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THE BEAR AND THE TIGER: DECODING ATTITUDES AND ANXIETIES TOWARDS NATURE THROUGH A.A. MILNE’S WINNIE-THE-POOH IN POST-
WWI BRITAIN
by
JOANNA WILSON
JESSICA DALLOW, COMMITTEE CHAIR HEATHER MCPHERSON
LUCY CURZON
A THESIS
Submitted to the graduate faculty of The University of Alabama at Birmingham, and the University of Alabama in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts.
BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA
2014
Copyright by Joanna Wilson
2014
iii
THE BEAR AND THE TIGER: DECODING ATTITUDES AND ANXIETIES TOWARDS NATURE THROUGH A.A. MILNE’S WINNIE-THE-POOH IN POST-
WWI BRITAIN
JOANNA WILSON
ART HISTORY
ABSTRACT
This thesis aims to demonstrate how the two volumes of Winnie-the-Pooh stories,
published in 1926 and 1928, and written by A.A. Milne and illustrated by E.H. Shepard,
operate as a unique lens through which early twentieth-century attitudes towards nature
and wildlife in Britain may be discerned, and in particular how the stuffed animal
characters of Pooh the bear and Tigger the tiger represent a shift in post-war British
worldviews concerning nature and domination.
The initial stage of this investigation determines how the exceptionally broad
demographic constituting the audience for children’s fiction makes the medium a
particularly expressive record of the society in which it is produced. And then
considering the text and illustrations of Winnie-the-Pooh in a broader cultural and
historical context reveals the stories’ anthropomorphic characters and pastoral environs to
be a surprisingly incisive document of the British, and particularly the English public’s
response to the shifting physical and psychological landscape of post-war Britain. The
fictional spaces of Winnie-the-Pooh reflect English pride in outdoor pursuits and
traditions of natural enclosure, aspects of national identity that appear increasingly in
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fiction, and imagery as industrial progress and urbanization take their toll on the real
spaces suitable for outdoor pursuits.
Finally, my research compares the Winnie-the-Pooh characters and illustrations to
their literary ancestors in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1893). In so doing, it
examines the significant parallels and differences between Kipling’s work, written at the
height of colonial enterprise in India, and Milne’s work, which transplants a bear and
tiger to the idyllic English countryside during a state of economic and imperial decline in
the wake of the war.
Keywords: Britain, England, imperialism, children’s literature, landscape, national
identity
v
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to offer a heartfelt thanks to the Graduate School, and all of the Art
History faculty and administration at the University of Alabama and the University of
Alabama at Birmingham, in addition to a profound thanks to my thesis committee for
supporting and guiding me through the exhilarating and exhausting process of completing
my Masters degree. Dr. Heather McPherson and Dr. Lucy Curzon have offered me
invaluable instruction, criticism and inspiration during this process. Archival research for
this thesis was made possible through the Ireland Research Travel Award. Thank you to
the Graduate School for selecting me, and to Charles and Caroline Ireland for endowing
this important scholarship. I must offer special thanks to my advisor Dr. Jessica Dallow,
without whose seemingly inexhaustible patience and unflagging support, I could never
have completed this task. Over the past two years Jessica has gone above and beyond the
responsibilities of an advisor, not only spurring me to be a better scholar through her
engaging instruction and thoughtful guidance, but also offering the generous support of
her time and energy in every aspect of my professional and academic life. Thanks,
Jessica. You are the best, really.
I would also like to thank my partner Derek for his constant patience and support,
which was crucial in helping me maintain a semblance of humanity as I completed this
degree.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...................................................................................................v LIST OF FIGURES ......................................................................................................... viii INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................1 Significance of Topic and Existing Literature ..............................................................8 Organization and Methodology ..................................................................................15 CHAPTERS 1 THE FORMATION OF CHILDHOOD .......................................................................18 Children’s Literature ...................................................................................................21 The Purpose of Playthings ..........................................................................................28 2 DRAWING NATURAL CONCLUSIONS ..................................................................34 Natural Traditions in England ....................................................................................37 An Expansive View of English Landscape .......................................................42 The Nature of Winnie-the-Pooh ................................................................................45 Entering the Hundred Acre Wood ....................................................................46 A Narrow View of English Landscape .............................................................49 Enclosing Winnie-the-Pooh ..............................................................................53 3 THE BEAR AND THE TIGER ....................................................................................58 Bringing Our Boys Home ..........................................................................................60 Subjects of an Inland Empire ....................................................................................65 Ruling the Inland Empire ...........................................................................................72 CONCLUSION ..................................................................................................................76
vii
BIBLIOGRAPHY ..............................................................................................................79 FIGURES ........................................................................................................................85
viii
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure Page 1 E.H. Shepard, Illustration for Punch, April 11, 1934, pg. 417 ..............................86 2 Photograph, Piglet, Kanga, Winnie-the-Pooh, Eeyore and Tigger, New York
Public Library, New York ......................................................................................87 2 Francisco Goya, Family of the Duke of Osuna, 1786. Museo del Prado, Madrid,
Spain ......................................................................................................................88 4 Replica of Steiff Bear, PB 55, Steiff Museum, Geingen, Germany ......................89
5 Capability and Lancelot Brown, Blenheim Park and Grounds, 1760s, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom. ..............................................................................90
6 E.H. Shepard, Illustration for A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, New York: Dutton, 1926........................................................................................................................91
7 John Constable, A View of Salisbury, 1st quarter of nineteenth century, Musee de Louvre, Paris ..........................................................................................................92
8 John Constable, Hampstead Heath, 1820-22, Musee Bonnat, Bayonne, France ..93
9 E.H. Shepard, Drawing from Sketchbook EHS/E/9, Pg. 31, Sheep in Landscape, From the E. H. Shepard Archive, Copyright of E. H. Shepard, early twentieth century, Archives and Special Collections, University of Surrey, Surrey, UK .....94
10 E.H. Shepard, Drawing from Sketchbook, EHS/E/9, Pg. 38-39, Panoramic
Landscape, From the E.H. Shepard Archive, Copyright of E. H. Shepard, early twentieth century, Archives and Special Collections, University of Surrey, Surrey, UK ..........................................................................................................................95
11 James Ward, Theophilus Levett and a Favorite Hunter, 1817, Yale Center for
British Art, New Haven, Connecticut ....................................................................96 12 Francis Calcraft Turner, The Berkeley Hunt, 1842, Yale Center for British Art,
New Haven, Connecticut .......................................................................................97
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13 E.H. Shepard, Illustrated map for A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, New York:
Dutton, 1926 ..........................................................................................................98 14 Ambrosius Holbein, Woodcut for Utopia by Thomas More, 1518 .......................99 15 E.H. Shepard, Illustration for A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, New York: Dutton,
1926......................................................................................................................100 16 E.H. Shepard, Illustration for A.A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner, New
York: Dutton, 1928 ..............................................................................................101 17 E.H. Shepard, Illustration for A.A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner, New
York: Dutton, 1928 ..............................................................................................102 18 E.H. Shepard, Illustration for A.A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner, New
York: Dutton, 1928 ..............................................................................................103 19 E.H. Shepard, Illustration for A.A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner, New
York: Dutton, 1928 ..............................................................................................104 20 E.H. Shepard, Illustration for A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, New York: Dutton,
1926......................................................................................................................105 21 E.H. Shepard, Illustration for A.A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner, New
York: Dutton, 1928 ..............................................................................................106 22 John Lockwood Kipling, Detail of “Baloo” from illustration for Rudyard
Kipling’s The Jungle Book, Garden City: Harper & Brothers, 1893 ...................107 23 John Lockwood Kipling, Detail of “Shere Kahn” from illustration for Rudyard
Kipling’s The Jungle Book, Garden City: Harper & Brothers, 1893 ...................107 24 John Lockwood Kipling, Illustration for Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book,
Garden City: Harper & Brothers, 1893
1
INTRODUCTION
When Winnie-the-Pooh was first published in 1926, the humorous episodes of a
young boy and his animal companions were so well received that they were quickly
followed by a second, and equally popular volume, The House at Pooh Corner, in 1928.1
The stories, written by author and playwright A.A. Milne and illustrated by E.H. Shepard,
take place in an idyllic natural environment where the anthropomorphic characters, which
are primarily modeled after stuffed animal toys, make their homes. The only human
presence in Winnie-the-Pooh is that of Christopher Robin, a six-year-old English boy
who frequently visits the “Hundred Acre Wood” where his wisdom is often required to
solve the dilemmas of his animal friends. Each chapter of Winnie-the-Pooh and The
House at Pooh Corner narrates a discreet plot, which vary in detail and action but are
inevitably propelled by an animal character’s (typically Winnie-the-Pooh’s) silly
misunderstanding of a situation or hapless attempt at executing a goal. This thesis argues
that the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, written by A.A. Milne and illustrated by E. H. Shepard,
operate as a unique lens through which early twentieth-century attitudes towards nature
and wildlife in Britain may be discerned, and in particular how the
1 A.A. Milne and E.H. Shepard, Winnie-the-Pooh (New York: Dutton, 1988); A. A. Milne and E.H. Shepard, The House at Pooh Corner (New York: Dutton, 1961).
2
characters of “Pooh” the bear and “Tigger” the tiger represent a shift in English
worldviews concerning nature and domination following World War I.
Elucidating the shift evidenced in Winnie-the-Pooh assumes some rudimentary
knowledge of global events taking place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but it
is important now to briefly discuss some details of the demographic that constituted the
initial audience for Winnie-the-Pooh and some of the notable differences distinguishing
the character of that readership from its pre-WWI identity. The first volume of Winnie-
the-Pooh stories, published just eight years after the end of the first great world war, has
the distinction of being written for the first generation of English and British children
born after the war. Because the stories targeted a very young audience of children this
meant that the stories often required a parent or guardian to read to the child. Thus
Winnie-the-Pooh’s narrative was consumed simultaneously by two demographics of
Britons with radically different national experiences. The adult reader would have come
of age in a Britain that was an undeniable global superpower and that viewed its self-
styled cultural, moral and racial superiority as justifying a vast imperial and colonial
enterprise that successfully and unapologetically claimed the right to exploit the
resources and cultures of populations across the globe. This same adult reader would
have witnessed the unprecedented death and destruction of a war brought on by imperial
grasping and the war’s subsequent economic and physical toll that left Britain struggling
to rebuild internally while incapable of addressing the widening fissures in their imperial
interests abroad.
To avoid any possible confusion I should address how the terms “British” and
“English” will function in this thesis. In their most basic definitions Britain or British
3
refer to the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, or to the
British Empire’s continent-spanning colonies, which were governed and partly inhabited
by British citizens. English refers more specifically to the territory and population of
England, which was (and is) Britain’s monarchic seat as well as the site of the privileged
cultural model that was touted and disseminated through the colonial exploits of the
British Empire. But these trivial definitions are a poor index for the complexities of
nationhood. For the purpose of reading this thesis I offer a slightly more nuanced, though
still radically simplified, definition. When I use the term British in this thesis I am
indicating a community bound chiefly by the terrestrial reach of England’s political and
economic sovereignty. There are also clearly racial and cultural affinities of which to be
aware—the natural homogenizing result of sharing a relatively small land mass that is
physically cut off by sea from the myriad interchange of influences typical among
continental nations—but these affinities are not significantly more pronounced than those
of any other group of nations that share borders, ethnicity, and a common tongue. Though
this definition does not address the complex cultural, political and religious makeup of
the groups that exist within those perimeters, the focus of this thesis requires some
narrowing of terms. Because the author, illustrator and narrative representation of
Winnie-the-Pooh are English, and because the issues of imperialism I address are also
associated with the objective of British expansion which was furthered and promoted by
English values in particular, I cannot devote adequate space here to a more complete
understanding of the diversities of British identity. So in the interest of conciseness I will
use ‘British’ to broadly describe the inhabitants of a strictly political and physical
domain. ‘Englishness’, on the other hand, refers not only to the official policies and
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boundaries of that country, but to the far more nebulous qualities that constitute an
English national identity.2
The specifics of English national identity (as with any national identity) are an
expansive set of cultural, psychological, and physical traits that form a sort of spiritual
kinship between a nation’s members, idiosyncrasies that are heavily invented and
sustained through the visual and literary output of a nation. In Benedict Anderson’s
exploration of nationalism, he aptly describes the bond of national identity as an
“imagined community.”3 Anderson uses the word imagined because no single citizen can
attempt to know even a fraction of her fellow compatriots, and yet a sense of community
is still allowed to exist among millions of strangers who assume a bond with each other
based on the constructed personality of their nation.
Nationalism and national identity are essentially, in all their various
manifestations, an instance of “us-ness” versus otherness, a system of identifying and
promoting what is unique to the imagined community. In England’s case, national
identity assumes somewhat epic proportions as it describes the character of the ruling
head of the British Empire. The expansion of Britain’s economic and political might was
accompanied by the power to proclaim and enforce the customs, values, and culture of its
sovereign state as supreme. These include, but are not limited to, a ritualized system of
social interaction and protocol, a vehemently enforced class system, and idealized
2 Krishan Kumar offers an in depth discussion of differing definitions of ‘British’ and ‘English’ in The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 3 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 7.
5
engagement with their own homogenous landscape. It is important, too, to clarify that
English national identity was not a democratic construction. The promotion and
maintenance of national ideals was a privilege primarily reserved for members of the
upper classes. Winnie-the-Pooh’s author and illustrator were British citizens and their
work was published for the broader market of Great Britain, but they are further
distinguished as being English, and not only English, but upper-middle-class, highly
educated Englishmen.
Milne was born in London and attended the small public school that his parents
John and Mary ran before receiving a B.A. in mathematics from Cambridge. It was
through his work for the student-run Cambridge literary magazine Granta that Milne
caught the notice of the storied London humor magazine, Punch. Milne was a contributor
to the magazine, which published his humorous essays and poetry, from the time he
graduated in 1903 until 1906 when he joined the staff as a writer and assistant editor. A
few years after returning to Punch, following his service as a propaganda writer in WWI,
Milne began looking for an illustrator to accompany a collection of children’s verse he
had written titled When We Were Very Young (1924).4 A colleague at Punch suggested
he try staff artist Ernest Shepard. Shepard was also born in London and had attended the
Royal Academy Schools before embarking on a successful career as an illustrator. Like
Milne, Shepard’s talents were employed in the war effort when he was tapped by the
Intelligence Department to sketch combat fields. Shepard also contributed illustrations to
Punch throughout the war, and was hired as a full-time staff writer in 1921.5 So while
4 Ann Thwaite, A.A. Milne: His Life (London: Faber and Faber, 1990). 5 Rawle Knox, ed., The Works of E.H. Shepard (New York: Shocken Books, 1980).
6
Winnie-the-Pooh’s reach encompassed Britain more broadly, the social values that are
represented through the episodes of a young English boy and his anthropomorphic
companions in a southern English landscape are specifically concerned with the national
identity of England.
The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed Europe’s mad scramble for
imperial expansion that was dominated by Germany, France and Great Britain. By the
last half of the nineteenth century Britain had managed to formally expand the British
Empire to include Canada, Australia and India in addition to its colonial outposts dotting
Africa and the Caribbean. The establishment of the British Raj in India in 1858 can be
seen to mark the heyday of the British Empire’s influence and affluence. What began in
the seventeenth century with the East India Trading Company as a business venture in
importing and exporting goods from an un-unified India gradually evolved into
hegemonic and then official control over many of the subcontinent’s disparate
principalities until the absorption of these territories was finally made official and
complete in the mid-nineteenth century.6
The lucrative addition of British India to the Empire was not only a political and
economic coup, but was also seen as confirmation of a self-styled British identity as
righteous supreme conquerors, explorers, and civilizers. Newspapers, fiction and
commercial products served to further this romantic self-portrait for Britons through the
end of the century. And it is this identity of boundless, invincible dominion that the
author, illustrator, and adult readers of Winnie-the-Pooh were born to assume and,
6 Percival Joseph Griffiths, The British in India (London: R. Hale, 1946).
7
following the devastation of the war, forced to re-assess for their children who were born
in a very different Britain.
Written initially for an audience of middle and upper-class English children and
their parents, Winnie-the-Pooh was embraced by one of the largest demographics for
children’s fiction to date among the most powerful and privileged population of that era.
The juvenile adventures of the ecologically diverse cast of animals—these include
kangaroos, a pig, donkey, rabbit, and owl in addition to the bear and tiger—inhabiting a
secluded English Eden is positioned to speak convincingly to the larger concerns of the
post-war English public when examined in their historic context. Nineteenth and early-
twentieth-century developments in the treatment of childhood, representations of nature,
and expansion of the British Empire provide a framework that makes the enthusiastic
reception for Winnie-the-Pooh’s narrative—novel for its placement of gentle stuffed
versions of foreign wild-life in a domestic pastoral environment—culturally significant.
Following the physical and economic trauma of WWI, the variation in Winnie-the-Pooh’s
representations of imperial and pastoral aspects of Englishness suggests a shift from the
pre-war identity that asserted expansive dominion over the domestic and global
landscape. This shift is expressed through the stories’ narratives and illustrations as that
of Britain coming to terms with the fallibility of its imperial initiative as well as the
growing disparity between the cultural and physical landscapes that were central to
English national identity.
8
Significance of Topic and Existing Literature
The immediate and continuing popularity of Winnie-the-Pooh has made it an oft-
revisited text for youth literature scholars, particularly those interested in the canon of
British children’s fiction. However, perhaps because illustrations for a children’s book
are seen to be too dependent on the text to sustain critical inquiry, there has been no art
historical scholarship on the stories. For this reason, my thesis will treat Winnie-the-Pooh
and The House at Pooh Corner as works of interactive media, with text and illustration
working in concert to produce meanings and keep their audiences continuously engaged.
It is important to state here that when I refer to the “narrative” or “stories” of Winnie-the-
Pooh throughout this thesis I am speaking of the visually and textually integrated
document. The stories, which were written to appeal to a very young demographic, would
initially have been read to a child by a parent or guardian. Thus Winnie-the-Pooh’s
readership constituted both adults and children, frequently providing the aural component
of speaking adult and listening child in addition to its visual and textual narrative.
My reason for examining Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner as a
whole document, that is, as narratives in which text and illustration are essentially
intertwined, and perhaps the reason why they have never before received critical attention
from an art historian, is that the books occupy an interstitial space in the realm of
children’s illustration. The majority of illustration for children’s literature functions in
one of two ways: either as the primary mode of narrative delivery, or what we would call
a picture book; or as a supplement to the narrative, in which images appear intermitted
through a text to aid in the readers’ visualization of the characters, action, or environment
that are described in the verbal narrative. The length and content of the textual narrative
9
of Winnie-the-Pooh make it impossible to suggest that it is a picture book. And yet,
Shepard’s simple but compelling illustrations appear on over half of the pages. But rather
than driving the narrative, or visually reiterating a moment or scene from the text, these
illustrations operate in concert with the text to produce meaning. It is one of the chief
charms of the narratives that while Milne writes from the utterly earnest point-of-view of
his childish protagonists, it is often Shepard’s illustrations that contradict the seriousness
of the characters’ situation and reveal the humorous scale or misunderstanding of which
the stories’ inhabitants are unaware. Shepard’s images for Winnie-the-Pooh provide
much more than a visual description, they often offer key narrative information and
insight that alter, not only the way the story may be visualized, but also the fundamental
plot. Shepard’s illustrations and Milne’s text perform different narrative functions that,
only in union, form a complete experience.
Further evidence of the essential symbiotic relationship between text and image in
Winnie-the-Pooh can be gleaned from the stories’ unique formatting. Shepard’s
illustrations, very few of which are full page, are strategically situated throughout the
text—at the top or bottom of a page or in between text sections as the narrative calls
for—to facilitate the whole experience of the narrative. Of the numerous reprints that
have appeared since its first publication, Winnie-the-Pooh has always retained its distinct
format that never alters the original placement of image within text. This preservation of
how text and image are read together is a significant testament to their mutual formation
of narrative when you consider how many popular, classic children’s books are reprinted
in a format to accommodate cheaper production, and sometimes even repackaged using
different illustrators. It is telling that, even ninety years after its first publication,
10
regardless of what licensed edition of Winnie-the-Pooh you pick up, the content of the
stories will be contained on exactly the same number of pages and each page will be laid
out within the margins in exactly the same way.
The lasting impact of Milne and Shepard’s collaboration perhaps suggest an
interpersonal bond or friendship between the men, but the reality appears to be much
more prosaic. As the creators of one of the most beloved children’s stories in history,
both Milne and Shepard have been subject to their fair share of biographic treatment that,
for the most part, follows a chronological formula that pays the most attention to the
inter-war years that brought author and illustrator together. Although Shepard was a
respected illustrator by the time Milne was looking for an artist for When We Were Very
Young, the author was apparently very reluctant to employ Shepard.7 But however
reticent to enter into a professional relationship, Milne was pleased with Shepard’s
finished product, an outcome that could not entirely be predicted, as the conflated scenes
of floating line work that surrounded each verse was the first time he had deviated so far
in his professional work from the more finished compositions that describe most of his
oeuvre up to this point (figure 1). The success of that first project is what prompted Milne
to think of Shepard again when he started work on Winnie-the-Pooh. That Milne
envisioned the story to be a visually and textually integrated experience is evident by
accounts of this planning stage. Milne was apparently the most particular and detailed
author Shepard had ever worked with; Milne even invited the illustrator to spend time at
his house in Sussex so Shepard could acquaint himself with the landscape of Ashdown
7 H. F. Ellis suggests that Shepard thought Milne was reluctant to use him because he was not as well known as the author in, "Ernest and the Punch Table," in The Work of E. H. Shepard (New York: Schocken Books, 1980), 107.
11
Forest that was the inspiration for The Hundred Acre Wood. However, despite the level
of involvement entailed in their working relationship, the two men were never on more
intimate terms than that of fruitful collaborators.
As I have stated, there is no shortage of literary criticism and commentary on
Winnie-the-Pooh, though scholarship concerning the specific themes I am addressing is
more limited. Humphrey Carpenter and M. Daphne Kutzer have both published research
illuminating the connections between Winnie-the-Pooh and British understandings of
nature and imperialism respectively.8 Each examines the stories as part of a broader study
of these themes in British children’s literature, positioning them as a continuation of their
pervasive cultural presence. However, neither scholar explores the considerable overlap
of environmental and imperial themes present in Winnie-the-Pooh, nor do they discuss
the historical post-war context of its publication or identify the subsequent shift in the
way that nature or Empire is presented.
Denis Butts and Paula Connolly, who each take a different critical approach the
stories’ environs, have also examined the insularity and seclusion of Winnie-the-Pooh.
Butts offers an instrumental discussion of Winnie-the-Pooh as domestic fantasy.9
Connolly similarly discusses the idyllic safety of the stories’ arcadian habitat, but she
draws a parallel between the characters and their settings and an Edwardian nursery to
suggest, without commenting on the larger historical post-war context, that the two
8 M. Daphne Kutzer, Empire's Children: Empire and Imperialism in Classic British Children's Books (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000); Humphrey Carpenter, Secret Gardens: A Study of the Golden Age of Children's Literature (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985). 9 Dennis Butts, ed., Stories and Society: Children's Literature in Its Social Context (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992).
12
volumes function to facilitate a child’s transition from the nursery to adolescence. Paul
Wake offers a unique investigation of how temporality is represented in Milne’s work in
a study that primarily focuses on the author’s other children’s works.10 But Wake also
addresses temporality in Winnie-the-Pooh, arguing that the environment of the Hundred-
Acre-Wood conveys a sense of timelessness.
Perhaps the most interesting and expansive scholarly assessment of Winnie-the-
Pooh can be found in Frederick Crews’ The Pooh Perplex: A Freshman Casebook
(1963), which is actually an entertaining and sharp satire of what he sees as the over-
wrought rhetoric of literary critics and academics.11 Crews, whose occupation as a
legitimate English scholar makes the lampooning of his peers all the sharper, presents a
collection of twelve critical chapters from as many invented literary scholars. Despite the
obvious parody of Crews’ application of various philosophical and critical theories
(delivered with the lingo and tone of these various schools of thought that brilliantly
walks the line between pitch perfect and heavy handed), The Pooh Perplex deserves
mentioning here for two reasons. First, in the process of lampooning the rhetoric of
Marxism, Freudian analysis, etc., he makes genuine connections to these ideas, albeit in
such a ridiculous manner that he effectively discourages would-be Pooh scholars from
attempting to legitimately tackle those topics. And second, Crews’ use of Winnie-the-
Pooh as the vessel for his parody of scholarly pretension forms the fundamental joke,
which is that Winnie-the-Pooh is an absurd subject for this kind of analysis. While
10Paul Wake, "Waiting in the Hundred Acre Wood: Childhood, Narrative and Time in A. A. Milne's Works for Children," The Lion and the Unicorn 33, no. 1 (2008): 26-43. 11 Frederick C. Crews, The Pooh Perplex, A Freshman Casebook (New York: Dutton, 1963).
13
Crews’ object was to poke fun at the rhetoric his peers employ in dissecting works from
authors such as James Joyce or Marcel Proust, he perhaps unintentionally highlights the
long-maintained academic assumption that serious scholarship is reserved for serious
subjects. While trying to restrain my use of academic jargon, this thesis asserts that light-
hearted popular culture such as Winnie-the-Pooh can not only sustain rigorous inquiry,
but in fact can speak with more depth to certain issues precisely because of its broad
appeal and accessibility.
My thesis will address the gap in existing scholarship that only rarely and
minimally deals with the mutual dependence of text and illustration that defines the genre
of children’s picture books. While children’s fiction has grown as a focus for research in
literary criticism over the past quarter century, illustration is largely ignored as a critical
narrative factor. Art historians seem equally reluctant to seriously explore the subject of
children’s book illustration. Shepard’s illustrations have received very little scholarly
attention with the exception of simplified summaries of his style that are included in
biographical accounts of the artist or in illustration compilations. An exception to the lack
of scholarship concerning the contents of picture books as a whole is found in the text,
How Picturebooks Work (2001) coauthored by Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott.12
Their research develops an extensive argument for an examination of children’s narrative
that includes the relationship between text and image. Using several examples of
eighteenth and nineteenth-century picture books, Nikolajeva and Scott make a case for
the understanding of these documents as complicated by the relationship between iconic
12 Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott, How Picturebooks Work (New York: Garland Publishing, 2001).
14
(visual) and conventional (textual) signs. By exploring the children’s book as a specific
medium that simultaneously engages visual and textual comprehension, I aim to map out,
not only the environmental and imperial themes of Winnie-the-Pooh, but also the peculiar
manner in which these themes function through the format of illustrated children’s
literature for the parents and children who consumed them.
As an art historical study this thesis is original in its submission of Winnie-the-
Pooh as an undivided narrative object. There are art historians such as W.J.T. Mitchell
who have championed blurring the disciplinary lines between visual and textual
interpretation, but support for this cause has not yet made a significant impact on
scholarship concerning children’s fiction.13 My argument, which treats Milne’s words
and Shepard’s images as symbiotic elements of an immersive narrative experience,
contributes to a more textured understanding of the histories of both illustration and
children’s fiction. It is as an immersive experience that I argue for Winnie-the-Pooh’s
ability to reflect concerns in post-war Britain that are also inextricably bound between
verbal and visual renderings. Understanding English national identity through landscape
or imperialism necessitates a reading of how these themes are articulated through both
language and image, which is why my argument for Winnie-the-Pooh’s eloquence on
these topics in a post-war context offers dimension to an art historical narrative.
13 See W.J.T. Mitchell, "Word and Image," in Critical Terms for Art History, by Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 47-56.
15
Organization and Methodology
In Chapter One I discuss why Winnie-the-Pooh is a useful object for
understanding the concerns of post-WWI English society and how the history of
children’s fiction makes the medium a particularly expressive record of the society in
which it is produced. Tracing the history of both children’s print and toys in Britain
reveals the relatively short evolution of childhood and childhood material culture in
Britain. Using eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century surveys of toys and children’s
literature, I show how the objects of childhood in England developed to become
increasingly relevant indicators of the values and preoccupations of adult society. In
charting this chronological narrative I am able to position Winnie-the-Pooh’s creation at a
historic peak in British society’s deference for, and investment in childhood.
In Chapter Two I consider the text and illustrations of Winnie-the-Pooh in a
broader cultural and historical context to reveal the stories’ anthropomorphic characters
and pastoral environs to be a register of the public’s anxiety concerning the shifting
physical and psychological landscape of post-WWI Britain. I examine how the fictional
spaces of Winnie-the-Pooh reflect English pride in outdoor pursuits and traditions of
natural enclosure and how those traditions were affected by the war, industrialization, and
urbanization. Additionally, looking at England’s long history of using visual and literary
representations of landscape to promote national and imperial identity prefaces an
understanding of the children’s stories as expressing Britain’s cultural and political
climate. I use a number of interdisciplinary sources in this chapter to establish the breadth
of England’s identification with nature. I look at pre-war English landscape painting and
scholarship to illustrate how E.H. Shepard’s illustrations for Winnie-the-Pooh deviate
16
from the standard ideal landscape composition. I use Humphrey Carpenter’s study of
isolated natural environments in the “Golden Age” of children’s literature to anchor a
discussion of how British children’s books have historically idealized nature, and how the
environment of Winnie-the-Pooh can be seen to subtly disrupt the pattern Carpenter
outlines.14 Additionally, I use examples of English landscape architecture and literary
references to landscape “improvements” to illustrate a specifically English standard and
valuation of nature with which to compare and contextualize the depictions of nature set
forth in Winnie-the-Pooh. Finally I will look at how the notable isolation and insularity of
Winnie-the-Pooh’s environment suggests that pre-war English identity of assertive
dominance over the natural world was shifting to more tentative attitudes concerning
nature in an inter-war context. This chapter will use Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland (1865), Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908) and Francis
Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1910) as pre-war examples with which to
compare and contrast Winnie-the-Pooh.15
Lastly, in Chapter Three, I compare the “Pooh” characters and illustrations to
their literary ancestors in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1893) by looking at the
significant parallels and differences between Kipling’s treatment of wildlife, offered at
the height of colonial enterprise in India, and Milne’s work, which presents nature during
14 Carpenter, Secret Gardens. 15 Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-glass (Chicago, IL: J.G. Ferguson Publishing, 1992); Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (New York: Scribner, 1960); Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1962).
17
a state of economic and imperial decline in the wake of the war.16 The Jungle Book’s
narrative, which also features a child as the sole human representative among a
community of animals, provides a wealth of material examples with which to compare
Winnie-the-Pooh. Marking the points where the two beloved works diverge, in light of
the events that transpire between their publications, this thesis makes a case for
understanding the Winnie-the-Pooh stories as a document of England’s struggle to
reconcile a mythologized understanding of the past with steadfast inter-war realities for
the generations that would inherit its changing physical and ideological landscapes. In
this chapter I look at the two aforementioned texts as well as Burnett’s The Secret
Garden and A Little Princess (1905) in conjunction with a chronology of key events in
British imperial expansion and decline.17 This method will allow me to illustrate how
children’s fiction has traditionally reflected contemporary English concerns.
Additionally, in this chapter I will focus on how animals are depicted in both The Jungle
Book and Winnie-the-Pooh, using animal studies and the colonial history of zoos to
contextualize the significance of the foreign animal in a domestic landscape.
16 Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1925). 17 Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1963).
18
CHAPTER 1
THE FORMATION OF CHILDHOOD
Before I delve into what the thematic content of what Winnie-the-Pooh can tell us
about post-WWI English society, it is necessary to discuss Winnie-the-Pooh more
generally as an object and product. At the time that I am writing this thesis in 2014, and
for most of the past century, picture books designed to engage parents and children in a
mutually beneficial and enjoyable activity are a very common, perhaps even nostalgic,
part of childhood; the existence of which is not typically pondered at length. However, as
the next two chapters of this thesis will make the case for what Winnie-the-Pooh’s text
and illustration meant for its contemporary British audience, this chapter will lay the
foundation for how a children’s picture book can be a meaningful historical document.
Appreciating the impact of the stories requires contextualization, not only of pertinent
recent and contemporary events affecting Winnie-the-Pooh’s reception, but also of the
significance children’s picture books and toys had in general in the 1920s.
This chapter examines the evolution of children’s literature and product culture
leading up to the “Pooh” series’ publication in the 1920s. The “Pooh” stories are among
the first to animate children’s toys as characters, and certainly the first of any note to use
stuffed animal toys. As a children’s book that incorporates toys into its narrative cast,
Winnie-the-Pooh offers a uniquely condensed example of the trappings of childhood at a
19
historic moment when these objects and narratives were just beginning to reach the large
shared audience that makes them such a meaningful document of their society of
production. At the time of Winnie-the-Pooh’s publication in 1926, the relatively recent
occurrences of industrialization, technological advances, and the First World War all
contributed to a much larger middle class, with far more access to the children’s toys and
books that had previously been primarily a privilege reserved for the children of upper-
class families. Concurrent with the growing numbers of middle-class children were
strides in print and manufacturing technology in the first decades of the twentieth
century, giving rise to the lucrative business of child-specific marketing. By examining
the growth and manufacture of children’s entertainment in conjunction with recent
scholarship concerned with the pervasive themes of that culture, I aim to establish
Winnie-the-Pooh’s social and economic context in the broader history of the English
treatment of childhood.
The phenomenon of marketing towards children is particularly relevant in a study
of Winnie-the-Pooh because the stories’ chief animal characters are modeled on the
stuffed toys of Milne’s son, Christopher Robin (figure 2).18 The novelty of
anthropomorphizing plush copies rather than real animals is a notable departure from the
norms of children’s fiction, a departure made more interesting by the toys’ roots in
imperial conquest. Through an investigation of the history of children’s media in England
it becomes clear that increased production and demand coincided with increasingly
18 The original stuffed animal toys are now housed at the New York Public Library, which is also home to a special collection devoted to Winnie-the-Pooh. "The Adventures of the REAL Winnie-the-Pooh," Nypl.org, accessed June 04, 2014, http://www.nypl.org/locations/tid/36/node/5557.
20
topical content. Particularly with children’s fiction, references to the concerns and current
events occupying the nation at the time of their publication became more and more
frequent. Introducing species that were native to British colonized territories as benign
toy characters suggests a connection between the stories and contemporary anxiety
towards the decline of the British Empire. This chapter will convey the contemporary
relevance of popular children’s media to a broader national dialogue, as well as consider
how the details and context of Winnie-the-Pooh’s creation and reception position the
work to give meaningful insight into post-WWI English society.
To fully appreciate the significance of Winnie-the-Pooh’s content and reception
requires a discussion of how children’s literature and product culture developed in
England. Childhood is an evolving concept that for much of England’s history bore little
resemblance to its modern incarnation. The idea that a person’s formative years should
include imaginative play and specialized instruction was not widely accepted until the
end of the eighteenth century.19 And it took another century for society to reach a point
wherein children’s media was widely accessible to a large audience. The magnitude of
the audience Shepard and Milne were able to reach was contingent on these fairly recent
economic and cultural developments. But beyond providing a socio-economic structure
for Winnie-the-Pooh’s publication, exploring these developments places the work at a
pivotal juncture in the history of children’s product culture. The Industrial Revolution,
the hulking grandfather of so many cultural shifts in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, is responsible for a number of the developments that enabled the “Pooh
19 J. H. Plumb, "The New World of Children in Eighteenth-Century England," Past & Present 67 (May 01, 1975): 64-95.
21
phenomenon.” Like nearly every other product we now take for granted, the manufacture
of toys and books benefited tremendously from technological advances and the
implementation of factories.20
Children’s Literature
Looking at the development of children’s literature is important to discerning the
significance of Winnie-the-Pooh. The blossoming of children’s literature is tied to
industrialization, the rise of the middle class and changes in the conception of childhood.
Winnie-the-Pooh’s publication was momentous not only because of the historic global
events surrounding its reception in England, but because the nation’s cultural and
economic investment in childhood was at a historic peak.
Children’s literature or even children’s stories are a fairly recent phenomenon and
are essentially an eighteenth-century invention. Fairy tales, in many ways the ancestors to
children’s literature, were never intended specifically for children. In fact, revisiting the
pre-Disney versions of fairy tales such as those of the brothers Grimm reveals them to be
totally unsuitable for a young audience. The stories are rife with murder, rape,
cannibalism and bestiality, with a theme of creative, gruesome violence running through
nearly all of them. Grimm’s written version of “The Juniper Tree” for example, narrates
the tale of a boy whose stepmother decapitates him, frames her own daughter for the
murder, then, in an act of gratuitous thriftiness, uses the meat of his body to make a stew
20 Tom Kemp, Industrialization in Nineteenth-Century Europe (London: Longmans, 1969).
22
that she feeds to the boy’s unsuspecting father.21 Though you could say the story ends
happily, with a series of magical events bringing the boy back to life so he can crush his
stepmother to death with a millstone, this is not the sort of narrative a modern parent
wants to plant in their child’s imagination at bedtime.
Children’s literature scholar Roger Sale traces the history of how fairy tales,
originally a form of oral narrative that explored the balance of humans’ deepest fears and
desires, came to be thought of as the ancestors of modern children’s stories. 22 Sale
points out that childhood as we now understand it is a recent cultural development. The
privileges of childhood first took shape in wealthy and middle class families in the
eighteenth century, and it was not until the nineteenth century that society broadly began
to adopt the view that a person’s early development requires specialized instruction,
constructive entertainment, and imaginative play. Though fairy tales might have been
popular among a demographic we now view as children, pre-eighteenth-century English
children were not offered unique forms of entertainment that catered to the lack of
understanding and experience of youth. Once the gentler and more generous conception
of childhood began to form, fairy tales and their promotion of violent solutions and
cyclical vengeance were forced to undergo a dramatic restructuring for their new
audience.
21 “The Juniper Tree” was number 47 in the collection Grimm’s Fairy Tales first published in 1812 by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, but this tale, like the rest in the collection, was part of a much older oral fairy tale tradition and merely edited and compiled by the brothers for the publication. Maria Tatar discusses the compilation and publication undertaken by the Grimm brothers at length in The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). 22 Roger Sale, Fairy Tales and After: From Snow White to E.B. White (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).
23
As evidenced in Winnie-the-Pooh and many other examples of children’s
literature, some of the elements of fairy tales—talking animals, wish fulfillment, magical
objects and beings—were repurposed for modern children’s tales. The naivety and
imagination of children made them especially receptive to stories that associated the
animals and objects of daily life with fantastic possibilities, though these possibilities
became increasingly less dark as the understanding of childhood education and
development progressed. And traditional fairy tales such as Snow White, Cinderella and
Sleeping Beauty were significantly watered down and censored to make them more
palatable to an impressionable young audience. Sale contends that this erasure of
violence, or humans’ deepest fears, is the destruction of the fairy tale, the balance of fear
and desire skewed, rendered it nothing but fantastic flight of fancy.23 The changes that
Sale laments as the demise of the fairy tale become standard, but the destruction of the
fairy tale as it originally functioned became the beginning of a trajectory that would
eventually lead to modern children’s literature and the creation of Winnie-the-Pooh.
The animal fable represents another oral/literary tradition, originally intended for
adults, that has influenced the evolution of children’s literature and is particularly
relevant to Winnie-the-Pooh. The tradition of using anthropomorphic animals as narrative
vessels for imparting moral lessons is thousands of years old. The slave and storyteller
Aesop whose legacy has become synonymous with animal fables is first mentioned by
the fifth-century (BCE) Greek historian Herodotus.24 The continued re-telling and
23 Ibid., 24-30. 24 Herodotus, Harry Carter, and Edward Bawden, The Histories of Herodotus of Halicarnassus (New York: Heritage Press, 1958), 132.
24
reimagining of animal fables for the past millennia testifies to the peculiar fascination
that talking animals hold for humans. Though as with fairy-tales, by the end of the
eighteenth century, the animal fable becomes more and more frequently relegated to the
nursery. Carolyn Burke explores some of the reasons why anthropomorphic characters
are so frequently used to appeal to children in “Animals as People in Children’s
Literature,” positing that animals represent a unique opportunity to reach children
because a child can both identify with and distance themselves from animals.25 Burke
suggests a child identifies with the animal as a being that is subject to adult control and
authority, but she suggests that this kinship is not strong enough to remove a certain level
of emotional distance kept between a child and animal that is useful in learning difficult
lessons. The enduring popularity of this tradition is important when considering the
influence of Winnie-the-Pooh.
Children’s literature continued to evolve until, by the nineteenth century, the
incidence of infanticide was down to a cheerful zero, and the rate of decapitation among
children’s characters was notably less frequent. The steady shift in children’s literature
since its conception has been towards a fiction that edifies while it entertains, keeping
pace with the morals and values of each generation it seeks to engage. In the nineteenth
century we begin to see an increase in topical material. An explosion in print media and
photography made current events much more present in the minds of British citizens.
And it seems that referencing contemporary news and events functioned duly to
capitalize on interest in English projects, such as the exploration of Antarctica and what
25 Carolyn L. Burke, "Animals as People in Children's Literature," Language Arts 81, no. 3 (January 2004), accessed July 12, 2014, JSTOR.
25
was at the time wildly successful British Imperial expansion, and to promote national
pride.26
Notable examples of children’s literature that capitalizes on topical content
include Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1893) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Treasure Island (1883) and Kidnapped (1886), with The Jungle Book taking place in
British ruled India, while both of Stevenson’s works involve young British boys finding
adventure and seeking fortune in unspecified foreign lands that were characterized by
their pristine natural environments and “native” population. Narratives that revolved
around the potential for adventure and conquest in “uncivilized” lands such as Kipling
and Stevenson’s were typically marketed towards young boys.27 However, there were
also contemporary references to British imperialism in literature intended for young girls
such as Francis Hodgson Burnett’s two most famous works A Little Princess (1905) and
The Secret Garden (1911), both of which begin with young heroines arriving back to
England from British colonized India. In both of these works by Burnett the heroines’
history of living in India confers special distinction on them. Their compatriots in an
English context treat the girls as objects of particular interest and curiosity.
The increase in overtly topical references in stories suggests by extension that
English authors were also making subtle references to contemporary happenings or
circumstances. The subtlety, for example, with which a high percentage of the most
popular English nineteenth and twentieth-century children’s literature refers to a
26 Dennis Butts, ed., Stories and Society: Children's Literature in Its Social Context (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992). 27 Kutzer discusses these, and many other examples of the presence of imperialism and the various ways that it functioned in children’s narratives in, Empire's Children.
26
nationally embedded romanticized version of nature, is a cultural element that would
have been tacitly promoted by the parents who purchased these works, and internalized
by the children who read them.28 The number of critically successful British children’s
titles that include idyllic natural settings attests to national pride and interest in the
outdoors that became more pronounced in their fictional rendering during the industrial
revolution. I will delve further into the topical depiction of nature in nineteenth and early
twentieth-century England, as well as how these cultural references were applied in
specific examples of children’s literature in the next chapter, but mention it here to make
an important point. As news media and information became more widely accessible and
sensational, children’s literature increasingly reflected the events and concerns of the
globally invested adult population, a fact that lends critical support to a reading of
Winnie-the-Pooh as a document of its historic moment.
Interestingly, the formation of childhood that fostered the evolution of children’s
literature up to the point of Winnie-the-Pooh’s publication had literary roots. Perhaps the
most salient evidence of how childhood was being reconstructed in England is the series
of Child Labor laws that were passed over the course of the nineteenth century.29 When
the century began there was nothing preventing factories or workhouses from employing
very young children to work sixteen-hour days in harsh conditions for a pittance. Child
labor laws gradually increased the age and limited the hours a child was allowed to work
28 This theme landscape and nationalism in English literature is explored at length in Humphrey Carpenter’s Secret Gardens. 29 England, The National Archives, accessed June 3, 2014, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/citizenship/struggle_democracy/childlabour.htm
27
until by the twentieth century the period of childhood was an officially defined and
protected period of development. The titular character of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist
(1838) is credited with garnering popular support for legislation that protected the rights
and wellbeing of children. The abuse and hardship that Dickens’s orphaned young
protagonist endured in a London workhouse promoted sympathy and visibility for the
throngs of underprivileged children in England who were forced to eke out an existence
under horrifying circumstances. The narrative and context of Oliver Twist serves to
highlight how dramatically England’s conception of childhood changed in a relatively
short period of time, and sets a precedent for English authors and readers to see boyhood,
and childhood in general, as a period deserving the support, care and protection of
society. Though written for an adult audience, Oliver Twist can be seen as both a catalyst
and herald for the children’s fiction that would follow.
The burgeoning market for children’s media at the turn of the century coincided
with the peak of imperial exploits and the wealth of photographic media that became
profitable fodder for children’s book authors. Winnie-the-Pooh’s is significant in that its
1926 publication is positioned in the recently but firmly established market for childhood
media to reach the broadest historical audience. The timing of the stories’ publication is
made more poignant when its innocent male protagonists and safe environment are
considered in view of the tremendous amount of English life that was lost in the recent
war, and that the books were speaking to the concerns and desires of the first generation
of post-war parents and children.
28
The Purpose of Playthings
Winnie-the-Pooh’s momentous publication and popularity in the context of
childhood in England is made more interesting by its being populated by yet another
recently developed childhood commodity, the stuffed animal. That the chief characters of
Winnie-the-Pooh are modeled after the stuffed animal toys of Milne’s son Christopher
Robin is an important element of the narrative and my study because it further testifies to
the evolution and packaging of childhood in England. In A History of Toys (1966)
Antonia Fraser provides perhaps the most comprehensive account of toys in Western
civilization.30 Beginning with the presumed playthings of ancient Egyptians, Fraser
makes a case for the idea that toys, or at least items used to amuse and distract children,
have always been a part of society. However, objects that are specifically and creatively
crafted for this purpose have a shorter history. Fraser’s text operates as a traditional
historic survey, providing a linear chronological understanding of the tangible evolution
of toys, but in doing so she also provides an important narrative that is lacking in most
other subject surveys. In chronicling the development of toys through history she narrates
how the social and economic structures of family and society have shaped our
understanding and valuing of the formative years of childhood over time. Fraser’s
chronological account of toys lays the foundation for a study of Winnie-the-Pooh because
it situates the stories and characters at a historic peak of society’s investment in
childhood.
Tracing the history of toys reveals a steady, if halting, evolution in their
sophistication. But it is important to note that until the nineteenth century, the
30 Antonia Fraser, A History of Toys (New York: Delacorte Press, 1966).
29
evolutionary pace of toys did not match that of material produced for adult entertainment.
The readily identifiable reason for this disparity is economic. It would seem foolish to
exert the same time and care in the construction of an object meant for a transient period
of play. And children, notorious for their destructive capacity, would be equally
inappropriate custodians of something made with the same degree of craftsmanship and
quality of materials reserved for adult commodities. But these reasons don’t wholly
explain the notable lag in toy technology unless you are aware of how childhood has
historically been perceived. As I have discussed in the first part of this chapter, our
current conception of childhood, wherein parents are expected to provide a nurturing and
protected environment, is one that doesn’t begin to take root in England until the
eighteenth century, and wasn’t widely accepted until beginning of the nineteenth. Until
that point, children were generally viewed as smaller, less adept adults as soon as they
were able to physically function without supervision. As the least productive members of
society, particularly in lower income households, the concerns and desires of young
European children were subordinate to those of the elder family members.
There were, as with every product, specialty exceptions for those who could
afford it. In her introduction to the chapter on eighteenth-century toys, Fraser exclaims,
“With the dawn of the eighteenth century, one is immediately conscious of a change in
the atmosphere in the world of toys. Now at last some attention seems to be paid to the
real needs and tastes of children.”31 Evidence of a greater variety and quality of
playthings beginning to emerge in this century do point to the existence of a more
31 Ibid., 90
30
childhood friendly culture, but it is still primarily the privilege of upper-class children in
England.
Though children of a wide economic bracket could reasonably access games such
as shuttlecock and hot cockles, there was a specific category of toys that was still cost
prohibitive. Playthings that were miniature mimetic versions of adult property—
dollhouses, rocking horses, etc.—were still the provenance of upper-class nurseries.
Fraser gives the increased appearance of this category of toys in family portraits as
evidence of an eighteenth-century society that is more attentive to childhood, illustrated
with Francisco Goya’s 1786 portrait of The Family of the Duke of Osuna (figure 3).32
Such an example tellingly only applies to wealthy and upper middle class progeny, which
was fitting because these children would one day inherit the full-scale versions of their
playthings. Therefore these playthings functioned almost as tools for young heirs and
heiresses to learn stewardship of property.
The idea that toys allow children to imaginatively engage with their future roles is
not a new one. For centuries dolls have served to prepare little girls for the roles intended
for them, endearing them from a young age to the cares and responsibilities of
motherhood. The principle remains the same for the privileged children whose dollhouses
and rocking horses would eventually be replaced with households to manage and land to
oversee from horseback. The preparatory function of toys for children becomes more
interesting by the end of the nineteenth century. A growing middle class expanded the
market for toys while industrial advances enabled their cost-efficient production. Both of
32 Ibid., 90-91.
31
these circumstances fostered an industry wherein there was economic incentive for
creativity and quality in toy production as tradesmen vied for a new customer base.
As the toy industry and middle class consumer market grew, so did the range of
ways in which they allowed a growing number of children to creatively anticipate
adulthood. Toys marketed towards girls unfortunately continued to promote the very
limited opportunities they had to look forward to. Dolls, dollhouses, and miniature
kitchen items were the most popular options available for girls. But nineteenth-century
little boys had a much wider variety of objects with which to act out and idealize
aspirations that reflected a male dominated society. In addition to toy wagons, trains and
eventually automobiles, toy soldiers, weapons and anything related to battle or conquest
became the most desired among little boys.
The expansion of toys in England, particularly those related to adult activity and
occupation, speaks to a society invested in providing fun and imaginative play for its
young members while simultaneously preparing them for adulthood; a system that makes
the contextual examination of children’s product culture a productive way to discern how
the concerns of a society were transmitted from one generation to the next.
Stuffed animal toys have their own connotations. Beginning in 1880 the Steiff
Company in Germany was the first to produce stuffed animal toys on a large scale,
introducing the stuffed bear as their first popular product (figure 4). The success of the
Steiff Company quickly fostered competition so that by the time Christopher Robin
Milne entered the stuffed toy demographic, he had an array of species to choose from.
These soft models of wild animals occupy an interesting space in the category of toys I
have been discussing. Their mimetic forms don’t function in quite the same way as a
32
dollhouse or toy soldier would in preparing children for adult occupation because there
was little likelihood that they would engage with the real animals that inhabited English
nurseries, much less engage with them as pets or companions. Instead of the more
directly applicable vocational preparation, stuffed toys appear to prepare children for a
more abstract and complicated form of stewardship, that of being an English citizen of
the British Empire. A child’s possession of these fluffy, miniature-scaled representatives
of Imperial dominion can be seen as preparing young English citizens for their nationally
determined role as global proprietors, the self-proclaimed caretakers of the resources and
inhabitants of everything within Imperial Britain’s continent spanning reach.
As the novel vestiges of imperial exploits, stuffed animals are a particularly
interesting inclusion in Winnie-the-Pooh. Christopher Robin’s soft menagerie represent
no less than three British colonized continents, “Miss Kanga” and “Roo” from Australia
in Oceana, “Tigger” from Asia, and Winnie-the-Pooh from North America.33
The first part of Pooh’s name “Winnie” is typically short for the girls’ name
Winifred, a fact which has occasionally been cited by gender theorists as evidence of a
methodical feminization of the anthropomorphic bear. However, the origin of the bear’s
moniker does not seem to support such a reading.34 There was already a bear named
Winnie housed at the London Zoo, which Christopher Robin frequently visited with his
father. Transplanted from Winnipeg (the inspiration for her name) by a Canadian
33 Kutzer, Empire’s Children, 79-86. 34 The origin of “Winnie” and how she came to inspire the character of Winnie-the-Pooh is relayed in "videosheritage//minutesvideosvideosvideos," Historica Canada, Winnie, accessed June 05, 2014, https://www.historicacanada.ca/content/heritage-minutes/winnie-0.
33
lieutenant en route to England for the First World War, Winnie was a Canadian black
bear that apparently captured Christopher Robin’s imagination. It seems most plausible
that a boy under the age of six would simply name his stuffed bear after the only other
bear of his acquaintance and similarly assign the stuffed toy a male gender to match that
of his school and playmates. But regardless of any sexual significance in Pooh’s
conception, the bear’s layered connection to imperial projects—a model from Canada to
the London Zoo by way of the war—makes his starring role in childish post-war English
imagination a compelling one.
The argument I have attempted in this chapter is really a preamble to the chief
argument of my thesis. Because the scholarship concerning illustrated children’s stories is
meager, particularly in the discipline of art history, it begs an explanation of why and
how the material, visual, and textual culture of childhood is a meaningful reflection of
society before the specific meaning of a particular children’s work can be posited. As I
continue to make the case that Winnie-the-Pooh (a picture book about a chubby
ineffectual stuffed bear) illuminates the catharsis of England as its citizens struggled to
recover a sense of national selfhood in the wake of their most destructive war to date, it is
important to my argument that we understand the contents of a child’s room as a
testament to the economic, psychological, social, and moral nature of its society of
production.
34
CHAPTER 2
DRAWING NATURAL CONCLUSIONS
In the previous chapter I looked at historic, economic, and cultural developments
that segued the creation of Winnie-the-Pooh in order to provide a narrative for
understanding why it is that the stories, as objects of childhood, are positioned to give
meaningful insight into inter-war English society. This chapter focuses on the way that
nature is represented through the text and illustrations of Winnie-the-Pooh and where
these representations converge with and diverge from English landscape traditions.
Nature plays a vital role in Winnie-the-Pooh as all of the narrative action and imagery
takes place in the arcadian environment that Milne and Shepard have constructed for their
audience. The historic importance of pastoral landscape to English identity is a
thoroughly chronicled phenomenon that I will briefly examine in order to characterize the
national narrative regarding nature as well as to provide context for the points at which
Winnie-the-Pooh strays from previous cultural expressions of nature, and how those
departures can be seen as a response to the devastation of the war and the decline of
British imperial might. This shift is most evident in the way that Winnie-the-Pooh’s
insular arcadian microcosm contrasts with the nation’s pre-war privileging of sweeping
expansive landscapes.
35
There are two lines of inquiry that I use to support a landscape reading of Winnie-
the-Pooh: the historic modes of English landscaping and landscape painting and the
tradition of natural seclusion in children’s literature. Tracing the visual history of
landscape in England will provide some understanding of how the nation has pictured
itself in the past, as well as how that image of nature evolves with the political and
economic climate, both at home and throughout the Empire. Looking at examples from
beloved English landscape painter John Constable show how England has romantically
envisioned itself in terms of landscape. Looking too at paintings of hunting scenes,
exemplified by the work of James Ward, gives a sense of how the English landscape has
been historically constructed to affirm English dominance over the natural world.
Further, examples of English landscape architecture will serve to solidify the traditional
visual and cultural ideal of nature with which Winnie-the-Pooh’s post-war natural habitat
can be compared.
In this chapter I will also provide a formal overview of E.H. Shepard’s illustration
style with more in depth analysis of his rendering of landscape in Winnie-the-Pooh.
Before he became irrevocably tethered to Winnie-the-Pooh, Shepard was respected for
the distinct style of rendering he could apply to a variety of subjects as an established
illustrator for the magazine Punch.35 I will discuss some examples of his work for the
magazine as well as examples from his personal sketchbooks in order to establish how
Shepard’s work fits into the tradition of landscape in England, and to provide important
35 Ernest H. Shepard and Rawle Knox, The Work of E. H. Shepard (New York: Schocken Books, 1980), 45-54.
36
points of comparison for how his illustrations for Winnie-the-Pooh subtly deviate from
his other work.36
Viewing Shepard as descending from English landscape traditions reveals an
alliance with his predecessors, making the subtle differences in his representations of
nature for Winnie-the-Pooh a more compelling testament to the historic moment. For,
with illustrations featured on almost every page of both Winnie-the-Pooh and The House
at Pooh Corner, the majority of them featuring elements of the landscape, the stories
provide a comprehensive visual description of the landscape in which the stories take
place.
Looking additionally at how Milne’s textual characterization of nature works in
concert with Shepard’s illustrations explores the way in which Winnie-the-Pooh’s content
and format function to shape its young readers’ concept of nature and nation in a way that
differs from pre-war depictions of nature.
England’s visual landscape culture is matched by an equally robust literary
landscape history. Pastoral poetry and fiction have long been an important part of
England’s cultural production, and the variations that emerge in British children’s fiction
are particularly useful in arguing that Winnie-the-Pooh represents an imaginative
response to the war’s physical and economic toll on the nation. Many of Britain’s most
beloved children’s books incorporate a secluded, Eden-like setting as the primary site of
narrative and character development. 37 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), The
36 The collection of Shepard’s unpublished sketchbooks is housed in the E.H. Shepard Archive, University of Surrey, Guildford, United Kingdom. 37 Carpenter writes extensively about this phenomenon in children’s literature, including each of the texts mentioned above in Secret Gardens.
37
Secret Garden (1911), and The Wind in the Willows (1908) are just a few examples
wherein children or anthropomorphic characters are situated in natural seclusion as ideal
environments for existence and personal growth.
Winnie-the-Pooh’s world takes the trope of natural seclusion further than its
literary predecessors, setting the story in an idyllic landscape that is considerably more
isolated and insular than its literary counterparts. In this chapter I show how the
illustrated and textual natural environment of Winnie-the-Pooh compares to its landscape
predecessors and relates to its contemporary context, and in so doing reveal how Milne
and Shepard’s work can speak specifically to a post-WWI shift in English attitudes
towards nature.
Natural Traditions in England
Milne and Shepard’s tiger and bear materialized during a period when the
changing mental and physical landscape of post-war England gave rise to increasingly
idealized renderings of a romanticized past. The countryside had been a longstanding
source of pride and recreation for the English people, and while the physical spaces fit for
outdoor pursuits were dwindling, their fictional presence was accelerating.38 Landscape,
which had always boasted strong representation in English cultural product, became a
national signature in English poetry, literature and art during the nineteenth century.
There are a number of reasons that help explain why this century cemented England’s
hold on the landscape.
38 Lawrence Buell discusses the construction of identity through environment in "The Ecocritical Insurgency," New Literary History 30, no. 3 (July 1999): 699-712.
38
The arcadian stage for Winnie-the-Pooh’s narrative was set much earlier by a
nation that has a long, rich history of picturing itself in terms of the landscape. As I’ve
mentioned before, the steady advance of industrialization and urbanization had a great
deal to do with the shift, spurring decorative and literary movements like the Arts and
Crafts movement and Romanticism.39 In Britain, as elsewhere, a binary of city versus
country begins to emerge in cultural consciousness in the eighteenth century. In her book
The Invention of Countryside (2001) Donna Landry explores how the word countryside
began to shift at end of the seventeenth century from referencing a geographic area to
evoking an idea.40 Landry focuses particularly on the English countryside as a space for
sport and recreation, pointing to the enactment of new hunting legislation and the British
Agricultural Revolution as key factors in a cultural current that, as it limited the
population’s engagement with or access to the countryside, restructured the idea of the
countryside as a space for poetic and patriotic leisure. And it is as an idea, as a mentally
accessible site of pride and pleasure, that the English countryside and landscape becomes
a significant part of national identity. There was now a firm delineation between the daily
realities of a city centered economy, and the countryside that had for so long been the
scene of everyday life. This separation between urban and rural life had the effect of
allowing city and town dwellers to romanticize the country.
39 Nikolaus Pevsner discusses the industrial cause for the shifting focus towards landscape in English art in "Constable and the Pursuit of Nature," in The Englishness of English Art (New York: Penguin, 1978), 157-72. 40 Donna Landry, The Invention of the Countryside: Hunting, Walking, and Ecology in English Literature, 1671-1831 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001).
39
Further contributing to the proliferation of landscape painting was the aggressive
expansion of natural enclosure in England during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
For many centuries in England much of the arable landscape was held as “common land”
that could be accessed for grazing, mowing, or agricultural purposes by the population
that could not otherwise afford property. Due to legislation allowing for the private
purchase of a ground’s “common rights” the commons began to be deeded off and
enclosed until by the nineteenth century they had all but disappeared.41 In her book
Landscape and Ideology (1986), Ann Bermingham devotes significant space to the idea
that enclosure is partly, if not chiefly, responsible for the development of England’s
national identity concerning nature.42 Bermingham suggests that the loss of common
rights, which was the democratic ownership of practical landscapes, spurred the creation
of a different kind of common ownership. In effect, the flood of pastoral poetry,
landscape paintings, and other nature-oriented cultural products replaced a landscape that
physically belonged to the English people with one that mentally belonged to them.
That some of England’s most popular nineteenth-century painters, John Constable
and Joseph Turner, were purveyors of ideal rural landscape is an indication of the
nation’s valuation of landscape. It is also during Constable’s reign that the idea of the
picturesque becomes a part of the English national dialogue. The “picturesque” was
touted in the late eighteenth century by the Reverend William Gilpin, who offered it as an
41 J. M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in Common-field England, 1700-1820 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 221-258. 42 Ann Bermingham refers to enclosure in many of the chapters, but outlines its importance to her study in the Introduction of Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740-1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 1-6.
40
aesthetic alternative to the concepts of beauty and the sublime.43 Gilpin’s somewhat
nebulous definition of the picturesque described it as, “that kind of beauty which is
agreeable in a picture.”44 Despite his inability to offer a more precise definition of what
qualified as picturesque, Gilpin had no problem identifying the phenomenon when he
saw it, and wrote many more essays extolling various picturesque views. Gilpin even
began what Dabney Townsend calls a cottage industry of picturesque tourism, offering
eager view-seekers guided expeditions through the English countryside in search of
scenes worthy of putting in pictures.45 Anna Gruetzner Robins details another instance of
this cyclical phenomenon in her chapter for The Geographies of Englishness, noting that
painted romanticized versions of rural life began to appear as artists bid to take advantage
of England’s newfound nostalgia for the countryside. 46 Why and how this separation
prompted such a strong reaction from the English in particular speaks to the nation’s
ideals and preoccupations and establishes the structure within which Winnie-the-Pooh
operates alternately as an affirmation or disruption of those ideals.
In addition to traditions in literary and visual culture, English landscaping offers
cultural insights that help to establish the English landscape ideal versus the landscape of
Winnie-the-Pooh. One of the facets of England’s ecological identity that Milne and
43 Dabney Townsend, "The Picturesque," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55, no. 4 (October 1997): 365, accessed July 12, 2014, JSTOR. 44 William Gilpin, An Essay on Prints (London: Printed for R. Blamire in the Strand, 1802). 45 Townsend, “The Picturesque,” 365. 46 Anna G. Robins, "Living the Simple Life," in The Geographies of Englishness: Landscape and the National Past, 1880-1940, ed. David Peters Corbett, Ysanne Holt, and Fiona Russell (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 3-9.
41
Shepard unquestioningly respect is the national taste for avoiding the appearance of
cultivation. The influence of geography and natural landscape on landscaping and
gardening is present to some degree in most cultures. However, the degree to which
English landscaping attempts to mimic nature is striking. In no other country is the
contrived illusion of nature so fully embraced and promoted as in England.
Two of eighteenth-century England’s most prominent landscape architects
embody this aesthetic. Looking at photographs of the brothers Lancelot and Capability
Brown’s mid-eighteenth-century work reveals designs that are almost imperceptible as
such. Though in a sprawling estate or park such as Blenheim Park and Grounds (figure 5;
1760s) there would also be more overtly designed and traditionally ordered gardens,
these seemingly organic views were just as considered. Hiring a landscape architect for a
project like this was an expense that ranged from considerable to enormous. It is telling
of how strong the national ideal of nature was that the clients of Brown and his
colleagues were often commissioned to make such subtle interventions with the natural
landscape. A reverence for the ideal of nature as presented by landscape painters seems to
have affected its inspirational source. This cycle, where the most picturesque and
idealized vistas of the raw English landscape become the standard to which an organic
landscape is held, is really a tidy example of the simulacrum at work. The cycle continues
in the pages of Winnie-the-Pooh with Shepard’s illustrations for Winnie-the-Pooh,
glimpsing a natural habitat that strikes the happy English medium between order and
organic profusion (figure 6).
42
Jane Austen gives a useful example of the roots of English landscaping practice in
her novel Mansfield Park (1814).47 Visiting the large estate of a character’s fiancé, the
central male characters of the novel essentially reveal their respective worth over the
course of a conversation concerning landscape. The fact that landscaping plays such a
revelatory role in this pivotal chapter suggests that contemporary English readers would
have been fully attuned to this culture, understanding before an American reader that the
dashing Henry Crawford’s grasp of the subtle manipulations required to “improve” the
landscape was an indication of his sophistication. While poor Mr. Rushworth’s grand
plans, a gross betrayal of good taste, were the final proof of his idiocy. Of course, the
power to physically alter the natural landscape was strictly the domain of the privileged
class, but its impact didn’t stop there. As evidenced in Mansfield Park, this image of what
nature should look like became embedded in English culture.
An Expansive View of English Landscape
One of the most interesting features of English landscape identity when looking at
Winnie-the-Pooh in this context, is the taste for compositions that privilege expansive
views and deep perspective. John Constable, arguably England’s most famous landscape
painter, was a leader in the romantic visualization of England and created numerous
paintings that promote a sweeping idyllic standard for English landscape painting.
Constable’s A View of Salisbury (figure 7; 1st quarter of nineteenth century) or
Hampstead Heath (figure 8; 1820-22) for example, set the compositional model that
47 Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 84-104.
43
would have enduring appeal for English landscape artists and enthusiasts even a century
later when Shepard was pursuing his career as an illustrator.
The E.H. Shepard archive at the University of Surrey in Guildford houses thirty-
nine of the small sketchbooks that the artist always kept on hand. There is a risk when
looking at Shepard’s professional work, particularly his illustrations for Punch, of not
knowing to what degree the final product reflects the direction of an editor. Shepard’s
personal sketchbooks provide important evidence when looking at Winnie-the-Pooh
because they offer abundant examples of how Shepard chose to render scenery without
any editorial intervention. In the many pages devoted to landscape, there is a reoccurring
theme; panoramic vistas of rolling hills and distant but distinct horizons jive perfectly
with the English conception of a picturesque landscape.
Two of Shepard’s sketches (figures 9 and 10; early twentieth century) of
unspecified locations in the English countryside are good comparative examples of how
he chose to depict the landscape.48 Though one of the sketches is clearly much more
finished than the other, it is revealing that even in the less detailed landscape Shepard fills
both pages, capturing as much as he can of the undulating terrain, horizon, and sky. The
more finished sketch of a village viewed from a distance, nestled into the English terrain,
draws easy comparison to Constable’s View of Salisbury. This sort of picturesque
expanse can be seen as a natural adaption of the English landscape painting tradition
exemplified by Constable.
48 Ernest Shepard, Sketchbook, EHS/E/9, Pg. 31, From the E.H. Shepard Archive, University of Surrey Guildford, UK; Ernest Shepard, Sketchbook, EHS/E/9, Pg, 38-39, From the E.H. Shepard Archive, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK.
44
Though Constable’s romanticized scenes influenced the tastes and production of
much of the landscape painters that followed him, there was another popular landscape
painting tradition in England that speaks pertinently to both Shepard’s landscape
compositions and where they diverge in Winnie-the-Pooh. During the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries there was a thriving market for paintings depicting hunting scenes.
This 1817 painting by James Ward, Theophilus Levett and a Favorite Hunter (figure 11),
or Francis Calcraft Turner’s The Berkeley Hunt (figure 12; 1842) incorporates the
majestic expanse of landscape favored in the genre, but also more overtly expresses what
is only implied in a traditional landscape. The potency that landscape held for the English
is deeply connected to the national conception of selfhood as being the divinely
appointed stewards of the natural world. 49
This hunting portrait commissioned by Levett articulates the English constructed
role as terrestrial guardian in explicit terms. Levett’s imposing presence in the foreground
of the sweeping property conveys the gentleman’s pride in ownership of the land and the
privilege and responsibility that the host of the hunt exercised in fostering and protecting
the wildlife on his land, as well as his right to control (or end) the flora and fauna life
under his care. The scepter-like riding crop that Levett wields in this painting functions as
a not-so-subtle reinforcement of the idea that he is the ordained ruler of the scene behind
him.
British historian Diana Donald traces the development of the nation’s eco-
mythology, pointing out that centuries of English landed gentry had promoted a cult of
49 Diana Donald details the popularity of this genre of painting and discusses how they functioned to self-affirm the rights and privileges of English landowners. Picturing Animals in Britain 1750-1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 237-271.
45
nature through hunting rites. 50 The artificial enclosure of “natural” landscape became the
grounds on which landowners enacted an elaborate pageant, fashioning themselves as
both protectors and rulers of the natural world. Though these issues of possession and
dominion are present in more traditional landscape, the additional element of animal life
featured in hunting scenes will be particularly useful when discussing the landscape
legacy of Winnie-the-Pooh.
The Nature of Winnie-the-Pooh
The natural environment in Winnie-the-Pooh, though essential to the narrative, is
not typically granted much critical attention, with scholars like Kutzer and even
Carpenter instead focusing on the action and dialogue of the characters as the primary
deliverers of meaning making. But as I discussed in the last section, landscape was a
visually and culturally pronounced characteristic of English identity that was fraught with
economic and political associations, which makes the bucolic realm wherein Winnie-the-
Pooh’s narrative takes place quite meaningful. This section will describe the nature of
Winnie-the-Pooh, focusing on the textual and illustrative structure of the narrative and
how the emphasis on the natural environment, shown through these representations in a
post-war context, reflect and refract the nation’s ideals concerning nature.
Carpenter offers an exception to the otherwise character or plot-focused
discussions of Winnie-the-Pooh. He writes about the “Golden Age” of children’s
literature as a period stretching from Lewis Carroll’s works in the mid nineteenth century
50 Ibid.
46
up until Milne’s creation of Winnie-the-Pooh in 1926.51 Carpenter points out the tendency
of British children’s authors of this period to create a bucolic or fantasy setting for their
characters that provides an insular escape from the physical realities of the industrialized
world. Carpenter is not as concerned with the biological environments of Arcadian
children’s fiction as with how these spaces represent imaginative escape from the real
world. My interest in Winnie-the-Pooh is in some ways a reversal of Carpenter’s study,
an investigation of why the stories’ escapist habitat looks and functions as it does, and
what the details in turn can tell as about inter-war English society.
Entering the Hundred Acre Wood
The landscape of Winnie-the-Pooh is established even before the narrative begins
with Shepard providing a map of the narrative territory filling the very first two pages
after the title page (figure 13). The inclusion of the map is important as it immediately
informs us that the stories to follow are generated around a community of persons bound
together by place. There is a long history of illustrated maps of fictional spaces,
particularly for adventure or travel based plots, with notable examples including Jonathan
Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883).
But one of the earliest examples of literary cartography can be found in Thomas More’s
1516 socialist fantasy novel Utopia which, like Winnie-the-Pooh, operates as a
geographic description of a community rather than as a navigational tool for a character’s
journey (figure 14).
51 Carpenter, Secret Gardens.
47
As a frontispiece, the map communicates that before we find out what happens,
we need to see where it happens. And where these stories take place is laid out in simple
line illustration as a place of charming pastoral seclusion. The designated landmarks—
characters’ houses, and the locations where their adventures take place—are primarily
trees drawn and spaced to distinguish them as places of note. In addition to the map,
dozens of illustrations detailing the natural environment within the text affirm how
important Winnie-the-Pooh’s ecological world is to the narrative.
The map also acts as a tool for spatial exposition in a story that is otherwise
atypical in this respect. The visual and textual descriptions of any book meant for very
young children operate differently than they do for older children or adults. For an
audience whose mental map of the world is very limited, there is not as much need for the
usual exposition that either connects the narrative’s location to reality or explains its
removal. In Burnett’s The Secret Garden for example, readers are ushered into the
imaginative narrative with an introduction that begins with Mary at the train station, a
location that existed prosaically in the mental maps of English children. A long carriage
ride in the dark of night over the moors brings Mary and her readers to the fictional hub
of the story, while also providing young readers with a connection to reality. 52
For the magical locales of English favorites such as Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland or C.S. Lewis’s The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, a different approach
is needed. In these stories, it is the magical operation of a specific portal that allows
children to accept the fantastic nature of the stories’ environments. The rabbit hole that
brings Alice to Wonderland and the wardrobe that functions as gateway to Narnia are
52 Burnett, Secret Garden, 3-24.
48
common objects and landscape features that tether these fantasy narratives to a physical
reality that is familiar to the reader. Though not uncommon in books intended for very
young children, the process of physical orientation lacking in Winnie-the-Pooh is, in one
sense, unusual for the nature of its setting. An isolated natural landscape ruled by
anthropomorphic characters and almost totally disconnected from human civilization
would presumably require a spatial exposition if only to sate a child’s curiosity about
how to find this world.
Perhaps the genius of Milne and Shepard’s tome, and the catalyst for its immense
popularity is that the conduit between the world they created and the one in which their
audience lived was already an imaginative portal. Populating the stories with the stuffed
toys, which were already the creative connection between children and an imagined other
world, enabled an easy transition for little readers or listeners from truth to fiction. Unlike
its children’s literary predecessors, Milne’s stuffed toys do not operate as singular fixed
conduits to a narrative Eden, but rather suggest the possibility of reaching that
environment is as simple as taking one’s teddy bear outside, which places the stories’
locale in a unique interstitial narrative space. Each example from the canon of English
children’s fiction preceding Winnie-the-Pooh situates its narrative in either an
inaccessible but realistic space, or in a realm that must be reached by specific magical
means. The fact that Winnie-the-Pooh lacks the spatial exposition that would determine
whether it belongs to a real or fantasy geographic realm, coupled with the use of toys as
models for its chief characters, implies that the stories are an active product of make-
believe. That the landscape inhabited by these characters was thoroughly English further
eased this transition.
49
The very first sentence of Winnie-the-Pooh’s first adventure begins, “One day
when he was out walking, he came to an open place in the middle of the forest, and in
that place was a large oak-tree…”53 Far from being a unique entry point to the story, this
is but the first of many chapters wherein the action of the plot is happened upon during
the process of an aimless walk through the forest. The second chapter, too, begins with
Winnie-the-Pooh, “…walking through the forest one day…”(figure 15)54 This repeating
motif (and accompanying illustrations) serves not only to immerse the audience in the
bucolic world of the characters, but to instill and reinforce an attachment to the
undeveloped landscape that was such a visible part of English identity. Shepard’s
illustration also underscores the English preference for the picturesque landscape.
Unkempt, but not unattractive, Winnie-the-Pooh is situated in an ideal natural space that
in many ways perfectly aligns with that of pre-war English society. The ability of the
stories’ characters to ramble through a picturesque environment, unperturbed by the
pollution of civilization, invokes the same romantic appreciation for landscape that had
begun to form with the industrial revolution. But for some subtle clues, we might imagine
that Winnie-the-Pooh’s world could be the subject of one of Constable’s paintings.
A Narrow View of English Landscape
One of the chief aspects differentiating Winnie-the-Pooh’s representation of
nature from that of its pre-war predecessors, however, is its marked insularity, which is
compounded by its lack of specificity. In the context of a post-war declining empire, this
generic and insular view of nature carries connotations of a society that no longer wants
53 Milne and Shepard, Winnie-the-Pooh, 5. 54 Ibid., 22-23.
50
to promote conquest or expansion. Shepard’s illustrations provide just enough detail to
invest the environment with familiarity without betraying a specific locale. And when I
say specific here I mean it in the most general way possible. Shepard’s unique
illustrations managed to convey an English sense of nature that was specific and intimate
for the broadest possible audience. His trademark sketchy, expressive line work
articulates just enough to convey the environment and action of a moment, but doesn’t
ever provide a larger picture, which fosters the sense of insularity in which the stories
take place.
Even in the map that introduces the world of Winnie-the-Pooh, and provides the
only complete picture of its organic community, there is a humorous juxtaposition
between the trivial scale of narrative from an adult’s point of view, and the seriousness
with which everything is undertaken within. There is vagueness to the perspective and
scale that, at first glance, makes the boundaries of the world of the story seem fairly
expansive. The orienting compass in the top left corner and what appears to be a river
meandering through the landscape until it disappears into the distance both suggest a
considerable land area. But then the landmark practically designated “six pine trees” puts
the space back into a more minute perspective.
The format and composition of Shepard’s illustrations working in concert with the
text are also designed to promote this sense of generic, yet intimate, spatial orientation.
Smaller illustrations are often integrated into the text pages, depicting a single action of a
character with very minimal suggestion of environment. In the examples shown here
(figures 15 and 16) the illustration of a single event is cleverly formatted across two
51
pages.55 At this point in the narrative Pooh and Piglet, illustrated at the bottom of the left
facing page, are concerned that the cries for help heard from above is the trick of a
“jagular” (one of the frequent occurrences in the stories of childish characters
mispronouncing and misunderstanding a noun, in this case a jaguar) who they fear will
drop on them as soon as they look up. The cries are actually coming from Tigger stuck
high in a tree illustrated at the top of the right facing page. The text, illustration, and
print format all work in concert here to establish the safe microcosm of the stories’ action
for the parents reading the book, while amplifying the drama taking place for childish
understanding. The composition allows a very young listener (and viewer) to invest in the
drama of Pooh and Piglet’s perceived danger as they consult at the roots of the great tree
that dwarfs their small forms. And Tigger’s predicament, discovered on the next page, is
subsequently more exciting when he is seen in the treetop that is cropped to exaggerate
his distance from the ground. The text dialogue between Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet on
the left-facing page is formatted above the illustration that cuts off just above the
animals’ heads, adding to the suspense of what might be lurking above their heads. Older
readers will of course quickly see the humor in drama taking place on such an intimate
scale, but for little ones, the tree that Shepard has cropped and magnified into two scenes
becomes an expanded space of action and adventure. Similarly, the text formatted below
the illustration of Tigger on the next page enhances the narrative experience. Pooh and
Piglet conversing below have this exchange after hearing their names yelled form above,
“Pooh!...I believe it’s Tigger and Roo!” says Piglet. To which Pooh replies, “So it is… I
thought it was a Jagular and another Jagular.” Up to this moment of revelation Milne has
55 Milne and Shepard, The House at Pooh Corner, 66-67.
52
not offered any description of Tigger at the top of the tree, nor does he describe Pooh
looking up to see for himself before confirming Piglet’s belief. Instead, he allows
Shepard’s illustration to do this narrative work.
But even in the larger, more detailed illustrations, the physical environment has
no regular compositional edges; instead, the lines of the scene bleed out and evaporate
inconclusively as in the full-page example seen here (figure 17).56 This compositional
decision has the effect of hazily suggesting a bigger and more complete environmental
picture, but the specifics of the larger picture are left to the viewers’ imagination. Leaving
out the details of the larger world that enclosed these spaces left readers with the dreamy
option of placing The Hundred Acre Wood almost anywhere. And as in the smaller
illustrations, the drawn scale of the animals simultaneously assures the adult reader of the
insular dimension of the space, while convincing the young reader of its magnitude. This
suggestive style of illustration meant that an imaginative young consumer might easily
locate the pictured tree, rock or stream within her or his personal mental map. Any child
with access to even the most minor expanse of natural landscape could recognize some
part of the Pooh environs in their own little geographic sphere.
Whether or not Shepard and Milne planned the illustrations with this purpose in
mind is up for interpretation as there is no record of either of them discussing how the
illustrative format might further a child’s connection to the stories. But it is reasonable to
assume that Milne was an author who conceived his work in both visual and verbal terms.
In addition to his career as a staff writer for the highly illustrated magazine Punch, Milne
was a fairly successful playwright. Writing for the stage in particular requires the author
56 Ibid., 134.
53
to concretely envision the space within which his characters will speak and act,
separating the dialogue of the play from the stage directions. Milne’s experience as a
playwright is apparent in Winnie-the-Pooh. The stories are dialogue driven with minimal
textual description of action or scene, relying instead, as often as possible, on Shepard’s
illustrations to stage the scene and action. And looking at Shepard’s past work at least
indicates that his work for Winnie-the-Pooh was something of a departure, particularly in
his depiction of nature.
In his long career as an illustrator for Punch, Shepard’s cartoons chiefly focused
on figures as the subject of a social or political satire. But even in contexts where the
figure’s physical environment is superfluous to the content, Shepard maintains a much
more solid rectangular composition. And in the examples from Shepard’s personal
sketchbooks that we discussed earlier in this chapter the landscape is fully realized and
imaginatively contained within the composition. Regardless of authorial intention, the
visual and textual construction of an insular landscape that might exist in the backyard or
nearest park of any English child should at least be entertained as indicating post-war
protectiveness.
Enclosing Winnie-the-Pooh
Winnie-the-Pooh’s final issue pointing to a post-war shift in views of nature is the
degree to which it is secluded. The isolation of Winnie-the-Pooh’s rural domestic habitat
offers an interesting example of the inward focused and domestic character of England in
the inter-war period. Alison Light charts this phenomenon in her book Forever England
(1991) through the domestic novels of female inter-war authors. Light observes and
54
complicates the idea that the inter-war years, marked by a rise of anti-imperialism and
middle-class peacetime domesticity, were a period of feminization for English identity.
Light focuses on female authors as a foil to the historically male literary representatives
of the nation during this period.57 Compared to the other “Golden Age” literature outlined
by Carpenter, the “Hundred Acre Wood” and surrounding environs, which make up the
charming rustic habitat of “Pooh” and his companions, is arguably the most isolated from
human interference. Though also incorporating anthropomorphic characters in pastoral
settings, popular stories like Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908) contain regular appearances of
people and man-made constructions. In the examples of Carroll and Grahame’s classic
pre-war stories, the action takes place in settings that are removed from an adult centered
civilization, but they still employ the societal structures of the adult world, albeit one that
revolves around the occupations and abodes of fantastic characters. The landscapes in
which their narratives unfold incorporate roads, modern architecture, and other signs of a
larger inhabited world to varying degrees. In contrast, the near total natural seclusion of
Winnie-the-Pooh is remarkable.
This seclusion is reinforced through the action of the stories, with the characters’
journeying through unpopulated landscape making up the bulk of the narrative. Even
such rural signs of civilization as fences or footpaths, are lacking in Winnie-the-Pooh’s
community. And with the exception of each character’s abode, all of the monuments or
landmarks are ubiquitous natural landscape features as seen in the map Shepard provides.
57 Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature, and Conservatism Between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991).
55
The third chapter of Winnie-the-Pooh, “In Which Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet go Hunting
and Nearly Catch a Woozle,” offers an effective example of their utter isolation.58 Piglet
happens upon Pooh walking intently in the forest and learns that the bear is hunting.
“Hunting what?” asks Piglet. Pooh answers, “That’s just what I ask myself. I ask myself,
What?” Pooh then shows Piglet the mysterious paw marks leaving a trail of tracks on the
ground, prompting Piglet to excitedly and somewhat nervously join the hunting
expedition in anticipation and fear of perhaps catching a “Woozle.” At this point
Shepard’s accompanying illustration lets the readers know the results of the hunt in
advance (figure 18). With our view of the animals from behind as they embark, we can
quickly see that the tracks Pooh has been following are his own, a fact confirmed when
they come full circle and are excited to mistake the addition of Piglet’s track marks for
the addition of another mysterious animal. This adventure, in which Pooh and Piglet
embark on a hunt for an animal intruder of some sort only to find that they have tracking
themselves in circles, tells a great deal about their degree of isolation. Not only are there
no other living creatures intruding on their habitat, but the characters are so absorbed in
their insular perspective that they don’t notice they have been walking in circles around
the same thicket of brush.
The seclusion of the stories, and of this episode in particular, was a heightened
continuation of the arcadian children’s literary tradition in Britain, as well as the English
attachment to the countryside as a space for respite and entertainment. Pooh and Piglet’s
traipsing through English landscape on a “hunt” was a convincing portrait of what the
landscape had become for the English in the nineteenth century. But here, in its idyllic
58 Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh, 34-43.
56
post-WWI context, there is something just a little bit uncanny about the landscape. The
seclusion of Winnie-the-Pooh’s world mirrors that of its contemporary English audience,
who were withdrawn into the safety and solitude of their domestic borders following the
war. But Milne’s introduction of the fear or possibility of intruders in this environment,
only to reveal those fears as totally unfounded, goes a step further in its promotion of
English insulation. This episode does not simply present the domestic landscape as
charming and friendly, but contrasts it with the vague menace presented by the
“woozle,” a creature whose native habitat is unknown to Pooh. So while the story
confirms that there are no “woozles” in the Hundred Acre Wood, it leaves open the
possibility that the threatening animals might exist anywhere outside of the stories’
bucolic boundaries.
The near complete absence of civilization markers in Winnie-the-Pooh is
complicated by the few that are included. There are several instances in the text in which
an animal character happens upon a manmade object in the forest and humorously
appropriates the item. The most telling example of this is with the character Piglet, who
explains the remnants of a signpost (figure 19), which was clearly once a property
warning to trespassers, as evidence of a grandfather named Trespasser Williams. 59
Piglet’s invented ancestry hints provocatively at past inhabitants. For, excepting the
fabricated legacy of Trespasser Williams, the cast of Winnie-the-Pooh has no perceivable
lineage or past. It appears that Milne has created this childish Eden, not out of virginal
landscape, but an abandoned territory, reclaimed by nature. The faintly post-apocalyptic
59Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh, 34.
57
tone of Pooh’s world seems to suggest a melancholy acceptance of the destruction of
natural landscape caused by industrialization and war.
The invention of an idyllic post-war world in which a sweet young English boy
acts as the unquestioned and adored authority to a kingdom of house-broken wildlife
suggests an ingrained longing for a past national identity that envisioned the landscape as
limitless. But the fact that the world of Winnie-the-Pooh is written and illustrated as an
almost comically scaled down natural dominion also implies that the adult purchasers of
the books were coming to terms with relinquishing their claim to a global dominion, and
preparing the next generation for this shrunken sphere of control as well. The notion of
coming to terms with English identity and dominion over the landscape through Winnie-
the-Pooh offers a peculiar compromise between fantasy and reality. In this chapter I
looked at how the construction of a pre-war English landscape identity was partially
constructed through a romantic nostalgia-fueled reaction to the realities of urbanization,
industrialization and enclosure. That the ideals of landscape and countryside in England
were not ever a true reflection of the landscape becomes confused in Winnie-the-Pooh’s
post-war engagement with nature. The utter safety and charm of the stories’ intimate
environment almost approaches satire. From the animals’ perspectives the story seems to
embrace the English ideals of finding adventure and taking pleasure in the a rural
wilderness, but Milne and Shepard provide a differing vantage to a more mature reader,
highlighting that this natural ideal can only exist in a microcosm.
58
CHAPTER 3
THE BEAR AND THE TIGER
The previous chapter discussed the natural environment of Winnie-the-Pooh and
its significance to pre and inter-war English landscape identity. In my final chapter I
discuss the unique ways that Winnie-the-Pooh deals with British imperial identity in a
post-war context, with a particular emphasis on how the stories depict foreign wildlife in
that domestic environment. I will first examine the history of how depictions and
allusions to imperialism have functioned in children’s literature from Rudyard Kipling’s
1893 work The Jungle Book, up until the publication of Winnie-the-Pooh in 1926.
Highlighting key examples of imperial presence in children’s fiction during this period
suggests the ways in which the state of the Empire has historically influenced youthful
imagination. I will then examine the use of foreign animals in Winnie-the-Pooh, with
particular focus on the characters of Pooh and Tigger and how they compare to their
fictional ancestors’ portrayal in The Jungle Book.
In the late nineteenth century, Britain’s colonial endeavors were a massive global
force. British presence in India had been expanding over two centuries from an economic
relationship, to colonial and hegemonic control over most territories, until 1858 when the
Indian provinces were officially united as the dominion of
59
British India.60 The complete British possession of India coincided with an explosion of
print media, which enabled images of South Asia to feed the imaginations of the English
public at home. By Winnie-the-Pooh’s 1926 creation, in the wake of World War I, the
British Empire had suffered severe economic blows, and its adult population had
witnessed the unprecedented destruction of a war caused by imperial ambition. Post-war
India was shifting from being a valuable source of pride to a state of growing tension and
dissatisfaction with British rule, and the continued occupation of India was proving to be
a more difficult and expensive project than the war-weakened British were prepared to
deal with.
The fact that the Pooh stories are primarily populated by wildlife that is not native
to English soil, and specifically by species that are instead transplanted from the
continents where Britain had exerted colonial force, is the most exceptional aspect of
Milne’s work. Prior to Winnie-the-Pooh’s 1926 publication, animal characters in
children’s fiction maintained a logical connection to their environment; exotic animals
were encountered either in their country of origin or a zoo, and stories taking place in
England were populated by domestic species such as cats, mice, or rabbits. Instead,
Milne’s cast of characters include a bear, tiger, and kangaroos whose presence in the
English countryside points to a society struggling to reconcile its long cherished imperial
identity with a post-war revelation that it could no longer sustain that identity.
60 Nisha George and Maggie Hendry, A History of Modern India, 1480-1950, ed. Claude Markovits (London: Anthem Press, 2002), 347-365.
60
Bringing Our Boys Home
Since the publication of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island in 1883,
imperialism increasingly influenced youthful narratives in a range of ways and to varying
degrees, although its thematic presence often overlaps with the children’s literary
tradition of isolated natural space. But Winnie-the-Pooh stands out for conflating two
gendered forms of this trope. On the one hand, the exotic and adventurous engagement
with nature on foreign soil that we see in works by Robert Louis Stevenson or Kipling
was for the most part targeted towards juvenile boys. These stories were popular among a
young English audience who was able to contemplate the thrills of imperial conquest
while safe at home. The English children’s classics with young female heroines on the
other hand act out their narratives in English or imaginary spaces. Carroll’s Alice enters
Wonderland from a rabbit hole in her English garden, and while the space she enters is
exotic in terms of logic and consistency, the mix of characters and creatures she meets
there are still rooted in British lore, if not biology, subtly suggesting the idea that
independent adventure for a woman should be confined to domestic space.61 Winnie-the-
Pooh takes elements from juvenile adventure literature marketed towards English boys,
but significantly softens these elements and places them in the domestic landscape
typically reserved for a young heroine’s engagement with the foreign or exotic.
From the mid-nineteenth century forward, Britain’s imperial grasp had extended
to the imaginations of young English boys. Treasure Island and The Jungle Book, both of
which were written at the zenith of British imperial power, are unapologetic in promoting
61 Shirley Foster and Judy Simons discuss the emphasis on domestic settings in What Katy Read: Feminist Re-readings of “Classic” Stories for Girls (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press 1995), 5.
61
an imperial initiative. Treasure Island’s narrative of exploration and adventure at sea and
on unmapped islands serves as an exultant picture of foreign conquest. The adventures of
The Jungle Book’s “native” protagonist, surviving among the wildlife deep in the Indian
jungle, propagates imperialism in a slightly subtler manner. At the time the book was
written, India was firmly under British rule. Nevertheless, the story paints an exciting
picture for young boys of the possibilities yet to be uncovered and conquered in foreign
lands. The impact and appeal of boyish adventure stories like this are discussed in an
article by Hayden Ward, who cites Treasure Island specifically as an example of how the
enduring popularity of this genre in an imperial age was contingent on its ability to
generate a fantasy wherein the practical or physical accomplishments associated with
successful adventure was equated with moral superiority.62 Ward suggests that this
correspondence of adventurous fantasy with moral imperative enabled the stories’
romantic take on exploration (and exploitation) to translate into adulthood. These stories,
and many less canon worthy boyish adventure stories, paint an enticing picture of the
imperial project in ways that might inspire boys to future enlistment in these ventures, or
at the very least prompt their enthusiastic support. However, it wasn’t long until the
heights of British imperial power at the close of the nineteenth century were shaken.
Two children’s classics by Francis Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess (1905) and
The Secret Garden (1910), provide an interesting illustration of the shifting views on
imperial adventure in the early twentieth century. Both involve young heroines whose
stories begin with the return home to England from India. And both heroines are also
made orphans by the “fever” outbreak in India, a fate inspired by the real and devastating
62 Hayden W. Ward, “`The Pleasure of Your Heart’: `Treasure Island’ and the Appeal of Boy’s Adventure Fiction,” Studies in the Novel 6, no. 3 (October 1974): 304-317.
62
cholera pandemic that began in India in 1899.63 By incorporating the real life devastation
of cholera in her narratives, Hodgson reflects a contemporary disillusionment with the
“Orient.” In contrast to the threat posed by “savages” or wild beasts, there could be no
glory or excitement in being wasted by a fatal illness. However, as these stories were
meant to appeal primarily to young English girls, there is a suggestion that even though
the ravages of cholera didn’t discriminate between sexes, it was the female population
that needed to fear.
The contemporary relevance of Burnett’s imperial references implies that she and
her readership were very attuned to the fluctuations of the Empire’s image. Even in the
brief five-year span between the two novels, there are differences in the narrative attitude
of caution towards India. Sara Crewe’s doting father leaves the title heroine of A Little
Princess at a London boarding school, so that he may be assured of her safety when he
returns to India for business.64 Sarah is pretty, smart, imaginative and likeable. Even
though Captain Crewe’s exotic business venture ends disastrously, leaving Sarah a
penniless orphan, the story still paints a romantic picture of India. There is a stark
contrast between the rigid structure of school set in grey London, and the warm and
colorful land where Sarah spent her happiest years, the memory of which feeds her
imagination and sustains her spirit when misfortune falls. Although the ending of A Little
Princess is technically a happy one, with Sarah being saved from the hardship and abuses
of poverty by her father’s old business partner, there is a distinctly melancholy tone to the
63 David Arnold, “Cholera and Colonialism in British India,” Past & Present 113 (November 1986): 118-151. 64 Burnett, A Little Princess.
63
dénouement. A much more serious and pragmatic young woman replaces the
effervescent, romantic Sarah Crewe that arrived from India. Burnett seems to be
acknowledging the folly of the imperial dream, but with a great deal of reluctance.
Compared to the mournful ode to imperial India found in A Little Princess,
Burnett’s The Secret Garden implies a strikingly different attitude towards India. After a
cholera epidemic kills her mother, father, and entire household, Mary Lennox is brought
back to England to live on her uncle’s country estate in Yorkshire.65 Mary’s story is
almost the reverse of Sarah Crewe’s. Mary is introduced as sallow, spoilt, unattractive
and disagreeable. As the story progresses, it is Mary’s communion with nature in a
thoroughly English garden and the effects of healthful English country life that reverse all
the negative traits she arrived from India with. In the time between publishing A Little
Princess and The Secret Garden, Burnett seems to have transferred all romantic notions
of India to the English landscape. The narrative shift in Burnett’s novels appears to
indicate a growing awareness, at least among the female public, that India, the “Jewel of
Imperial Britain” was falling short of its imagined promise.
Burnett’s curious change of attitude towards India in the brief five-year span
between the publication of A Little Princess and The Secret Garden can be connected to
two global events. The first was the devastating famine that swept India from 1899 to the
first year of the twentieth century.66 The famine’s toll on India was exacerbated by what
was seen as the British Imperial government’s mishandling of the events, as well as
65 Burnett, The Secret Garden. 66 David Hardiman discusses the immediate and continuing impact of the famine in "Usury, Dearth and Famine in Western India," Past and Present 152 (August 1996), accessed June 08, 2014, JSTOR.
64
subsequent cholera and malaria outbreaks. Though this disaster occurred well before the
publication of A Little Princess, the effects the famine had on Indian attitudes towards
British rule were slow burning, and the events that might have initially inspired Sarah
Crewe’s sad farewell to India had not stabilized by the time Mary Lennox returns to
England in 1910. Further explanation of The Secret Garden’s emphasis on the charms of
England might be found closer to home. The seed that would sprout the “Great War” was
already germinated with the roiling unrest and violence unfolding in Eastern Europe by
the time Burnett was writing The Secret Garden.67 Whether or not Burnett was
consciously anticipating the soon to be realized disastrous consequences of imperial
reach, there is uncanny poignancy in her timely depiction of a heroine who flourishes in
the ultimate anti-imperial context, a walled English garden that literally locks out all
unwanted disturbance and external concerns.
The gender specificity of her audience not withstanding, Burnett’s novels chart
the way that English anxieties about the failings of imperial conquest were seeping into
youth literature even before the war. But this phenomenon has much broader and solidly
established significance in the inter-war narrative of Winnie-the-Pooh. Milne’s story in
many ways mirrors the pre-war imperial adventure stories, with one important difference.
Christopher Robin, the English boy acting independently as the senior authoritative figure
among a population of foreign wildlife, draws numerous parallels to the earlier works by
Stevenson and Kipling, which enamored young boys to the possibilities of imperial
adventure. However, the fact that Christopher Robin’s adventures and imperial
engagement are enacted at home on English soil makes a convincing case for a post-war
67 John Keegan, The First World War (New York: A. Knopf, 1999), 48-49.
65
ethos that no longer promoted foreign conquest. The books, written for and featuring the
first post-war generation of children, quite understandably steer clear of encouraging the
kind of terrestrial (and economic) ambition that was at the root of the war. The pattern in
imperial fiction that Winnie-the-Pooh breaks in keeping its young male hero in a
domestic setting seems very pointed when you consider that over 700,000 men, many of
them barely out of boyhood, never came home from the war.68 It seems fairly
understandable why a nation mourning the casualties of so much of its male population
would prefer to keep the next generation safely at home. But the dichotomous message
sent by staging the adventures of imperial animals on domestic soil suggests that Winnie-
the-Pooh reflects a nation that was simultaneously longing for and relinquishing its
global authority.
Subjects of an Inland Empire
After discussing the significance of the post-war domestic setting for Winnie-the-
Pooh’s cast of imperial transplants, we can now examine how these foreign animals, the
bear and tiger in particular, are themselves depicted and what those depictions tell us
about their contemporary audience. In looking at the characters of Pooh and Tigger it is
interesting to compare them to their fictional species predecessors, the most notable being
the bear Baloo and tiger Shere Kahn, of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book.69
68 United Kingdom, The War Office, Statistics of the Military Efforts of Great Britain During the Great War 1914-1920 (1922), 237, http://www.vlib.us/wwi/resources/britishwwi.pdf. 69 Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1925).
66
Kipling’s The Jungle Book tells the story of “Mowgli,” a young boy who is raised
among a pack of wolves in the Indian jungle. Mowgli’s tale is told in a series of episodic
chapters that narrate the boy’s experience living in the wild and navigating the politics
and dangers of the various animal individuals and communities with whom he shares the
jungle. Mowgli is befriended and mentored by the panther “Bagheera” and sloth bear
“Baloo,” who teach him how to survive in the jungle. The lessons that Mowgli’s guides
impart to him include how to forage for food, what kind of social behavior is required to
engage with the different jungle species and, most importantly, how to protect himself
from the bloodthirsty Bengal tiger “Shere Kahn.” Although the anthropomorphic
characters of The Jungle Book speak, and are intellectually realized characters, they are
otherwise depicted naturalistically with the anatomy, diet, and physical capabilities
proper to each species. Though they function more traditionally as the occasional
visualization of a narrative moment, the illustrations for The Jungle Book provide an
important aspect of how Kipling was presenting nature, and the foreign animal in
particular, to the British reading public. The resonance of the realist imagery (both verbal
and visual) in this work is made more interesting by the fact that both the author and
illustrator, the author’s father John Lockwood Kipling, were British citizens who spent
much of their lives and careers in India. In 1865 the artist John Lockwood Kipling moved
to Bombay with his wife Alice to assume the post of principal and professor at the city’s
newly founded art school. John and Alice’s first child Rudyard was born at the end of
that same year. The Kiplings embraced their adopted land, and identified as Anglo-
Indians. Though Kipling spent much of his boyhood (from the age of five to sixteen) at a
boarding school in England, upon completing school he returned to India begin a job his
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father had found for him as assistant editor for a small newspaper in Lahore of India’s
(now Pakistan’s) Punjab region.70 Kipling’s fascination for his adopted home manifested
in the fiction he began writing shortly after re-settling in India, spurring him to the
prolific publication of thirty-nine short stories by the time he was twenty-two. Kipling’s
national status and English education positioned him as an authority in the minds of his
domestic British audience, and the simultaneous intimacy and strangeness with which he
wrote of the nature, peoples and culture of India were accepted as authentic. As English
residents of British India, the Kiplings’ collaboration on The Jungle Book can be seen as
a primary resource in the development of domestic British understanding of India and its
impact on imperial imagination.
Kipling’s story, written at the height of colonial power in India, characterizes
wildlife as both alluring and threatening. In contrast, Winnie-the-Pooh’s presentation of
an utterly harmless tiger and bear existing in a benign English landscape was written for a
war rattled nation in a state of imperial decline. The strong parallels between the structure
of Kipling’s and Milne’s stories and cast highlight their differences as evidence of a
change in English attitudes towards nature and the “other”—which in this case includes
human and non-human animals—when viewed in light of the events that transpire
between the publication of The Jungle Book and Winnie-the-Pooh.
Both the Jungle Book and Winnie-the-Pooh narrate stories around an animal
community and their relations to a young human boy. Kipling’s Mowgli and Milne’s
Christopher Robin both act as the sole human representatives in domains lacking the
70 When India became officially independent of British rule in 1947 the sub-continent divided itself into two nations. The dominantly Muslim territories of northwestern India became Pakistan, and the rest of the sub-continent, in which Hindi was the majority faith, retained the name India.
68
traditional authoritative structure of an adult society. Whereas Kipling’s animal cast acts
in accordance with the natural habitat, and physical capabilities proper to them as jungle
animals, the inhabitants of Winnie-the-Pooh occupy variations of human dwellings, and
are animated to mimic slightly clumsier versions of humans.
The visible contrast between Kipling’s and Milne’s animals can be illustrated by
Tigger’s first appearance in the stories (figure 20). The image of Pooh and Tigger’s first
encounter with each other paints the misshapen bodies of each in stark relief to the far
more naturalistic renderings of Baloo and Shere Kahn (figures 21 and 22). Shepard’s
animation of Tigger slumping over his ragdoll like limbs emphasizes his drastic departure
from the powerful musculature proper to a tiger. And though Kipling’s sloth bear does
not present quite as dramatic a comparison to Winnie-the-Pooh, the egg-shaped torso and
squat limbs of Milne’s bear are far from a convincing imitation of nature.
The sharp contrast between the creatures of Jungle Book and Winnie-the-Pooh
can be further marked through the narrative of Tigger’s first arrival, in a plot propelled by
Tigger’s increasing hunger and discovery through trial and error that the only food he
likes is the health supplement “Extract of Malt”. 71 Pooh’s equally tame diet of honey
and condensed milk, which had also been determined in his first narrative, marks the tiger
and bear as the only characters whose diets receive exaggerated attention. The fact that
they are also the only characters with carnivorous real world counterparts makes plain the
effort to distance them from the dangerous species they are modeled after.
Milne’s early determination of his tiger as harmless is equaled by Kipling’s
eagerness to establish his tiger as menacing. Demanding his “quarry”—the human boy
71 A.A. Milne, “Tigger Comes to the Forest and has Breakfast” in The House at Pooh Corner (New York: Dutton, 1993), 21-37.
69
Mowgli who has escaped him—from the wolves, Shere Kahn’s entrance into The Jungle
Book narrative is immediately threatening.72 Father Wolf defies Shere Kahn, responding,
“The Wolves are a free people. They take orders from the Head of the Pack, and not from
any striped cattle-killer. The man’s cub is ours—to kill if we choose.”73 It is unclear
whether Father Wolf would be so bold if not for the fact that Shere Kahn is too large to
enter the wolf den. But Shere Kahn’s outraged reply, punctuated by a roar that, “filled the
cave with thunder,” suggests he is not accustomed to being denied.74 The accompanying
illustration (figure 23) visually asserts Shere Kahn’s menace. The tiger’s head alone (all
that he can comfortably fit through the cave entrance) is shown as nearly half the size of
Father Wolf’s whole body.
Shere Kahn’s opening scene not only depicts the tiger as threatening, but also
describes the whole environment as perilous. Though the readers know from a few pages
before that the Father Wolf is inclined to protect Mowgli, his ominous assertion that the
boy is the pack’s, “to kill if we choose,” highlights the fact that the these stories are
unfolding in a place fraught with danger, particularly for a human child. Kipling’s
illustration further clarifies this perspective. For though the tiger’s ruthless enormity
dwarfs Father and Mother Wolf, their bared teeth and tense muscles are in turn a striking
physical contrast to Mowgli’s small vulnerable body. The man-cub is just barely
decipherable from the litter of wolf cubs in the darkened background of the image. As a
whole, the scene confirms that these animals are in fact wild.
72 Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1925), 10. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid.
70
The wildness of Kipling’s animals and the contrasting tameness of Milne’s
becomes more interesting when considering the history of animal keeping in England. In
1826 the London Zoological Gardens was opened by the city’s Zoological Society under
the auspices of scientific research and interest. Stephen Bostock summarizes the history
of animal keeping in England in his 1993 work, Zoos and Animal Rights, noting that the
London Zoo was the first menagerie to explicitly define itself in these terms.75 The
collection and caging of exotic animals had been practiced throughout the ages as an
elaborate form of souvenir or trophy gathering. These menageries, which were primarily
in the possession of wealthy rulers, were stocked for the most part by species captured or
delivered during economic conquest in distant lands.76 The London Zoological Society
had ample access to foreign animals through imperial channels, as had the London
Menagerie preceding it, but was distinct in its proposed aim to prepare the species they
housed for breeding, domestication and general integration into the English landscape.77
Though this particular goal was thankfully never successfully realized, the desire to
civilize foreign wildlife for the benefit and adornment of the domestic landscape seems to
return as an echo in the fictional boundaries of the Hundred Acre Wood where the tiger
and bear have assimilated quite comfortably.
Kay Anderson writes of the zoo as an institution with which Western civilization
has sought to confront its fears and distrust of nature, an operation that applies a
contrived system of organization and control to the inherently disorganized state of
75 Stephen St. C. Bostock, Zoos and Animal Rights: The Ethics of Keeping Animals, (London: Routledge, 1993) 26-30. 76 Ibid. 77 L.H. Matthews, “The Zoo: 150 Years of Research” Nature, 261 (1976): 281-284.
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nature.78 The separation by species to a cage, and the presentation of each animal as a
specimen or representative example stripped of context, are forms of control that are
deeply rooted in in an imperial mentality of privilege and authority that denies the
autonomy of foreign bodies. Harriet Ritvo similarly discusses the zoo in Victorian
England as an emblem of colonialism, exploring the parallels between those structures
through their conquer and capture of foreign bodies.79 Ritvo also sees the zoo as an
institutional reflection of the colonial impulse to establish and maintain a social and racial
hierarchy. It seems significant that Milne presents his updated version of the zoo, wherein
the specimens from each of the British colonized continents are allowed to exist
compatibly together in an environment that suspends practical needs and physical
realities. The Hundred Acre Wood appears to embody the English colonial fantasy
wherein the civilizing influence of Englishness overcomes all natural and cultural
barriers, so thoroughly succeeding in “taming” the wild variations of non-English nature
that cages are no longer needed. But here it is important to note that Milne does not hide
the fantastic elements of this narrative. By using stuffed animal toys to act out this
fruition of colonial ambition, Milne qualifies it as childish and unattainable without
relinquishing the romantic appeal of that fantasy.
78Kay Anderson, "Culture and Nature at the Adelaide Zoo: At the Frontiers of 'Human' Geography," Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 20, no. 3 (1995): 275-294. 79 Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
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Ruling the Inland Empire
In addition to the hyperbolic difference between Kipling and Milne’s animal
representation is an equally radical disparity between their structuring of the role of
human to animal. Kipling’s Mowgli is raised among a litter of wolf cubs, and further
educated in the laws of the jungle by Baloo and the panther Bagheera. His survival is
contingent on his ability to adapt to the conditions of the natural world, and most
importantly, to discern the presence of danger posed by the animal kingdom, and
personified in the tiger Shere Kahn. By contrast Christopher Robin, who is of average
intelligence for his six years, is nevertheless the most sensible and capable figure in
Winnie-the-Pooh, and is frequently compelled to solve the dilemmas of his animal
companions.
In fact, if we compare character role functions rather than species in The Jungle
Book and Winnie-the-Pooh, the menagerie becomes more complicated. As the characters
central to most of the action, and frequently in need of aid or advice from other cast
members, it is Mowgli and Winnie-the-Pooh who have the most in common. The bear’s
clumsy body can also be seen as a parallel to Mowgli’s weakness among the powerful
jungle animals if we compare the stuffed protagonist to Christopher Robin. For if we look
at Winnie-the-Pooh as mirroring Mowgli’s initial helplessness, then Christopher Robin is
a more apt reflection of Kipling’s panther Bagheera. Both characters act as the oracles of
sense and wisdom within their respective narratives. And, if Mowgli’s human body was
inferior to that of the agile jungle cat’s, Christopher Robin’s boyish body is far superior
to the comical form of Winnie-the-Pooh.
73
The issue of race further complicates the differing ways that Mowgli and
Christopher Robin engage with animals and nature. The man cub Mowgli is introduced in
the first chapter of The Jungle Book when “Father Wolf” discovers a “naked brown baby
who could just walk.”80 Though Kipling wrote Mowgli’s adventures to appeal to a British
audience, and was himself an English representative of Britain in India, it is important
that he immediately establishes the child as not white. Shortly after Father Wolf discovers
the baby, the tiger Shere Kahn arrives looking for him. With the questionable explanation
that the boy’s parents have “run off,” Shere Kahn seeks to claim the man cub as his
property…soon to be dinner. 81 No matter how much young English readers sympathize
with Mowgli’s character, or even envy his adventures, the acceptance of his origin story
would be very different if he was a white baby with English parents who had either
abandoned him or been murdered. Mowgli’s plight suggests carelessness or neglect on
the part of his non-English/non-white parents, and by extension confirms the imperialist
attitude that painted cultural and economic invasion as an act of benevolent adoption. So
much of the British imperial project was promoted and justified by an almost evangelical
conviction that Englishness was a supreme state of racial and cultural authority, and that
their intrusion in other nations was in fact a charitable extension of their superior
governing skills and civilizing moral influence, that it would have been near treasonous
for Kipling to suggest that this sort of chaos could befall the progeny of English parents.
So too, Mowgli’s status as a “native” colors the way his engagement with nature
must be read. As Kutzer points out in Empire’s Children, the trope for adventure stories
80 Kipling, The Jungle Book, 8-9 81Ibid.,10.
74
starring English boys in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was for any young
Briton in a foreign land to escape or overcome any difficulty with his own innate good
sense and exemplary practical capability.82 In contrast, Mowgli is utterly vulnerable,
physically disadvantaged and mentally reliant on his animal mentors. Christopher
Robin’s physical and intellectual superiority to his stuffed animal companions maintains
the standard literary construction of English dominance over nature in this respect, but
the description and character of the animals themselves suggests an alteration in the way
the English viewed their post-WWI role to nature and other.
Even though Mowgli’s role as equal participant, rather than ruler, of the natural
kingdom he inhabits is tinged by his “brownness,” it is still significant that all of The
Jungle Book’s characters possess depth, intelligence, and in some cases even wisdom and
nobility. If Mowgli’s status as essentially one of the animals was an indication of his
perceived racial inferiority, the fact remains that during the height of British power in
India depicting the natives of that land (both man and animal) as strong and sometimes
dangerous was, by extension, a testament to the might and intelligence of the English
who managed to subdue them. The soft shrunken imperial counterparts found in Winnie-
the-Pooh, when England’s imperial grip on the world and India particularly was straining
and slipping, are depicted as sweet and foolish.
The reversal of human-animal relations shown between The Jungle Book and
Winnie-the-Pooh highlights an evolution in attitudes toward nature when considered in
their historic context. The Jungle Book, written in 1893 at the height of imperial
dominion in India, depicts the danger and strangeness of foreign wildlife in terms that
82 Kutzer, Empire's Children, 1-11.
75
would have understandably fascinated young British citizens by allowing them a taste of
the excitement and exultation in dominating an exotic land.
This chapter has discussed the imperial history (and literary ancestors) of Winnie-
the-Pooh’s inhabitants as evidence of the Empire’s continuing influence on English
notions of childhood, as well as how the manifestation of its influence evolved to reflect
the fissures in British colonial endeavors. Viewed in light of what takes place between
The Jungle Book and Winnie-the-Pooh, it doesn’t seem coincidental that the most popular
post-war children’s literature promoted a much gentler engagement with foreign bodies,
this time safely enclosed on English soil.
76
CONCLUSION
Winnie-the-Pooh’s significance to post-WWI English identity is complex. The
thematic content diffused throughout the pages of the children’s picture book make it a
veritable network of culturally potent signs. The interactions between text and
illustration, and between the reading/looking adult and listening/looking child, form a
nexus for the layers of cultural, geographic and ideological messages found in Winnie-
the-Pooh to be absorbed by its audience. As a parent or guardian read the picture book, in
many cases repeatedly, to a child, the stories’ content would be implicitly affirmed and
sanctioned through the caretakers’ voice. Its historic context, and the plurality of
communications intrinsic in the process of sharing a picture book with a child is enough
to mark Winnie-the-Pooh for scholarly interest, or at least curiosity. But the shades of
change in English imperial and pastoral identity revealed in the stories fix it firmly as a
document worth exploring.
Winnie-the-Pooh stands out as a vessel of the English population coming to terms
with the failings of past national identity and how to introduce this legacy to the next
generation. Childhood, which was largely regarded as merely a state of physical
immaturity for much of the eighteenth century, had developed to become a legally
protected and culturally invested period of mental development by the end of the
nineteenth century. The visual and material culture that developed along with the modern
conception of childhood became increasingly expressive of the values and aspirations
77
that an adult society wished to impart to its youth. Winnie-the-Pooh’s popularity for a
post-war society thus speaks with particular potency as a record of how England chose to
introduce their children to the world at a moment when the adult population was forced to
radically reassess their own worldviews. In a single generation immediately preceding
Winnie-the-Pooh, England underwent a shift from being the authoritative governing head
of an ever expanding lucrative empire, to a nation physically and economically crippled
by a war that left it struggling to rebuild its own island nation and unable to manage its
increasingly burdensome imperial interests. The way that nature was restructured in this
inter-war context is inevitably reflective of a nation that can no longer assert extensive
control over nature (or all non-Western organic life).
Winnie-the-Pooh’s young readers were introduced and endeared to a version of
the English landscape that maintained its gentle romantic pre-war character, but did so in
almost hyperbolic terms. The presentation of English nature through Winnie-the-Pooh’s
narrative appeals not only to the pre-war reverence for homogenous domestic landscape,
but emphasizes this habitat as an insular haven, utterly protected from the unknown
dangers of the external world hinted at through the mysterious existence of the “jagular.”
The trauma that Milne and all of his adult audience experienced in World War I, a brutal
lesson in the consequences of nations seeking to extend their dominion, paints Winnie-
the-Pooh’s narrative almost as cautious propaganda for the post-war generation.
Similarly the Hundred Acre Wood’s population consisting of stuffed toy
representatives of British imperial reach was a careful introduction to Britain’s fading
imperial legacy for a generation that needed to understand Britain’s global identity in
terms very different from those their parents were raised to assert. The fundamentally
78
make-believe nature of Winnie-the-Pooh’s stuffed bear, tiger and kangaroos’, and their
placid adventures in idyllic English seclusion was formulated to acknowledge the
grandeur of the imperial past, to introduce children to the chief characters in the drama of
British conquest—represented by an English boy and the docile imperial animals who
revere him—but did so in such a way that when the child was ready to leave the nursery
the fairy-tale of Britain as a righteously appointed world rulers would be left behind with
the rest of their childish illusions.
It was at this critical historic moment when England had refocused its energy and
interest inward to its own domestic boundaries that Winnie-the-Pooh offered more than
just a humorously narrated tale of childish adventure. Between the lines of the episodes
of a young English boy and his animal companions existing in arcadian isolation is an
alternate narrative. Read in the context of all the changes and trauma that lead to its
creation, Winnie-the-Pooh tells the story of a nation in the process of restructuring a once
grand reality to a fondly recalled memory. Winnie-the-Pooh and Tigger, the bear and the
tiger, are the benign souvenirs of imperial power that may still be visited, but only in the
imaginative confines of the gentle English landscape.
79
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FIGURES
86
Figure 1. E.H. Shepard, Illustration for Punch, April 11, 1934, pg. 417.
87
Figure 2. Photograph, Piglet, Kanga, Winnie-the-Pooh, Eeyore and Tigger, New York Public Library, New York.
88
Figure 3. Francisco Goya, The Family of the Duke of Osuna (1786). Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain.
89
Figure 4. Replica of Steiff Bear, PB 55, Steiff Museum, Geingen, Germany.
90
Figure 5. Capability and Lancelot Brown, Blenheim Park and Grounds, 1760s, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom.
91
Figure 6. E.H. Shepard, Illustration for A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, New York: Dutton, 1926.
92
Figure 7. John Constable, A View of Salisbury, 1st quarter of nineteenth century, Musée de Louvre, Paris.
93
Figure 8. John Constable, Hampstead Heath, 1820-22, Musée Bonnat, Bayonne, France.
94
Figure 9. E.H. Shepard, Drawing from Sketchbook, EHS/E/9, Pg. 31, From the E.H. Shepard Archive, Copyright of E.H. Shepard, early twentieth century, Archives and Special Collections, University of Surrey, Surrey, UK.
95
Figure 10. E.H. Shepard, Drawing from Sketchbook, EHS/E/9, Pg. 38-39, Panoramic Landscape, From the E. H. Shepard Archive, Copyright of E. H. Shepard, early twentieth century, Archives and Special Collections, University of Surrey, Surrey, UK.
96
Figure 11. James Ward, Theophilus Levett and a Favorite Hunter, 1817, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut.
97
Figure 12. Francis Calcraft Turner, The Berkeley Hunt, 1842, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut.
98
Figure 13. E.H. Shepard, Illustrated map for A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, New York: Dutton, 1926.
99
Figure 14. Ambrosius Holbein, Woodcut for Utopia by Thomas More, 1518.
100
Figure 15. E.H. Shepard, Illustration for A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, New York: Dutton, 1926.
101
Figure 16. E.H. Shepard, Illustration for A.A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner, New York: Dutton, 1926.
102
Figure 17. E.H. Shepard, Illustration for A.A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner, New York: Dutton, 1926.
103
Figure 18. E.H. Shepard, Illustration for A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, New York: Dutton, 1926.
104
Figure 19. E.H. Shepard, Illustration for A.A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner, New York: Dutton, 1926.
105
Figure 20. E.H. Shepard, Illustration for A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, New York: Dutton, 1926.
106
Figure 21. E.H. Shepard, Illustration for A.A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner, New York: Dutton, 1928.
107
Figure 22. John Lockwood Kipling, Detail of “Baloo” from illustration for Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, Garden City: Harper & Brothers, 1893.
Figure 23. John Lockwood Kipling, Detail of “Shere Kahn” from illustration for Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, Garden City: Harper & Brothers, 1893.
108
Figure 24. John Lockwood Kipling, Illustration for Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, Garden City: Harper & Brothers, 1893.
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