To Chesterton, the Just So Stories (1902) were ‘a great chronicle of primal fables’, their
animals ‘walking portents’. Brecht admired and copied Kipling and C.S.Lewis identified
him as primarily the poet of work, bringing to literature new areas of language. Lewis
judged him the first journalist since Defoe to bring a sense of news to the service of
fiction.
Apart from The Jungle Books, and Just So Stories his influential novels Captains
Courageous (1894), Stalky and Co. (1899), and Kim (1900) (all of which have had a
somewhat ambiguous status between adults’ and children’s literature) demonstrate his
linguistic facility, deserving greater attention from students of modernism. His later
historical fictions Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910) summon up
England’s ancestral spirits. In his adult works, especially his short stories, children and
the child’s vision receive detailed attention; Wee Willie Winkie (1895) also maps the world
of the British woman’s sojourn in India. Overall, Kipling expresses a larger vision than
that of little England and confounds charges of aggressive imperialism.
P.G.Wodehouse (1881–1975) started by writing school stories for the magazine The
Captain; of these the most significant was Mike (1909). One of his characters, Psmith,
proved so popular that he was transferred to Wodehouse’s adult fiction.
Old Possum’s male world is piratical, clubbable, dandyish and streetwise, a world of
double lives and legendary reputations. T.S.Eliot (1888–1965) celebrates the secret,
devilish dimensions of the cat’s personae in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939),
(a book seldom mentioned in evaluations of his work) creating fable characters. Like
children, these characters inhabit their own subculture at odds with dominant values. A
relish for naming and for terms of address permeates the text, which extends rather
than re-works the fable form. Diabolical aspects are explored in names like
Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell, Mistofflees and Griddlebone; other names, like the
fiendish epithets, resonate with suggestions of transformation, trickery, tumbling,
tormenting and disarray. One female character only appears, preoccupied with
educational reform and control, as if the child dedicatees might recognise a nanny or
governess in The Gumbie Cat. Eliot’s felicitous dancing and marching rhythms contrast
markedly with his adult verse of the period, such as Four Quartets (1943).
Masefield (1878–1967) and Ransome (1884–1967) combined writing for children with a
wide range of professional work as journalists. Extensive travel and a fondness for
sailing were, however, expressed in remarkably different ways. Masefield as poet, editor,
anthologiser and populariser of story telling and poetry in performance exerted a
considerable influence upon generations of children to whom The Midnight Folk (1927)
and The Box of Delights (1935) appealed. The contribution of such works to modernism
is now attracting critical interest. In Ransome’s series Swallows and Amazons (from
1930), Hunt recognises classic patterns of displacement and closure (Hunt 1991:131)
which motivated less inventive imitators to exploit the holiday adventure sequence.
Ransome’s first writing for children, his ghost-writing and early journalism preceded his
time spent in Russia after which his career became established with the publication of Old
Peter’s Russian Tales (1916) for children and Six Weeks in Russia (1919) for adults. In
the 1938 edition to the Russian tales he wrote that ‘fairy stories...live for ever with a life
of their own’, deprecating his role as editor transmitting the stories to the child in every
reader of whatever age and distinguishing Russia as the country where ‘hardly anybody
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