If Enid had lived longer

[pbsausie]

I was wondering - what if Enid hadnt had dementia and had lived to her 80s or 90s - how would her writing have been influenced by the Swinging Sixties and the Polyester Seventies?

[Dick Kirrin]

Considering that she was a very sick woman by the time the swinging sixties did put out their first feelers, I don't think she would have understood it.
Adding in her slight wariness of "new American ways", I can actually hear Julian or Fatty or Roger making disapproving comments about people wearing jeans or long hair and listening to rock and roll.
About the 70s, as there was quite a lot of British influence, she might perhaps have liked them. On the other hand, they were too shrill for a decent elderly lady.

Cheers

Dick Kirrin

[pete9012S]

I can actually hear Julian or Fatty or Roger making disapproving comments about people wearing jeans or long hair and listening to rock and roll.


Cheers

Dick Kirrin

Yes, very true Dick,I suspect Enid would have woven references in to all these changes much like Agatha Christie went on to do until she herself passed away in 1976.

I remember when I was very young finding out from one of the books I had just read that Enid died in 1968 and feeling really really sad..

But,although I love Enid and her work so much,a little part of me suspects that her characters and the series she created like the Famous Five,Fatty & co etc etc were actually an anachronism even when they were first issued......

Although I dont like to admit it,and lets face it I wasn't alive then to confirm or deny it,Enids best escapist work reminds me of Inspector Morse,or Midsomer Murders,(for example),portrayals of places people and events you know arent strictly representative of the way things really are,but enjoyable and watchable for all that none the less!

Really I suppose,Enid Blyton,Agatha Christie,Conan Doyle,GK Chesterton,etc all captured the zeitgeist of their respective generations in much the same as J K Rowling and WV Awdry have today.......

Regards
Pete

[sixret]

And yet,to me,I always thought that British always live like the characters in Midsomer Murders at least to British folks who live in the village.But now I know it is far from the reality.

All the best authors;Agatha Christie,GK Chesterton,Conan Doyle and many more.

[Enikyoga]

I think Enid Blyton, though not often noted, changed to changing circumstances. For instance, the tone in her 1930s edition of "The Little Black Doll" was considered to have been overtly racist. However, when she re-published the same story in A Story Party At Green Hedges (which was first published in 1949), the tone had changed and Enid was sounding more like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., i.e. when the golly argues that Sambo whose original colour has been washed after fleeing the bigoted, but now remorseful dolls, that he can be any colour he wants and it wouldn't matter, which in a way sounds a little bit like Dr. Martin Luther King's speech in which he contended that people not be judged by their skin but the content of their character. Probably, Dr. Martin King (both he and Enid Blyton would incidentally die the same year, 1968) never knew Enid Blyton, otherwise, we would contend that he was inspired by the revised "The Little Black Doll' in A story party At Green Hedges, but nonetheless, the coincidence of the two narratives is very deafening. Also according to David Rudd's Enid Blyton and The Mystery of children's literature, in one footnote/endnote, we are told that Enid was planning on removing the golliwogs from most of the Noddy books, but probably was interrupted by her illness. I have run out of time. I will post more later. I am going to order via Inter-library loan E.B's Jolly Book, as pointed out by Anita. Probably, that is how I can get the original "The Little Black Doll: story. Let me hope that it can be obtained this end of the world.
Stephen Isabirye

[Yak]

I would be fascinated to see a more in depth source for that latter sentence.

[Anita Bensoussane]

I would be fascinated to see a more in depth source for that latter sentence.

You mean "I will post more later"?!

There is more about the supposed "writing out" of the golliwogs in the following thread - it seems that Enid Blyton probably didn't have a hand in it:

http://www.enidblytonsociety.co.uk/foru ... ogs#p35591" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

...Enid was sounding more like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., i.e. when the golly argues that Sambo whose original colour has been washed after fleeing the bigoted, but now remorseful dolls, that he can be any colour he wants and it wouldn't matter, which in a way sounds a little bit like Dr. Martin Luther King's speech in which he contended that people not be judged by their skin but the content of their character. Probably, Dr. Martin King (both he and Enid Blyton would incidentally die the same year, 1968) never knew Enid Blyton, otherwise, we would contend that he was inspired by the revised "The Little Black Doll' in A story party At Green Hedges, but nonetheless, the coincidence of the two narratives is very deafening.

I honestly wouldn't contend anything of the sort. That character is more important than colour of skin is a conclusion that any number of people could have come to quite independently!

[Tony Summerfield]

I think Enid Blyton, though not often noted, changed to changing circumstances. For instance, the tone in her 1930s edition of "The Little Black Doll" was considered to have been overtly racist. However, when she re-published the same story in A Story Party At Green Hedges (which was first published in 1949), the tone had changed and Enid was sounding more like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., i.e. when the golly argues that Sambo whose original colour has been washed after fleeing the bigoted, but now remorseful dolls, that he can be any colour he wants and it wouldn't matter, which in a way sounds a little bit like Dr. Martin Luther King's speech in which he contended that people not be judged by their skin but the content of their character. Probably, Dr. Martin King (both he and Enid Blyton would incidentally die the same year, 1968) never knew Enid Blyton, otherwise, we would contend that he was inspired by the revised "The Little Black Doll' in A story party At Green Hedges, but nonetheless, the coincidence of the two narratives is very deafening.
Stephen Isabirye

I'm sorry Stephen, but this is a load of rubbish. Before you put forward your theories you should check your facts more carefully. For a start 'The Little Black Doll' was written in 1943, not the 1930s, and it appeared in Sunny Stories No. 308. When it was published in A Story Party at Green Hedges, six years later, it wasn't revised in any way. I have just read both versions and they are the same word for word, apart from a slight alteration to the first paragraph, which was done to fit the style of the book, ie Enid Blyton reading a story aloud to a group of children.

[Anita Bensoussane]

Stephen appears to be confusing two different stories about "little black dolls." One was published in Sunny Stories in 1937 and collected in EB's Jolly Story Book in 1944. The other was published in Sunny Stories in 1943 and collected in A Story Party at Green Hedges (unchanged, as Tony points out) in 1949. In the earlier story, a black doll named Sambo is not liked by the other toys in the nursery but, after his blackness is washed off in the rain, leaving him with a pink face, the toys accept him. In the later story, a black doll also named Sambo is not liked by the other toys in the nursery (they tell him that they like golliwogs because they're supposed to be black and they look nice like that, but that dolls aren't supposed to be black!) He too goes out in the rain and his blackness is washed off but this time the toys feel sorry, saying that they want "Black Sambo" back again. The golliwog restores Sambo to his original colour by inking his face. In his book Enid Blyton and the Mystery of Children's Literature, David Rudd points out that, in such stories, "the blackness is usually incidental." In some stories white dolls are rejected, e.g. the sailor doll and fairy doll in Tales of Toyland, and in other stories toys are rejected for other reasons, e.g. because they lack a tail.

[Enikyoga]

Tony and Anita,
Many thanks for clarifying those points about the two "The Black Doll" stories. I had been reacting to Bob Dixon's segment in his book, Catching Them Young (v.1): Sex, Race and Class in Children's Fiction (1977), who like Anita, had read the 1937 version of "The Black Doll" that I now understand was published in Enid Blyton's Sunny Stories magazine. I had tried to obtain it via inter-library loan but I was unsuccessful at obtaining it (since I guess hardly any institution here in America carries the magaine). So I had to rely on Bob Dixon's extraction of that story in his book. What I was doing was refuting Bob Dixon's assertion that the 1943/1949 version of The Little Black Doll was deliberately doctored by Enid Blyton's later publishers of A Story Party At Green Hedges (that presumably was published either in 1972 or 1976) but that it was Enid Blyton that had actually written that story since I had read the 1949 [1956 imprint] version of the book, that was written while Enid Blyton was still very much alive, rather than the suggestion that is had been doctored by the "new" version of A Story party At Green Hedges that was published after Enid Blyton's death. So my argument was that if the 1937 version of "The Little Black Doll" was watered down because of what appeared to be some racial insensitivities in it, according to Bob Dixon (as well as a letter writer that wrote a published letter to either The Guardian or some other prominent newspaper in 1984, under title, "Bejabers.....," I will look up the whole title when I get time in my lengthy bibliography) in the 1943/1949, it was done by Enid Blyton, herself, while she was still alive, rahter than a posthumous publisher, an aspect that in itself per se should be treated as very positive on Enid's part. In the 1937 version, according to an extract of the story in Bob Dixon's book, the black doll is told or is wished to turn into another color, an aspect that is missing in the 1943/1949 version, which may demonstartate Enid Blyton's positive gradual evolution in her ideas on race (as well as gender, as I was to discover reading the 21 Famous Five books). I am also going to try to inter-library-loan E.B's Jolly Story Book (thanks a million for pointing out this book, Anita). Perhaps that is how I can get the original version of the 1937 "The Black Doll" in this place. I hope I am successful.
Stephen I.

[Redrachel76]

I originally thought that Six Cousins at Mistletoe Farm and especially "Six Cousins Again" were a 1960's conservative critism against hippies.
I'm talking about the "Benedict" character who is found to be baddie and is described in the book as wearing sandals and long hair ....and Cyril's friends at school being portrayed in a negative light because they wear sandals and have long hair and like poetry. - like 60's beatniks I assumed when I first read it.

I remember thinking then that it had been written in the 60's and that Enid Blyton was having a go at hippies.
This was before I knew that Enid Blyton had died so early and that the books was written in the late 1940's and 1950.

The two "Six Cousins" books are the sort of thing Enid Blyton would have written if she had lived and carried on writing into the late sixties - I believe.
It's a bit weird those 2 books. It's like they were written ahead of their time.

[Tony Summerfield]

Stephen, you seem to be missing the point here of what Anita said. Enid wrote two stories with the title 'The Little Black Doll', but they were completely different stories, the second one is not simply a watered down version of the first. I have read both stories in their original Sunny Stories versions and they were not changed in any way when they were put into books. The versions are identical word for word.

As such a prolific writer of short stories, inevitably Enid did repeat titles on a number of occasions, but the actual stories were always completely different. I appreciate that it is difficult for you living in America to get hold of some of this original material, but I also think it is foolish to put something into a book unless you are absolutely certain of your facts. If you are offering your opinion that is one thing, and though others might disagree with you it is always open to debate. If however you state something as fact when it is definitely wrong then that is another matter altogether.

[Moonraker]

If you are offering your opinion that is one thing, and though others might disagree with you it is always open to debate. If however you state something as fact when it is definitely wrong then that is another matter altogether.

That is what concerns me about your book, Stephen. Most of your wildest theories, although pretty absurd, are nonetheless held in your opinion. Talking about Professor Hayley, on eb.net, show a lack of preparation or even knowledge of Enid's characters. I still find it difficult to understand why you didn't send a proof to Tony and/or Anita. If I had written a book concerning Enid Blyton, I would definitely want the fact checked by an authority on the subject.

It is similar to speculating that the lands at the top of the Faraway Tree are in fact Heaven - quite another to talk of one of the apostles being the Frying Pan Man.

[Ming]

It is similar to speculating that the lands at the top of the Faraway Tree are in fact Heaven - quite another to talk of one of the apostles being the Frying Pan Man.

The Saucepan Man!

Goodness, that is a wonderful theory. The land of the Polar bears (forgot what it was called) must have been the Faraway Tree-equivalent of Hell!

[Tony Summerfield]

Nigel was trying to make the point of getting facts wrong when he put 'Frying Pan' Man, Ming!!