cannot be denied that much of the books’ appeal rests in their nostalgia, as is witnessed
in the high sales of Potter merchandise and the tourism generated in her adopted home,
the English Lake District.
In America, meanwhile, a different series of animal stories began to emerge. Joel
Chandler Harris was a newspaperman who began to collect the folk-tales told by slaves
in the Southern states. Uncle Remus, his Songs and Sayings was first published in 1880
and was followed by seven more volumes, many of which had the wily character of Brer
Rabbit as their hero. Brer Rabbit is an obvious descendant of folk heroes from Africa,
including Anansi and Wakaima, who use their wits rather than any physical strength to
get them out of dangerous situations. Nor do the stories shirk the extremities of violence
in animal life: Brer Bear is stung to death by bees, Brer Wolf scalded in a chest and Brer
Fox’s head is served up in a stew to his wife and children.
Harris used the Grimm brothers’ methods of collecting stories, and his assemblage of
Afro-American folk-tales was the largest of its time. However, he also chose to set them
down in an almost phonetically rendered dialect which has meant that many children
since have come to the stories, particularly the famous ones like ‘The tar baby’, through
adaptations. In more recent years the books have become associated with an
unacceptable attitude towards black slavery, as represented mainly through the
character of Uncle Remus, who looks back with nostalgia to what he sees as the golden
days of slavery while telling his stories to a solitary white child. Julius Lester, who has
produced his own adaptation of the Brer Rabbit stories, says
the telling of black folktales, and indeed tales of all cultures, was a social event
bringing together adults and children. That folktales are now considered primarily
stories for children is an indication of our society’s spiritual impoverishment.
Traditionally, tales were told by adults to adults. If the children were quiet, they
might be allowed to listen. Clearly, black folktales were not created and told for the
entertainment of little white children, as the Uncle Remus tales would lead one to
believe.
Lester 1987: xvAnother British landmark in fantasy writing of the golden age of children’s literature,
which involves the use of anthropomorphism, is Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the
Willows, written for Grahame’s own son and published in 1908 to almost complete
indifference. In Grahame’s world, animals and humans exist side by side with each
other, sometimes being of the same size and at other times existing in their natural
dimensions. It is also a world very much of its period, which often encourages a feeling of
nostalgia in its adult readers.
There are a number of strands to the story. The most attractive from the child reader’s
point of view is almost certainly the story of Toad, the nouveau riche braggart who
closely resembles the unattractive aspect of children’s nature and who is given the
author’s freedom to race around the countryside in his bright new car. This may well be
why A.A.Milne chose to call his stage adaptation of Grahame’s book Toad of Toad Hall
(1929) and to make that animal’s adventures the centre of the work. Another strand now
seems to the modern reader mawkish and set firmly in its own time: the pantheism
284 ANIMAL STORIES