Abstract
In discussion of genre there is great potential for disagreement and camping and tramping fiction is no exception to this. This makes the idea of genre as a ‘fuzzy set’ particularly useful, because it is an accommodating (and forgiving) way of approaching the subject. Rather than being focused on rigid boundaries, a generic fuzzy set is based around a core or centre; the further a book moves away from that centre, the fewer generic features it will share. For M. H. Abram, genre refers to a type of generic literary family that is bound by a set of shared or familial resemblances. In practice, books (or members) share some but not all of these family resemblances, marking them out as either close or distant generic relatives. Arthur Ransome’s ‘Swallows and Amazons’ novels (1930–47) are the core or the head, of the generic family that is camping and tramping fiction.1
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Notes
On the usefulness of fuzzy sets, see Brian Attebery Strategies of Fantasy (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 12–13;
M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms (1941; Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1993), p. 77.
Geoffrey Trease, Tales Out of School, 2nd edn (1949; London: Heinemann Educational, 1964), p. 141, and
Frank Eyre, 20th Century Children’s Books (London: The British Council, 1952), p. 56. These are by no means the only writers to attribute this position to Arthur Ransome.
See also Sheila G. Ray, Children’s Fiction. A Handbook for Librarians (1970; Leicester: Brockhampton Press, 1972), p. 57.
Peter Hunt, Approaching Arthur Ransome (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), p. 13.
Roger Lancelyn Green, Tellers of Tales. Children’s Books and Their Authors from 1800 to 1964 (1946; London: Edmund Ward, 1965), p. 262.
Brian Doyle, The Who’s Who of Children’s Literature (London: Hugh Evelyn, 1968), p. 229.
Marcus Crouch, Treasure Seekers and Borrowers (1962; London: The Library Association, 1963), p. 72.
See Malcolm Saville, The Secret of the Gorge (London: George Newnes, 1958), Lone Pine London (London: George Newnes, 1957), The Elusive Grasshopper (London: George Newnes, 1951), Mystery Mine (London: George Newnes, 1959) and The Gay Dolphin Adventure (London: George Newnes, 1943). Victor Watson demonstrates how Saville develops the sexual relationships of his older protagonists in his analysis of the editing of Saville’s books for publication in paperback.
See Victor Watson, ‘Malcolm Saville: The Price Paid’, in Reading Series Fiction: From Arthur Ransome to Gene Kemp (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 101–16.
See Saville, The Secret of the Gorge, Wings over Witchend (London: George Newnes, 1956) and Saucers over the Moon, illus. by Bertram Prance (London: George Newnes, 1955).
Mary Cadogan and Patricia Craig, You’re a Brick, Angela. A New Look at Girl’s Fiction from 1839–1975 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1976), p. 351.
Humphrey Carpenter and Mari Pritchard, The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature (Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 7.
Doyle, The Who’s Who of Children’s Literature, p. 146. According to Marcus Crouch, Hogg was concerned with the accuracy of these novels and as a result took steps such as testing them himsell ‘by walking and cycling over the ground’ that he describes. See, Crouch, Treasure Seekers and Borrowers, p. 72. Arthur Ransome also tested the accuracy of We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea (1937) by sailing across the North Sea to Holland. Arthur Ransome, ‘A Letter to the Editor’, The Junior Bookshelf, 1.4 (1937), 4.
See, Sarah Spooner, ‘Landscapes: “Going Foreign” in Arthur Ransome’s Peter Duck’, in Children’s Literature, New Approaches, ed. by Karin Lesnik-Oberstein (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2004), pp. 206–28.
See Brian Morris, ‘Ernest Thompson Seton and the Origins of the Woodcraft Movement’, Journal of Contemporary History, 5.2 (1970), 183–94.
On the development of the rural tradition, see W. J. Keith, The Rural Tradition. A Study of the Non-Fiction Prose Writers of the English Countryside (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1974). Raymond Williams notes that there is a history of such moments of crises, when the countryside has appeared to be undergoing changes that are viewed as threatening a Golden Age or idyll. See ‘A Problem of Perspective’, in Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973; repr., London: The Hogarth Press, 1993), pp. 9–12.
G. Bramwell Evens, Out with Romany. Adventures with Birds and Animals (London: University of London Press, 1937), p. 45;
G. Bramwell Evens, Out with Romany Again (London: University of London Press, 1938), p. 41.
F. Fraser Darling, The Seasons and the Farmer. A Book for Children, illus. by C. F. Tunnicliffe (Cambridge University Press, 1939), note, unpaginated.
Jan Marsh, Back to the Land. The Pastoral Impulse in Victorian England from 1880 to 1914 (London: Quarter Books, 1982), p. 112.
Monica Edwards, Black Hunting Whip (Collins, 1950; repr., Bath: Girls Gone By, 2011), p. 78.
Marjorie Lloyd, The Farm at Mallerstang, illus. by Astrid Walford (London: Methuen, 1956), p. 27.
Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Long Week-End. A Social History of Great Britain 1918–1939 (London: Faber and Faber, 1950), p. 276.
Raphael Samuel, ‘Country Visiting: A Memoir’, in Island Stories. Unravelling Britain. Theatres of Memory Volume II, ed. by Alison Light (London: Verso, 1998), pp. 132–52 (133).
It is well known that Hull and Whitlock wrote their novel while still at school, sending their manuscript to Arthur Ransome, who championed their work with his own publisher, Jonathan Cape. For a full account of this see Ransome’s own introduction to the novel. Katherine Hull and Pamela Whitlock, The Tar Distant Oxus, illus. by Pamela Whitlock (1937; Edinburgh: Fidra, 2008), pp. i–x.
Monica Edwards, No Mistaking Corker, illus. by Anne Bullen (1947; London: May Fair Books, 1965), pp. 18, 11, 18.
In the main, criticism has largely focused on the insistence that the Lockett children always encounter adventures, which for some critics, such as Marcus Crouch, led to rather ‘tiresome’ and ‘manufactured’ plots. See Marcus Crouch, The Nesbit Tradition. The Children’s Novel 1945–1970 (London: Ernest Benn, 1972), p. 144. Owen Dudley Edwards finds no merit in Atkinson’s work whatsoever and argues that her books are ‘openly anti-lower class’.
See Owen Dudley Edwards, British Children’s Fiction in the Second World War (Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 471.
M. E. Atkinson, The Compass Points North (London: The Bodley Head, 1938), p. 28.
Henry Durant, The Problem of Leisure (London: Routledge, 1938), p. 204.
On anti-militarism and children’s culture post-1918, see A Graves and A Hodge, The Long Week-End, p. 269. On the link between scouting and militarism, see John Springhall, Youth, Empire and Society. British Youth Movements, 1883–1940 (London: Croom Helm, 1977), p. 64.
Watson, Reading Series Fiction, p. 19. On the subject of play and the rehearsal of adult roles, see Margaret Lowenfeld, Play in Childhood (London: Victor Gollancz, 1965), p. 208.
W. C. Berwick Sayers, ‘Swallows and Amazons For Ever!’, The Junior Bookshelf, 1.4 (1937), 6–8 (7).
Carol Forrest, Caravan School (London: Arthur Pearson, 1946), p. 71.
Ross McKibbin makes this distinction between traditional and non-traditional working classes, the latter of which, he argues, were somewhat resented by the former. See Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures. England 1918–1951 (Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 92.
Andrew Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh: Pearson Education, 2005), p. 18.
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© 2014 Hazel Sheeky Bird
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Bird, H.S. (2014). A Very Fuzzy Set-Defining Camping and Tramping Fiction. In: Class, Leisure and National Identity in British Children’s Literature, 1918–1950. Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137407436_2
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