Strolling around Disneyland this summer, re-acquainting myself
with Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh, Mister Toad, Simba, and so on,
the following reflection occurred to me: that these strange
imagined characters were originally (at one slight remove, in
Simba’s case) the creations of some very bourgeois persons.
Barrie, Grahame, Milne, and Kipling were conventional, sober,
uxorious, well-dressed gentlemen of respectable employment and
opinions, yet the fruits of their imaginations have proved far
more durable than those of any bohemian counterculture you can
name. Not a very original reflection, to be sure, but it is
something
to be able to reflect at all while heading from
Fantasyland to Adventureland in ninety-degree heat with a
first-grader and
a preschooler in tow.
Some similar thoughts came to mind as I was reading the new
selection of Longfellow’s works recently published by the Library
of America.
Longfellow was as respectable as it is possible for
a man to be. Writing and public lecturing apart, his entire paid
employment consisted of five-and-a-half years teaching modern
languages at Bowdoin and seventeen years teaching the same at
Harvard. He had two wives, both of whom he adored, both of whom
pre-deceased him. We know of no other liaisons involving
physical intimacy, and on both internal and external evidence, it
is extremely unlikely that any such connections existed. He was
