books, the Sam Pig stories. She strongly denied that she had tried to humanise
animals:
Animals are mysteries, a race apart... They are too noble to be humanised in story
and fable, they are too great for our small civilisations, and yet only by a
humanisation shall we know them and learn to love them.
To humanise is to attempt to bring animals and nature itself into our lives, a way
known to ancient man, who felt that the rocks and earth were alive and full of
power and living substance...
Far from the machine age, the animals are older and wiser than we in the best
sense of the word, inhabitants of earth alongside humanity, struggling to survive,
yet waging no wars, and using no poisons, as they struggle on through life to silent
death.
Uttley 1970:116–117Nevertheless, her books did open the way for other, more popular, writers to adopt a
similar style of anthropomorphism. This can be seen in the animal stories of Enid Blyton
(whose popularity Uttley resented) and, more recently, in the highly commercialised
work of Jill Barklem’s Brambly Hedge series.
In the years between the First and Second World Wars, picture books were also using
animals as main characters. Jean de Brunhoff’s The Story of Babar, the Little Elephant
(1934) made a huge impact in both Britain and North America. A.A. Milne wrote the
preface to the English edition of the book which used a hand-written text and a large
format to tell its story of Babar’s escape from the forest after his mother is killed. He is
adopted by a rich old lady and becomes the toast of the town but the call of the wild
becomes too strong for him and he returns to the forest where he and his wife Celeste
are crowned King and Queen of the Elephants. A number of sequels followed, written
first by de Brunoff and after his death by his son, Laurent, but the originality of both the
format and the animal characters disintegrated. In time the figure of Babar has become
a marketable product, probably known more through the cartoon versions and his
appearance on calendars and diaries than through the original books.
Another stunning picture book which appeared in the 1930s was Kathleen Hale’s
Orlando the Marmalade Cat (1938) which achieved many of its visual effects through the
use of lithography. The book and its sequels achieved other effects through the witty use
of puns and through its sense of domesticity which does not deny the feline characters
their breed’s special qualities. Margaret Blount has said:
The Orlando books are holidays from life as it is, giving another species a chance of
being dominant without suggesting that they are out to manipulate humans by
being more human than they. The cats are always catlike, never really humanised,
however much they enjoy civilised living. Dining out, they sit on their chairs as cats
do, not as those cat-headed people in The Poll Parrot Picture Book who all have their
feet in shoes, on the floor. Orlando, kissing Grace, gives her an eye-closing lick and
greets her with the ‘half-purr, half-mew’ that cats use to each other but very rarelyTYPES AND GENRES 287