Keep William alive!
Written: Sep 23 '06
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Hilarious stories that unwittingly ooze the social history of England over fifty years.
Cons: The stories are not consistently good.
The Bottom Line: The William books, apart from being funny and perceptive, chart the social history of Britain from the early twenties throgh to the sixties.
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| wansteader's Full Review: Richmal Crompton - William the Fourth |
I grew up on Richmal Crompton's William Brown. It therefore came as a disappointment to me that there are, to date, no other reviews on this site of any of the long series of books she wrote about the misadventures this romantic hero. While William the Fourth is one of my favourites, this is really a review of the entire series.
William is a timeless figure. Conceived in 1918, Richmal Crompton carried on writing about him until her death in 1969. Were the novels just about an eleven-year-old boy, his gang ('the Outlaws') and his mongrel dog, Jumble, the books would probably have fallen into obscurity. It's the other characters, some regular, some making a cameo appearance, that made William, for many, the epitome of Britain and all that it stands (or at least stood) for. I know nobody who read the books as a child who has not re-read them as adults and I know many adults who have read them for the first time and marvelled at the social history contained therein. While William remained eleven for fifty years, Britain, or more especially England, or more especially still the Home Counties of England (the bits that are an hour or two train ride from London) moved on. Richmal Crompton moved on too. The changing faces of the eccentrics who make her novels bear testimony to this.
William lives in a village in an undefined county in the south of England. His family is terribly middle class, and he has an older brother and sister, Robert and Ethel. Sometimes knowingly, sometimes unwittingly, William is the bane of their lives, for many a budding romance is nipped in the bud for them by William's antics. Some of these stories (and with one exception each chapter of each book is a new story) are amusing enough, but when the eccentrics arrive things really start to let rip!
In the twenties, for example, we have the vegetarians who move into the village (this may seem like a modern touch to those who don't remember George Bernard Shaw and his set), the fake mediums, the mad poets. For years there were always new people moving into the big house known as The Hall, all of them totally nuts in one way or another. Eventually, some time in the thirties, The Hall gains permanent residents in the shape of Mr and Mrs Bott, Cockney grocers who made their fortune when they invented Botts Sauce. Mrs Bott's attempts at fitting in with the class to which she aspires can be amusing enough (today it may seem a little snobbish of Miss Crompton) though it is her daughter, Violet Elizabeth, who poses the biggest challenge to William. The seven-year-old Violet Elizabeth knows how to get her own way, both with her mother and the Outlaws. That threat to 'thcream and thcream and thcream till I'm thick' ensures her dominance.
For many, the stories written during the war years are the finest. This is a world of strict rationing (for everyone apart from William's spoiled rival, Hubert Lane, whose mother sees to it that the black market caters for all her darling son's needs), of blackouts, of air raids, of impending Nazi invasion. Crompton works William's adventures into all this, humanising them and making them strangely real to later readers. After that, the fifties and sixties seem like something of an anticlimax. The stories are funny as ever, but the world seems to be changing too quickly even for her. For the stories, it has to be said, are not uniformly good. In the earliest, until William the Fourth, Crompton seems to be limbering up, whereas in the later ones she is trying to write about a brave new world in which she is not entirely comfortable. She tilts to pop stars and television but she knows by then that William's world is probably lost for ever, and that was before play stations and ipods.
But is that world lost? I recently stayed with friends who had children just like William and Violet Elizabeth. They play in the woods with the rest of their gang and a mongrel dog. They are bemused by the local clergyman, even moreso by the funny, typically English eccentrics who have moved into the big house up the road. They even told me that Winston Churchill was their favourite historical figure. A pity, really, that this was a village in Poland!
But maybe that's too pessimistic. William's eagerness to do the right thing and invariably getting it wrong is probably a trait that will go on forever, even in the land of his birth. William's occasional selfishness certainly will. That's the conundrum, you see. William typifies both the best and the worst in human nature, typifies them beyond his years. He wants to be kind, he really does, but oh, the realities that compromise that ambition! Not least his own love of humbugs and chocolate and other goodies in the local sweet shop.
But for many the social history will ensure that these novels do not die. In William the Fourth, for example, our hero, on a trip to London during which he escapes from his minders (this is the 1920s), comes face to face with poor Cockney children and has a fantastically good time with them. Again, during the Second World War, he is confronted with evacuees from the East End. His own family face changes, too. In the twenties they have several servants, by the late forties this has been reduced to one housekeeper. In the fifties it is one charlady who comes in a couple of times a week. By the sixties the only servants are a vacuum cleaner and a washing machine. How the mighty have fallen!
And yet, when we think of William, do we think of Richmal Crompton at all? Many younger readers, and not a few older ones, must surely have flicked through in search of Thomas Henry's illustrations before buying or borrowing any of the books. For most of us this was how William was supposed to look, and this was the yardstick we used to judge the dramatisations on TV and film. One of the saddest discoveries I ever made was that Richmal Crompton and Thomas Henry met only twice, and then very briefly. I had, until then, assumed that it was a close collaboration. How could two artists on such a divine project not be close friends? Such coldness diminished them both in my eyes. The William books are supposed to be about warmth, about that glow I felt whenever I picked up the one I had not yet read.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
wansteader
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Member: Paul Williams
Location: London, UK
Reviews written: 16
Trusted by: 14 members
About Me:
I was born in London and have lived here most of my life.
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