1897 The phenomenally successful author of children’s fiction was nothing if not prolific, regularly producing between 10,000 and 14,000 words of finished copy a day. In 1948 alone she brought out 28 titles under fifteen imprints. By 2007, nearly 40 years after her death, over 3,400 translations had been made of her books, almost as many as of Shakespeare’s work.
She is best known now for the Famous Five and Secret Seven stories (Noddy, for very young children, was a relatively late arrival). The ‘Five’ tales involve four boarding-school pals home on holiday, plus their dog, going on adventures like camping, or exploring the seaside. In the ‘Seven’ series the companions are amateur sleuths solving mysteries that baffle the police. The bad guys are invariably working-class, sometimes foreign as well.
As the country’s social climate lurched from rationing and austerity to sexual liberation in the swinging sixties, Blyton’s fiction was criticised for its increasingly eccentric construction of normality. Families had mummies and daddies who sent their children away to school; everyone had access to the countryside; boys were leaders while girls played with dolls (unless, like Georgina in the Five books, they called themselves George and wanted to out-Tom the boys).
No doubt these comforting family structures compensated for the lack of them in Blyton’s own life. Just before her thirteenth birthday her father left the family to live with another woman. Blyton herself married a divorced man, then divorced him in turn to marry another, making sure that the children would never see their father again.
And what is less often remembered is that before Blyton’s work was assailed for classism, sexism and racism, librarians in the late forties and fifties worried that it was linguistically and stylistically too undemanding to stretch their young readers’ minds – the sentences too short, the vocabulary limited, the implied authorial attitude moralising and condescending.
Of course Ernest Hemingway worked very hard to achieve short sentences and a basic vocabulary, but this was middle-class England. Anyway, as Enid Blyton said, librarians probably disliked her books because ‘the hordes of children swarming into the library on Saturday morning became a nuisance’.1 Or so she would have found them, anyway.
1 Quoted in Robert Druce, This Day our Daily Fictions: An Enquiry into the Multi-Million Bestseller Status of Enid Blyton and Ian Fleming, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992, p. 38.