The Enid Blyton Society

As a child reading EB books (and almost nothing else except E Nesbit and a few others occasionally!) I never thought anything about the strange fact that there were dinner bells and nurseries and governesses and goloshes etc. As Anita says, these were highly enjoyable facets of the books and made them feel different and exciting. I don't think, even then, that I twigged these books were set in a different era. I just thought it was a special version of England that Enid Blyton books inhabited!

Phrases like 'gosh!' and 'I say!' and 'Do lets!@ were phrases that helped to make the books even more special. Again, I didn't realise these were 'archaic' sayings - I thought they were just what characters in books always said! When I wrote stories at school and at home, my characters always said things like 'gosh!' and 'How smashing!' I'd never heard people talking that way in real life, so presumed it was just how children always spoke in stories, and thought this was one of the 'rules' of story-writing! .

Tony Summerfield wrote: One of the questions I frequently get asked by the media is why are Blyton books still popular today (usually just asking about the Famous Five) and my answer is normally the same, because they are virtually timeless.

That and because they are good storytelling, and stimulating for children's imagination, filled as they are with sense of fun, friendship, freedom and exciting adventures.

That's awfully cute^!
I loved phrases like "Do let's!" as a kid, although I never really knew what heather was.. actually still don't, just checked and it's a purple flower? Wow, I always assumed it was like the toe toe plants.
Do Enid books still sell very well, does anyone know?

As well as being timeless - they are popular because Enid Blyton wrote with the mind of a child, and understood children from the bottom up, so to speak. She didn't need to try and see things from the children's point-of-view.

I'm pretty sure this has something to do with the stunted development of her uterus - but I don't know enough about this sort of biology to know what truth there is in that - just going by suggestions made in the Biography. Some people believe that Enid didn't develop much beyond the age of 12 when her father left and that this helped her to keep the mind of a child.

stardust wrote: Do Enid books still sell very well, does anyone know?

I don't know how well they sell, but it's enough to remain in print. They also have brand awareness, as shown by the success of the recent parody books.

stardust wrote:That's awfully cute^!
I loved phrases like "Do let's!" as a kid, although I never really knew what heather was.. actually still don't, just checked and it's a purple flower? Wow, I always assumed it was like the toe toe plants.

You from New Zealand, by any chance, Stardust? (I'm an Aussie, but living in the UK.)

I wondered what heather was too when I was little, but I figured, from descriptions in Enid's books and elsewhere, that it must be a low-growing springy-feeling kind of plant, given how often characters seem to sit or lie down on it! It's actually the most common type of heathland plant in Britain (I've just been reading the Wikipedia article on it). We have similar native plants in Australia, but we just call them "heath" rather than "heather".

I also never minded the various old-fashioned expressions and other features like servants and dinner-bells in Enid's books when I read them as a child. I knew they were set not only in another country (though I doubt I'd have been able to point to England on a map as a five- or six-year-old — I just knew it was somewhere a long way away from Australia! ), but in another time, since I knew Mum and Dad grew up reading them as well. Mum would always explain words I didn't know like "goloshes" or "mackintosh", or remind me that "that's how things were in those days" where there were insinuations that girls should be doing the housework instead of going on adventures. So none of the old-fashionedness ever really bothered me. In fact, it made the books more interesting and exciting, precisely because they were quite different from the world I knew while still having characters I could relate to.

I'm sure that's why Enid's books continue to appeal to children today, not because of the various "updates" to the text. In fact, I can't help suspecting that if they were currently in print with all the original text as Enid wrote it, they would still be just as popular with kids as always, whatever modern editors may assume!

Just to clarify my earlier statement about Armada and Puffin, I was of course referring to the early 60s when Armada first appeared and I would certainly agree that a decade or so later Puffin had really upped their game and by this time were actually publishing books that children themselves would want to buy - particularly if they had seen a book serialised on TV.

I think around a million or so EB books are still being bought new worldwide each year, which is quite a lot for a long dead author!

Tony Summerfield wrote:Just to clarify my earlier statement about Armada and Puffin, I was of course referring to the early 60s when Armada first appeared and I would certainly agree that a decade or so later Puffin had really upped their game and by this time were actually publishing books that children themselves would want to buy - particularly if they had seen a book serialised on TV.

I was going to say, hey — a heck of a lot of my childhood favourite books were Puffins, and in most cases it wasn't because anyone told me I "should" read them!!

It's interesting to read how many of us realised the stories were set in a different era, even as children. I must have been pretty darn thick, loL!! I didn't realise this at all, even though I knew my mom had read Enid Blyton stories in her childhood during the 1930's and 40's and had Sunny Stories when she was little. She knew all about Amelia Jane and the Faraway Tree and Wishing Chair etc - but I still read the books presuming they were set in the 1970's.

However, as I say, times had changed very little between the 1950's and 1970's and so it was fairly easy to assume Enid Blyton was still alive and writing books in 1978 - which I thought she was. I can remember reading in one book, aged about 10, that 'Enid died in 1968' and being quite upset about it, as I had hoped to write to her.

I read these as a child in the late 80s/very early 90s, and I don't remember thinking very much about when they were set. In that sense, I guess they worked as "timeless" for me. At that time we had no mobile phones (not even pre-smartphone ones), so it was the same as in the books. We had (primitive) computers, but we didn't have internet. So the Famous five and the Adventure kids just seemed very outdoors-oriented and independent, to be able to go on holidays on their own. The fact that there was the occasional cook... well, I did not think much about it, to be honest. It's not like the cook played a big role in the adventures.

Now it's much more blatant that the books are set in the past, because the absence of smartphones is very noticeable.

Courtenay wrote:

stardust wrote:That's awfully cute^!
I loved phrases like "Do let's!" as a kid, although I never really knew what heather was.. actually still don't, just checked and it's a purple flower? Wow, I always assumed it was like the toe toe plants.

You from New Zealand, by any chance, Stardust? (I'm an Aussie, but living in the UK.)

From NZ indeed, but moved to Australia

A million or so bought each year? That sounds very respectable, I'm pleased to hear that. When I was a kid in NZ I could always find heaps of old Enid books in the second hand bookshops, I wonder how many are left these days.