The Library

This article was written by a collector of children's books, Keith Robinson of EnidBlyton.net. Although Keith grew up in England, he moved to the USA in 2001 where he now lives with his wife and daughter. Sadly, it's very difficult to find Enid Blyton books in the USA, so he has to resort to using eBay and good old Bibs Books. Mr Bibs approves of his keen enthusiasm.

The Smashing World of Enid Blyton

She has 184 novels to her name, plus at least 1250 other books that include around 9500 short stories, poems and plays. She's been translated into some 90 languages. She's sold more than 400 million copies of her books across the world. Forty years after her death she STILL sells 8-10 million books a year, a million of which are Famous Five novels. If that isn't enough, today she's fifth of the list of the world's most translated authors, after Walt Disney, Agatha Christie, Jules Verne, and Vladimir Lenin – but ahead of William Shakespeare, Barbara Cartland, Danielle Steele, Hans Christian Andersen and Stephen King.

Anyone who disputes Enid Blyton's worldwide appeal needs to think again! Oddly, despite a small and mostly unsuccessful Blyton wave in the seventies, the United States of America is sadly ignorant of her existence. Perhaps with the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, coupled with the Three Investigators, Brains Benton, Power Boys Adventures and Troy Nesbit Mysteries, the American youth had enough to get on with; or perhaps Blyton was just too English. In any case, most of the world has heard of Enid Blyton... except the USA. It's ironic, then, that the only book award Blyton ever won was for the American edition of The Island of Adventure (renamed Mystery Island).

Enid Mary Blyton, born in East Dulwich, England, in 1897, always dreamed of becoming a writer, despite being forced to sit for hours a day learning the piano. "Writing is a waste of time," she was constantly told by her parents and guardians, and proof of this came in the form of hundreds of rejections for her early poetry. But her persistence paid off; her first work was published in 1917, one of three poems in Nash's Magazine. A humble beginning to an amazing career.

Enid's training as a teacher proved to be a valuable source of research. During a two year period as a Kindergarten teacher – what she described as the happiest two years of her life – she got to read her own early and unpublished stories to a small group of children and receive feedback about what was exciting and what was not. Testing the water, so to speak. It was during this time that she fully realized the path she was to take in her writing career. Around this time, in 1920, she renewed her acquaintance with an artist/illustrator friend, and when they started to submit work together this proved to be a turning point in their careers. In 1922 her first short story was published in Teacher's World, a magazine which went on accepting her submissions. In that same year her first book was published too – the very rare and valuable collection of poems, Child Whispers. Fueled by her success, and with doors opening everywhere, her literary earnings in 1923 reached £300 – the price of a small suburban house at the time.

Skip forward fifteen years or so years to 1937. Now firmly established and very successful as a writer of poems, short stories, and articles, and published in numerous journals and magazines (including her own), Blyton made the leap into full length serialized novels. First appearing in Sunny Stories magazine, these were soon compiled and published as hardback novels. Early titles included Adventures of the Wishing Chair, The Secret Island, Mr Galliano's Circus, and The Enchanted Wood, all of which are still considered favorites today. The next five years brought along many other now-familiar titles including The Children of Cherry Tree Farm, The Adventurous Four, and the first in the St Clare's school series. And of course, 1942 brought with it Five on a Treasure Island, the first of what was planned as a six-book Famous Five series, but which became twenty one!

Enid's output over the next twenty years is staggering. The most accurate bibliography has been carefully researched over many years by fan and collector Tony Summerfield of the Enid Blyton Society, for which I am proud to be webmaster. Tony's extensive work, compiled after many years of work, forms part of Barbara Stoney's Biography of Enid Blyton as well as being fully databased for the website. The Book Listing pages list 184 novels and novelettes written by Enid Blyton during her career, plus 1261 character books, short story books, educational books, and recreational books. Overall this is something like 1445 books with 9492 short stories, plays and poems! And the list isn't entirely complete. The fascinating thing about Enid's output is that portions of it are "lost in time" – that is, records from the past are a little sketchy to say the least. One publisher in particular, Birns Brothers, had something of an unusual contract which meant Enid's name, as author, could be removed from the credits after a certain amount of time – and because Birns no longer exist, a growing number of Enid's uncredited titles are still being discovered today... via eBay!

10,000 words a day? Impossible!

There has been talk of Enid using ghost writers throughout her career. How else, argue skeptics, can her phenomenal output be explained? 1955, for example, saw the publication of over sixty new books including full length novels and short story compilations. It's fairly common knowledge that she could bang out 10,000 words a day on the little typewriter in her lap, and this, according to many, is impossible! As a part-time writer myself (unpublished) I have worked hard over a weekend and churned out 10,000-15,000 words, including 7,000 in one day – my most ever. 10,000 words a day for a skilled, hardworking writer? Of course! There are a couple of comments I could make here to support Enid:

1. Enid wrote for a living and was able to lock herself away all day and every day without interruption. Most of us have other livings to earn and rarely manage to write non-stop for eight hours. So of course writing such a vast amount every day is going to seem impossible to most – but any serious writer would surely disagree.
2. Even if we could write for eight hours (as I did one time), it's exhausting on a one-off basis. But if you build up the writing time over many, many years, as Enid did, I have no doubt at all that eight hours non-stop writing is not only plausible but perfectly reasonable. After all, that's an average of only 21 words a minute, or 24 words a minute if you take away an entire hour's worth of breaks each day.

Considering that a Famous Five novel is around 40,000 words long, there's a standing joke that Enid could bang out a Five book on Monday through Thursday, and take Friday off! This kind of output has consequences though. I personally believe that Enid rarely rewrote anything she produced, and as a result her work is riddled with tiny, mostly insignificant continuity errors, stuff that could easily have been spotted and put right had she or her editors taken the time to do so. Many of her stories came straight from the mind's eye, and played out literally as she wrote them, so it's not surprising that a character who suddenly needs a notebook or length of rope or some other object to move the plot forward just happens to be carrying that very object without any mention of it beforehand. These are minor inconsistencies and quibbles; however, I personally believe Enid's popularity was so great that her publishers just accepted her manuscripts without question and handed them straight to the typesetting department – a shame, as there are enough Blyton Bloopers (as I call them) to maintain a conversation for days.

An inspiration to children

There's little doubt that Enid Blyton's work has been an inspiration to children all over the world. Many critics over the years have lauded her work as "without merit" (whatever THAT means) and school libraries realized that children could, if they wanted, go through their schooldays – from five to sixteen – reading nothing but Blyton, from Noddy to the Famous Five. "It's not exactly Shakespeare," English teachers grumbled. And that's the point; I'm not sure I remember ANYBODY actually liking Shakespeare when I was at school – and what exactly did we learn from "literary classics" such as MacBeth and Hamlet anyway? I seemed to remember learning only that the old days were violent and that people talked funny.

When critics ask what kids have learned from Enid Blyton's many adventure series, the answer is in fact plainly obvious – because through Blyton's characters children are taught right from wrong, reasons not to lie or be selfish, and the true meaning of being brave and strong and loyal in a way that all children can relate to. Not only that, but how many children over the years have actively formed secret clubs and pretended to solve mysteries? I know I have! Harmless, innocent fun. I've read many accounts where children have copied the Secret Seven and rushed out to set up a little fund raising scheme for charity – just as Blyton's loveable characters do.

The tired "racist" argument

There's a lot of talk about her "racist attitude," fueled primarily because of her Golliwog characters that appeared in numerous stories. The Three Golliwogs from 1944 is one the PC brigade loves to hate. This story is about Golly, Woggie and Nigger – yes, yes, go ahead and cringe at the offensive N-word. Around 1972 the book was altered so the character names are now Golly, Wollie and Waggie. I assume the golliwogs' favorite song, "Ten Little Nigger Boys," has also been cut from the newer versions. But despite this book's ability to evoke sharp intakes of breath, probably about 95% of Blyton's "racist attitude" is nothing more than simple harmless fun. Never mind that the original golliwog was a caricature of the American black minstrel, which itself was a derogatory caricature of black folks. Despite a varying history of "good" and "bad" golliwogs dating as far back as the late 19th Century, Blyton's golliwogs – and indeed most golliwog characters throughout Europe – were generally loveable characters, as they were when I was growing up in the 1970s. Heck, even the jam jars had golliwogs on them. Many jump on the band wagon and claim that Blyton's golliwogs were always villainous or mischievous, but anyone who actually read the books would find that this is not entirely accurate.

Blyton lived in a very different era as far as black folk were concerned, and it's hardly surprising that stories written in the '40s and '50s are going to be packed with expressions that don't fit in with today's society. It's true that, in Five Go Off To Camp, George emerges from a railway shaft "as black as a nigger with soot," and perhaps that's an acceptable change for today's editions. But I don't think it's necessary to change the black villainous servant Jo-Jo to an ordinary white man named Joe, in The Island of Adventure, just on the off-chance it's seen as a racial stereotyping.

"I feel really rather queer!"

It's not just "racist" phrases, though, that fall victim to the PC brigade. It's now quite unacceptable to print such phrases as "the children felt gay and happy" or "I've come over all queer" in case some filthy minded children snigger quietly about it at the back of the class. Admittedly some of these phrases are pretty funny now; there's one in particular from a Secret Seven book, when Peter asked where Scamper the dog was. One of the other kids said, "He's gone to make love to the cook." In the old days this simply meant he'd gone to be extra friendly in the hope of a treat, but now... well. But hey, it's not just Blyton. For a while I thought nothing would top the incredibly funny and retro Hardy Boys title, The Missing Chum. But then I came across a Malcolm Saville title that beat it hands down: The Gay Dolphin. Wonderful! Of course, then there's the double-whammy non-pc short story by Enid Blyton entitled The Gay Golliwogs.

It's a shame, though, that while the publishers are busy replacing such offensive words as "gay" and "queer," and updating potentially confusing "old money" with something today's thicko kids can comprehend, they are in fact confusing things further. When a modern child sees a modern book cover and reads of modern kids with modern money doing modern things, how then do they react to an obviously dated (and unaltered) scene that could only have happened in "the old days"?

Take Five Have Plenty of Fun, in which the children try to protect an American girl from would-be kidnappers by cropping her hair short and dressing her like a boy. Going for a swim in the sea one morning, the children are reasonably satisfied that anyone spying from afar would see three boys and two girls, not two boys and three girls. Whoa! Is this because the American girl has taken to wearing a pair of boy's swimming trunks, or because the boys are all wearing girly bikinis? The fact that boys' and girls' swimsuits looked the same in the '40s and '50s is lost on the modern reader, especially as new paperbacks typically don't contain any illustrations like this one from an original hardback.

However, one thing's for sure. While the PC brigade continues to bemoan "racist attitudes" in Blyton's books, and publishers continue to butcher the texts with their "necessary updates," children all over the world continue to buy the books and enjoy them – with or without golliwogs in girly swimsuits looking really rather queer.

Keith Robinson
May 15, 2007