to read Enid Blyton with caution?

[catandbabyequalschaos]

DD is only 11 months so this isn't an issue yet.

However, we have been given by a relative some old, beautiful sets of The Wishing Chair and The Faraway Tree, which I remember adoring as a young child.

Fast forward to now and I really have my doubts about them. It isn't just the blatant racism and sexism in them, but the way the children mercilessly bully anyone who isn't like them, the way names are chucked around carelessly and the references to spankings in so many of the books make me really uncomfortable too!

Have any of you not read Enid Blyton with DCs?

Well, I was talking about other children curlew ds read all the Harry Potter series in French at three

3?????. oh, well, children learn different things at different times. I'm sure there are loads of other things he's good at........

@ curlew

Yes there certainly are!

@ curlew & valium

I LOVED Enid Blyton as a child and have thus far managed to avoid being a racist bigot. I really don't its an issue.

Exactly!!

No need to get in to an earnest discussion or try to censor them. Your child will probably have enough common sense to realise this is fiction and a tad old-fashioned but still enjoy them

DD has read quite a few EB and has turned in to a well-balanced, non-racist, non-sexist 17yo. She first read Malory Towers at about 7 and thoroughly enjoyed it. However, she surprised me by spotting for herself that the main characters did bully the less-favoured girls. I certainly didn't pick up on that at her age.

The Family at One End Street, Norman and Henry Bones, Jennings, What Katy Did, Little Black Sambo, Steamboat Bill, Biggles, Black Beauty, anything by Dennis Wheatley, MMM, Naughty Sophia, Swallows and Amazons, Gerald Durrell, Hilaire Belloc, Edward Lear, Lewis Carol, Arthur Connan Doyle, Jules Verne, M R James, Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, A A Milne, Albert Schweitzer - all read by the time I was 11. No EB, though, my dad thought she was rubbish (I don't think he knew about Dennis W - devil worship for pre-teens would not have been on the menu, but it was wonderfully scary and racy). I think I missed out, I might give her a try.

I loved Enid blyton as a child!
The language is simple and repetitive ideal for learning to read, and what is wrong with promoting independence, which these books do!
The racism and sexism seems outdated now and I always point it out, my only problem is I have two boys so Malory towers probably won't appeal!

Ps when I got my hands on Dennis Wheatley at the age of eight wow!!!!

curlew Tue 15-Oct-13 15:58:48

"Oh, and probably not employ a team of people to write her books for her. (Sorry if anyone finds that shocking)"

Crosses Dumas off the list of classics.

My DDs are 9 and 11 and still like being read to - so we've read a huge variety of books together, including some Enid Blyton.
As others have said, we have talked about how it was written a long time ago when things were different.
We have read some other older books (the secret garden, some Noel Streatfield, Tom's midnight garden, the Hobbit, Narnia, those Pamela Brown books about the kids that form a theatre company, Anne of Green Gables, Just William). I think Enid Blyton made me feel more uncomfortable than most of the others (Dame slap a lot, 'chinky', fanny, over-use of the word 'queer' meaning 'odd', Anne always doing the dishes), but we did talk about some of these issues.
If you want to read boarding school books, the Trebizon series is slightly less dated than the Enid Blyton ones, and we enjoyed those.
We have also read loads of more modern stuff (Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, Jaqueline Wilson books, how to train your dragon books, Roman Mysteries, David Walliams books, worst witch, etc). My older daughter and I have also both read and really enjoyed the Hunger Games. There are loads of fantastic series out there if you want to avoid Enid Blyton. But I don't think you need to avoid it completely, as some of her books have good storylines, and provide an opportunity to discuss how attitudes have changed.

That's not true that EB employed a team of people to write her books for her. People thought that because she churned out so many so quickly, but she was just a very prolific writer. She didn't plan them, she just sat and wrote what came into her head. She took action against someone who claimed she employed a team of ghost writers and they had to apologise to her in court.

My mum still still say 'oh I feel a bit queer' if she feels odd

Chinky that didn't actually register at all as a child, in fact the only time I have ever heard it said was 5 years ago and it was used to describe the local take away.

I LOVED the Dame Slap stories!

I wouldn't have had any great problem with the DC reading EB, if they had wanted do, but they never showed any interest. But there was one book we were given many years ago when DD1 was a toddler which I found so repulsively racist that I binned it. It was a present from my DM and I'm sure she got it from a pound shop or bargain basement type thing. It was a picture book aimed at younger readers and it was actually the illustrations rather than the text that was so poisonous - but I can't remember if it was the original illustrations or not.

I can't remember the title, but it was the delightful tale of the toys in Toyland. A new family of goblins moved in and at the same time things started going missing. So the brave toys set a trap and the evil goblin was exposed as a thief and forced to leave Toyland. Way to go with stereotypes of evil outsiders! But the worst thing was the visual depictions of the goblins, which was perilously close to Nazi images of Jewish people - not saying this was necessarily deliberate, I suppose it depends on when they were drawn (and I don't think EB did them herself). I live in Germany, which has a bit of bad history for anti-semitism - this book would probably not be allowed to be published here. I didn't want my children seeing that kind of thing unless it was in a museum environment where the social context is explained. Now they're old enough to work out what crap it is all by themselves.

Jenny Nimmo's Charlie Bone series could be good for 7-8 year olds. Also some of Diana Wynne Jones' books for younger children.

Am I way off the mark?

Oh how I adored Enid Blyton. I was never a fan of her books for young children, Magic Faraway Tree, Mr Pinkwhistle Interferes (!) etc. and wouldn't be encouraging a child to read a book featuring a charcter called 'Chinky'. But I absolutely devoured Famous Five, Five Find-Outers, R Mysteries, Adventure Series, Malory Towers, St Clares etc.

To be honest they were as obviously dated when I was reading them in the mid 1980s as they are now and I was more than capable aged 7 of seeing what a sexist dickwad Julian was, and how ridiculously passive Anne was.

The most upsetting thing about EB to me is that they really don't stand up to revisiting as an adult as some childrens books do. The writing is repetitive, predictable, simplistic and plodding. Nothing like I remember them. So I conclude that the real magic of reading EB as a nipper is that she sparks the imagination, gives you some badly drawn characters and a plot by numbers and whooooooosh, your own imagination takes over and turns it into some kind of magic.

EeTraceyluv I remember feeling very uneasy reading the Six Bad Boys, Enid Blyton does 'kitchen sink'. One set of parents split up because the wife was a nag . Then there was a hard faced glamorous young widow, she had a son, she wore lipstick, gasp, and had a job, horror, andwent out of an evening to non church related social events, harlot!

Oh these awful working class families!

It really exposed EB for the colossal snob she was.

EB would probably be slated for being a child neglector and incompetent Mother these days.

Apparently her children used to tiptoe round the house for fear of angering dear Mamma and disturbing her work. Meanwhile EB was hammering away at her manual Adler typewriter dream up stories depicting idyllic childhood days with "jolly fairy cakes and lashings of ginger beer" on tap.

I bet her kids must have smiled wryly at the hypocracy of it all!

But as a girl, I read everything from The Magic Faraway Tree to The Famous Five and Five Findouters (and their Dog) and I cannot remember ever picking up on racism, sexism, or classism. Just loved the predictable, formulaic papp and invariably had an EB on reserve at the local library as they were so popular! I agree with the posters who say that it engenders a lifelong love of reading, which it has done for me.

I think Moni does have a point that George in the Famous Five did encourage girls to rail against the unfairness of boys having all the fun. I picked up on that myself as a child.

George was based on Enid Blyton herself. Tom and his miserable, infighting family in 6 Bad Boys was based on her own family while she was growing up.

Also, having reread them as an adult, they aren't as bad as their detractors make out. Sure, there are some outrageous bits, but how many times do the Famous Five get it completely wrong because they arrogantly assumed they knew best? In some of the books, if they'd only listened to Morgan or Mr. Penruthlan and kept out of it, instead of assuming they were the bad guys, they wouldn't have risked nearly wrecking the whole operation with their interfering!

And, yes, Carlotta in St. Clare's was a circus girl. She was also one of the most popular girls in the school and she saves Sadie with the help of her circus friends. It is middle class Prudence who is loathed and who enables Sadie to be kidnapped in the first place.

I do wonder now though was Enid Blyton a secret sexual deviant; aunt Fanny and Uncle Dick spanking in the gay bedroom anyone?

I thought Chinky was simply given an semi-onomatopoeic nams/descriptive name, like all the other magic characters are in Enid Blyton books. I thought she did a lot of chinking of china, etc, when she was cleaning.

Are you sure it was actually a random racist reference?

What always strikes me about the books is that the characters who are not middle class like the child protagonists are definitely looked down upon. It amazed me, reading The Secret Seven books with DS a few years ago, that they are terribly condescending even to the policeman (Mr Potts??)

Gazz- that's nothing to what happens to a working class child who by some freak accident ends up in St Clare's or Malory Towers.

Do you mean Eileen, curlew?

Because it's emphasised that she's perfectly entitled to be there - it's her family problems that cause her to leave - her decision - and it's made clear that she is welcome to stay on if she wants to.
Claudine, the other girl there on reduced fees because her aunt teaches, is another very popular character and later joined by her sister.

Angela, the very rich and snobbish girl who looks down on them both, is disliked and pulled up on her attitude countless times.

From what I can gather about Enid Blyton she was a massive cunt and that kind of colours me wanting to read her books to my son. BUT I loved them as a child so I'll probably let him read them if he wants to.

Mind you, I read the Narnia books again recently and whilst I love them CS Lewis is a massive racist and misogynist.

I remember thinking with Enid Blyton, and the Chalet School books (I know they're not EB) how odd some of the things they did was - I wanted to be a master of disguise like Fatty and wondered how my Dad recognised me when I dressed up as someone else one morning. And I remember Jo on the Chalet School saying she couldn't very well do something-or-other and I couldn't understand why because I did it.