Enid Blyton (31 page)

It is in these opening lines that the author catches the child’s imagination to prepare it for the adventure ahead. Once a firm home base is established, once the young reader sees that the writer has her priorities right, he can follow her through the most improbable hair-raising deeds. It parallels the young child’s need to cling to its mother in a strange environment, emerging only gradually to explore its new surroundings and fleeing back to its mother at the first sign of danger. But Enid Blyton never goes too far, the children are wrapped in a cocoon of middle-class niceness, which demands respect from even the beastliest villain. There is never any real threat to the children, no upsetting fears or panicky terrors; it is all so nicely under control.

Another interesting feature of these opening chapters is that Enid Blyton often has the father killed off or maimed in some way before the book opens; those who survive the massacre are inevitably amiable, pipe-smoking buffoons, as harmless as toothless tigers. An exception is George’s father, ‘Uncle Quentin’, who is a rather irritable scientist, but he is never very much in evidence. When it is necessary to introduce a man, he is typically a walking compendium of everything within, but in all other ways a complete goon.

Bill Cunningham of the ‘Adventure’ series is a good example. He is actually a policeman, not your ordinary ‘copper’ of course, but something referred to mysteriously as ‘high-up’. In another series, ‘The
Secret Seven
’, the children’s mentor is also a policeman; this time an Inspector. Such characters help the plot along by enabling the author to cut corners and get crooks arrested and jailed in a paragraph. The policeman of course also symbolises super-authority and one word of praise for the children is enough: (‘Well done you kids, we have had half the police force in the country looking for this little lot.’) Care is taken however to keep this potentially threatening authority figure well into the background for most of the time and he is usually shown as tolerant and thoroughly non-threatening: one of Enid Blyton’s most obvious failings is that she cannot handle men.

(By the way, here is a puzzle for the cynically minded. What exactly is Bill Cunningham’s relationship to the widowed Mrs Mannering? Does he arrange adventures to suit himself to get those children away while he has Mrs Mannering all to himself? Those children normally so shrewdly observant seem to be peculiarly blind to what must be going on while they are away.)

For most adults who write children’s books, once the communication barrier has been largely overcome, the main problem is to write what children want to read and yet remain intellectually honest to themselves in presenting the world as it really is. For Enid Blyton it seems unlikely that any such dilemma raised its head; she was a child, she thought as a child, and she wrote as a child; of course the craft of an extremely competent adult writer is there, but the basic feeling is essentially pre-adolescent. Piaget has shown us that children tend to make moral judgement purely in terms of good and bad and that it is only with the advent of adolescence that the individual is able to accept different levels of goodness and to judge the actions of others according to the circumstances. Enid Blyton has no moral dilemmas and her books satisfy children because they present things clearly in black and white with no confusing intermediate shades of grey. For the adult of course this is what makes life interesting; for the child ambiguity is untenable. The reason Enid Blyton was able to write so much (most of her books appeared in the ten-year period, 1945-1955) was because she did not have to make any effort to think herself back into childhood or wrestle with her conscience about the falsity of what she wrote.

Gossip about the famous naturally feeds on public doubts as to the validity of the eminent personages’ adopted pose. Clerics become debauchers; politicians, embezzlers and generals, cowards. Inevit ably Enid Blyton was labelled by rumour as a child-hater. If true, such a fact should come as no surprise to us, for as a child herself all other children can be nothing but rivals to her. Perhaps this is why she so constantly put her bold adventurers in dark tunnels and on lonely islands, while canny adults like Bill Cunningham, Mrs Mannering and Uncle Quentin remained behind, enjoying holidays as they ought to be enjoyed, without children or animals to bother them!

Books by Enid Blyton 1922–1968

All books are listed in chronological order under their first publication date. A few books were undated and do not appear in reference books and these have been placed in an approximate year and are indicated by an asterisk (*). Many books were reissued several times, sometimes with a new wrapper or a changed publisher, but this list only includes reprints which were substantially changed in format, sometimes with a new illustrator. Paperback editions of previously published hardbacks are not included. Books published outside the UK (a few unique titles were published in Australia) and those in languages other than English (some books were published in Welsh) are not included.

All titles are as they appeared on the title page of the book; this sometimes differed slightly from the title on the cover. Where they are known illustrators are given and if a book used multiple illustrators, this is listed as ‘various’.

Only books written or edited by Enid Blyton are listed, anthologies, annuals and periodicals containing Blyton stories or articles are beyond the remit of this bibliography. Whilst this list aims to be as complete as possible, there are still a number of books which were published by Birn Bros. in the 1920s and 30s waiting to be ‘discovered’. In this period they gave no copies of their books to reference libraries and no information to reference books. It is known that Enid Blyton produced a considerable amount of work for them, but even she was sent no copies of her books by them, so many titles remain a mystery.

Source of Reference:
Enid Blyton: An Illustrated Bibliography
(Parts 1–4)

1922

1923

1924

1925

1926

1927

1928

1929

1930

1931

1932

1933