steepholm

On 29th January 2025 the Daiwa Foundation in London will be hosting a launch for the paperback edition of my book, British Children's Literature in Japanese Culture: Wonderlands and Looking-Glasses.

The launch starts at 6pm, with a drinks reception from 7-8pm, during which discounted copies of the book will be available for signing and sale. The event is entirely free, but it requires registration. Details and a registration link can be found here.

Please feel free to forward this to anyone who you think may be interested. Maybe I'll see some of you there?

When I was in Hokkaido with my friend Mami in 2022, we visited an exhibition in the Sapporo Clock Tower, where we saw some 道徳 (doutoku) textbooks, sets of stories with accompanying discussion points used to teach ethical behaviour to Japanese primary school children. The stories almost always use schoolchildren as the protagonists, and put them in a position where they have a moral dilemma of some kind. You've accidentally cracked the glass in the tank that houses the class turtle - should you own up? That kind of thing.

Anyway, these books piqued my interest, and Mami was kind enough to send me a few afterwards, which I've been enjoying on and off ever since. I think what interested me was the slightly unfamiliar take on both the analysis of these child-sized dilemmas and what might count as a good solution to them.



Take this story, for example. It's about a boy whose classmate has been teased by another boy for his supposed resemblance to a monkey. At first, the teased boy seems to take it in good part, and even acts up by making monkey sounds, to his classmates' amusement. But when the protagonist tells his father about it, the father comments: "Are they really just teasing - isn't it more like bullying?"

Thus sensitized, the boy sees the same antics the next day through a different lens, and notices when the teased boy goes quiet and no longer cares to share in the joke. The ringleader continues regardless, however.

Our hero sits through several classes, wondering what would be the best thing to do. How can he stop the bullying? He has no authority to tell them to lay off, but neither can he sit back and watch this go on. Events come to a head when he is directly invited by the teaser-in-chief to join in, or at least to laugh. He finds he can do neither. Instead, he turns away silently and leaves the class, while everyone else looks on in shock.

As a result, the other boy is never teased again.



I don't say this is great literature, or even optimal ethics, but I do savour the difference from how the story would likely have played out in a Western setting, where some kind of confrontation, or at least a speech laying down the moral law in terms, would have been almost inevitable, I think.

I spent a very pleaseant Halloween with my daughter, her boyfriend and my lodger, which ended with my reading them 'Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad'. It was the first time any of them had heard it, and I think I can say that it produced the desired effect (despite my halting performance in the Latin sections). I've promised another M. R. James classic for Christmas.

Which should I choose? 'Count Magnus' is the one that freaked me out the most when I first read it, but I'm not sure it's his best. 'The Mezzotint' and 'The Ash Tree' are justly celebrated, but if it's not too long (which I suspect it may be) I'm leaning towards 'Casting the Runes', which has one of my favourite final lines in literature.

Pondering that story as it might be seen by people in their 20s and 30s, it occurred to me that it may remind them of The Ring - with its time-delayed curse. Are there other examples of the phenomenon, especially pre-James? Plenty of curses only 'take' when certain conditions are met, but I can't think of any others that are on a simple time delay.

Well, no one's been asking my opinion of the latest Roald Dahl controversy, so here it is. Or rather, here they are, for I have several.

First, context. Here's a link to the original Telegraph article, which lists all the emendations. Let's just acknowledge that the whole issue has been very consciously taken up by the Tory press as a culture-war issue because they have nothing but culture wars on which to fight the next election. Their own deputy chairman has said as much. So, expect a lot more of this sort of stuff, wherever they can find it. Even Rishi Sunak has weighed in. Clearly, Dahl is the new J. K. Rowling in terms of right-wing white-knighting.

As for me, although I've edited an academic collection on Dahl, and almost the first thing that happened to me on arriving at Cardiff University was being involved in a conference to mark his centenary - Cardiff being his birthplace - I've never been a particular fan, either now or in childhood. As a stylist he seems uninteresting, and his humour just wasn't to my taste, though clearly it appealed to many others. (I'm not even a huge fan of Quentin Blake's illustrations. He's one of those figures, like Anthony Browne and Charles Keeping, who seem universally beloved - and indeed they may all be lovely people - who somehow don't do it for me. But I am not a very visual person. My loss.) Unfortunately, what I do like about Dahl is intimately connected to his less pleasant qualities - such as the comment on Mrs Winter, the teacher in The Magic Finger who is made to grow a tail by the protagonist-narrator: "if any of you are wondering whether Mrs Winter is quite all right again now, the answer is No. And she never will be." I've got to admit that I did laugh at that.

So anyway, I have a number of hats.

Hat the First. As a children's literature teacher, silent emendations are bothersome. From now on, for example, if I want to teach Matilda, I'll have to check whether my students are reading the 2023 edition (in which she reads Jane Austen) or one of the earlier ones (in which she reads Kipling). I'm aware this is a niche problem for a niche demographic, however.

Hat the Second. As someone with an academic interest in reception history, the emendations and the row they've engendered are quite interesting. I'll certainly be using the article I've linked above in classes.

Hat the Third. As a parent and general reader, I'm well aware that this kind of 'updating' goes on, and has for decades if not centuries. Looking down the list of emendations, I see some that have an obvious point and others that seem silly or senseless. But I'm aware that this is a reflection of my own sensitivities and blind spots. If I'm more sensitised to racism than sexism or fatphobia, for example, then this will affect my view of what seems like overkill or conversely complicit. Bearing that in mind, I'd find it hard to divide those emendations into sheep and goats, as it were - but an absolutist stance seems no more satisfactory.

Hat the Fourth. As a children's writer and someone with many friends in that field, I can't shake the suspicion that children's books get this kind of treatment more than books for adults, and while there may be good reasons for this (adults are generally better equipped to take an author's prejudices and cultural/historical situation into account) there are also bad ones that rub a raw spot (children's books are insignificant as literature and can be mucked about with sans cultural loss). Of course, adult books are sometimes amended in this way too - it's currently possible to buy Joseph Conrad's The Nice Guy of the Narcissus on Amazon, for example - but it's undoubtedly rarer.

The online dislikers of Dahl seem to have settled on two rather contradictory positions. One group thinks that the books should be amended, and that this fuss is just an opportunistic culture-war issue (in which latter contention they're certainly right). The other, that they should, as it were, have a Do Not Resuscitate order placed on them and be allowed to slide out of print, to replaced by better, more recent books. I have sympathy with both positions, but both make me uneasy, perhaps because both assume the integral relation of books to a capitalist/market model. On the one hand, the publishers amend books (and the Estate allows it) so that they can continue to make money out of a very lucrative author. On the other, reading - viewed as a zero-sum game - allows for only a certain number of books to be 'in play' at one time (those Waterstone's tables only have so much space!), and Dahl's are seen as hogging shelf-space at the expense of younger pretenders.

So, what's my opinion? Having taken all these factors into account and done the sums, I think the end result is that I don't feel strongly either way. But at least my indifference is sophisticated.

Sorry to drop in so briefly after so long an absence (which has included Covid and a lot of marking, just so you don't feel left out), but you may perhaps be interested to know that I gave this webinar on Studio Ghibli and British Children's Books a couple of days ago. Think of it as an amuse bouche for my forthcoming book.



Anyway, I'm just back from my final visit to Cardiff of 2022, and feeling rather cosily settled in here in Bristol. There are still some cards to post, but most of what's needful has been dealt with. I'm going to have a nap.

Last weekend I was in Glasgow, co-hosting the 50th Anniversary Conference on Watership Down with Dimitra Fimi. I was too busy to take photographs, so you'll have to take it from me that the event did indeed take place, and not only that but was a success. Richard Adams's daughter gave one of the keynotes (she looks exactly like him!), but we had many other contributions too, from diverse disciplines: the inventor of the "Bunnies and Burrows" tabletop game, for example; a couple a French scholars talking about the French translation; linguists and Tolkienists on the Lapine language; classicists on the echoes of the Aeneid; the twin sons of the one of the key animators on the 1978 film, the novelist SF Said on Adams as a personal writing inspiration, and so on. (I talked about theory of mind in animal stories.) This the kind of mix I really appreciate.

Any other big WD fans here? I've been really surprised at how little academic work's been done on it, considering how many ways it seems to invite it.

In other news, I took delivery of a couple more reprints of books by Weeden Butler the elder. I thought I might as well order them cheap, since I'm unlikely to be able to get first editions. One is called Indian Vocabulary, and is essentially an early version of Hobson-Jobson, but published about a century earlier, in 1788.

One interesting thing is that Weeden deliberately attempted to write the words phonetically, so as to aid his English readers' pronunciation of Indian words, with the consequence that 'shah,' for instance, becomes 'shaw.' One of the earliest entries is for Abdallah Shaw - which gives a decidedly odd effect.

We also get little insights that fall outside strict word definition, as with 'Abrooa'n', 'A sort of fine muslin, manufactured solely for the king's seraglio; a piece of which, costing four hundred rupees, or £50 sterling, is said to have weighed only five Sicca rupees, and, if spread upon wet grass, to have been scarcely visible.' Steady, Weeden.

Rather cannily, Weeden promoted this book as being of topical interest, because it was published while the trial of Warren Hastings was ongoing - and he even throws in, by way of a makeweight, a detailed description of the process and rules of impeachment. Bonus!

The other book is merely a sermon, more interesting for the occasion of its delivery than for its content, given as it was before the newly formed 'Armed Association of the Parish of St Luke, Chelsea... on Sunday, 8th July, 1798.' The 'Armed Association' was basically a kind of anti-Napoleonic Home Guard, although Weeden is as concerned about sedition at home as threats directly from abroad.

I wonder what would happen if they tried to make the inhabitants of Cheyne Row into an armed militia today?

I met her on a house party in Norfolk.
Very flat, Norfolk.
There's no need to be unpleasant.
That was no reflection on her, unless of course she made it flatter.

I took both Urn Burial and When Marnie Was There with me on my overnight trip to Norfolk this weekend - my first ever foray into that county. I turns out that they are set in pretty much the same place on the north Norfolk coast, and it was quite interesting to overlay Browne's 17th century meditations on death and memorialising with Joan G. Robinson's twentieth century ones. It was Marnie that was the main pull, though. Having recently both reread the book and rewatched the Ghibli film (albeit that's relocated to Hokkaido, where I also hope to go at some point) I realised I would have visit the spot, to shake hands with its genius loci and to take my own photographs at the minimum 300dpi required by the publisher.

Haruka came to keep me company, and the night before we stayed in King's Lynn, about 25 miles away (i.e. 90 minutes by bus). I had little idea what to expect of King's Lynn, but it was an interesting place in itself, with plenty of history from its time in the Hanseatic League and earlier, though also a degree of barely papered-over poverty. We took a ferry across the River Great Ouse and got this rather lovely view in exchange:



Perhaps the most striking things, though, were the great Seahenge inverted oak (now in the Lynn Museum next to the bus station) - which I'd entirely forgotten was there - and the illuminations at night, which seem to be in aid of nothing but fun. For example, the central tower of the old Greyfriars monastery church is a ruin by day, but by night becomes a retro video game than can be played via pedals in the adjoining park...



Yesterday morning we went to Burnham Overy Staithe, where we found the original of Marnie's Marsh House and windmill. I hope you'll agree that comparing them with the Marsh House and silo of the film is instructive:





Of course, the missing link between these pairs of pictures is Robinson's prose, which does at least some of the transformative work.

After, we walked to Burnham Overy Town and Burnham Market - nor did we by any means thereby exhaust the store of local Burnhams. There were many farms called Marsh Farm, too, and as many pubs devoted to the memory of Nelson, a local lad - all rather dizzying. Burnham Market I particularly recommend for a visit, if you're round those parts - it's really quite lovely. Nowhere, though, could we find anyone who had heard of Marnie - whether in the pub, or the second-hand bookshop, or any other shop, or in the taxi back to King's Lynn. The one exception was the man who lives in Marnie's house, but he definitely didn't want to talk about her. I feel somehow that this is as it should be, though.

Afterwards we went back to London and ate a bao bun in the spectacular Coal Drops Yard, which has mushroomed up since I was last in the King's Cross area.

Did I made Norfolk flatter? I hope not... but perhaps I flatter myself.

How did Henry V happen to know that 25th October was St Crispin's day?

Crispin and Crispinian have never been major saints, but they did have a personal connection to Shakespeare, for they are (among other things) the patron saints of glovemakers, which was of course the profession of Shakespeare's father. As a good Catholic, no doubt John Shakespeare kept the feast. 25th October was important to Will as the feast of Crispin long before he knew it as the date of Agincourt.

"This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered."

Is it fanciful to hear in these lines a little batsqueak of recusant defiance? A sly filial tribute?

This speculation brought to you courtesy of 3am insomnia.

We took advantage of the Coronavirus relaxation to go to Borth, where we stayed with my brother and partner - the first night not in my own bed since, I think, a Glasgow hotel in January 2020.

Ayako very much took to the village and the life, and it was a happy break. She's not quite ready for Susan Cooper yet, but made some inroads into Nancy Bond's Borth-based fantasy, A String in the Harp. Walks to Ynyslas (with a view over the river to the tantalizingly close Aberdovey, the very place where young Gwion/Taliesin was tangled in the salmon traps of Elffin) and up to the monument made it all very real. We also took a walk through the 4,500-year-old tree stumps of the woodland that once covered the Drowned Hundred...



Not that Susan C was forgotten. Much as Tethys is appeased by seeing a picture of a boat named, 'The White Lady' in Greenwitch, so the denizens of the drowned cantref are held close in the hearts of the Borth Tandoori, for behold here is none other than Gwyddno Garanhir.

I've had occasion in these pages to reflect with melancholy ambivalence on my family connection to Francis Galton - but this week brought to light another connection to another rather dubious Francis, albeit the link is not in this case familial.

In the roll of causes and activities that were considered respectable in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but are now very much not, eugenics probably tops the list; but also present is the collecting of birds' eggs. In my attempt to build a small library of Butler productions, I recently bought a copy of great-great-uncle Arthur's British Birds, Their Nests and Eggs, published in six volumes in the mid 1890s. I've left the armchair in shot, to give a sense of scale:



I do like that quintessentially 1890s lettering, don't you? The illustrations within are mostly line drawings, by Frohawk, but he also provided several full colour plates of various birds' eggs:



Of course, there's nothing wrong with a scientific book providing this kind of information. This is a book of facts about birds, right, not a collector's manual? I'm far from having read the whole text, but so far I haven't caught Uncle Arthur with his hand in a nest - however, his disarmingly conversational descriptions, full of personal reminiscence as they are, reveal him as an avid trapper and breeder of wild birds, which is hardly much better.

What really struck me, though, was the inscription at the front of my copy:



The recipient, Francis C. R. Jourdain, was at this time a mere curate, and had as yet published nothing on ornithology, but that would change within a couple of years of reading Arthur's book. Of course, I'm not claiming that the shells fell from his eyes on that occasion, although the volumes contain numerous memoranda of errata in what I assume is Jourdain's hand, and I think we can say that he read the work with close attention.



From around 1899 to his death in 1940 he would be an ornithologist of renown - though with a reputation for ill temper that earned him the title Pastor Pugnax, so Wiki tells me. With Lord Rothschild, he founded the British Oological Association, renamed in his honour at his death as the Jourdain Society. In an age when stealing eggs had ceased to be seen as a respectable hobby for either scholars or schoolboys this organisation became notorious, and a police raid at a Society dinner in the mid-1990s led to six convictions. What a difference a century makes!

I'm not sure who the giver, Frances Jourdain, was. Wife? Sister? Not his mother - she was Emily, apparently. His siblings were quite a distinguished lot, it turns out. Among the rest, I'll just mention Margaret Jourdain, who besides her personal achievements became the partner of Ivy Compton-Burnett, one of my favourite mid-century English novelists. Does anyone else read her now?

Admittedly, inspiring Francis Jourdain to steal eggs probably isn't in the same league, morally speaking, as inspiring the Nazis to practise eugenics. But it does continue a rather sinister trend. To quote one of my favourite lines in Compton-Burnett (the speaker is a young child, the subject a hen), “Perhaps it ought not to do a thing that ends in dying."