, Amir Khusro wrote verse for children in the 14th century. Later, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Rabindranath Tagore and Sukumar Ray became famous in part for the children’s stories and dramas they composed. In the mid-20th century, the Bengali author Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay wrote children’s detective novels not unlike Blyton’s. But before the 1960s, much of what was available for children was transmitted orally or published in regional tongues. Plus Blyton’s books worked their own special magic. As Rukun Advani puts it: “There is something very specifically British about Blyton’s imagination which appealed at that time to the English-colonised Indian imaginations of urban kids who had access to English books. A very partial explanation of this is political – upper-class Indian kids who had the reading habit were normally taught to look towards British culture as superior and worthy of emulation. A larger explanation is probably psychological or plainly to do with how imagination works: You tend to like what you’re deprived of in your own situation.”

thanks Amitava for the link.