When Fanfiction Took Over British Children’s Publishing

The Horn Book just published Caroline Fraser’s excoriation of how Penguin has recently exploited Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit with an aggressive copyright claim, broad product licensing, spin-off titles, and, most recently, commissioning sequels from actress and writer Emma Thompson.

British publishing seems to be crazy about such latter-day sequels lately. Such books have always been with us, of course, but the latest wave is distinguished by a couple of features:

• Many of the intellectual properties involved are still under copyright, meaning the new books were authorized or commissioned by the companies or trusts controlling those properties.
• The authors of those latter-day books aren’t work-for-hire hacks or even solid writers without a recent hit (like David Benedictus, author of Return to the Hundred Acre Wood) but well-known authors who could get reasonably well paid for their own original work.

Thus we have Oscar-winner Thompson writing about rabbits (though not, as Sutton says, with the zoological precision of Potter). Penguin can thus benefit from the Peter Rabbit brand name and good will, Thompson’s celebrity, and the now-increasingly-common media story of a new sequel to a beloved classic.

Likewise, we have Carnegie Medal winner Geraldine McCaughrean writing an authorized sequel to Peter Pan, and competing in the marketplace with the not-originally-authorized American titles from Ridley Pearson and Dave Barry. Dame Jacqueline Wilson was commissioned to extend E. Nesbit’s Psammead trilogy. Former British poet laureate Andrew Motion penned a sequel to Treasure Island.

In other worlds, it appears the British children’s literature establishment has turned to fanfiction.

New Nesbit and Another Nesbit News Bit

The Guardian reports that Jacqueline Wilson, one of the UK’s most respected and popular writers for children, has signed a contract to “write a new version of E Nesbit’s classic Five Children and It.”

That seemed like such a wasted effort that I went looking for more detail, but even the original report in The Bookseller adds little—only that Wilson will write a “contemporary version.”

Does this mean retelling the same Psammead adventures in contemporary England, where children don’t have to worry so much about evading the household help? Or will a new set of children discover the grumpy little wish-provider and make new wishes?

Is Wilson writing The Psammead Comes Back: And This Times It’s Personal? Should we look forward to more Nesbit revamps that reflect modern lifestyles, like The Airline Children? The Enchanted McMansion? The Would-Be-Above-Averages?

Most of Nesbit’s novels are set in England a century ago, of course, and some display the racism and class attitudes of their times. But the children—almost always a gender mix of siblings, not vastly distinguishable—treat each other in easily relatable ways. The narrative style and voice in many of Nesbit’s fantasies is delightfully fresh. So I’m not sure what about Five Children and It is so dated as to demand a contemporary rewrite, which would therefore be driven by the new copyright claim and exclusive sales.

There are other ways to regain that old magical realism, of course. Edward Eager unabashedly updated Nesbit for the postwar suburban American child, and Laurel Snyder has updated Eager with Any Which Wall. In 1999 Books of Wonder commissioned new illustrations for Five Children and It from Paul O. Zelinsky, as shown above. All those editions and additions share a certain old-fashioned and nostalgic tone, but surely that’s what people seeking “a new version of E Nesbit” would be looking for. Perhaps Wilson will simply produce her own “inspired by Nesbit” adventure.

The other Nesbit news story for this week was the revelation that some beloved details of The Railway Children—particularly flagging down a train to prevent an accident and receiving an engraved watch as a reward—also appear in a novel published just a few years before: The House by the Railway, by Ada J. Graves. Since I dislike The Railway Children, this news didn’t derail me in the least.

Good Old Beautiful Phoenix

On my five-hour bus ride last Friday, I learned that my godson's five-year-old first cousins on his mother's side some fine children were enjoying E. Nesbit's The Phoenix and the Carpet. And that put me in mind of one of my favorite passages from that magnificent character study:

"I've been here all the time," said the Phoenix, yawning politely behind its claw. "If you wanted me you should have recited the ode of invocation; it's seven thousand lines long, and written in very pure and beautiful Greek."

"Couldn't you tell it us in English?" asked Anthea.

"It's rather long, isn't it?" said Jane...

"Couldn't you make a short English version, like Tate and Brady?"

"Oh, come along, do," said Robert, holding out his hand. "Come along, good old Phoenix."

"Good old beautiful Phoenix," it corrected shyly.

"Good old beautiful Phoenix, then. Come along, come along," said Robert, impatiently, with his hand still held out.

The Phoenix fluttered at once on to his wrist.

"This amiable youth," it said to the others, "has miraculously been able to put the whole meaning of the seven thousand lines of Greek invocation into one English hexameter--a little misplaced some of the words--but

'Oh, come along, come along, good old beautiful Phoenix!'

"Not perfect, I admit--but not bad for a boy of his age."

I especially admire Nesbit's insertion of the word "shyly."

[ADDENDUM: Indeed, I realized after posting this passage that every adverb in it but "impatiently"--in other words, every adverb modifying something to do with the Phoenix--brings a little irony. The Phoenix's yawn isn't polite, the bird isn't shy about seeking compliments, Robert's plea isn't miraculous, and the 7,000-line invocation isn't just "rather long." The adverbs draw attention to themselves and the qualities they describe only to make us reexamine what's really going on.]

E. Nesbit and the language barrier

One of the toughest challenges of writing about characters moving from our world to another is having them communicate believably to the folks they find in that other world [or time, or country, or level of reality, or junior high]. You can't just stop the plot for months of language-training. Well, that's what Philip Jose Farmer did in A Barnstormer in Oz, and the result wasn't pretty.

Usually fantasy authors ignore this problem, trusting their readers to go along. Deep down most of us believe our native tongue is the natural one, so of course it would also be the language of mermaids, medieval knights, or aliens who look like giant dust clouds.

But there are some cleverer treatments of the problem out there. Douglas Adams, working on the original and still-the-greatest form of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for radio, invented the babelfish; he made evolution solve his language problem, then bankshot that idea into a logical and theological joke. One of my writing-group colleagues has made her heroine's ability to communicate with everyone part of her plot; the girl becomes the new society's translator, which is interesting enough that we stop caring about how she came to have that ability.

My award for canniest use of intrusive narrative voice to meet this challenge goes to E. Nesbit in The Story of the Amulet. In chapter 3, she describes how the magical amulet speaks to the four children we met in Five Children and It:

I cannot tell you what language the voice [of the amulet] used. I only know that everyone present understood it perfectly. If you come to think of it, there must be some language that everyone could understand, if we only knew what it was.

Thus, the groundwork is laid for the children's first visit to another world. The next chapter offers Nesbit's longest attempt at explanation--or a semblance of it, in the form of an explanation from an adult who realizes that she is not making sense and is rather cross that the children might found her out.

Now, once for all, I am not going to be bothered to tell you how it was that the girl could understand Anthea and Anthea could understand the girl. You, at any rate, would not understand me, if I tried to explain it, any more than you can understand about time and space being only forms of thought. You may think what you like. Perhaps the children had found out the universal language which everyone can understand, and which wise men so far have not found. You will have noticed long ago that they were singularly lucky children, and they may have had this piece of luck as well as others. Or it may have been that...but why pursue the question further? The fact remains that in all their adventures the muddle-headed inventions which we call foreign languages never bothered them in the least. They could always understand and be understood. If you can explain this, please do. I daresay I could understand your explanation, though you could never understand mine.

Fortunately, that difficult moment is over, and the narrator feels no need to relive it in chapter 6:

(I think I must have explained to you before how it was that the children were always able to understand the language of any place they might happen to be in, and to be themselves understood. If not, I have no time to explain it now.)

And by chapter 8 the narrator is quite convinced that this is old business, and we readers know we could never convince her otherwise, anymore than we could convince nanny to let us stay up till midnight or set fire to the cat.

I really am not going to explain again how it was that the children could understand other languages than their own so thoroughly, and talk them, too, so that it felt and sounded (to them) just as though they were talking English.