He is famous for his love of honey, and being a bear of “little brain”. So Winnie the Pooh might be a little surprised to find himself the subject of a major new museum exhibition.

Winnie the Pooh: Exploring a Classic will explore the creative partnership of writer A.A. Milne and illustrator E.H. Shepard. Together they produced the much-loved whimsical stories featured in Winnie the Pooh (1926) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928).

The decision by the Victoria and Albert museum in London to hold the exhibition proves that the bear and his friends have become establishment figures. As children’s literature expert Peter Hunt notes, they are “part of British culture, passing from generation to generation”.

One element of the incredible success of the Pooh books is that they reflect ideas about childhood that emerged in what is widely known as the “golden age” of children’s literature, spanning from the mid-19th century to World War I.

The golden age view of a child’s world was one that was close to nature – the child an innocent before the imposed horrors of school and education, and a figure of loss and nostalgia for the adult. This was very much the landscape of Winnie’s home in Hundred Acre Wood.

As cultural theorist Stefan Herbrechter said: “Children are supposed to live in a world of their own, which is clearly defined and marked out as the space and time for play and in which toys are the main objects and controlling devices of socialisation.”

However, Milne’s books are more poignant and have a slightly different flavour, than other examples, such as Wind in the Willows (of which Milne was a great fan, writing a stage adaptation). They came after World War I, when many illusions about innocence, the upper class, Englishness and patriotism had reached breaking point.

They contain traces of the experiences in the trenches that marked both Milne and Shepard, whose illustrations of carnage at the Somme and Paschendale were the subject of a separate recent exhibition.

The pastoral paradise of Hundred Acre Wood was one that Milne, who wrote passionately in favour of pacifism, conjured from his own childhood memories – back to a time before the terrifying intrusion and destruction of the war.

As such, Milne’s invented world is also saturated with loss, poignantly embodied in the depressed donkey character of Eyore, who sees no reasons to be cheerful. It is also haunted by the threat of leaving the safe space of the wood for places over the horizon that can’t yet be seen. When Christopher Robin and Pooh organise an “expotition” to the North Pole, they find a large pole in the woods and label it accordingly.

Toys, argues Herbrechter, are intimately concerned with storytelling. They are “like little story machines, narrative catalysers, objects that help make sense of the world”.

This idea is addressed with humour and complexity in Milne’s writing, and beautifully rendered in Shepard’s illustrations that always emphasise the “toyness” of the animals. It explains much about why these books have remained so loved.

Pooh the satirist

Milne shows his real life son Christopher (whom Christopher Robin was named after) how playing with his toys is a kind of writing, just as the playwright makes scenes for his characters. Before he wrote the Pooh stories, Milne worked as a playwright and as a satirist at Punch magazine.

We can detect the specific pleasures of introducing the craft of storytelling to his son from a man who made a living from writing. Milne’s stories gently teach the young credulous reader, who reads literally, that they may be other more rewarding ways of interpreting the world, and what the difference is between what people say and what they mean.

Milne offers the pleasures of word play. The narrator explains that “Winnie the Pooh lived in the forest all by himself under the name of Sanders”, which meant “he had the name over the door in gold letters and lived under it”.

The non-literal reader is invited to find this funny. Similarly, if Piglet says anything “carelessly” he is probably concealing a very important wish. He will say he isn’t afraid when he wants to appear brave.

Although the Pooh books were famously dismissed by fellow satirist Dorothy Parker, who wrote a dismayed and withering review of Winnie-the-Pooh, the success of Milne’s works suggests that he managed to translate his love of making stories into a form that beguiled the child reader. Stories which showed how they too might make an imaginative life for themselves in the world of storytelling and understand how to master words and meanings.

In one notable scene Pooh finds himself stuck on the doorway to Rabbit’s house, and must wait for a week until he is thin enough to be pulled free. Christopher Robin sits down with him and reads him a “sustaining book”, such as would help and comfort a Wedged Bear in Great Tightness.

The comforting presence and companionship of a good book is something all readers of Pooh take away with them. And it is perhaps this which explains the enduring popularity of these stories, which taught us how to read and write in our own way.

Eleanor Byrne, Senior Lecturer in English, Manchester Metropolitan University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

A Fuller Picture on UK Ebook Sales

28 April 2017 by particularkev

The link below is to an article that looks a little more on the decline of ebook sales in the United Kingdom, as reported in a post on this Blog yesterday.

For more visit:
http://the-digital-reader.com/2017/04/27/damn-facts-ebook-sales-narrative-must-maintained-costs/

Ebooks in Decline?

27 April 2017 by particularkev

Ebooks sales are in decline, or that is what many would have us believe. I don’t know that I believe that at this stage. In all markets, sales go up and down and I think it far too early to call this a trend. None-the-less, the links below are to two articles that look at the decline in ebook sales in the United Kingdom.

For more visit:
– https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/27/screen-fatigue-sees-uk-ebook-sales-plunge-17-as-readers-return-to-print
– https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/27/how-ebooks-lost-their-shine-kindles-look-clunky-unhip-

For the Edwardians, bookplates were as rebellious as modern day tattoos

4 March 2017 by particularkev

Image 20170222 1358 1p1q12p — Bookplates held a special place in the heart of the Edwardians.
POP/Flickr

Lauren O’ Hagan, Cardiff University

For countless young people, and even the odd deeply defiant older person, tattoos are the ultimate way to express your identity.

Go back just over 100 years, however, and revealing your personality to the world was a very different matter. Though tattoos and intimate piercings were had by people at all levels of society – even King Edward’s son, George V, was said to have had a tattoo during his time in the Royal Navy – the slightly more conservative Edwardians turned to something very different: bookplates.

The small decorative labels used to denote book ownership which date back to the 1500s, became hugely popular across the Western world at start of the 1900s, fading into obscurity just before World War I. But they offer a fascinating insight into the people who used them.

The early 20th Century saw a boom in book publishing: literacy levels were on the rise as were family incomes. Numerous public libraries were also established, along with Workers’ Educational Associations and book clubs. The stories published ranged widely in subject matter: this was the era of PG Wodehouse, HG Wells, JM Barrie, Saki and Rudyard Kipling.

In their time, bookplates were the physical embodiment of their owners, featuring bold, lavish and striking designs. They were seen as a decorative expression of a person’s tastes, temperaments and dispositions.

Edwardian readers were expected to share books from their own library with others, and so very special attention was paid to the plate design, to indicate the type of person that the owner was. While the wealthy were able to afford privately commissioned plates by famous artists, the average Edwardian depended on stationers or booksellers for mass-produced plates, or something from a pattern book. For the bibliophile, choosing a bookplate was a delicate process and the purchase commanded quite a price, varying from £2 to £50 – roughly £220-£5,500 today.

Personalised plates

Like the tattoo trends of the 21st Century, bookplates followed style trends, too. The more conscious would choose a socially acceptable design, aware that they may be judged by family and friends. But there was plenty of room for rebellion.

The bookplate of Sir John Forrest, explorer.
Wikimedia

Each illustration or image used in the bookplate was tied to a particular aspect of the owner’s identity. Popular designs related to social class involved coats of arms, for example, or library interior scenes that showed a replica of the owner’s own reading room. Other common identity markers involved maps of the owner’s birthplace, pictures of the family house, and symbols representing the family surname. Biblical landscapes or local churches were also used to reflect religious beliefs, while images of the owner’s occupation or hobbies were other favoured choices.

However, knowing that the book would enter into the hands of other people, owners often used bookplates to portray themselves as funny and likeable, featuring a caricature of themselves or some other funny sketch. Like the more quirky tattoos of today, their reception would have undoubtedly been subjective.

Bookplates could also tell of the intimacy or distance between a husband and wife. Though it may seem a curious way to display such sentiments, the display of unity shown by the couple using a joint design showed that the two people were together. They could tell of other family changes, too, expressing relationship status – a woman marking a bookplate with her new surname following marriage, for instance – or signalling the birth or death of a family member.

Fantasy and insults

Like the novels of the time, the Edwardians also portrayed utopian images of faraway places or exotic landscapes in their personalised plates. These locations were often taken directly from fairy tales or other popular fantasy lands of the era, such as Atlantis and Avalon. These were often accompanied by Chinese or Latin philosophical quotes; for example, resurgam (“I shall rise again”), fac et spera (“Do and hope”) and pro patria (“For the fatherland”).

Pegasus flies through the night sky on this plate from 1904.
Wikimedia

There was a more serious side to bookplates, too. Many designs were intended to make a statement, through striking images or more direct text. This could be political, pledging allegiance to a particular party, religion, or something more personal, relating to family members or friends. One man openly used his bookplate to “name and shame” a friend who ruined his books when helping to move them to his new house. Whatever the context, the declarations were made to shock and surprise.

The Edwardians came out of an era of inequality and poverty, and into a time where imaginations were allowed to soar. And yet, this was still the early 1900s, where social life was much more reserved than it is today. It might not seem like the most rebellious way to express one’s identity now, but then it truly could have been.

Lauren O’ Hagan, PhD Student in Language and Communication, Cardiff University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Seven academic books that helped to shape modern Britain

2 February 2017 by particularkev

Diarmaid MacCulloch, University of Oxford; Ian Kershaw, University of Sheffield; Richard English, Queen’s University Belfast; Ruth Lister, Loughborough University; Simon Frith, University of Edinburgh, and Veronika Fikfak, University of Cambridge

To celebrate the diversity, innovation and influence of academic books over the course of modern history, seven specialists share the book they believe has been most influential on modern British culture and society, as part of Academic Book Week.

1. The Law of the Constitution, by A.V Dicey

Veronika Fikfak, lecturer and fellow in law, University of Cambridge

It is a measure of A.V.Dicey’s influence that more than 132 years after the first publication, the relevance of his writing is at the core of the UK’s departure from the European Union.

While students and scholars have read Dicey for more than a century as a basic constitutional text, the general public will have become familiar with his arguments on parliamentary sovereignty and the primacy of parliament only recently – with Gina Miller, the lead claimant in the legal fight to get parliament to vote on whether the UK can start the process of leaving the EU.

Dicey argued that the British parliament is an “absolutely sovereign legislature” and had the “right to make or unmake any law”. His legacy in the UK constitutional sphere is unrivalled, and to this day he is referred to as “the great constitutional lawyer”, whose writings have not only shaped the constitutional landscape of the UK until now but are also very likely to decide our future.

2. The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life, by Richard Hoggart

Simon Frith, Tovey professor of music, University of Edinburgh

When it was first published in 1957, Richard Hoggart’s book made sense of the upheavals in post-war ways of life by referring back to working-class culture – and Hoggart’s own childhood – in pre-war Britain.

What is clear now though, is how important the book became for our understanding of what came next: consumer culture. The book was both a founding text for the academic fields of media and cultural studies, and an inspiration for a new generation of novelists, dramatists and film makers – not least for the team behind Coronation Street, launched in 1960.

3. Modern Ireland 1600-1972, by Roy Foster

Richard English, professor of politics, Queen’s University Belfast

At a difficult point in Anglo-Irish politics, this book brought to a very wide audience the insights of the latest and most important academic scholarship on Ireland. And it considered “Irishness” in terms of a layered and inclusive sense of identities which was then less widely accepted than it has subsequently become.

As the Northern Irish Troubles began to be transformed into a much more benign peace process, and as relations between the Republic of Ireland and the UK continue to be shaped in ways that are significant for both islands, this book heralded a more inclusive and subtle interpretation of how properly to understand Ireland. Indirectly, it made it possible to know a fuller reality of British experience too.

4. The Invention of Tradition, by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger

Diarmaid MacCulloch, professor of the history of the church, University of Oxford

As the UK began to come to terms with its retreat from imperial narcissism, Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s book was a dose of common sense. These essays edited in 1983 concentrate on the creation of the UK and its empire, and nationalist reactions against those developments. It is still just as relevant now as it was when it was published, posing many questions for the understanding of our history.

5. The English and their History, by Robert Tombs

Ian Kershaw, emeritus professor of modern history, University of Sheffield

As its title suggests, Robert Tombs’ magnificent book published in 2014 focuses on English, not British, history. However, England’s history was – long before the union with Scotland in 1707 – deeply entwined with that of Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Tombs’ book not only incorporates these interrelationships but is greatly enlightening about them. It is a book that cannot be ignored by anyone wishing to know more about the history of the isles.

6. Poverty in the United Kingdom, by Peter Townsend

Ruth Lister, emeritus professor of social policy, Loughborough University

Published in 1979, this is a monumental work, which helped modern Britain better to understand itself. Not only did it provide the most comprehensive in-depth picture of what modern poverty means for those affected, it also represented a milestone in developing our understanding of poverty.

Its opening words provided a relative definition of poverty, rooted in a concept of relative deprivation, which still resonates nearly 40 years later and which has influenced subsequent research and policy. As predicted at the time, it ranks as the modern day successor to the classic works of Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree.

7. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, by John Maynard Keynes

John Kay, supernumerary fellow in economics, University of Oxford

In a letter to George Bernard Shaw, Keynes wrote: “I believe myself to be writing a book on economic theory, which will largely revolutionise … the way the world thinks about economic problems.” The author’s assessment of its impact was correct. The analysis of the book was the dominant influence on macroeconomic policies in the 30 years that followed World War II, and we still debate, and employ, Keynesian policies today.

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church, University of Oxford; Ian Kershaw, Emeritus Professor of Modern History, University of Sheffield; Richard English, Professor of Politics, Queen’s University Belfast; Ruth Lister, Emeritus Professor of Social Policy, Loughborough University; Simon Frith, Tovey Chair of Music, University of Edinburgh, and Veronika Fikfak, Lecturer in Law, University of Cambridge