An educative advantage of writing regular columns for publications in distant countries (an educative advantage for me, that is, not necessarily for the distant countries) is that it encourages me to learn at least a little about them, which I might otherwise not do. I try to make some slight or passing local reference in what I write for them, bearing in mind how easy it is in journalism to appear to know much more than one does.

The latest national beneficiary, or victim, of my technique is Brazil. Recently I retrieved from the recycling bin of my memory the fact that, as a child, I read a book titled Billy Bunter in Brazil, by Frank Richards. It was published in the year of my birth, 1949, and I read it when I was ten. Until I came across Exploration Fawcett a couple of years later, it was my only source of knowledge of Brazil, and between these two books I gained the impression that Brazil was a land teeming with jaguars, bandits, and anacondas, the latter up to eighty feet long and with a poisonous breath that it was death to inhale. My knowledge of Argentina at the time was, by contrast, entirely derived from postage stamps, with the result that I thought Eva Perón was the most beautiful woman who had ever lived.

Billy Bunter was a character in a long-running series of stories (from 1908 to 1961), first in a weekly magazine called The Magnet and then in a large number of books about the boys and teachers at a fictional boarding school called Greyfriars. In half a century, the boys never grew up, nor did the teachers change their ways. No new pedagogical theories for them! The blackboard and chalk, rote learning and the cane were all they needed in the thankless task of educating the eternally fourteen- and fifteen-year-old boys of Greyfriars School. My father read these stories as a boy forty years before I did so, and with the same pleasure. I doubt that any boy reads them now.

William George Bunter was by far the most memorable creation of his author, Frank Richards, one of the twenty or more pen names employed by Charles Hamilton (1876–1961). Hamilton is said to have been the most prolific author in human history, with an output estimated at 100,000,000 words—and this before the arrival of that most efficient of drivel-generators, the word processor. In contrast to the computer slaves of today, Hamilton had only his old Remington typewriter to assist him.

My father read these stories as a boy forty years before I did so, and with the same pleasure.

Hamilton was an intriguing and enigmatic figure. He wrote almost exclusively for children, except for his autobiography, published in 1952, which was written under the best-known of his pen names, Frank Richards. He wrote it in the third person: he refers to himself as Frank Richards, and so it is an autobiography entirely without an I. It contains almost nothing of an emotional nature. There is nothing, for example, about his childhood or his school days; no human attachments are described that are stronger than those of pleasing but not very deep friendships, and this seems to have been an accurate depiction of his affective life.

His father, a journalist, died of the consequences of alcoholism when Hamilton/Richards was eight. Such was his father’s unpredictability in drink that his death apparently came as a relief to the boy, but it is possible to infer from his writings that it was also—understandably—a great and enduring sadness to him. Hamilton started to earn his living by the pen at the age of seventeen and never earned a penny any other way.

His closest relations were with his sister, his niece, his housekeeper, his cats and dogs, and his fictional characters. He said that his stories came to him virtually without conscious effort: it was as if he were writing a report on what was happening before his eyes. He lived several hours a day in his fictional world, which, while he was creating it, was more real to him than the real world. He set a number of stories in the wilds of Canada and the South Seas, of which his descriptions are said to have been notably accurate despite the fact that he had never set foot in either region.

One of his most surprising traits was his addiction to roulette. He might have been a very rich man had he not for years wasted much of his substance at Monte Carlo, which—even more surprisingly—he did not in the least regret having done. He was also careless in the matter of paying income tax, which several times landed him in financial difficulties. He seems to have cared little for material wealth and overall gives the impression of having glided through life in a detached way rather than having fully participated in it, as if nothing good could have come from doing so and avoidance of involvement were the key to a tolerable existence.

Billy Bunter is—one cannot speak of him in the past or the future, for he is eternally fixed in the present—in the school class called the “Remove,” that is to say a class for the transition from junior to senior. He is known as the “fat Owl of the Remove,” first because he is fat and second because he wears round, thick-framed, thick-lensed, owlish spectacles, through which he peers blindly, seeing very little except when food is about, when he becomes conspicuously more eagle-eyed. The proverbial wisdom of the owl plays no part in his sobriquet.

There is no mystery as to why he is fat, and no exculpatory physiological, psychological, or sociological explanations are offered. The fat Owl is fat because he is gluttonous and eats as much as he can. He will, for example, cut a small slice from a cake and eat the rest, leaving the small slice for everyone else. If possible, he will eat several meals on the trot, even if they belong to other people. Apart from eating, his favorite activity, if such it can be called, is sleeping. Of course, he snores.

Bunter is lazy, mendacious, light-fingered, cowardly, and stupid. He never learns. When his form-master, the wonderfully named Quelch, asks him to translate “Magna est veritas et praevalebit,” Bunter always offers “Great is the truth and it will prevail a bit,” and is suitably chastised for his idiocy.

William George Bunter is also self-centered, boastful, vainglorious, and a sponger. His classmates, by contrast, are all clean-living, fine, upstanding young boys, except for Vernon-Smith, who is a cad and a bounder, being the son of a millionaire, though he is also intelligent and intellectual. Bunter’s classmates are of a higher social class than he, though he tries to impress them with his status by calling his parents’ very ordinary suburban home (to which none of his friends is ever invited) “Bunter Court.”

Bunter is always expecting money to arrive by post and tries to borrow on his expectations, but of course the money never arrives. He even owes his sister, the equally fat and greedy Bessie Bunter, five shillings, which he never repays.

In the days when Richards wrote, fat children were few, progress in the form of mass obesity not yet having taken place, and someone like Bunter would have stood out. But Bunter insists on making himself even more conspicuous because, unlike his fellow pupils who wear the regulation school uniform, he insists on wearing a spotted bow tie and loud check trousers. There is a curious psychology at work here, which Richards intuited: you try to make yourself inconspicuous by drawing attention to yourself. It is curious how obese people often squeeze themselves into tight clothes of bright colors, as if challenging you, while noticing them, not to notice that they are extremely fat.

Bunter is not popular among his classmates, and when he approaches them with the words, “I say, you fellows . . .” they invariably try to escape. Yet in a strange way they are protective of him. No matter how disgracefully he behaves, they never reject him once and for all; he is at the same time one of them and an outsider.

Richards had the temerity to answer Orwell at some length, and very effectively into the bargain.

Perhaps the highlight of Richards’s literary career, if a career writing tens of thousands of largely ephemeral stories for children can be called literary, was the stinging attack on him by George Orwell in Cyril Connolly’s magazine Horizon, in a famous essay published in 1940 titled “Boys’ Weeklies.” It conferred on Richards such literary immortality as he possesses, apart from among the band of aficionados that almost every writer attracts, in the way that Montaigne conferred immortality on Raymond Sebond, who would otherwise have been entirely forgotten. But as we shall see, Richards had the temerity to answer Orwell at some length, and very effectively into the bargain, Cyril Connolly having had the broad-mindedness to open his pages to him even though at the very beginning of his reply Richards satirized the high modernism of Connolly’s review. Richards said that he was surprised to find in it anything as readable as Orwell’s essay.

This essay, more than ten thousand words long, takes children’s periodical publications as its theme, but there is no doubt that it is Richards’s work that preoccupies Orwell and is the main target of his criticism. It was an essay ahead of its time, in that it made much of writing that, until then, would have passed under the radar of literary intellectuals, who would have disdained even to notice its existence. The essay thus helped to launch the academic activity known as “cultural studies,” the main difference between Orwell and his successors being that Orwell was a very good writer.

He lays several charges against Hamilton, or Richards. One cannot help feeling on reading the essay that he is using bazookas to shoot butterflies. He later admitted that one of the charges, at least, was mistaken, namely that “a series lasting thirty years could hardly be the work of the same person every week.” To this, Richards (who on occasion wrote twenty-five thousand words in a day) replied, “In the presence of such authority, I speak with diffidence: and can only say that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, I am only one person, and have never been two or three.”

But from his mistaken assumption, Orwell draws the conclusion that “they have to be written in a style that is easily imitated.” To this, again, Richards replies:

On this point, I may say that I could hardly count the numbers of authors who have striven to imitate Frank Richards, not one of whom has been successful. The style, whatever its merits or demerits is my own, and—if I may say it with due modesty—inimitable. Nobody has ever written like it before, and nobody will ever write like it again.

The question of the merits and demerits of that style is not entirely straightforward. Orwell calls it an extraordinary, artificial, repetitive style. He complains that Richards’s writing suffers from tiresome stylization and facetiousness, from padding and repetitiousness, and gives the following example, that “takes a hundred words to tell you that Bunter is in the detention class.”

Billy Bunter groaned.

A quarter of an hour had elapsed out of the two hours that Bunter was booked for extra French.

In a quarter of an hour were only fifteen minutes! But every one of those minutes seemed inordinately long to Bunter. They seemed to crawl by like tired snails.

Looking at the clock in Classroom No. 10 the fat Owl could hardly believe that only fifteen minutes had passed. It seemed more like fifteen hours, fifteen days!

Other fellows were in extra French as well as Bunter. They did not matter. Bunter did!

This, perhaps, was an unfortunate passage for Orwell to have chosen because it has certain merits. For example, it captures very well the agonizing way in which time passes for the young when they are waiting for something they desire or while they are forced to do something they don’t want to do. I remember the sensation all too clearly. Richards therefore has the merit of having entered (he actually claimed never to have left) the child’s view of the world. The undoubted repetition in the passage therefore serves a literary purpose that it fulfils very well, and which Orwell entirely misses.

In addition, Bunter’s utter, though not malicious and indeed almost innocent, egocentricity is conveyed with deftness. But it is done by allowing the reader to infer it, thus encouraging the use of his imagination. When one considers that Richards was writing for children, not for adult literary critics, this is surely a virtue.

As might be expected, though, Orwell’s most serious charges against Richards are not aesthetic or stylistic but social. Richards creates a fantasy world, that of the public school urealistically portrayed, that is far removed from that of the majority of his readers (who, Orwell admits, are of all conditions and races of boys, for example my father in the slums of the East End of London).The world that Richards depicts is static and unchanging; Bunter’s problem with the non-arrival of a postal order is the worst economic problem that is allowed to enter it. There is no poverty, no class conflict, no social problem, no war, no hunger other than that occasioned by Bunter’s greed, no unemployment, no politics, and no sex in Greyfriars School. Such conflict as there is results from a clash of personalities, good versus bad. There is nothing in the stories that will prepare their young readers for the world they will actually face, that of the mine or the factory or the shop or the office, where, of course, their lives will be monotonous at best and appalling at worst. Richards didn’t write directly about the problems of the world, but in effect is preparing the ground for boys’ acceptance of their unjust lot.

Orwell’s argument is a deeply philistine one. It is our present unpleasant and conflictual identitarian politics ab ovo. It suggests that literature should not so much take us out of ourselves, or allow us to enter into something of which we have no direct experience, but should be about ourselves and our own lives. It should be relevant to what we already know, namely our own experience, in which it should thereby enfold and enclose us. It should show us our miserable present and our even worse future. In fact, the logical conclusion of Orwell’s priggish or po-faced argument would be the abolition of literature, for inevitably practically none of it is about ourselves or our lives, in the Orwellian sense.

In his reply, Richards has good-natured fun at Orwell’s expense.

Mr Orwell perpetrates so many inaccuracies . . . and flicks off his condemnations with so careless a hand, that I am glad of an opportunity to set him right on a few points. He reads into my very innocent fiction a fell scheme for drugging the minds of the younger proletariat into dull acquiescence in a system of which Mr Orwell does not approve: and of which, in consequence, he cannot imagine anyone else approving except from interested motives. . . . [He] not only reads a diehard dunderheaded Tory into a harmless author for boys: he accuses him of plagiarism, of snobbishness, of being out of date, even of cleanliness of mind, as if that were a sin also.

But it is in his rejection of Orwell’s narrow-minded philistinism that Richards is at his best:

Of strikes, slumps, unemployment, etc., complains Mr Orwell, there is no mention. But are these really subjects for young people to meditate upon? It is true that we live in an insecure world: but why should not youth feel as secure as possible? It is true that burglars break into houses: but what parent in his senses would tell a child that a masked face may look in at the nursery window! A boy of fifteen or sixteen is on the threshold of life: and life is a tough proposition; but will he be better prepared for it by telling him how tough it may possibly be? I am sure that the reverse is the case. Gray—another obsolete poet, Mr Orwell!—tells us that sorrows never come too late, and happiness too swiftly flies. Let youth be happy, or as happy as possible. Happiness is the best preparation for misery, if misery must come. . . . He may, at twenty, be hunting for a job and not finding it—why should his fifteenth year be clouded by this in advance? He may, at thirty, get the sack—why tell him so at twelve? He may, at forty, be a wreck on Labour’s scrap-heap—but how will it benefit him to know that at fourteen? Even if making miserable children would make happy adults, it would not be justifiable. But the truth is the adult will be all the more miserable if he was miserable as a child. Every day of happiness, illusory or otherwise—is so much to the good. It will help to give the boy confidence and hope. Frank Richards tells him that there are some splendid fellows in a world that is, after all, a decent sort of place. He likes to think himself like one of these fellows, and is happy in his day-dreams. Mr Orwell would have him told that he is a shabby little blighter, his father an ill-used serf, his world a dirty, muddled, rotten sort of show. I don’t think it would be fair play to take his twopence for telling him that!

This is surely more genial (and realistic) than Orwell’s ideologized view of what children’s literature should be.

Orwell probably thought that in Richards he was dealing with some semi-literate hack. In fact, Richards was an accomplished man, notwithstanding that he had left school sooner than had Orwell. He early thought of being a musical performer and composer before turning (at the age of seventeen) to full-time writing. He was an accomplished Latinist who read the classics for pleasure and whose greatest unfulfilled ambition was to translate Horace into English. When bored, he recited long passages of Dante, which he had by heart, to himself, or replayed famous chess matches in his head. It is true that in some respects his taste was narrow—he reprehended Chekhov and Ibsen, for example, finding them banal and sordid. But we probably all have our blind spots.

It might be said that Billy Bunter (whom Orwell had the grace to accept as a first-class literary creation) had some morally educative value.

Orwell criticized Richards because he made fun of foreigners in his stories, thereby instilling xenophobia in his readers. But here Orwell is condescending not only to Richards himself but also to his readers, who were surely sophisticated enough to be aware (as Orwell apparently was not) that the caricatural portrayals were not to be taken literally. In Orwell’s literal-minded argument, then, we see political correctness gestating. Moreover, Orwell entirely misses something about Richards: that he was against racism and anti-Semitism. When Bunter uses the world “nigger,” he is reproved by his classmates, who tell him that the word is gratuitously insulting and hurtful. One of the main characters in Bunter’s class is Hurree Jamset Ram Singh, the Nabob of Bhanipur. True, the other boys call him “Inky,” but obviously with affection; true also that his utterances are stylized and are not strictly correct English (when he is told that someone has the wind up, he says “The windupfulness is terrific!”). But the other boys understand that English is not his first language, and that his use of it is original and expressive; they recognize his very high social status and live with him on complete terms of equality. Furthermore, he is the cleverest of them, which they recognize, too. This may not seem remarkable to us now, but it was remarkable at the time Richards was writing, and Orwell had not the perspicacity to appreciate its significance.

As it stands, it might be said that Billy Bunter (whom Orwell had the grace to accept as a first-class literary creation) had some morally educative value. It is difficult to think of a single virtue, in the ordinary sense, that he possesses, and he has several, indeed many, vices. But far from hating him, we sympathize and even commiserate with him. We sense that it must be very uncomfortable being Bunter, fat and sensitive about his social inferiority (a nuance that Orwell does not catch, surprisingly, in view of the importance he attaches to examining everything through the lens of social class). But we not only sympathize with the boy, we also love Bunter. His existence enriches our world enormously and the pleasure that we derive from it. He is not just the fat Owl, he is also the Falstaff of the Remove: banish plump Bunter, and banish all the world!

This, by implication, teaches us the ambiguities of moral judgment and a tolerance for Man’s foibles—lessons that we would never learn from reading Orwell’s essay.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 39 Number 7, on page 12
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