Enid Blyton and the Politics of Freedom

Had her publisher not admitted their mistake, I might never have thought to reread Enid Blyton. There was something intriguing, however, about Hatchette’s recent acknowledgment that there was a problem with modernising her books. Six years after they changed every ‘Mother’ to ‘Mum’ and ‘swotter’ to ‘bookworm’, they have admitted that their ‘sensitive reworking’ didn’t quite work.

The mistake, perhaps, was in believing that Enid Blyton’s books were ever truly modern. When the first Famous Five adventure was published in 1942, the world of Julian, Dick, Anne, George, and Timmy the Dog would have already felt somewhat out of time. The war intrudes so little on the books that it would be easy to miss the point that Blyton’s idylls were, even then, no more real than the ankles-in-spats world of Wodehouse’s Drones Club. They would have felt less contemporary, even, than Rowling’s Hogwarts feels to the modern reader. Updating Blyton’s world was always going to be an attempt to set it inside an identifiable timeframe when it has always worked best by being disconnected from specifics, thereby finding a quality that had, until recently, remained timeless.

The difficulty of modernising the texts might not be peculiar to Blyton, but the prescriptive urge to do so is relatively unique. Blyton does not fare too well once her readership passes adolescence. Few of us have showed much loyalty to our childhood favourite, described in her obituary in The Times as the ‘most controversial children’s author of the postwar period’ who mainly appealed to ‘children who can read but do not read much’. Blyton is ridiculed for her Englishness in a way quite unlike any other author. It places her in that uncomfortable zone between patriotism and nationalism; the reason, no doubt, why so few defended her when the modernisers came to call. Such revisions would be hard to justify in a different context but especially when publishers increasingly try to resell their classics catalogue by promising editions as close as possible to the author’s original text. Blyton, however, has been treated almost as though she is a special case. Textual criticism – one of the great forces of modern literary scholarship – is apparently less important when an author continues to shape the attitudes of children. Even now, Blyton’s most glaring anachronisms are changed without much complaint. Language has been appropriated and revisionism is rampant.

Read through adult sensibilities, the Famous Five books might be stronger than you remember, but also considerably leaner. The years easily embellish them with a Gothic grandeur that’s absent from the texts. In my own memory, I had always recalled the hidden passageways of Smugger’s Top as more labyrinthine and dark than any in Gormenghast; the cave on Kirrin Island as deep and fortified as that built by Crusoe. Written in Blyton’s often shallow prose, devoid of description and real places, people, and products, her stories and characters resonate longer than one might guess based on the relative brevity of the books. That is because Blyton is doing something more than constructing stories. Her understanding of archetypes is elemental. Caves, tunnels, towers all need exploring. Secrets need uncovering. Even Blyton’s children are idealisations of the adult’s they’ll become: Julian is judicial, Dick brave, and, most worrying for modern readers, Anne so very domestic.

Yet it is George who remains the key to the rest. She is now held up as a model of gender dysphoria, but that’s another modernisation unsupported by the texts. She is the soul of the Five but not because she represents some modern understanding of gender fluidity. Helena Bonham Carter, who played Blyton for 2009’s drama, Enid, described the writer as being ‘allergic to reality’. Blyton’s daughter, Imogen, even wrote that her mother was ‘arrogant, insecure, pretentious, very skilled at putting difficult or unpleasant things out of her mind, and without a trace of maternal instinct.’ Other descriptions describe her adolescent nature, a ‘childlike woman’, and that is perhaps what we see revealed through George, who biographer Barbara Stoney suggests was based on Blyton herself. George is rebelling against her given identity, defying time as well as denying her given role. George represents the truest spirit of adventure. She is liberty and it is through George that Blyton reveals politics that are more pointed and radical than the entrenched conservatism usually attributed to her.

The politics of the Five books are closer to the libertarianism of Henry David Thoreau than, say, the Catholic orthodoxy of Tolkien or the High Anglicism of C.S. Lewis. The themes of adventure, freedom, and friendship are inseparable from Blyton’s morality and, indeed, her mild undogmatic Christian faith. ‘I do believe in God, though perhaps not your idea of God,’ she once wrote to a friend. ‘I do trust him in that I believe that there is a real purpose and love behind everything and I do want to serve and love the highest – whatever and whoever that may be.’ Childhood, then, represents something intrinsically good that is challenged by the intrusive business of adults. Where Tolkien constantly deals in the rights of rulers, Blyton deals with the rights of children. The Famous Five’s childhood is one in which no villainy is so great that it cannot be defeated by the teeth of a brave and loyal dog.

It means that Blyton’s judgements are sometimes troublingly acute. After rescuing Jennifer, the kidnapped daughter of a millionaire, from the dungeons on Kirrin Island, Julian throws the kidnapper’s son into the cell. What follows is striking in whatever context but, certainly, feels out of place inside a children’s story.

“There’s only one way to teach people like you and your parents that wickedness doesn’t pay!” said the boy, grimly. “And that is to punish you hard. People like you don’t understand kindness. You think it’s just being soft and silly. All right — you can have a taste of what Jennifer has had. It will do you good, and do your parents a lot of good too! Good-bye!”

Similar examples abound and are routinely – one might even say glibly – offered as proof that Blyton harboured some hard right authoritarian tendencies, but Blyton’s fiction is more anarchic than that. Couched in a quite parochial form of Englishness, the books nevertheless teach us to maintain a persistent distrust of authority. Even where Blyton’s world is heavy on punishment, that punishment is presented as a means of reforming the bad habits we learn from adults. Life, otherwise, is good and consequence free. Children clamber up trees, into caves, down wells, and through barely stable tunnels, and always emerge unscathed.

That, of course, puts Blyton at odds with the modern world where parents allow their children to climb trees but only once they are suitably roped and helmeted. Safety is nearly absent from the world of the Famous Five. Meanwhile, in modern Britain, increasingly fewer children walk to school and three quarters spend less than 60 minutes playing outside each day. To the modern reader, Blyton’s books aren’t just archaic in language. Their attitude sits poorly with an audience accustomed to a Harry Potter world which so closely mirrors our own. Rowling’s world is product heavy – magical consumerism, if you wish – and filled with moral ambiguity.

Blyton keeps the real world at bay, which is why parodies of her work always take this as their obvious point of attack: conflating the imaginary childhood with real adulthood. The Comic Strip Presents did just this in Five Go Mad in Dorset (1982) and Five Go Mad On Mescalin (1983). This November, new Blyton parodies will appear with titles such as Five Go Gluten Free and Five Give Up the Booze. Anne McNeil of Enid Blyton Entertainment has said that ‘we are certain Enid Blyton would have delighted in the gentle parody of her characters.’ To which one is tempted to ask: well, she would say that, wouldn’t she?

I suspect Blyton would have been less than ‘delighted’ to see her creations cave in to the modish prohibitions of the modern world: gluten, booze, or, perhaps, fatty foods. Blyton presented children with a powerful message about personal responsibility but it’s a message that can feel increasingly dated. Today’s children soon learn that the private self is intimately bound with their social self. George cares nothing for what other people think. It would be rare to find a child that thought the same. This lesson of being true to oneself is the very lesson undercut by revisions. If the texts cannot be true to themselves, then how, we might ask, are we meant to be true to ourselves?