posted on 04 Jan 2019

William by Richmal Crompton

William Brown is one of those characters from fiction who became part of the cultural landscape of generations of young readers in the years from when he first appeared in print in 1922 through to the 1960s. William books continued to appear until 1970 but they had pretty much run their course by then, depicting a version of childhood and British family life that had largely gone the way of all flesh. But despite the fact that the world Richmal Crompton created for William Brown to live in has now long gone, the character she created continues to have an echo today with William still being occasionally conjured up to represent the sort of imaginative, cheeky, daring or even slightly anti-adult authority figure we sometimes like to imagine older pre-pubescent boys should be like. Naughty but essentially big hearted and without malice.

I have to admit that I have never, until now, read a William book from cover to cover. I was given one to read when I was about 13 and was bedridden from a particularly evil bout of the mumps but I never got very far with it. Since then I’ve listened to episodes being read on the radio and I’ve always found myself mildly amused by them but it’s never really pushed me to read anything. On this particular occasion I was prompted to pick up this copy of William because I discovered that actually Crompton saw herself as an adult novelist and was rather frustrated by a  creation that had developed a life of its own and had sabotaged her career. Danuta Kean writing in The Guardian noted that:

‘Richmal Crompton has long been overshadowed by her creation Just William, but the darker side of her imagination is set to be rediscovered, with several of her lesser-known adult novels coming back into print.

Although best known for her 38 books about the errant schoolboy William Brown and his gang of Outlaws, Lancashire-born Compton was a prolific writer for both children and adults, often publishing two books a year, as well as writing short stories magazines. “She wrote 41 adult novels as well as the Just William books,” her new publisher Harriet Sanders said. “They did very well at the time and display something that you see in other writers of children’s books … the clarity with which they are written.”’

On the blog site, Shiny New Books they note:

“William was her ‘Frankenstein’s Monster’, or so she once labelled him – for overshadowing her novels. The William series had originally been intended for adults, so she was a little reluctant to be considered solely a children’s writer.”

I like a bit of complexity rippling away under the surface and so I thought I might just take a look at one of these ‘monsters’ and see how the stories shaped up for me today – 50 years or so after my first encounter with them.

Pretty much at random I selected this book just simply entitled William, published in 1929 and already by that time the 12th book in the series. Illustrated by Thomas Henry, the ten chapters are really little short stories that can be read in an entirely self-contained way, with each story following a very similar story arc – William and his school friends, a gang called The Outlaws, (this was a time when the word ‘gang’ didn’t have the associations it now has) come up with a cunning plan for fun and adventure which goes unexpectedly wrong and results in various degrees of mayhem. William and the Outlaws are periodically plagued by a rival gang lead by Hubert Lane – a posher boy who also has a set of motley acolytes.

Crompton writes the stories in a serious and non-condescending way, not quite through the eyes of William and the rest of the boys but in sympathy with them – we are invited to see the various hare-brained schemes as entirely logical and so we’re never outraged by what they do even when they steer pretty close to the wind.

In truth, the stories get a bit samey after the first four or five and Crompton’s attempts to reproduce William’s lower middle-class argot gets a bit tiresome. What I actually enjoyed a lot more was the way Crompton dealt with the adults. What these stories give her the chance to do, while the reader is distracted by William and his doings, is to slip in a healthy dose of social satire that is often sharp and insightful. Take for example this extract from the chapter called ‘William’s Double Life’:

“He was going to tea with the Vicar. Occasionally the Vicar, who disliked children intensely, but suffered from an over-active conscience, invited his more youthful parishioners to tea. He was a precise and tidy man and liked peace and quiet, and he hardly slept at all the night before such a party took place, but he felt it was part of his priestly duty and went through it with the spirit of the early Christian martyrs.”

Or this pointed little barb at an adult far too wrapped up with her pet dog from ‘The Outlaws Deliver the Goods’:

“Apparently Toto’s mistress here abandoned herself yet more luxuriously to her grief. ..She was a small woman with red hair, a ludicrously grief-stricken expression and a green hat that was too small for her.”

I am pretty sure that William and his adventures are now likely  to appeal to only a very small audience of children – the language, the social settings and the kinds of escapist, slightly risky situations William and the Outlaws put themselves in feel as if they belong to another era. I can’t see myself dashing off to read more because I have no personal, historical investment in the stories but I’m sure there is still a generation of readers, perhaps ten or more years older than me even, for who this stuff is hugely nostalgic. Many of the books are absurdly expensive to buy in first edition book jackets and this, I think, is the clue to their popularity on the collectors’ market. The jacket art is superb and exactly captures something of the essence of the William stories – if you have the books in their jackets there’s almost no need to read them because the cover art does the business for you at a glance.

 

Terry Potter

January 2019