Wastrel’s Reviews > Swallows and Amazons > Status Update

(the parallax section reminded me so strongly both of Delany in Babel-17 explaining... I can't remember, but it involved relative frames of reference and a series of metal balls I think... or Doc Smith explaining the gravity flip in a decelerating spaceship)

It's striking, anyway, how educated everyone is in this novel - not because they're educated by the standards of their time, but just because everyone in their time knew so much, even if they knew it badly. The children start off the novel with a Keats reference. People know how to cook, how to tie knots (rope is available at every shop), how to fish, some vague sense of world history and geography, and of course how to sail, etc etc. [though to be fair one child doesn't know what scurvy is]


Anyway, for the record, nothing happens in the first seven chapters, but then it starts to pick up.

Oh, and I thought Enid Blyton novels had Safeguarding Issues... but Ransome is off the charts.

Not only are the children sent off to sail a boat while living wild for a week, but some of them can't even swim, and the parents just handwave it away with a "if they're that stupid, it's better they drown" (not verbatim quote).

...and then children start SHOOTING ACTUAL ARROWS AT EACH OTHER.

Wastrel wrote: "Oh, and I thought Enid Blyton novels had Safeguarding Issues... but Ransome is off the charts.

Not only are the children sent off to sail a boat while living wild for a week, but some of them can'..."

Yes, the casual lack of safety concern is especially notable in light of the subsequent dangers.

...actually I feel like a lot of children's fiction used to feature quite casual allowing of children out and about despite known presence of poachers or smugglers or whatnot. I recall one where the brother and sister are out trying to steal back their rowboat from a tramp who stole it first.

The worst safeguarding issue in this so far is when theoretically responsible adults say to the children (paraphrasing) "hey, I hear there are some creepy men living in tents out in the forest, you should totally go and talk to them by yourselves at some point without telling anyone where you're going!"

I mean that feels like something that even in 1920 children would have been warned against doing. It's not like "creepy strangers in the woods outside town who are dangerous to children" was an unknown literary trope back then!

The children are also doing insanely dangerous things, like sailing boats in pitch darkness around sharp rocks, and climbing up tall, branchless trees with no safety equipment, and abandoning younger children on islands by themselves overnight without telling any adult about it, and so on, but at least in those cases the adults have just let the kids run wild and don't know what they're doing. With the charcoal-burners they actually encourage the kids to go off and talk to strangers! Strangers who keep poisonous snakes!

(I've read this before - and half a dozen other Ransome novels, which I actually minorly collected as a child from local secondhand bookshops (back when those existed) - so I knew the general idea and that it wouldn't be considered safe parenting these days. But I didn't remember just HOW unsafe it was!)

Wastrel wrote: "they actually encourage the kids to go off and talk to strangers! Strangers who keep poisonous snakes!"

You're probably aware, but in the US we have some snake-handling sects. I wonder if they ever feature in children's fiction?

It's a really good observation about the attitude and sf! I think maybe old classic sf kind of grew up from boys adventure style stories?

I remember reading this, and thinking the past really is an alien country (or planet!). There is a difference between reading contemporary historical-set fiction and reading fiction actually written at that time, with a very different normal.

I remember being shocked at how boring and poor their diet was, which makes sense retroactively and made me value how extravagant Enid Blyton's midnight feast must have looked like!