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the experience of reading in Britain, from 1450 to 1945...

Reading Experience Database UK Historical image of readers
 
 
 
 

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Beatrix Potter

  

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Beatrix Potter : [unknown]

'The Bermant family arrived in Scotland when Chaim was eight: before his ninth birthday he had mastered enough English to read Beatrix Potter in the Mitchell Library. Her stories were not so alien to him as one might imagine: somehow the animal characters reminded him of the Latvian village from which he had come. Chaim soon became a fan of the Beano's Lord Snooty, an aristocrat who inexplicably consorted with a gang of working class kids: the strip fulfilled every schoolboy's fantasy of finding himself among wealthy people in a noble setting"...[as] young Bermant... followed the progress of the Second World War on the Glasgow Herald and the Manchester Guardian [he felt a strong sense of British identity]. The war, the school, the boys' weeklies were all "building up new obsessions to replace the old and drawing reassurance and pride from the Empire".'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Chaim Bermant      Print: Book

  

Beatrix Potter : Peter Rabbit

[L.M. Montgomery] 'read a great deal; she mentions fifty different authors in her journal which covers the years 1910 to 1921. Titles range from Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" to Beatrix Potter's "Peter Rabbit" and Thackeray's "Vanity Fair". She also read many female writers, such as George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Edith Wharton and Olive Schreiner'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Lucy Maud Montgomery      Print: Book

  

Beatrix Potter : unknown

'My mother started to read to me when I was very young indeed. She read aloud beautifully and never got tired, and she would never, from the first, read anything that she could not enjoy herself, which cut out all the poor quality writing which every right-minded child loves when he can get it. Her only concession was one weekly comic, "Rainbow". But apart from that, I was reared on a fine mixed diet of Beatrix Potter, A.A. Milne, Dickens, Stevenson, Hans Andersen, Kenneth Grahame and Kipling – especially Puck of Pook’s Hill whose three magnificent stories of Roman Britain were the beginning of my own passion for the subject, and resulted in the fullness of time in The Eagle of the Ninth. Hero myths of Greece and Rome I had, in an unexpurgated edition which my mother edited herself as she went along, and Norse and Saxon and Celtic legends. There were Whyte Melville’s The Gladiators and Bulwer Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii and Weigal’s Egyptian Princess; for my mother loved historical novels – history of any kind, though her view of it was always the minstrel’s rather than the historian’s.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Rosemary Sutcliff      Print: Book

  

Beatrix Potter : The Tale of Samuel Whiskers

'Meeting held at 22 Cintra Avenue 10.3.41 F. E. Pollard in the Chair.
1. The minutes of the last meeting were read and signed.
[...]
3. Violet Clough read an exceedingly interesting paper on “Children’s Literature” showing the was it has developed from the “Moral Tales” of Maria Edgeworth published at the beginning of the 19th. Century, to the delightful tales by Beatrix Potter & A. A. Milne which are read today. The one retrogressive step she thought was in the binding of the books, which today seem to come to pieces almost at once. All the mothers present agreed with this, so it is no reflection on the Clough children in particular although it may be on the modern child in general.
4. Readings from children’s literature were then given as follows: Labour Lost from the Rollo Books. Selected by S. A. Reynolds & read by A. B. Dilks.
“The Fairchild Family” by Mrs. Sherwood read by Mrs. Pollard – this was particularly gruesome.
“Little Women” by Louisa Alcott read by Mary Stansfield.
Divers examples of children[’]s poetry read by Rosamund Wallis, which included an impromptu recitation by Howard Smith of one of Hillair[e] Belloc’s Cautionary Tales.
“Alice in Wonderland” by Lewis Carrol[l] read by F. E. Pollard.
“Samuel Whiskers” by Beatrix Potter read by Muriel Stevens.
“The Sing Song of Old Man Kangaroo” a Just So Story by Rudyard Kipling, read by Howard Smith.
“The Wind in the Willows” by Kenneth Grahame read by Margaret Dilks.
“The House at Pooh Corner” by A. A. Milne, read by A. B. Dilks.
5. Bruce Dilks sang two of Fraser-Simsons settings of A. A. Milne’s Poems. “Christopher Robin Alone in the Dark” and “Happiness”.

[Signed as a true record of the meeting by] S. A. Reynolds April 7th / 41'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Muriel Stevens      Print: Book

  

Beatrix Potter : [Unnamed tales]

'Meeting held at 22 Cintra Avenue 10.3.41
F. E. Pollard in the Chair.
1. The minutes of the last meeting were read and signed.
[...]
3. Violet Clough read an exceedingly interesting paper on “Children’s Literature” showing the was it has developed from the “Moral Tales” of Maria Edgeworth published at the beginning of the 19th. Century, to the delightful tales by Beatrix Potter & A. A. Milne which are read today. The one retrogressive step she thought was in the binding of the books, which today seem to come to pieces almost at once. All the mothers present agreed with this, so it is no reflection on the Clough children in particular although it may be on the modern child in general.
4. Readings from children’s literature were then given as follows:
Labour Lost from the Rollo Books. Selected by S. A. Reynolds & read by A. B. Dilks.
“The Fairchild Family” by Mrs. Sherwood read by Mrs. Pollard – this was particularly gruesome.
“Little Women” by Louisa Alcott read by Mary Stansfield.
Divers examples of children[’]s poetry read by Rosamund Wallis, which included an impromptu recitation by Howard Smith of one of Hillair[e] Belloc’s Cautionary Tales.
“Alice in Wonderland” by Lewis Carrol[l] read by F. E. Pollard.
“Samuel Whiskers” by Beatrix Potter read by Muriel Stevens.
“The Sing Song of Old Man Kangaroo” a Just So Story by Rudyard Kipling, read by Howard Smith.
“The Wind in the Willows” by Kenneth Grahame read by Margaret Dilks.
“The House at Pooh Corner” by A. A. Milne, read by A. B. Dilks.
5. Bruce Dilks sang two of Fraser-Simsons settings of A. A. Milne’s Poems. “Christopher Robin Alone in the Dark” and “Happiness”.

[Signed as a true record of the meeting by] S. A. Reynolds April 7th / 41'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Violet Clough      Print: Book

  

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