THE BEAR AND THE TIGER: DECODING ATTITUDES AND ANXIETIES TOWARDS NATURE THROUGH A.A. MILNE’S WINNIE-THE-POOH IN POST-

WWI BRITAIN

by

JOANNA WILSON

JESSICA DALLOW, COMMITTEE CHAIR HEATHER MCPHERSON

LUCY CURZON

A THESIS

Submitted to the graduate faculty of The University of Alabama at Birmingham, and the University of Alabama in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts.

BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA

2014

Copyright by Joanna Wilson

2014

iii

THE BEAR AND THE TIGER: DECODING ATTITUDES AND ANXIETIES TOWARDS NATURE THROUGH A.A. MILNE’S WINNIE-THE-POOH IN POST-

WWI BRITAIN

JOANNA WILSON

ART HISTORY

ABSTRACT

This thesis aims to demonstrate how the two volumes of Winnie-the-Pooh stories,

published in 1926 and 1928, and written by A.A. Milne and illustrated by E.H. Shepard,

operate as a unique lens through which early twentieth-century attitudes towards nature

and wildlife in Britain may be discerned, and in particular how the stuffed animal

characters of Pooh the bear and Tigger the tiger represent a shift in post-war British

worldviews concerning nature and domination.

The initial stage of this investigation determines how the exceptionally broad

demographic constituting the audience for children’s fiction makes the medium a

particularly expressive record of the society in which it is produced. And then

considering the text and illustrations of Winnie-the-Pooh in a broader cultural and

historical context reveals the stories’ anthropomorphic characters and pastoral environs to

be a surprisingly incisive document of the British, and particularly the English public’s

response to the shifting physical and psychological landscape of post-war Britain. The

fictional spaces of Winnie-the-Pooh reflect English pride in outdoor pursuits and

traditions of natural enclosure, aspects of national identity that appear increasingly in

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fiction, and imagery as industrial progress and urbanization take their toll on the real

spaces suitable for outdoor pursuits.

Finally, my research compares the Winnie-the-Pooh characters and illustrations to

their literary ancestors in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1893). In so doing, it

examines the significant parallels and differences between Kipling’s work, written at the

height of colonial enterprise in India, and Milne’s work, which transplants a bear and

tiger to the idyllic English countryside during a state of economic and imperial decline in

the wake of the war.

Keywords: Britain, England, imperialism, children’s literature, landscape, national

identity

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to offer a heartfelt thanks to the Graduate School, and all of the Art

History faculty and administration at the University of Alabama and the University of

Alabama at Birmingham, in addition to a profound thanks to my thesis committee for

supporting and guiding me through the exhilarating and exhausting process of completing

my Masters degree. Dr. Heather McPherson and Dr. Lucy Curzon have offered me

invaluable instruction, criticism and inspiration during this process. Archival research for

this thesis was made possible through the Ireland Research Travel Award. Thank you to

the Graduate School for selecting me, and to Charles and Caroline Ireland for endowing

this important scholarship. I must offer special thanks to my advisor Dr. Jessica Dallow,

without whose seemingly inexhaustible patience and unflagging support, I could never

have completed this task. Over the past two years Jessica has gone above and beyond the

responsibilities of an advisor, not only spurring me to be a better scholar through her

engaging instruction and thoughtful guidance, but also offering the generous support of

her time and energy in every aspect of my professional and academic life. Thanks,

Jessica. You are the best, really.

I would also like to thank my partner Derek for his constant patience and support,

which was crucial in helping me maintain a semblance of humanity as I completed this

degree.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...................................................................................................v LIST OF FIGURES ......................................................................................................... viii INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................1 Significance of Topic and Existing Literature ..............................................................8 Organization and Methodology ..................................................................................15 CHAPTERS 1 THE FORMATION OF CHILDHOOD .......................................................................18 Children’s Literature ...................................................................................................21 The Purpose of Playthings ..........................................................................................28 2 DRAWING NATURAL CONCLUSIONS ..................................................................34 Natural Traditions in England ....................................................................................37 An Expansive View of English Landscape .......................................................42 The Nature of Winnie-the-Pooh ................................................................................45 Entering the Hundred Acre Wood ....................................................................46 A Narrow View of English Landscape .............................................................49 Enclosing Winnie-the-Pooh ..............................................................................53 3 THE BEAR AND THE TIGER ....................................................................................58 Bringing Our Boys Home ..........................................................................................60 Subjects of an Inland Empire ....................................................................................65 Ruling the Inland Empire ...........................................................................................72 CONCLUSION ..................................................................................................................76

vii

BIBLIOGRAPHY ..............................................................................................................79 FIGURES ........................................................................................................................85

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure Page 1 E.H. Shepard, Illustration for Punch, April 11, 1934, pg. 417 ..............................86 2 Photograph, Piglet, Kanga, Winnie-the-Pooh, Eeyore and Tigger, New York

Public Library, New York ......................................................................................87 2 Francisco Goya, Family of the Duke of Osuna, 1786. Museo del Prado, Madrid,

Spain ......................................................................................................................88 4 Replica of Steiff Bear, PB 55, Steiff Museum, Geingen, Germany ......................89

5 Capability and Lancelot Brown, Blenheim Park and Grounds, 1760s, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom. ..............................................................................90

6 E.H. Shepard, Illustration for A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, New York: Dutton, 1926........................................................................................................................91

7 John Constable, A View of Salisbury, 1st quarter of nineteenth century, Musee de Louvre, Paris ..........................................................................................................92

8 John Constable, Hampstead Heath, 1820-22, Musee Bonnat, Bayonne, France ..93

9 E.H. Shepard, Drawing from Sketchbook EHS/E/9, Pg. 31, Sheep in Landscape, From the E. H. Shepard Archive, Copyright of E. H. Shepard, early twentieth century, Archives and Special Collections, University of Surrey, Surrey, UK .....94

10 E.H. Shepard, Drawing from Sketchbook, EHS/E/9, Pg. 38-39, Panoramic

Landscape, From the E.H. Shepard Archive, Copyright of E. H. Shepard, early twentieth century, Archives and Special Collections, University of Surrey, Surrey, UK ..........................................................................................................................95

11 James Ward, Theophilus Levett and a Favorite Hunter, 1817, Yale Center for

British Art, New Haven, Connecticut ....................................................................96 12 Francis Calcraft Turner, The Berkeley Hunt, 1842, Yale Center for British Art,

New Haven, Connecticut .......................................................................................97

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13 E.H. Shepard, Illustrated map for A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, New York:

Dutton, 1926 ..........................................................................................................98 14 Ambrosius Holbein, Woodcut for Utopia by Thomas More, 1518 .......................99 15 E.H. Shepard, Illustration for A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, New York: Dutton,

1926......................................................................................................................100 16 E.H. Shepard, Illustration for A.A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner, New

York: Dutton, 1928 ..............................................................................................101 17 E.H. Shepard, Illustration for A.A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner, New

York: Dutton, 1928 ..............................................................................................102 18 E.H. Shepard, Illustration for A.A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner, New

York: Dutton, 1928 ..............................................................................................103 19 E.H. Shepard, Illustration for A.A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner, New

York: Dutton, 1928 ..............................................................................................104 20 E.H. Shepard, Illustration for A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, New York: Dutton,

1926......................................................................................................................105 21 E.H. Shepard, Illustration for A.A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner, New

York: Dutton, 1928 ..............................................................................................106 22 John Lockwood Kipling, Detail of “Baloo” from illustration for Rudyard

Kipling’s The Jungle Book, Garden City: Harper & Brothers, 1893 ...................107 23 John Lockwood Kipling, Detail of “Shere Kahn” from illustration for Rudyard

Kipling’s The Jungle Book, Garden City: Harper & Brothers, 1893 ...................107 24 John Lockwood Kipling, Illustration for Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book,

Garden City: Harper & Brothers, 1893

   

   

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INTRODUCTION

When Winnie-the-Pooh was first published in 1926, the humorous episodes of a

young boy and his animal companions were so well received that they were quickly

followed by a second, and equally popular volume, The House at Pooh Corner, in 1928.1

The stories, written by author and playwright A.A. Milne and illustrated by E.H. Shepard,

take place in an idyllic natural environment where the anthropomorphic characters, which

are primarily modeled after stuffed animal toys, make their homes. The only human

presence in Winnie-the-Pooh is that of Christopher Robin, a six-year-old English boy

who frequently visits the “Hundred Acre Wood” where his wisdom is often required to

solve the dilemmas of his animal friends. Each chapter of Winnie-the-Pooh and The

House at Pooh Corner narrates a discreet plot, which vary in detail and action but are

inevitably propelled by an animal character’s (typically Winnie-the-Pooh’s) silly

misunderstanding of a situation or hapless attempt at executing a goal. This thesis argues

that the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, written by A.A. Milne and illustrated by E. H. Shepard,

operate as a unique lens through which early twentieth-century attitudes towards nature

and wildlife in Britain may be discerned, and in particular how the

                                                                                                               1 A.A. Milne and E.H. Shepard, Winnie-the-Pooh (New York: Dutton, 1988); A. A. Milne and E.H. Shepard, The House at Pooh Corner (New York: Dutton, 1961).

 

 

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characters of “Pooh” the bear and “Tigger” the tiger represent a shift in English

worldviews concerning nature and domination following World War I.

Elucidating the shift evidenced in Winnie-the-Pooh assumes some rudimentary

knowledge of global events taking place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but it

is important now to briefly discuss some details of the demographic that constituted the

initial audience for Winnie-the-Pooh and some of the notable differences distinguishing

the character of that readership from its pre-WWI identity. The first volume of Winnie-

the-Pooh stories, published just eight years after the end of the first great world war, has

the distinction of being written for the first generation of English and British children

born after the war. Because the stories targeted a very young audience of children this

meant that the stories often required a parent or guardian to read to the child. Thus

Winnie-the-Pooh’s narrative was consumed simultaneously by two demographics of

Britons with radically different national experiences. The adult reader would have come

of age in a Britain that was an undeniable global superpower and that viewed its self-

styled cultural, moral and racial superiority as justifying a vast imperial and colonial

enterprise that successfully and unapologetically claimed the right to exploit the

resources and cultures of populations across the globe. This same adult reader would

have witnessed the unprecedented death and destruction of a war brought on by imperial

grasping and the war’s subsequent economic and physical toll that left Britain struggling

to rebuild internally while incapable of addressing the widening fissures in their imperial

interests abroad.

To avoid any possible confusion I should address how the terms “British” and

“English” will function in this thesis. In their most basic definitions Britain or British

 

 

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refer to the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, or to the

British Empire’s continent-spanning colonies, which were governed and partly inhabited

by British citizens. English refers more specifically to the territory and population of

England, which was (and is) Britain’s monarchic seat as well as the site of the privileged

cultural model that was touted and disseminated through the colonial exploits of the

British Empire. But these trivial definitions are a poor index for the complexities of

nationhood. For the purpose of reading this thesis I offer a slightly more nuanced, though

still radically simplified, definition. When I use the term British in this thesis I am

indicating a community bound chiefly by the terrestrial reach of England’s political and

economic sovereignty. There are also clearly racial and cultural affinities of which to be

aware—the natural homogenizing result of sharing a relatively small land mass that is

physically cut off by sea from the myriad interchange of influences typical among

continental nations—but these affinities are not significantly more pronounced than those

of any other group of nations that share borders, ethnicity, and a common tongue. Though

this definition does not address the complex cultural, political and religious makeup of

the groups that exist within those perimeters, the focus of this thesis requires some

narrowing of terms. Because the author, illustrator and narrative representation of

Winnie-the-Pooh are English, and because the issues of imperialism I address are also

associated with the objective of British expansion which was furthered and promoted by

English values in particular, I cannot devote adequate space here to a more complete

understanding of the diversities of British identity. So in the interest of conciseness I will

use ‘British’ to broadly describe the inhabitants of a strictly political and physical

domain. ‘Englishness’, on the other hand, refers not only to the official policies and

 

 

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boundaries of that country, but to the far more nebulous qualities that constitute an

English national identity.2

The specifics of English national identity (as with any national identity) are an

expansive set of cultural, psychological, and physical traits that form a sort of spiritual

kinship between a nation’s members, idiosyncrasies that are heavily invented and

sustained through the visual and literary output of a nation. In Benedict Anderson’s

exploration of nationalism, he aptly describes the bond of national identity as an

“imagined community.”3 Anderson uses the word imagined because no single citizen can

attempt to know even a fraction of her fellow compatriots, and yet a sense of community

is still allowed to exist among millions of strangers who assume a bond with each other

based on the constructed personality of their nation.

Nationalism and national identity are essentially, in all their various

manifestations, an instance of “us-ness” versus otherness, a system of identifying and

promoting what is unique to the imagined community. In England’s case, national

identity assumes somewhat epic proportions as it describes the character of the ruling

head of the British Empire. The expansion of Britain’s economic and political might was

accompanied by the power to proclaim and enforce the customs, values, and culture of its

sovereign state as supreme. These include, but are not limited to, a ritualized system of

social interaction and protocol, a vehemently enforced class system, and idealized

                                                                                                               2  Krishan Kumar offers an in depth discussion of differing definitions of ‘British’ and ‘English’ in The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 3  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 7.  

 

 

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engagement with their own homogenous landscape. It is important, too, to clarify that

English national identity was not a democratic construction. The promotion and

maintenance of national ideals was a privilege primarily reserved for members of the

upper classes. Winnie-the-Pooh’s author and illustrator were British citizens and their

work was published for the broader market of Great Britain, but they are further

distinguished as being English, and not only English, but upper-middle-class, highly

educated Englishmen.

Milne was born in London and attended the small public school that his parents

John and Mary ran before receiving a B.A. in mathematics from Cambridge. It was

through his work for the student-run Cambridge literary magazine Granta that Milne

caught the notice of the storied London humor magazine, Punch. Milne was a contributor

to the magazine, which published his humorous essays and poetry, from the time he

graduated in 1903 until 1906 when he joined the staff as a writer and assistant editor. A

few years after returning to Punch, following his service as a propaganda writer in WWI,

Milne began looking for an illustrator to accompany a collection of children’s verse he

had written titled When We Were Very Young (1924).4 A colleague at Punch suggested

he try staff artist Ernest Shepard. Shepard was also born in London and had attended the

Royal Academy Schools before embarking on a successful career as an illustrator. Like

Milne, Shepard’s talents were employed in the war effort when he was tapped by the

Intelligence Department to sketch combat fields. Shepard also contributed illustrations to

Punch throughout the war, and was hired as a full-time staff writer in 1921.5 So while

                                                                                                               4  Ann Thwaite, A.A. Milne: His Life (London: Faber and Faber, 1990).  5  Rawle Knox, ed., The Works of E.H. Shepard (New York: Shocken Books, 1980).

 

 

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Winnie-the-Pooh’s reach encompassed Britain more broadly, the social values that are

represented through the episodes of a young English boy and his anthropomorphic

companions in a southern English landscape are specifically concerned with the national

identity of England.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed Europe’s mad scramble for

imperial expansion that was dominated by Germany, France and Great Britain. By the

last half of the nineteenth century Britain had managed to formally expand the British

Empire to include Canada, Australia and India in addition to its colonial outposts dotting

Africa and the Caribbean. The establishment of the British Raj in India in 1858 can be

seen to mark the heyday of the British Empire’s influence and affluence. What began in

the seventeenth century with the East India Trading Company as a business venture in

importing and exporting goods from an un-unified India gradually evolved into

hegemonic and then official control over many of the subcontinent’s disparate

principalities until the absorption of these territories was finally made official and

complete in the mid-nineteenth century.6

The lucrative addition of British India to the Empire was not only a political and

economic coup, but was also seen as confirmation of a self-styled British identity as

righteous supreme conquerors, explorers, and civilizers. Newspapers, fiction and

commercial products served to further this romantic self-portrait for Britons through the

end of the century. And it is this identity of boundless, invincible dominion that the

author, illustrator, and adult readers of Winnie-the-Pooh were born to assume and,

                                                                                                               6  Percival Joseph Griffiths, The British in India (London: R. Hale, 1946).  

 

 

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following the devastation of the war, forced to re-assess for their children who were born

in a very different Britain.

Written initially for an audience of middle and upper-class English children and

their parents, Winnie-the-Pooh was embraced by one of the largest demographics for

children’s fiction to date among the most powerful and privileged population of that era.

The juvenile adventures of the ecologically diverse cast of animals—these include

kangaroos, a pig, donkey, rabbit, and owl in addition to the bear and tiger—inhabiting a

secluded English Eden is positioned to speak convincingly to the larger concerns of the

post-war English public when examined in their historic context. Nineteenth and early-

twentieth-century developments in the treatment of childhood, representations of nature,

and expansion of the British Empire provide a framework that makes the enthusiastic

reception for Winnie-the-Pooh’s narrative—novel for its placement of gentle stuffed

versions of foreign wild-life in a domestic pastoral environment—culturally significant.

Following the physical and economic trauma of WWI, the variation in Winnie-the-Pooh’s

representations of imperial and pastoral aspects of Englishness suggests a shift from the

pre-war identity that asserted expansive dominion over the domestic and global

landscape. This shift is expressed through the stories’ narratives and illustrations as that

of Britain coming to terms with the fallibility of its imperial initiative as well as the

growing disparity between the cultural and physical landscapes that were central to

English national identity.

 

 

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Significance of Topic and Existing Literature

The immediate and continuing popularity of Winnie-the-Pooh has made it an oft-

revisited text for youth literature scholars, particularly those interested in the canon of

British children’s fiction. However, perhaps because illustrations for a children’s book

are seen to be too dependent on the text to sustain critical inquiry, there has been no art

historical scholarship on the stories. For this reason, my thesis will treat Winnie-the-Pooh

and The House at Pooh Corner as works of interactive media, with text and illustration

working in concert to produce meanings and keep their audiences continuously engaged.

It is important to state here that when I refer to the “narrative” or “stories” of Winnie-the-

Pooh throughout this thesis I am speaking of the visually and textually integrated

document. The stories, which were written to appeal to a very young demographic, would

initially have been read to a child by a parent or guardian. Thus Winnie-the-Pooh’s

readership constituted both adults and children, frequently providing the aural component

of speaking adult and listening child in addition to its visual and textual narrative.

My reason for examining Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner as a

whole document, that is, as narratives in which text and illustration are essentially

intertwined, and perhaps the reason why they have never before received critical attention

from an art historian, is that the books occupy an interstitial space in the realm of

children’s illustration. The majority of illustration for children’s literature functions in

one of two ways: either as the primary mode of narrative delivery, or what we would call

a picture book; or as a supplement to the narrative, in which images appear intermitted

through a text to aid in the readers’ visualization of the characters, action, or environment

that are described in the verbal narrative. The length and content of the textual narrative

 

 

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of Winnie-the-Pooh make it impossible to suggest that it is a picture book. And yet,

Shepard’s simple but compelling illustrations appear on over half of the pages. But rather

than driving the narrative, or visually reiterating a moment or scene from the text, these

illustrations operate in concert with the text to produce meaning. It is one of the chief

charms of the narratives that while Milne writes from the utterly earnest point-of-view of

his childish protagonists, it is often Shepard’s illustrations that contradict the seriousness

of the characters’ situation and reveal the humorous scale or misunderstanding of which

the stories’ inhabitants are unaware. Shepard’s images for Winnie-the-Pooh provide

much more than a visual description, they often offer key narrative information and

insight that alter, not only the way the story may be visualized, but also the fundamental

plot. Shepard’s illustrations and Milne’s text perform different narrative functions that,

only in union, form a complete experience.

Further evidence of the essential symbiotic relationship between text and image in

Winnie-the-Pooh can be gleaned from the stories’ unique formatting. Shepard’s

illustrations, very few of which are full page, are strategically situated throughout the

text—at the top or bottom of a page or in between text sections as the narrative calls

for—to facilitate the whole experience of the narrative. Of the numerous reprints that

have appeared since its first publication, Winnie-the-Pooh has always retained its distinct

format that never alters the original placement of image within text. This preservation of

how text and image are read together is a significant testament to their mutual formation

of narrative when you consider how many popular, classic children’s books are reprinted

in a format to accommodate cheaper production, and sometimes even repackaged using

different illustrators. It is telling that, even ninety years after its first publication,

 

 

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regardless of what licensed edition of Winnie-the-Pooh you pick up, the content of the

stories will be contained on exactly the same number of pages and each page will be laid

out within the margins in exactly the same way.

The lasting impact of Milne and Shepard’s collaboration perhaps suggest an

interpersonal bond or friendship between the men, but the reality appears to be much

more prosaic. As the creators of one of the most beloved children’s stories in history,

both Milne and Shepard have been subject to their fair share of biographic treatment that,

for the most part, follows a chronological formula that pays the most attention to the

inter-war years that brought author and illustrator together. Although Shepard was a

respected illustrator by the time Milne was looking for an artist for When We Were Very

Young, the author was apparently very reluctant to employ Shepard.7 But however

reticent to enter into a professional relationship, Milne was pleased with Shepard’s

finished product, an outcome that could not entirely be predicted, as the conflated scenes

of floating line work that surrounded each verse was the first time he had deviated so far

in his professional work from the more finished compositions that describe most of his

oeuvre up to this point (figure 1). The success of that first project is what prompted Milne

to think of Shepard again when he started work on Winnie-the-Pooh. That Milne

envisioned the story to be a visually and textually integrated experience is evident by

accounts of this planning stage. Milne was apparently the most particular and detailed

author Shepard had ever worked with; Milne even invited the illustrator to spend time at

his house in Sussex so Shepard could acquaint himself with the landscape of Ashdown

                                                                                                               7  H. F. Ellis suggests that Shepard thought Milne was reluctant to use him because he was not as well known as the author in, "Ernest and the Punch Table," in The Work of E. H. Shepard (New York: Schocken Books, 1980), 107.  

 

 

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Forest that was the inspiration for The Hundred Acre Wood. However, despite the level

of involvement entailed in their working relationship, the two men were never on more

intimate terms than that of fruitful collaborators.

As I have stated, there is no shortage of literary criticism and commentary on

Winnie-the-Pooh, though scholarship concerning the specific themes I am addressing is

more limited. Humphrey Carpenter and M. Daphne Kutzer have both published research

illuminating the connections between Winnie-the-Pooh and British understandings of

nature and imperialism respectively.8 Each examines the stories as part of a broader study

of these themes in British children’s literature, positioning them as a continuation of their

pervasive cultural presence. However, neither scholar explores the considerable overlap

of environmental and imperial themes present in Winnie-the-Pooh, nor do they discuss

the historical post-war context of its publication or identify the subsequent shift in the

way that nature or Empire is presented.

Denis Butts and Paula Connolly, who each take a different critical approach the

stories’ environs, have also examined the insularity and seclusion of Winnie-the-Pooh.

Butts offers an instrumental discussion of Winnie-the-Pooh as domestic fantasy.9

Connolly similarly discusses the idyllic safety of the stories’ arcadian habitat, but she

draws a parallel between the characters and their settings and an Edwardian nursery to

suggest, without commenting on the larger historical post-war context, that the two

                                                                                                               8 M. Daphne Kutzer, Empire's Children: Empire and Imperialism in Classic British Children's Books (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000); Humphrey Carpenter, Secret Gardens: A Study of the Golden Age of Children's Literature (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985). 9 Dennis Butts, ed., Stories and Society: Children's Literature in Its Social Context (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992).  

 

 

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volumes function to facilitate a child’s transition from the nursery to adolescence. Paul

Wake offers a unique investigation of how temporality is represented in Milne’s work in

a study that primarily focuses on the author’s other children’s works.10 But Wake also

addresses temporality in Winnie-the-Pooh, arguing that the environment of the Hundred-

Acre-Wood conveys a sense of timelessness.

Perhaps the most interesting and expansive scholarly assessment of Winnie-the-

Pooh can be found in Frederick Crews’ The Pooh Perplex: A Freshman Casebook

(1963), which is actually an entertaining and sharp satire of what he sees as the over-

wrought rhetoric of literary critics and academics.11 Crews, whose occupation as a

legitimate English scholar makes the lampooning of his peers all the sharper, presents a

collection of twelve critical chapters from as many invented literary scholars. Despite the

obvious parody of Crews’ application of various philosophical and critical theories

(delivered with the lingo and tone of these various schools of thought that brilliantly

walks the line between pitch perfect and heavy handed), The Pooh Perplex deserves

mentioning here for two reasons. First, in the process of lampooning the rhetoric of

Marxism, Freudian analysis, etc., he makes genuine connections to these ideas, albeit in

such a ridiculous manner that he effectively discourages would-be Pooh scholars from

attempting to legitimately tackle those topics. And second, Crews’ use of Winnie-the-

Pooh as the vessel for his parody of scholarly pretension forms the fundamental joke,

which is that Winnie-the-Pooh is an absurd subject for this kind of analysis. While

                                                                                                               10Paul Wake, "Waiting in the Hundred Acre Wood: Childhood, Narrative and Time in A. A. Milne's Works for Children," The Lion and the Unicorn 33, no. 1 (2008): 26-43. 11 Frederick C. Crews, The Pooh Perplex, A Freshman Casebook (New York: Dutton, 1963).  

 

 

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Crews’ object was to poke fun at the rhetoric his peers employ in dissecting works from

authors such as James Joyce or Marcel Proust, he perhaps unintentionally highlights the

long-maintained academic assumption that serious scholarship is reserved for serious

subjects. While trying to restrain my use of academic jargon, this thesis asserts that light-

hearted popular culture such as Winnie-the-Pooh can not only sustain rigorous inquiry,

but in fact can speak with more depth to certain issues precisely because of its broad

appeal and accessibility.

My thesis will address the gap in existing scholarship that only rarely and

minimally deals with the mutual dependence of text and illustration that defines the genre

of children’s picture books. While children’s fiction has grown as a focus for research in

literary criticism over the past quarter century, illustration is largely ignored as a critical

narrative factor. Art historians seem equally reluctant to seriously explore the subject of

children’s book illustration. Shepard’s illustrations have received very little scholarly

attention with the exception of simplified summaries of his style that are included in

biographical accounts of the artist or in illustration compilations. An exception to the lack

of scholarship concerning the contents of picture books as a whole is found in the text,

How Picturebooks Work (2001) coauthored by Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott.12

Their research develops an extensive argument for an examination of children’s narrative

that includes the relationship between text and image. Using several examples of

eighteenth and nineteenth-century picture books, Nikolajeva and Scott make a case for

the understanding of these documents as complicated by the relationship between iconic

                                                                                                               12 Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott, How Picturebooks Work (New York: Garland Publishing, 2001).

 

 

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(visual) and conventional (textual) signs. By exploring the children’s book as a specific

medium that simultaneously engages visual and textual comprehension, I aim to map out,

not only the environmental and imperial themes of Winnie-the-Pooh, but also the peculiar

manner in which these themes function through the format of illustrated children’s

literature for the parents and children who consumed them.

As an art historical study this thesis is original in its submission of Winnie-the-

Pooh as an undivided narrative object. There are art historians such as W.J.T. Mitchell

who have championed blurring the disciplinary lines between visual and textual

interpretation, but support for this cause has not yet made a significant impact on

scholarship concerning children’s fiction.13 My argument, which treats Milne’s words

and Shepard’s images as symbiotic elements of an immersive narrative experience,

contributes to a more textured understanding of the histories of both illustration and

children’s fiction. It is as an immersive experience that I argue for Winnie-the-Pooh’s

ability to reflect concerns in post-war Britain that are also inextricably bound between

verbal and visual renderings. Understanding English national identity through landscape

or imperialism necessitates a reading of how these themes are articulated through both

language and image, which is why my argument for Winnie-the-Pooh’s eloquence on

these topics in a post-war context offers dimension to an art historical narrative.

                                                                                                               13 See W.J.T. Mitchell, "Word and Image," in Critical Terms for Art History, by Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 47-56.

 

 

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Organization and Methodology

In Chapter One I discuss why Winnie-the-Pooh is a useful object for

understanding the concerns of post-WWI English society and how the history of

children’s fiction makes the medium a particularly expressive record of the society in

which it is produced. Tracing the history of both children’s print and toys in Britain

reveals the relatively short evolution of childhood and childhood material culture in

Britain. Using eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century surveys of toys and children’s

literature, I show how the objects of childhood in England developed to become

increasingly relevant indicators of the values and preoccupations of adult society. In

charting this chronological narrative I am able to position Winnie-the-Pooh’s creation at a

historic peak in British society’s deference for, and investment in childhood.

In Chapter Two I consider the text and illustrations of Winnie-the-Pooh in a

broader cultural and historical context to reveal the stories’ anthropomorphic characters

and pastoral environs to be a register of the public’s anxiety concerning the shifting

physical and psychological landscape of post-WWI Britain. I examine how the fictional

spaces of Winnie-the-Pooh reflect English pride in outdoor pursuits and traditions of

natural enclosure and how those traditions were affected by the war, industrialization, and

urbanization. Additionally, looking at England’s long history of using visual and literary

representations of landscape to promote national and imperial identity prefaces an

understanding of the children’s stories as expressing Britain’s cultural and political

climate. I use a number of interdisciplinary sources in this chapter to establish the breadth

of England’s identification with nature. I look at pre-war English landscape painting and

scholarship to illustrate how E.H. Shepard’s illustrations for Winnie-the-Pooh deviate

 

 

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from the standard ideal landscape composition. I use Humphrey Carpenter’s study of

isolated natural environments in the “Golden Age” of children’s literature to anchor a

discussion of how British children’s books have historically idealized nature, and how the

environment of Winnie-the-Pooh can be seen to subtly disrupt the pattern Carpenter

outlines.14 Additionally, I use examples of English landscape architecture and literary

references to landscape “improvements” to illustrate a specifically English standard and

valuation of nature with which to compare and contextualize the depictions of nature set

forth in Winnie-the-Pooh. Finally I will look at how the notable isolation and insularity of

Winnie-the-Pooh’s environment suggests that pre-war English identity of assertive

dominance over the natural world was shifting to more tentative attitudes concerning

nature in an inter-war context. This chapter will use Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in

Wonderland (1865), Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908) and Francis

Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1910) as pre-war examples with which to

compare and contrast Winnie-the-Pooh.15

Lastly, in Chapter Three, I compare the “Pooh” characters and illustrations to

their literary ancestors in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1893) by looking at the

significant parallels and differences between Kipling’s treatment of wildlife, offered at

the height of colonial enterprise in India, and Milne’s work, which presents nature during

                                                                                                               14 Carpenter, Secret Gardens. 15 Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-glass (Chicago, IL: J.G. Ferguson Publishing, 1992); Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (New York: Scribner, 1960); Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1962).

 

 

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a state of economic and imperial decline in the wake of the war.16 The Jungle Book’s

narrative, which also features a child as the sole human representative among a

community of animals, provides a wealth of material examples with which to compare

Winnie-the-Pooh. Marking the points where the two beloved works diverge, in light of

the events that transpire between their publications, this thesis makes a case for

understanding the Winnie-the-Pooh stories as a document of England’s struggle to

reconcile a mythologized understanding of the past with steadfast inter-war realities for

the generations that would inherit its changing physical and ideological landscapes. In

this chapter I look at the two aforementioned texts as well as Burnett’s The Secret

Garden and A Little Princess (1905) in conjunction with a chronology of key events in

British imperial expansion and decline.17 This method will allow me to illustrate how

children’s fiction has traditionally reflected contemporary English concerns.

Additionally, in this chapter I will focus on how animals are depicted in both The Jungle

Book and Winnie-the-Pooh, using animal studies and the colonial history of zoos to

contextualize the significance of the foreign animal in a domestic landscape.

                                                                                                               16 Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1925). 17 Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1963).

 

 

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CHAPTER 1

THE FORMATION OF CHILDHOOD

Before I delve into what the thematic content of what Winnie-the-Pooh can tell us

about post-WWI English society, it is necessary to discuss Winnie-the-Pooh more

generally as an object and product. At the time that I am writing this thesis in 2014, and

for most of the past century, picture books designed to engage parents and children in a

mutually beneficial and enjoyable activity are a very common, perhaps even nostalgic,

part of childhood; the existence of which is not typically pondered at length. However, as

the next two chapters of this thesis will make the case for what Winnie-the-Pooh’s text

and illustration meant for its contemporary British audience, this chapter will lay the

foundation for how a children’s picture book can be a meaningful historical document.

Appreciating the impact of the stories requires contextualization, not only of pertinent

recent and contemporary events affecting Winnie-the-Pooh’s reception, but also of the

significance children’s picture books and toys had in general in the 1920s.

This chapter examines the evolution of children’s literature and product culture

leading up to the “Pooh” series’ publication in the 1920s. The “Pooh” stories are among

the first to animate children’s toys as characters, and certainly the first of any note to use

stuffed animal toys. As a children’s book that incorporates toys into its narrative cast,

Winnie-the-Pooh offers a uniquely condensed example of the trappings of childhood at a

 

 

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historic moment when these objects and narratives were just beginning to reach the large

shared audience that makes them such a meaningful document of their society of

production. At the time of Winnie-the-Pooh’s publication in 1926, the relatively recent

occurrences of industrialization, technological advances, and the First World War all

contributed to a much larger middle class, with far more access to the children’s toys and

books that had previously been primarily a privilege reserved for the children of upper-

class families. Concurrent with the growing numbers of middle-class children were

strides in print and manufacturing technology in the first decades of the twentieth

century, giving rise to the lucrative business of child-specific marketing. By examining

the growth and manufacture of children’s entertainment in conjunction with recent

scholarship concerned with the pervasive themes of that culture, I aim to establish

Winnie-the-Pooh’s social and economic context in the broader history of the English

treatment of childhood.

The phenomenon of marketing towards children is particularly relevant in a study

of Winnie-the-Pooh because the stories’ chief animal characters are modeled on the

stuffed toys of Milne’s son, Christopher Robin (figure 2).18 The novelty of

anthropomorphizing plush copies rather than real animals is a notable departure from the

norms of children’s fiction, a departure made more interesting by the toys’ roots in

imperial conquest. Through an investigation of the history of children’s media in England

it becomes clear that increased production and demand coincided with increasingly

                                                                                                               18 The original stuffed animal toys are now housed at the New York Public Library, which is also home to a special collection devoted to Winnie-the-Pooh. "The Adventures of the REAL Winnie-the-Pooh," Nypl.org, accessed June 04, 2014, http://www.nypl.org/locations/tid/36/node/5557.

 

 

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topical content. Particularly with children’s fiction, references to the concerns and current

events occupying the nation at the time of their publication became more and more

frequent. Introducing species that were native to British colonized territories as benign

toy characters suggests a connection between the stories and contemporary anxiety

towards the decline of the British Empire. This chapter will convey the contemporary

relevance of popular children’s media to a broader national dialogue, as well as consider

how the details and context of Winnie-the-Pooh’s creation and reception position the

work to give meaningful insight into post-WWI English society.

To fully appreciate the significance of Winnie-the-Pooh’s content and reception

requires a discussion of how children’s literature and product culture developed in

England. Childhood is an evolving concept that for much of England’s history bore little

resemblance to its modern incarnation. The idea that a person’s formative years should

include imaginative play and specialized instruction was not widely accepted until the

end of the eighteenth century.19 And it took another century for society to reach a point

wherein children’s media was widely accessible to a large audience. The magnitude of

the audience Shepard and Milne were able to reach was contingent on these fairly recent

economic and cultural developments. But beyond providing a socio-economic structure

for Winnie-the-Pooh’s publication, exploring these developments places the work at a

pivotal juncture in the history of children’s product culture. The Industrial Revolution,

the hulking grandfather of so many cultural shifts in the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries, is responsible for a number of the developments that enabled the “Pooh

                                                                                                               19 J. H. Plumb, "The New World of Children in Eighteenth-Century England," Past & Present 67 (May 01, 1975): 64-95.

 

 

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phenomenon.” Like nearly every other product we now take for granted, the manufacture

of toys and books benefited tremendously from technological advances and the

implementation of factories.20

Children’s Literature

Looking at the development of children’s literature is important to discerning the

significance of Winnie-the-Pooh. The blossoming of children’s literature is tied to

industrialization, the rise of the middle class and changes in the conception of childhood.

Winnie-the-Pooh’s publication was momentous not only because of the historic global

events surrounding its reception in England, but because the nation’s cultural and

economic investment in childhood was at a historic peak.

Children’s literature or even children’s stories are a fairly recent phenomenon and

are essentially an eighteenth-century invention. Fairy tales, in many ways the ancestors to

children’s literature, were never intended specifically for children. In fact, revisiting the

pre-Disney versions of fairy tales such as those of the brothers Grimm reveals them to be

totally unsuitable for a young audience. The stories are rife with murder, rape,

cannibalism and bestiality, with a theme of creative, gruesome violence running through

nearly all of them. Grimm’s written version of “The Juniper Tree” for example, narrates

the tale of a boy whose stepmother decapitates him, frames her own daughter for the

murder, then, in an act of gratuitous thriftiness, uses the meat of his body to make a stew

                                                                                                               20 Tom Kemp, Industrialization in Nineteenth-Century Europe (London: Longmans, 1969).

 

 

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that she feeds to the boy’s unsuspecting father.21 Though you could say the story ends

happily, with a series of magical events bringing the boy back to life so he can crush his

stepmother to death with a millstone, this is not the sort of narrative a modern parent

wants to plant in their child’s imagination at bedtime.

Children’s literature scholar Roger Sale traces the history of how fairy tales,

originally a form of oral narrative that explored the balance of humans’ deepest fears and

desires, came to be thought of as the ancestors of modern children’s stories. 22 Sale

points out that childhood as we now understand it is a recent cultural development. The

privileges of childhood first took shape in wealthy and middle class families in the

eighteenth century, and it was not until the nineteenth century that society broadly began

to adopt the view that a person’s early development requires specialized instruction,

constructive entertainment, and imaginative play. Though fairy tales might have been

popular among a demographic we now view as children, pre-eighteenth-century English

children were not offered unique forms of entertainment that catered to the lack of

understanding and experience of youth. Once the gentler and more generous conception

of childhood began to form, fairy tales and their promotion of violent solutions and

cyclical vengeance were forced to undergo a dramatic restructuring for their new

audience.

                                                                                                               21 “The Juniper Tree” was number 47 in the collection Grimm’s Fairy Tales first published in 1812 by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, but this tale, like the rest in the collection, was part of a much older oral fairy tale tradition and merely edited and compiled by the brothers for the publication. Maria Tatar discusses the compilation and publication undertaken by the Grimm brothers at length in The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). 22 Roger Sale, Fairy Tales and After: From Snow White to E.B. White (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).

 

 

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As evidenced in Winnie-the-Pooh and many other examples of children’s

literature, some of the elements of fairy tales—talking animals, wish fulfillment, magical

objects and beings—were repurposed for modern children’s tales. The naivety and

imagination of children made them especially receptive to stories that associated the

animals and objects of daily life with fantastic possibilities, though these possibilities

became increasingly less dark as the understanding of childhood education and

development progressed. And traditional fairy tales such as Snow White, Cinderella and

Sleeping Beauty were significantly watered down and censored to make them more

palatable to an impressionable young audience. Sale contends that this erasure of

violence, or humans’ deepest fears, is the destruction of the fairy tale, the balance of fear

and desire skewed, rendered it nothing but fantastic flight of fancy.23 The changes that

Sale laments as the demise of the fairy tale become standard, but the destruction of the

fairy tale as it originally functioned became the beginning of a trajectory that would

eventually lead to modern children’s literature and the creation of Winnie-the-Pooh.

The animal fable represents another oral/literary tradition, originally intended for

adults, that has influenced the evolution of children’s literature and is particularly

relevant to Winnie-the-Pooh. The tradition of using anthropomorphic animals as narrative

vessels for imparting moral lessons is thousands of years old. The slave and storyteller

Aesop whose legacy has become synonymous with animal fables is first mentioned by

the fifth-century (BCE) Greek historian Herodotus.24 The continued re-telling and

                                                                                                               23 Ibid., 24-30.  24  Herodotus, Harry Carter, and Edward Bawden, The Histories of Herodotus of Halicarnassus (New York: Heritage Press, 1958), 132.  

 

 

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reimagining of animal fables for the past millennia testifies to the peculiar fascination

that talking animals hold for humans. Though as with fairy-tales, by the end of the

eighteenth century, the animal fable becomes more and more frequently relegated to the

nursery. Carolyn Burke explores some of the reasons why anthropomorphic characters

are so frequently used to appeal to children in “Animals as People in Children’s

Literature,” positing that animals represent a unique opportunity to reach children

because a child can both identify with and distance themselves from animals.25 Burke

suggests a child identifies with the animal as a being that is subject to adult control and

authority, but she suggests that this kinship is not strong enough to remove a certain level

of emotional distance kept between a child and animal that is useful in learning difficult

lessons. The enduring popularity of this tradition is important when considering the

influence of Winnie-the-Pooh.

Children’s literature continued to evolve until, by the nineteenth century, the

incidence of infanticide was down to a cheerful zero, and the rate of decapitation among

children’s characters was notably less frequent. The steady shift in children’s literature

since its conception has been towards a fiction that edifies while it entertains, keeping

pace with the morals and values of each generation it seeks to engage. In the nineteenth

century we begin to see an increase in topical material. An explosion in print media and

photography made current events much more present in the minds of British citizens.

And it seems that referencing contemporary news and events functioned duly to

capitalize on interest in English projects, such as the exploration of Antarctica and what

                                                                                                               25 Carolyn L. Burke, "Animals as People in Children's Literature," Language Arts 81, no. 3 (January 2004), accessed July 12, 2014, JSTOR.  

 

 

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was at the time wildly successful British Imperial expansion, and to promote national

pride.26

Notable examples of children’s literature that capitalizes on topical content

include Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1893) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s

Treasure Island (1883) and Kidnapped (1886), with The Jungle Book taking place in

British ruled India, while both of Stevenson’s works involve young British boys finding

adventure and seeking fortune in unspecified foreign lands that were characterized by

their pristine natural environments and “native” population. Narratives that revolved

around the potential for adventure and conquest in “uncivilized” lands such as Kipling

and Stevenson’s were typically marketed towards young boys.27 However, there were

also contemporary references to British imperialism in literature intended for young girls

such as Francis Hodgson Burnett’s two most famous works A Little Princess (1905) and

The Secret Garden (1911), both of which begin with young heroines arriving back to

England from British colonized India. In both of these works by Burnett the heroines’

history of living in India confers special distinction on them. Their compatriots in an

English context treat the girls as objects of particular interest and curiosity.

The increase in overtly topical references in stories suggests by extension that

English authors were also making subtle references to contemporary happenings or

circumstances. The subtlety, for example, with which a high percentage of the most

popular English nineteenth and twentieth-century children’s literature refers to a

                                                                                                               26 Dennis Butts, ed., Stories and Society: Children's Literature in Its Social Context (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992). 27 Kutzer discusses these, and many other examples of the presence of imperialism and the various ways that it functioned in children’s narratives in, Empire's Children.

 

 

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nationally embedded romanticized version of nature, is a cultural element that would

have been tacitly promoted by the parents who purchased these works, and internalized

by the children who read them.28 The number of critically successful British children’s

titles that include idyllic natural settings attests to national pride and interest in the

outdoors that became more pronounced in their fictional rendering during the industrial

revolution. I will delve further into the topical depiction of nature in nineteenth and early

twentieth-century England, as well as how these cultural references were applied in

specific examples of children’s literature in the next chapter, but mention it here to make

an important point. As news media and information became more widely accessible and

sensational, children’s literature increasingly reflected the events and concerns of the

globally invested adult population, a fact that lends critical support to a reading of

Winnie-the-Pooh as a document of its historic moment.

Interestingly, the formation of childhood that fostered the evolution of children’s

literature up to the point of Winnie-the-Pooh’s publication had literary roots. Perhaps the

most salient evidence of how childhood was being reconstructed in England is the series

of Child Labor laws that were passed over the course of the nineteenth century.29 When

the century began there was nothing preventing factories or workhouses from employing

very young children to work sixteen-hour days in harsh conditions for a pittance. Child

labor laws gradually increased the age and limited the hours a child was allowed to work

                                                                                                               28 This theme landscape and nationalism in English literature is explored at length in Humphrey Carpenter’s Secret Gardens. 29 England, The National Archives, accessed June 3, 2014, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/citizenship/struggle_democracy/childlabour.htm

 

 

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until by the twentieth century the period of childhood was an officially defined and

protected period of development. The titular character of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist

(1838) is credited with garnering popular support for legislation that protected the rights

and wellbeing of children. The abuse and hardship that Dickens’s orphaned young

protagonist endured in a London workhouse promoted sympathy and visibility for the

throngs of underprivileged children in England who were forced to eke out an existence

under horrifying circumstances. The narrative and context of Oliver Twist serves to

highlight how dramatically England’s conception of childhood changed in a relatively

short period of time, and sets a precedent for English authors and readers to see boyhood,

and childhood in general, as a period deserving the support, care and protection of

society. Though written for an adult audience, Oliver Twist can be seen as both a catalyst

and herald for the children’s fiction that would follow.

The burgeoning market for children’s media at the turn of the century coincided

with the peak of imperial exploits and the wealth of photographic media that became

profitable fodder for children’s book authors. Winnie-the-Pooh’s is significant in that its

1926 publication is positioned in the recently but firmly established market for childhood

media to reach the broadest historical audience. The timing of the stories’ publication is

made more poignant when its innocent male protagonists and safe environment are

considered in view of the tremendous amount of English life that was lost in the recent

war, and that the books were speaking to the concerns and desires of the first generation

of post-war parents and children.

 

 

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The Purpose of Playthings

Winnie-the-Pooh’s momentous publication and popularity in the context of

childhood in England is made more interesting by its being populated by yet another

recently developed childhood commodity, the stuffed animal. That the chief characters of

Winnie-the-Pooh are modeled after the stuffed animal toys of Milne’s son Christopher

Robin is an important element of the narrative and my study because it further testifies to

the evolution and packaging of childhood in England. In A History of Toys (1966)

Antonia Fraser provides perhaps the most comprehensive account of toys in Western

civilization.30 Beginning with the presumed playthings of ancient Egyptians, Fraser

makes a case for the idea that toys, or at least items used to amuse and distract children,

have always been a part of society. However, objects that are specifically and creatively

crafted for this purpose have a shorter history. Fraser’s text operates as a traditional

historic survey, providing a linear chronological understanding of the tangible evolution

of toys, but in doing so she also provides an important narrative that is lacking in most

other subject surveys. In chronicling the development of toys through history she narrates

how the social and economic structures of family and society have shaped our

understanding and valuing of the formative years of childhood over time. Fraser’s

chronological account of toys lays the foundation for a study of Winnie-the-Pooh because

it situates the stories and characters at a historic peak of society’s investment in

childhood.

Tracing the history of toys reveals a steady, if halting, evolution in their

sophistication. But it is important to note that until the nineteenth century, the

                                                                                                               30 Antonia Fraser, A History of Toys (New York: Delacorte Press, 1966).

 

 

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evolutionary pace of toys did not match that of material produced for adult entertainment.

The readily identifiable reason for this disparity is economic. It would seem foolish to

exert the same time and care in the construction of an object meant for a transient period

of play. And children, notorious for their destructive capacity, would be equally

inappropriate custodians of something made with the same degree of craftsmanship and

quality of materials reserved for adult commodities. But these reasons don’t wholly

explain the notable lag in toy technology unless you are aware of how childhood has

historically been perceived. As I have discussed in the first part of this chapter, our

current conception of childhood, wherein parents are expected to provide a nurturing and

protected environment, is one that doesn’t begin to take root in England until the

eighteenth century, and wasn’t widely accepted until beginning of the nineteenth. Until

that point, children were generally viewed as smaller, less adept adults as soon as they

were able to physically function without supervision. As the least productive members of

society, particularly in lower income households, the concerns and desires of young

European children were subordinate to those of the elder family members.

There were, as with every product, specialty exceptions for those who could

afford it. In her introduction to the chapter on eighteenth-century toys, Fraser exclaims,

“With the dawn of the eighteenth century, one is immediately conscious of a change in

the atmosphere in the world of toys. Now at last some attention seems to be paid to the

real needs and tastes of children.”31 Evidence of a greater variety and quality of

playthings beginning to emerge in this century do point to the existence of a more

                                                                                                               31 Ibid., 90

 

 

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childhood friendly culture, but it is still primarily the privilege of upper-class children in

England.

Though children of a wide economic bracket could reasonably access games such

as shuttlecock and hot cockles, there was a specific category of toys that was still cost

prohibitive. Playthings that were miniature mimetic versions of adult property—

dollhouses, rocking horses, etc.—were still the provenance of upper-class nurseries.

Fraser gives the increased appearance of this category of toys in family portraits as

evidence of an eighteenth-century society that is more attentive to childhood, illustrated

with Francisco Goya’s 1786 portrait of The Family of the Duke of Osuna (figure 3).32

Such an example tellingly only applies to wealthy and upper middle class progeny, which

was fitting because these children would one day inherit the full-scale versions of their

playthings. Therefore these playthings functioned almost as tools for young heirs and

heiresses to learn stewardship of property.

The idea that toys allow children to imaginatively engage with their future roles is

not a new one. For centuries dolls have served to prepare little girls for the roles intended

for them, endearing them from a young age to the cares and responsibilities of

motherhood. The principle remains the same for the privileged children whose dollhouses

and rocking horses would eventually be replaced with households to manage and land to

oversee from horseback. The preparatory function of toys for children becomes more

interesting by the end of the nineteenth century. A growing middle class expanded the

market for toys while industrial advances enabled their cost-efficient production. Both of

                                                                                                               32 Ibid., 90-91.

 

 

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these circumstances fostered an industry wherein there was economic incentive for

creativity and quality in toy production as tradesmen vied for a new customer base.

As the toy industry and middle class consumer market grew, so did the range of

ways in which they allowed a growing number of children to creatively anticipate

adulthood. Toys marketed towards girls unfortunately continued to promote the very

limited opportunities they had to look forward to. Dolls, dollhouses, and miniature

kitchen items were the most popular options available for girls. But nineteenth-century

little boys had a much wider variety of objects with which to act out and idealize

aspirations that reflected a male dominated society. In addition to toy wagons, trains and

eventually automobiles, toy soldiers, weapons and anything related to battle or conquest

became the most desired among little boys.

The expansion of toys in England, particularly those related to adult activity and

occupation, speaks to a society invested in providing fun and imaginative play for its

young members while simultaneously preparing them for adulthood; a system that makes

the contextual examination of children’s product culture a productive way to discern how

the concerns of a society were transmitted from one generation to the next.

Stuffed animal toys have their own connotations. Beginning in 1880 the Steiff

Company in Germany was the first to produce stuffed animal toys on a large scale,

introducing the stuffed bear as their first popular product (figure 4). The success of the

Steiff Company quickly fostered competition so that by the time Christopher Robin

Milne entered the stuffed toy demographic, he had an array of species to choose from.

These soft models of wild animals occupy an interesting space in the category of toys I

have been discussing. Their mimetic forms don’t function in quite the same way as a

 

 

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dollhouse or toy soldier would in preparing children for adult occupation because there

was little likelihood that they would engage with the real animals that inhabited English

nurseries, much less engage with them as pets or companions. Instead of the more

directly applicable vocational preparation, stuffed toys appear to prepare children for a

more abstract and complicated form of stewardship, that of being an English citizen of

the British Empire. A child’s possession of these fluffy, miniature-scaled representatives

of Imperial dominion can be seen as preparing young English citizens for their nationally

determined role as global proprietors, the self-proclaimed caretakers of the resources and

inhabitants of everything within Imperial Britain’s continent spanning reach.

As the novel vestiges of imperial exploits, stuffed animals are a particularly

interesting inclusion in Winnie-the-Pooh. Christopher Robin’s soft menagerie represent

no less than three British colonized continents, “Miss Kanga” and “Roo” from Australia

in Oceana, “Tigger” from Asia, and Winnie-the-Pooh from North America.33

The first part of Pooh’s name “Winnie” is typically short for the girls’ name

Winifred, a fact which has occasionally been cited by gender theorists as evidence of a

methodical feminization of the anthropomorphic bear. However, the origin of the bear’s

moniker does not seem to support such a reading.34 There was already a bear named

Winnie housed at the London Zoo, which Christopher Robin frequently visited with his

father. Transplanted from Winnipeg (the inspiration for her name) by a Canadian

                                                                                                               33 Kutzer, Empire’s Children, 79-86. 34 The origin of “Winnie” and how she came to inspire the character of Winnie-the-Pooh is relayed in "videosheritage//minutesvideosvideosvideos," Historica Canada, Winnie, accessed June 05, 2014, https://www.historicacanada.ca/content/heritage-minutes/winnie-0.

 

 

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lieutenant en route to England for the First World War, Winnie was a Canadian black

bear that apparently captured Christopher Robin’s imagination. It seems most plausible

that a boy under the age of six would simply name his stuffed bear after the only other

bear of his acquaintance and similarly assign the stuffed toy a male gender to match that

of his school and playmates. But regardless of any sexual significance in Pooh’s

conception, the bear’s layered connection to imperial projects—a model from Canada to

the London Zoo by way of the war—makes his starring role in childish post-war English

imagination a compelling one.

The argument I have attempted in this chapter is really a preamble to the chief

argument of my thesis. Because the scholarship concerning illustrated children’s stories is

meager, particularly in the discipline of art history, it begs an explanation of why and

how the material, visual, and textual culture of childhood is a meaningful reflection of

society before the specific meaning of a particular children’s work can be posited. As I

continue to make the case that Winnie-the-Pooh (a picture book about a chubby

ineffectual stuffed bear) illuminates the catharsis of England as its citizens struggled to

recover a sense of national selfhood in the wake of their most destructive war to date, it is

important to my argument that we understand the contents of a child’s room as a

testament to the economic, psychological, social, and moral nature of its society of

production.

 

 

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CHAPTER 2

DRAWING NATURAL CONCLUSIONS

In the previous chapter I looked at historic, economic, and cultural developments

that segued the creation of Winnie-the-Pooh in order to provide a narrative for

understanding why it is that the stories, as objects of childhood, are positioned to give

meaningful insight into inter-war English society. This chapter focuses on the way that

nature is represented through the text and illustrations of Winnie-the-Pooh and where

these representations converge with and diverge from English landscape traditions.

Nature plays a vital role in Winnie-the-Pooh as all of the narrative action and imagery

takes place in the arcadian environment that Milne and Shepard have constructed for their

audience. The historic importance of pastoral landscape to English identity is a

thoroughly chronicled phenomenon that I will briefly examine in order to characterize the

national narrative regarding nature as well as to provide context for the points at which

Winnie-the-Pooh strays from previous cultural expressions of nature, and how those

departures can be seen as a response to the devastation of the war and the decline of

British imperial might. This shift is most evident in the way that Winnie-the-Pooh’s

insular arcadian microcosm contrasts with the nation’s pre-war privileging of sweeping

expansive landscapes.

 

 

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There are two lines of inquiry that I use to support a landscape reading of Winnie-

the-Pooh: the historic modes of English landscaping and landscape painting and the

tradition of natural seclusion in children’s literature. Tracing the visual history of

landscape in England will provide some understanding of how the nation has pictured

itself in the past, as well as how that image of nature evolves with the political and

economic climate, both at home and throughout the Empire. Looking at examples from

beloved English landscape painter John Constable show how England has romantically

envisioned itself in terms of landscape. Looking too at paintings of hunting scenes,

exemplified by the work of James Ward, gives a sense of how the English landscape has

been historically constructed to affirm English dominance over the natural world.

Further, examples of English landscape architecture will serve to solidify the traditional

visual and cultural ideal of nature with which Winnie-the-Pooh’s post-war natural habitat

can be compared.

In this chapter I will also provide a formal overview of E.H. Shepard’s illustration

style with more in depth analysis of his rendering of landscape in Winnie-the-Pooh.

Before he became irrevocably tethered to Winnie-the-Pooh, Shepard was respected for

the distinct style of rendering he could apply to a variety of subjects as an established

illustrator for the magazine Punch.35 I will discuss some examples of his work for the

magazine as well as examples from his personal sketchbooks in order to establish how

Shepard’s work fits into the tradition of landscape in England, and to provide important

                                                                                                               35 Ernest H. Shepard and Rawle Knox, The Work of E. H. Shepard (New York: Schocken Books, 1980), 45-54.

 

 

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points of comparison for how his illustrations for Winnie-the-Pooh subtly deviate from

his other work.36

Viewing Shepard as descending from English landscape traditions reveals an

alliance with his predecessors, making the subtle differences in his representations of

nature for Winnie-the-Pooh a more compelling testament to the historic moment. For,

with illustrations featured on almost every page of both Winnie-the-Pooh and The House

at Pooh Corner, the majority of them featuring elements of the landscape, the stories

provide a comprehensive visual description of the landscape in which the stories take

place.

Looking additionally at how Milne’s textual characterization of nature works in

concert with Shepard’s illustrations explores the way in which Winnie-the-Pooh’s content

and format function to shape its young readers’ concept of nature and nation in a way that

differs from pre-war depictions of nature.

England’s visual landscape culture is matched by an equally robust literary

landscape history. Pastoral poetry and fiction have long been an important part of

England’s cultural production, and the variations that emerge in British children’s fiction

are particularly useful in arguing that Winnie-the-Pooh represents an imaginative

response to the war’s physical and economic toll on the nation. Many of Britain’s most

beloved children’s books incorporate a secluded, Eden-like setting as the primary site of

narrative and character development. 37 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), The

                                                                                                               36 The collection of Shepard’s unpublished sketchbooks is housed in the E.H. Shepard Archive, University of Surrey, Guildford, United Kingdom. 37 Carpenter writes extensively about this phenomenon in children’s literature, including each of the texts mentioned above in Secret Gardens.  

 

 

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Secret Garden (1911), and The Wind in the Willows (1908) are just a few examples

wherein children or anthropomorphic characters are situated in natural seclusion as ideal

environments for existence and personal growth.

Winnie-the-Pooh’s world takes the trope of natural seclusion further than its

literary predecessors, setting the story in an idyllic landscape that is considerably more

isolated and insular than its literary counterparts. In this chapter I show how the

illustrated and textual natural environment of Winnie-the-Pooh compares to its landscape

predecessors and relates to its contemporary context, and in so doing reveal how Milne

and Shepard’s work can speak specifically to a post-WWI shift in English attitudes

towards nature.

Natural Traditions in England

Milne and Shepard’s tiger and bear materialized during a period when the

changing mental and physical landscape of post-war England gave rise to increasingly

idealized renderings of a romanticized past. The countryside had been a longstanding

source of pride and recreation for the English people, and while the physical spaces fit for

outdoor pursuits were dwindling, their fictional presence was accelerating.38 Landscape,

which had always boasted strong representation in English cultural product, became a

national signature in English poetry, literature and art during the nineteenth century.

There are a number of reasons that help explain why this century cemented England’s

hold on the landscape.

                                                                                                               38 Lawrence Buell discusses the construction of identity through environment in "The Ecocritical Insurgency," New Literary History 30, no. 3 (July 1999): 699-712.

 

 

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The arcadian stage for Winnie-the-Pooh’s narrative was set much earlier by a

nation that has a long, rich history of picturing itself in terms of the landscape. As I’ve

mentioned before, the steady advance of industrialization and urbanization had a great

deal to do with the shift, spurring decorative and literary movements like the Arts and

Crafts movement and Romanticism.39 In Britain, as elsewhere, a binary of city versus

country begins to emerge in cultural consciousness in the eighteenth century. In her book

The Invention of Countryside (2001) Donna Landry explores how the word countryside

began to shift at end of the seventeenth century from referencing a geographic area to

evoking an idea.40 Landry focuses particularly on the English countryside as a space for

sport and recreation, pointing to the enactment of new hunting legislation and the British

Agricultural Revolution as key factors in a cultural current that, as it limited the

population’s engagement with or access to the countryside, restructured the idea of the

countryside as a space for poetic and patriotic leisure. And it is as an idea, as a mentally

accessible site of pride and pleasure, that the English countryside and landscape becomes

a significant part of national identity. There was now a firm delineation between the daily

realities of a city centered economy, and the countryside that had for so long been the

scene of everyday life. This separation between urban and rural life had the effect of

allowing city and town dwellers to romanticize the country.

                                                                                                               39 Nikolaus Pevsner discusses the industrial cause for the shifting focus towards landscape in English art in "Constable and the Pursuit of Nature," in The Englishness of English Art (New York: Penguin, 1978), 157-72. 40  Donna Landry, The Invention of the Countryside: Hunting, Walking, and Ecology in English Literature, 1671-1831 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001).  

 

 

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Further contributing to the proliferation of landscape painting was the aggressive

expansion of natural enclosure in England during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

For many centuries in England much of the arable landscape was held as “common land”

that could be accessed for grazing, mowing, or agricultural purposes by the population

that could not otherwise afford property. Due to legislation allowing for the private

purchase of a ground’s “common rights” the commons began to be deeded off and

enclosed until by the nineteenth century they had all but disappeared.41 In her book

Landscape and Ideology (1986), Ann Bermingham devotes significant space to the idea

that enclosure is partly, if not chiefly, responsible for the development of England’s

national identity concerning nature.42 Bermingham suggests that the loss of common

rights, which was the democratic ownership of practical landscapes, spurred the creation

of a different kind of common ownership. In effect, the flood of pastoral poetry,

landscape paintings, and other nature-oriented cultural products replaced a landscape that

physically belonged to the English people with one that mentally belonged to them.

That some of England’s most popular nineteenth-century painters, John Constable

and Joseph Turner, were purveyors of ideal rural landscape is an indication of the

nation’s valuation of landscape. It is also during Constable’s reign that the idea of the

picturesque becomes a part of the English national dialogue. The “picturesque” was

touted in the late eighteenth century by the Reverend William Gilpin, who offered it as an

                                                                                                               41 J. M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in Common-field England, 1700-1820 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 221-258. 42 Ann Bermingham refers to enclosure in many of the chapters, but outlines its importance to her study in the Introduction of Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740-1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 1-6.

 

 

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aesthetic alternative to the concepts of beauty and the sublime.43 Gilpin’s somewhat

nebulous definition of the picturesque described it as, “that kind of beauty which is

agreeable in a picture.”44 Despite his inability to offer a more precise definition of what

qualified as picturesque, Gilpin had no problem identifying the phenomenon when he

saw it, and wrote many more essays extolling various picturesque views. Gilpin even

began what Dabney Townsend calls a cottage industry of picturesque tourism, offering

eager view-seekers guided expeditions through the English countryside in search of

scenes worthy of putting in pictures.45 Anna Gruetzner Robins details another instance of

this cyclical phenomenon in her chapter for The Geographies of Englishness, noting that

painted romanticized versions of rural life began to appear as artists bid to take advantage

of England’s newfound nostalgia for the countryside. 46 Why and how this separation

prompted such a strong reaction from the English in particular speaks to the nation’s

ideals and preoccupations and establishes the structure within which Winnie-the-Pooh

operates alternately as an affirmation or disruption of those ideals.

In addition to traditions in literary and visual culture, English landscaping offers

cultural insights that help to establish the English landscape ideal versus the landscape of

Winnie-the-Pooh. One of the facets of England’s ecological identity that Milne and

                                                                                                               43  Dabney Townsend, "The Picturesque," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55, no. 4 (October 1997): 365, accessed July 12, 2014, JSTOR.    44  William Gilpin, An Essay on Prints (London: Printed for R. Blamire in the Strand, 1802).  45 Townsend, “The Picturesque,” 365. 46 Anna G. Robins, "Living the Simple Life," in The Geographies of Englishness: Landscape and the National Past, 1880-1940, ed. David Peters Corbett, Ysanne Holt, and Fiona Russell (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 3-9.

 

 

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Shepard unquestioningly respect is the national taste for avoiding the appearance of

cultivation. The influence of geography and natural landscape on landscaping and

gardening is present to some degree in most cultures. However, the degree to which

English landscaping attempts to mimic nature is striking. In no other country is the

contrived illusion of nature so fully embraced and promoted as in England.

Two of eighteenth-century England’s most prominent landscape architects

embody this aesthetic. Looking at photographs of the brothers Lancelot and Capability

Brown’s mid-eighteenth-century work reveals designs that are almost imperceptible as

such. Though in a sprawling estate or park such as Blenheim Park and Grounds (figure 5;

1760s) there would also be more overtly designed and traditionally ordered gardens,

these seemingly organic views were just as considered. Hiring a landscape architect for a

project like this was an expense that ranged from considerable to enormous. It is telling

of how strong the national ideal of nature was that the clients of Brown and his

colleagues were often commissioned to make such subtle interventions with the natural

landscape. A reverence for the ideal of nature as presented by landscape painters seems to

have affected its inspirational source. This cycle, where the most picturesque and

idealized vistas of the raw English landscape become the standard to which an organic

landscape is held, is really a tidy example of the simulacrum at work. The cycle continues

in the pages of Winnie-the-Pooh with Shepard’s illustrations for Winnie-the-Pooh,

glimpsing a natural habitat that strikes the happy English medium between order and

organic profusion (figure 6).

 

 

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Jane Austen gives a useful example of the roots of English landscaping practice in

her novel Mansfield Park (1814).47 Visiting the large estate of a character’s fiancé, the

central male characters of the novel essentially reveal their respective worth over the

course of a conversation concerning landscape. The fact that landscaping plays such a

revelatory role in this pivotal chapter suggests that contemporary English readers would

have been fully attuned to this culture, understanding before an American reader that the

dashing Henry Crawford’s grasp of the subtle manipulations required to “improve” the

landscape was an indication of his sophistication. While poor Mr. Rushworth’s grand

plans, a gross betrayal of good taste, were the final proof of his idiocy. Of course, the

power to physically alter the natural landscape was strictly the domain of the privileged

class, but its impact didn’t stop there. As evidenced in Mansfield Park, this image of what

nature should look like became embedded in English culture.

An Expansive View of English Landscape

One of the most interesting features of English landscape identity when looking at

Winnie-the-Pooh in this context, is the taste for compositions that privilege expansive

views and deep perspective. John Constable, arguably England’s most famous landscape

painter, was a leader in the romantic visualization of England and created numerous

paintings that promote a sweeping idyllic standard for English landscape painting.

Constable’s A View of Salisbury (figure 7; 1st quarter of nineteenth century) or

Hampstead Heath (figure 8; 1820-22) for example, set the compositional model that

                                                                                                               47 Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 84-104.

 

 

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would have enduring appeal for English landscape artists and enthusiasts even a century

later when Shepard was pursuing his career as an illustrator.

The E.H. Shepard archive at the University of Surrey in Guildford houses thirty-

nine of the small sketchbooks that the artist always kept on hand. There is a risk when

looking at Shepard’s professional work, particularly his illustrations for Punch, of not

knowing to what degree the final product reflects the direction of an editor. Shepard’s

personal sketchbooks provide important evidence when looking at Winnie-the-Pooh

because they offer abundant examples of how Shepard chose to render scenery without

any editorial intervention. In the many pages devoted to landscape, there is a reoccurring

theme; panoramic vistas of rolling hills and distant but distinct horizons jive perfectly

with the English conception of a picturesque landscape.

Two of Shepard’s sketches (figures 9 and 10; early twentieth century) of

unspecified locations in the English countryside are good comparative examples of how

he chose to depict the landscape.48 Though one of the sketches is clearly much more

finished than the other, it is revealing that even in the less detailed landscape Shepard fills

both pages, capturing as much as he can of the undulating terrain, horizon, and sky. The

more finished sketch of a village viewed from a distance, nestled into the English terrain,

draws easy comparison to Constable’s View of Salisbury. This sort of picturesque

expanse can be seen as a natural adaption of the English landscape painting tradition

exemplified by Constable.

                                                                                                               48 Ernest Shepard, Sketchbook, EHS/E/9, Pg. 31, From the E.H. Shepard Archive, University of Surrey Guildford, UK; Ernest Shepard, Sketchbook, EHS/E/9, Pg, 38-39, From the E.H. Shepard Archive, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK.

 

 

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Though Constable’s romanticized scenes influenced the tastes and production of

much of the landscape painters that followed him, there was another popular landscape

painting tradition in England that speaks pertinently to both Shepard’s landscape

compositions and where they diverge in Winnie-the-Pooh. During the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries there was a thriving market for paintings depicting hunting scenes.

This 1817 painting by James Ward, Theophilus Levett and a Favorite Hunter (figure 11),

or Francis Calcraft Turner’s The Berkeley Hunt (figure 12; 1842) incorporates the

majestic expanse of landscape favored in the genre, but also more overtly expresses what

is only implied in a traditional landscape. The potency that landscape held for the English

is deeply connected to the national conception of selfhood as being the divinely

appointed stewards of the natural world. 49

This hunting portrait commissioned by Levett articulates the English constructed

role as terrestrial guardian in explicit terms. Levett’s imposing presence in the foreground

of the sweeping property conveys the gentleman’s pride in ownership of the land and the

privilege and responsibility that the host of the hunt exercised in fostering and protecting

the wildlife on his land, as well as his right to control (or end) the flora and fauna life

under his care. The scepter-like riding crop that Levett wields in this painting functions as

a not-so-subtle reinforcement of the idea that he is the ordained ruler of the scene behind

him.

British historian Diana Donald traces the development of the nation’s eco-

mythology, pointing out that centuries of English landed gentry had promoted a cult of

                                                                                                               49 Diana Donald details the popularity of this genre of painting and discusses how they functioned to self-affirm the rights and privileges of English landowners. Picturing Animals in Britain 1750-1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 237-271.

 

 

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nature through hunting rites. 50 The artificial enclosure of “natural” landscape became the

grounds on which landowners enacted an elaborate pageant, fashioning themselves as

both protectors and rulers of the natural world. Though these issues of possession and

dominion are present in more traditional landscape, the additional element of animal life

featured in hunting scenes will be particularly useful when discussing the landscape

legacy of Winnie-the-Pooh.

The Nature of Winnie-the-Pooh

The natural environment in Winnie-the-Pooh, though essential to the narrative, is

not typically granted much critical attention, with scholars like Kutzer and even

Carpenter instead focusing on the action and dialogue of the characters as the primary

deliverers of meaning making. But as I discussed in the last section, landscape was a

visually and culturally pronounced characteristic of English identity that was fraught with

economic and political associations, which makes the bucolic realm wherein Winnie-the-

Pooh’s narrative takes place quite meaningful. This section will describe the nature of

Winnie-the-Pooh, focusing on the textual and illustrative structure of the narrative and

how the emphasis on the natural environment, shown through these representations in a

post-war context, reflect and refract the nation’s ideals concerning nature.

Carpenter offers an exception to the otherwise character or plot-focused

discussions of Winnie-the-Pooh. He writes about the “Golden Age” of children’s

literature as a period stretching from Lewis Carroll’s works in the mid nineteenth century

                                                                                                                50 Ibid.

 

 

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up until Milne’s creation of Winnie-the-Pooh in 1926.51 Carpenter points out the tendency

of British children’s authors of this period to create a bucolic or fantasy setting for their

characters that provides an insular escape from the physical realities of the industrialized

world. Carpenter is not as concerned with the biological environments of Arcadian

children’s fiction as with how these spaces represent imaginative escape from the real

world. My interest in Winnie-the-Pooh is in some ways a reversal of Carpenter’s study,

an investigation of why the stories’ escapist habitat looks and functions as it does, and

what the details in turn can tell as about inter-war English society.

Entering the Hundred Acre Wood

The landscape of Winnie-the-Pooh is established even before the narrative begins

with Shepard providing a map of the narrative territory filling the very first two pages

after the title page (figure 13). The inclusion of the map is important as it immediately

informs us that the stories to follow are generated around a community of persons bound

together by place. There is a long history of illustrated maps of fictional spaces,

particularly for adventure or travel based plots, with notable examples including Jonathan

Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883).

But one of the earliest examples of literary cartography can be found in Thomas More’s

1516 socialist fantasy novel Utopia which, like Winnie-the-Pooh, operates as a

geographic description of a community rather than as a navigational tool for a character’s

journey (figure 14).

                                                                                                               51 Carpenter, Secret Gardens.

 

 

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As a frontispiece, the map communicates that before we find out what happens,

we need to see where it happens. And where these stories take place is laid out in simple

line illustration as a place of charming pastoral seclusion. The designated landmarks—

characters’ houses, and the locations where their adventures take place—are primarily

trees drawn and spaced to distinguish them as places of note. In addition to the map,

dozens of illustrations detailing the natural environment within the text affirm how

important Winnie-the-Pooh’s ecological world is to the narrative.

The map also acts as a tool for spatial exposition in a story that is otherwise

atypical in this respect. The visual and textual descriptions of any book meant for very

young children operate differently than they do for older children or adults. For an

audience whose mental map of the world is very limited, there is not as much need for the

usual exposition that either connects the narrative’s location to reality or explains its

removal. In Burnett’s The Secret Garden for example, readers are ushered into the

imaginative narrative with an introduction that begins with Mary at the train station, a

location that existed prosaically in the mental maps of English children. A long carriage

ride in the dark of night over the moors brings Mary and her readers to the fictional hub

of the story, while also providing young readers with a connection to reality. 52

For the magical locales of English favorites such as Alice’s Adventures in

Wonderland or C.S. Lewis’s The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, a different approach

is needed. In these stories, it is the magical operation of a specific portal that allows

children to accept the fantastic nature of the stories’ environments. The rabbit hole that

brings Alice to Wonderland and the wardrobe that functions as gateway to Narnia are

                                                                                                               52 Burnett, Secret Garden, 3-24.

 

 

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common objects and landscape features that tether these fantasy narratives to a physical

reality that is familiar to the reader. Though not uncommon in books intended for very

young children, the process of physical orientation lacking in Winnie-the-Pooh is, in one

sense, unusual for the nature of its setting. An isolated natural landscape ruled by

anthropomorphic characters and almost totally disconnected from human civilization

would presumably require a spatial exposition if only to sate a child’s curiosity about

how to find this world.

Perhaps the genius of Milne and Shepard’s tome, and the catalyst for its immense

popularity is that the conduit between the world they created and the one in which their

audience lived was already an imaginative portal. Populating the stories with the stuffed

toys, which were already the creative connection between children and an imagined other

world, enabled an easy transition for little readers or listeners from truth to fiction. Unlike

its children’s literary predecessors, Milne’s stuffed toys do not operate as singular fixed

conduits to a narrative Eden, but rather suggest the possibility of reaching that

environment is as simple as taking one’s teddy bear outside, which places the stories’

locale in a unique interstitial narrative space. Each example from the canon of English

children’s fiction preceding Winnie-the-Pooh situates its narrative in either an

inaccessible but realistic space, or in a realm that must be reached by specific magical

means. The fact that Winnie-the-Pooh lacks the spatial exposition that would determine

whether it belongs to a real or fantasy geographic realm, coupled with the use of toys as

models for its chief characters, implies that the stories are an active product of make-

believe. That the landscape inhabited by these characters was thoroughly English further

eased this transition.

 

 

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The very first sentence of Winnie-the-Pooh’s first adventure begins, “One day

when he was out walking, he came to an open place in the middle of the forest, and in

that place was a large oak-tree…”53 Far from being a unique entry point to the story, this

is but the first of many chapters wherein the action of the plot is happened upon during

the process of an aimless walk through the forest. The second chapter, too, begins with

Winnie-the-Pooh, “…walking through the forest one day…”(figure 15)54 This repeating

motif (and accompanying illustrations) serves not only to immerse the audience in the

bucolic world of the characters, but to instill and reinforce an attachment to the

undeveloped landscape that was such a visible part of English identity. Shepard’s

illustration also underscores the English preference for the picturesque landscape.

Unkempt, but not unattractive, Winnie-the-Pooh is situated in an ideal natural space that

in many ways perfectly aligns with that of pre-war English society. The ability of the

stories’ characters to ramble through a picturesque environment, unperturbed by the

pollution of civilization, invokes the same romantic appreciation for landscape that had

begun to form with the industrial revolution. But for some subtle clues, we might imagine

that Winnie-the-Pooh’s world could be the subject of one of Constable’s paintings.

A Narrow View of English Landscape

One of the chief aspects differentiating Winnie-the-Pooh’s representation of

nature from that of its pre-war predecessors, however, is its marked insularity, which is

compounded by its lack of specificity. In the context of a post-war declining empire, this

generic and insular view of nature carries connotations of a society that no longer wants

                                                                                                               53 Milne and Shepard, Winnie-the-Pooh, 5. 54 Ibid., 22-23.

 

 

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to promote conquest or expansion. Shepard’s illustrations provide just enough detail to

invest the environment with familiarity without betraying a specific locale. And when I

say specific here I mean it in the most general way possible. Shepard’s unique

illustrations managed to convey an English sense of nature that was specific and intimate

for the broadest possible audience. His trademark sketchy, expressive line work

articulates just enough to convey the environment and action of a moment, but doesn’t

ever provide a larger picture, which fosters the sense of insularity in which the stories

take place.

Even in the map that introduces the world of Winnie-the-Pooh, and provides the

only complete picture of its organic community, there is a humorous juxtaposition

between the trivial scale of narrative from an adult’s point of view, and the seriousness

with which everything is undertaken within. There is vagueness to the perspective and

scale that, at first glance, makes the boundaries of the world of the story seem fairly

expansive. The orienting compass in the top left corner and what appears to be a river

meandering through the landscape until it disappears into the distance both suggest a

considerable land area. But then the landmark practically designated “six pine trees” puts

the space back into a more minute perspective.

The format and composition of Shepard’s illustrations working in concert with the

text are also designed to promote this sense of generic, yet intimate, spatial orientation.

Smaller illustrations are often integrated into the text pages, depicting a single action of a

character with very minimal suggestion of environment. In the examples shown here

(figures 15 and 16) the illustration of a single event is cleverly formatted across two

 

 

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pages.55 At this point in the narrative Pooh and Piglet, illustrated at the bottom of the left

facing page, are concerned that the cries for help heard from above is the trick of a

“jagular” (one of the frequent occurrences in the stories of childish characters

mispronouncing and misunderstanding a noun, in this case a jaguar) who they fear will

drop on them as soon as they look up. The cries are actually coming from Tigger stuck

high in a tree illustrated at the top of the right facing page. The text, illustration, and

print format all work in concert here to establish the safe microcosm of the stories’ action

for the parents reading the book, while amplifying the drama taking place for childish

understanding. The composition allows a very young listener (and viewer) to invest in the

drama of Pooh and Piglet’s perceived danger as they consult at the roots of the great tree

that dwarfs their small forms. And Tigger’s predicament, discovered on the next page, is

subsequently more exciting when he is seen in the treetop that is cropped to exaggerate

his distance from the ground. The text dialogue between Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet on

the left-facing page is formatted above the illustration that cuts off just above the

animals’ heads, adding to the suspense of what might be lurking above their heads. Older

readers will of course quickly see the humor in drama taking place on such an intimate

scale, but for little ones, the tree that Shepard has cropped and magnified into two scenes

becomes an expanded space of action and adventure. Similarly, the text formatted below

the illustration of Tigger on the next page enhances the narrative experience. Pooh and

Piglet conversing below have this exchange after hearing their names yelled form above,

“Pooh!...I believe it’s Tigger and Roo!” says Piglet. To which Pooh replies, “So it is… I

thought it was a Jagular and another Jagular.” Up to this moment of revelation Milne has

                                                                                                               55 Milne and Shepard, The House at Pooh Corner, 66-67.

 

 

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not offered any description of Tigger at the top of the tree, nor does he describe Pooh

looking up to see for himself before confirming Piglet’s belief. Instead, he allows

Shepard’s illustration to do this narrative work.

But even in the larger, more detailed illustrations, the physical environment has

no regular compositional edges; instead, the lines of the scene bleed out and evaporate

inconclusively as in the full-page example seen here (figure 17).56 This compositional

decision has the effect of hazily suggesting a bigger and more complete environmental

picture, but the specifics of the larger picture are left to the viewers’ imagination. Leaving

out the details of the larger world that enclosed these spaces left readers with the dreamy

option of placing The Hundred Acre Wood almost anywhere. And as in the smaller

illustrations, the drawn scale of the animals simultaneously assures the adult reader of the

insular dimension of the space, while convincing the young reader of its magnitude. This

suggestive style of illustration meant that an imaginative young consumer might easily

locate the pictured tree, rock or stream within her or his personal mental map. Any child

with access to even the most minor expanse of natural landscape could recognize some

part of the Pooh environs in their own little geographic sphere.

Whether or not Shepard and Milne planned the illustrations with this purpose in

mind is up for interpretation as there is no record of either of them discussing how the

illustrative format might further a child’s connection to the stories. But it is reasonable to

assume that Milne was an author who conceived his work in both visual and verbal terms.

In addition to his career as a staff writer for the highly illustrated magazine Punch, Milne

was a fairly successful playwright. Writing for the stage in particular requires the author

                                                                                                               56 Ibid., 134.

 

 

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to concretely envision the space within which his characters will speak and act,

separating the dialogue of the play from the stage directions. Milne’s experience as a

playwright is apparent in Winnie-the-Pooh. The stories are dialogue driven with minimal

textual description of action or scene, relying instead, as often as possible, on Shepard’s

illustrations to stage the scene and action. And looking at Shepard’s past work at least

indicates that his work for Winnie-the-Pooh was something of a departure, particularly in

his depiction of nature.

In his long career as an illustrator for Punch, Shepard’s cartoons chiefly focused

on figures as the subject of a social or political satire. But even in contexts where the

figure’s physical environment is superfluous to the content, Shepard maintains a much

more solid rectangular composition. And in the examples from Shepard’s personal

sketchbooks that we discussed earlier in this chapter the landscape is fully realized and

imaginatively contained within the composition. Regardless of authorial intention, the

visual and textual construction of an insular landscape that might exist in the backyard or

nearest park of any English child should at least be entertained as indicating post-war

protectiveness.

Enclosing Winnie-the-Pooh

Winnie-the-Pooh’s final issue pointing to a post-war shift in views of nature is the

degree to which it is secluded. The isolation of Winnie-the-Pooh’s rural domestic habitat

offers an interesting example of the inward focused and domestic character of England in

the inter-war period. Alison Light charts this phenomenon in her book Forever England

(1991) through the domestic novels of female inter-war authors. Light observes and

 

 

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complicates the idea that the inter-war years, marked by a rise of anti-imperialism and

middle-class peacetime domesticity, were a period of feminization for English identity.

Light focuses on female authors as a foil to the historically male literary representatives

of the nation during this period.57 Compared to the other “Golden Age” literature outlined

by Carpenter, the “Hundred Acre Wood” and surrounding environs, which make up the

charming rustic habitat of “Pooh” and his companions, is arguably the most isolated from

human interference. Though also incorporating anthropomorphic characters in pastoral

settings, popular stories like Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908) contain regular appearances of

people and man-made constructions. In the examples of Carroll and Grahame’s classic

pre-war stories, the action takes place in settings that are removed from an adult centered

civilization, but they still employ the societal structures of the adult world, albeit one that

revolves around the occupations and abodes of fantastic characters. The landscapes in

which their narratives unfold incorporate roads, modern architecture, and other signs of a

larger inhabited world to varying degrees. In contrast, the near total natural seclusion of

Winnie-the-Pooh is remarkable.

This seclusion is reinforced through the action of the stories, with the characters’

journeying through unpopulated landscape making up the bulk of the narrative. Even

such rural signs of civilization as fences or footpaths, are lacking in Winnie-the-Pooh’s

community. And with the exception of each character’s abode, all of the monuments or

landmarks are ubiquitous natural landscape features as seen in the map Shepard provides.

                                                                                                               57 Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature, and Conservatism Between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991).

 

 

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The third chapter of Winnie-the-Pooh, “In Which Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet go Hunting

and Nearly Catch a Woozle,” offers an effective example of their utter isolation.58 Piglet

happens upon Pooh walking intently in the forest and learns that the bear is hunting.

“Hunting what?” asks Piglet. Pooh answers, “That’s just what I ask myself. I ask myself,

What?” Pooh then shows Piglet the mysterious paw marks leaving a trail of tracks on the

ground, prompting Piglet to excitedly and somewhat nervously join the hunting

expedition in anticipation and fear of perhaps catching a “Woozle.” At this point

Shepard’s accompanying illustration lets the readers know the results of the hunt in

advance (figure 18). With our view of the animals from behind as they embark, we can

quickly see that the tracks Pooh has been following are his own, a fact confirmed when

they come full circle and are excited to mistake the addition of Piglet’s track marks for

the addition of another mysterious animal. This adventure, in which Pooh and Piglet

embark on a hunt for an animal intruder of some sort only to find that they have tracking

themselves in circles, tells a great deal about their degree of isolation. Not only are there

no other living creatures intruding on their habitat, but the characters are so absorbed in

their insular perspective that they don’t notice they have been walking in circles around

the same thicket of brush.

The seclusion of the stories, and of this episode in particular, was a heightened

continuation of the arcadian children’s literary tradition in Britain, as well as the English

attachment to the countryside as a space for respite and entertainment. Pooh and Piglet’s

traipsing through English landscape on a “hunt” was a convincing portrait of what the

landscape had become for the English in the nineteenth century. But here, in its idyllic

                                                                                                               58 Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh, 34-43.  

 

 

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post-WWI context, there is something just a little bit uncanny about the landscape. The

seclusion of Winnie-the-Pooh’s world mirrors that of its contemporary English audience,

who were withdrawn into the safety and solitude of their domestic borders following the

war. But Milne’s introduction of the fear or possibility of intruders in this environment,

only to reveal those fears as totally unfounded, goes a step further in its promotion of

English insulation. This episode does not simply present the domestic landscape as

charming and friendly, but contrasts it with the vague menace presented by the

“woozle,” a creature whose native habitat is unknown to Pooh. So while the story

confirms that there are no “woozles” in the Hundred Acre Wood, it leaves open the

possibility that the threatening animals might exist anywhere outside of the stories’

bucolic boundaries.

The near complete absence of civilization markers in Winnie-the-Pooh is

complicated by the few that are included. There are several instances in the text in which

an animal character happens upon a manmade object in the forest and humorously

appropriates the item. The most telling example of this is with the character Piglet, who

explains the remnants of a signpost (figure 19), which was clearly once a property

warning to trespassers, as evidence of a grandfather named Trespasser Williams. 59

Piglet’s invented ancestry hints provocatively at past inhabitants. For, excepting the

fabricated legacy of Trespasser Williams, the cast of Winnie-the-Pooh has no perceivable

lineage or past. It appears that Milne has created this childish Eden, not out of virginal

landscape, but an abandoned territory, reclaimed by nature. The faintly post-apocalyptic

                                                                                                               59Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh, 34.

 

 

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tone of Pooh’s world seems to suggest a melancholy acceptance of the destruction of

natural landscape caused by industrialization and war.

The invention of an idyllic post-war world in which a sweet young English boy

acts as the unquestioned and adored authority to a kingdom of house-broken wildlife

suggests an ingrained longing for a past national identity that envisioned the landscape as

limitless. But the fact that the world of Winnie-the-Pooh is written and illustrated as an

almost comically scaled down natural dominion also implies that the adult purchasers of

the books were coming to terms with relinquishing their claim to a global dominion, and

preparing the next generation for this shrunken sphere of control as well. The notion of

coming to terms with English identity and dominion over the landscape through Winnie-

the-Pooh offers a peculiar compromise between fantasy and reality. In this chapter I

looked at how the construction of a pre-war English landscape identity was partially

constructed through a romantic nostalgia-fueled reaction to the realities of urbanization,

industrialization and enclosure. That the ideals of landscape and countryside in England

were not ever a true reflection of the landscape becomes confused in Winnie-the-Pooh’s

post-war engagement with nature. The utter safety and charm of the stories’ intimate

environment almost approaches satire. From the animals’ perspectives the story seems to

embrace the English ideals of finding adventure and taking pleasure in the a rural

wilderness, but Milne and Shepard provide a differing vantage to a more mature reader,

highlighting that this natural ideal can only exist in a microcosm.

 

 

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CHAPTER 3

THE BEAR AND THE TIGER

The previous chapter discussed the natural environment of Winnie-the-Pooh and

its significance to pre and inter-war English landscape identity. In my final chapter I

discuss the unique ways that Winnie-the-Pooh deals with British imperial identity in a

post-war context, with a particular emphasis on how the stories depict foreign wildlife in

that domestic environment. I will first examine the history of how depictions and

allusions to imperialism have functioned in children’s literature from Rudyard Kipling’s

1893 work The Jungle Book, up until the publication of Winnie-the-Pooh in 1926.

Highlighting key examples of imperial presence in children’s fiction during this period

suggests the ways in which the state of the Empire has historically influenced youthful

imagination. I will then examine the use of foreign animals in Winnie-the-Pooh, with

particular focus on the characters of Pooh and Tigger and how they compare to their

fictional ancestors’ portrayal in The Jungle Book.

In the late nineteenth century, Britain’s colonial endeavors were a massive global

force. British presence in India had been expanding over two centuries from an economic

relationship, to colonial and hegemonic control over most territories, until 1858 when the

Indian provinces were officially united as the dominion of

 

 

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British India.60 The complete British possession of India coincided with an explosion of

print media, which enabled images of South Asia to feed the imaginations of the English

public at home. By Winnie-the-Pooh’s 1926 creation, in the wake of World War I, the

British Empire had suffered severe economic blows, and its adult population had

witnessed the unprecedented destruction of a war caused by imperial ambition. Post-war

India was shifting from being a valuable source of pride to a state of growing tension and

dissatisfaction with British rule, and the continued occupation of India was proving to be

a more difficult and expensive project than the war-weakened British were prepared to

deal with.

The fact that the Pooh stories are primarily populated by wildlife that is not native

to English soil, and specifically by species that are instead transplanted from the

continents where Britain had exerted colonial force, is the most exceptional aspect of

Milne’s work. Prior to Winnie-the-Pooh’s 1926 publication, animal characters in

children’s fiction maintained a logical connection to their environment; exotic animals

were encountered either in their country of origin or a zoo, and stories taking place in

England were populated by domestic species such as cats, mice, or rabbits. Instead,

Milne’s cast of characters include a bear, tiger, and kangaroos whose presence in the

English countryside points to a society struggling to reconcile its long cherished imperial

identity with a post-war revelation that it could no longer sustain that identity.

                                                                                                               60 Nisha George and Maggie Hendry, A History of Modern India, 1480-1950, ed. Claude Markovits (London: Anthem Press, 2002), 347-365.

 

 

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Bringing Our Boys Home

Since the publication of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island in 1883,

imperialism increasingly influenced youthful narratives in a range of ways and to varying

degrees, although its thematic presence often overlaps with the children’s literary

tradition of isolated natural space. But Winnie-the-Pooh stands out for conflating two

gendered forms of this trope. On the one hand, the exotic and adventurous engagement

with nature on foreign soil that we see in works by Robert Louis Stevenson or Kipling

was for the most part targeted towards juvenile boys. These stories were popular among a

young English audience who was able to contemplate the thrills of imperial conquest

while safe at home. The English children’s classics with young female heroines on the

other hand act out their narratives in English or imaginary spaces. Carroll’s Alice enters

Wonderland from a rabbit hole in her English garden, and while the space she enters is

exotic in terms of logic and consistency, the mix of characters and creatures she meets

there are still rooted in British lore, if not biology, subtly suggesting the idea that

independent adventure for a woman should be confined to domestic space.61 Winnie-the-

Pooh takes elements from juvenile adventure literature marketed towards English boys,

but significantly softens these elements and places them in the domestic landscape

typically reserved for a young heroine’s engagement with the foreign or exotic.

From the mid-nineteenth century forward, Britain’s imperial grasp had extended

to the imaginations of young English boys. Treasure Island and The Jungle Book, both of

which were written at the zenith of British imperial power, are unapologetic in promoting

                                                                                                               61 Shirley Foster and Judy Simons discuss the emphasis on domestic settings in What Katy Read: Feminist Re-readings of “Classic” Stories for Girls (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press 1995), 5.

 

 

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an imperial initiative. Treasure Island’s narrative of exploration and adventure at sea and

on unmapped islands serves as an exultant picture of foreign conquest. The adventures of

The Jungle Book’s “native” protagonist, surviving among the wildlife deep in the Indian

jungle, propagates imperialism in a slightly subtler manner. At the time the book was

written, India was firmly under British rule. Nevertheless, the story paints an exciting

picture for young boys of the possibilities yet to be uncovered and conquered in foreign

lands. The impact and appeal of boyish adventure stories like this are discussed in an

article by Hayden Ward, who cites Treasure Island specifically as an example of how the

enduring popularity of this genre in an imperial age was contingent on its ability to

generate a fantasy wherein the practical or physical accomplishments associated with

successful adventure was equated with moral superiority.62 Ward suggests that this

correspondence of adventurous fantasy with moral imperative enabled the stories’

romantic take on exploration (and exploitation) to translate into adulthood. These stories,

and many less canon worthy boyish adventure stories, paint an enticing picture of the

imperial project in ways that might inspire boys to future enlistment in these ventures, or

at the very least prompt their enthusiastic support. However, it wasn’t long until the

heights of British imperial power at the close of the nineteenth century were shaken.

Two children’s classics by Francis Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess (1905) and

The Secret Garden (1910), provide an interesting illustration of the shifting views on

imperial adventure in the early twentieth century. Both involve young heroines whose

stories begin with the return home to England from India. And both heroines are also

made orphans by the “fever” outbreak in India, a fate inspired by the real and devastating

                                                                                                               62 Hayden W. Ward, “`The Pleasure of Your Heart’: `Treasure Island’ and the Appeal of Boy’s Adventure Fiction,” Studies in the Novel 6, no. 3 (October 1974): 304-317.

 

 

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cholera pandemic that began in India in 1899.63 By incorporating the real life devastation

of cholera in her narratives, Hodgson reflects a contemporary disillusionment with the

“Orient.” In contrast to the threat posed by “savages” or wild beasts, there could be no

glory or excitement in being wasted by a fatal illness. However, as these stories were

meant to appeal primarily to young English girls, there is a suggestion that even though

the ravages of cholera didn’t discriminate between sexes, it was the female population

that needed to fear.

The contemporary relevance of Burnett’s imperial references implies that she and

her readership were very attuned to the fluctuations of the Empire’s image. Even in the

brief five-year span between the two novels, there are differences in the narrative attitude

of caution towards India. Sara Crewe’s doting father leaves the title heroine of A Little

Princess at a London boarding school, so that he may be assured of her safety when he

returns to India for business.64 Sarah is pretty, smart, imaginative and likeable. Even

though Captain Crewe’s exotic business venture ends disastrously, leaving Sarah a

penniless orphan, the story still paints a romantic picture of India. There is a stark

contrast between the rigid structure of school set in grey London, and the warm and

colorful land where Sarah spent her happiest years, the memory of which feeds her

imagination and sustains her spirit when misfortune falls. Although the ending of A Little

Princess is technically a happy one, with Sarah being saved from the hardship and abuses

of poverty by her father’s old business partner, there is a distinctly melancholy tone to the

                                                                                                               63 David Arnold, “Cholera and Colonialism in British India,” Past & Present 113 (November 1986): 118-151. 64 Burnett, A Little Princess.

 

 

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dénouement. A much more serious and pragmatic young woman replaces the

effervescent, romantic Sarah Crewe that arrived from India. Burnett seems to be

acknowledging the folly of the imperial dream, but with a great deal of reluctance.

Compared to the mournful ode to imperial India found in A Little Princess,

Burnett’s The Secret Garden implies a strikingly different attitude towards India. After a

cholera epidemic kills her mother, father, and entire household, Mary Lennox is brought

back to England to live on her uncle’s country estate in Yorkshire.65 Mary’s story is

almost the reverse of Sarah Crewe’s. Mary is introduced as sallow, spoilt, unattractive

and disagreeable. As the story progresses, it is Mary’s communion with nature in a

thoroughly English garden and the effects of healthful English country life that reverse all

the negative traits she arrived from India with. In the time between publishing A Little

Princess and The Secret Garden, Burnett seems to have transferred all romantic notions

of India to the English landscape. The narrative shift in Burnett’s novels appears to

indicate a growing awareness, at least among the female public, that India, the “Jewel of

Imperial Britain” was falling short of its imagined promise.

Burnett’s curious change of attitude towards India in the brief five-year span

between the publication of A Little Princess and The Secret Garden can be connected to

two global events. The first was the devastating famine that swept India from 1899 to the

first year of the twentieth century.66 The famine’s toll on India was exacerbated by what

was seen as the British Imperial government’s mishandling of the events, as well as

                                                                                                               65 Burnett, The Secret Garden. 66 David Hardiman discusses the immediate and continuing impact of the famine in "Usury, Dearth and Famine in Western India," Past and Present 152 (August 1996), accessed June 08, 2014, JSTOR.

 

 

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subsequent cholera and malaria outbreaks. Though this disaster occurred well before the

publication of A Little Princess, the effects the famine had on Indian attitudes towards

British rule were slow burning, and the events that might have initially inspired Sarah

Crewe’s sad farewell to India had not stabilized by the time Mary Lennox returns to

England in 1910. Further explanation of The Secret Garden’s emphasis on the charms of

England might be found closer to home. The seed that would sprout the “Great War” was

already germinated with the roiling unrest and violence unfolding in Eastern Europe by

the time Burnett was writing The Secret Garden.67 Whether or not Burnett was

consciously anticipating the soon to be realized disastrous consequences of imperial

reach, there is uncanny poignancy in her timely depiction of a heroine who flourishes in

the ultimate anti-imperial context, a walled English garden that literally locks out all

unwanted disturbance and external concerns.

The gender specificity of her audience not withstanding, Burnett’s novels chart

the way that English anxieties about the failings of imperial conquest were seeping into

youth literature even before the war. But this phenomenon has much broader and solidly

established significance in the inter-war narrative of Winnie-the-Pooh. Milne’s story in

many ways mirrors the pre-war imperial adventure stories, with one important difference.

Christopher Robin, the English boy acting independently as the senior authoritative figure

among a population of foreign wildlife, draws numerous parallels to the earlier works by

Stevenson and Kipling, which enamored young boys to the possibilities of imperial

adventure. However, the fact that Christopher Robin’s adventures and imperial

engagement are enacted at home on English soil makes a convincing case for a post-war

                                                                                                               67 John Keegan, The First World War (New York: A. Knopf, 1999), 48-49.

 

 

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ethos that no longer promoted foreign conquest. The books, written for and featuring the

first post-war generation of children, quite understandably steer clear of encouraging the

kind of terrestrial (and economic) ambition that was at the root of the war. The pattern in

imperial fiction that Winnie-the-Pooh breaks in keeping its young male hero in a

domestic setting seems very pointed when you consider that over 700,000 men, many of

them barely out of boyhood, never came home from the war.68 It seems fairly

understandable why a nation mourning the casualties of so much of its male population

would prefer to keep the next generation safely at home. But the dichotomous message

sent by staging the adventures of imperial animals on domestic soil suggests that Winnie-

the-Pooh reflects a nation that was simultaneously longing for and relinquishing its

global authority.

Subjects of an Inland Empire

After discussing the significance of the post-war domestic setting for Winnie-the-

Pooh’s cast of imperial transplants, we can now examine how these foreign animals, the

bear and tiger in particular, are themselves depicted and what those depictions tell us

about their contemporary audience. In looking at the characters of Pooh and Tigger it is

interesting to compare them to their fictional species predecessors, the most notable being

the bear Baloo and tiger Shere Kahn, of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book.69

                                                                                                               68 United Kingdom, The War Office, Statistics of the Military Efforts of Great Britain During the Great War 1914-1920 (1922), 237, http://www.vlib.us/wwi/resources/britishwwi.pdf. 69 Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1925).

 

 

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Kipling’s The Jungle Book tells the story of “Mowgli,” a young boy who is raised

among a pack of wolves in the Indian jungle. Mowgli’s tale is told in a series of episodic

chapters that narrate the boy’s experience living in the wild and navigating the politics

and dangers of the various animal individuals and communities with whom he shares the

jungle. Mowgli is befriended and mentored by the panther “Bagheera” and sloth bear

“Baloo,” who teach him how to survive in the jungle. The lessons that Mowgli’s guides

impart to him include how to forage for food, what kind of social behavior is required to

engage with the different jungle species and, most importantly, how to protect himself

from the bloodthirsty Bengal tiger “Shere Kahn.” Although the anthropomorphic

characters of The Jungle Book speak, and are intellectually realized characters, they are

otherwise depicted naturalistically with the anatomy, diet, and physical capabilities

proper to each species. Though they function more traditionally as the occasional

visualization of a narrative moment, the illustrations for The Jungle Book provide an

important aspect of how Kipling was presenting nature, and the foreign animal in

particular, to the British reading public. The resonance of the realist imagery (both verbal

and visual) in this work is made more interesting by the fact that both the author and

illustrator, the author’s father John Lockwood Kipling, were British citizens who spent

much of their lives and careers in India. In 1865 the artist John Lockwood Kipling moved

to Bombay with his wife Alice to assume the post of principal and professor at the city’s

newly founded art school. John and Alice’s first child Rudyard was born at the end of

that same year. The Kiplings embraced their adopted land, and identified as Anglo-

Indians. Though Kipling spent much of his boyhood (from the age of five to sixteen) at a

boarding school in England, upon completing school he returned to India begin a job his

 

 

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father had found for him as assistant editor for a small newspaper in Lahore of India’s

(now Pakistan’s) Punjab region.70 Kipling’s fascination for his adopted home manifested

in the fiction he began writing shortly after re-settling in India, spurring him to the

prolific publication of thirty-nine short stories by the time he was twenty-two. Kipling’s

national status and English education positioned him as an authority in the minds of his

domestic British audience, and the simultaneous intimacy and strangeness with which he

wrote of the nature, peoples and culture of India were accepted as authentic. As English

residents of British India, the Kiplings’ collaboration on The Jungle Book can be seen as

a primary resource in the development of domestic British understanding of India and its

impact on imperial imagination.

Kipling’s story, written at the height of colonial power in India, characterizes

wildlife as both alluring and threatening. In contrast, Winnie-the-Pooh’s presentation of

an utterly harmless tiger and bear existing in a benign English landscape was written for a

war rattled nation in a state of imperial decline. The strong parallels between the structure

of Kipling’s and Milne’s stories and cast highlight their differences as evidence of a

change in English attitudes towards nature and the “other”—which in this case includes

human and non-human animals—when viewed in light of the events that transpire

between the publication of The Jungle Book and Winnie-the-Pooh.

Both the Jungle Book and Winnie-the-Pooh narrate stories around an animal

community and their relations to a young human boy. Kipling’s Mowgli and Milne’s

Christopher Robin both act as the sole human representatives in domains lacking the

                                                                                                               70 When India became officially independent of British rule in 1947 the sub-continent divided itself into two nations. The dominantly Muslim territories of northwestern India became Pakistan, and the rest of the sub-continent, in which Hindi was the majority faith, retained the name India.

 

 

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traditional authoritative structure of an adult society. Whereas Kipling’s animal cast acts

in accordance with the natural habitat, and physical capabilities proper to them as jungle

animals, the inhabitants of Winnie-the-Pooh occupy variations of human dwellings, and

are animated to mimic slightly clumsier versions of humans.

The visible contrast between Kipling’s and Milne’s animals can be illustrated by

Tigger’s first appearance in the stories (figure 20). The image of Pooh and Tigger’s first

encounter with each other paints the misshapen bodies of each in stark relief to the far

more naturalistic renderings of Baloo and Shere Kahn (figures 21 and 22). Shepard’s

animation of Tigger slumping over his ragdoll like limbs emphasizes his drastic departure

from the powerful musculature proper to a tiger. And though Kipling’s sloth bear does

not present quite as dramatic a comparison to Winnie-the-Pooh, the egg-shaped torso and

squat limbs of Milne’s bear are far from a convincing imitation of nature.

The sharp contrast between the creatures of Jungle Book and Winnie-the-Pooh

can be further marked through the narrative of Tigger’s first arrival, in a plot propelled by

Tigger’s increasing hunger and discovery through trial and error that the only food he

likes is the health supplement “Extract of Malt”. 71 Pooh’s equally tame diet of honey

and condensed milk, which had also been determined in his first narrative, marks the tiger

and bear as the only characters whose diets receive exaggerated attention. The fact that

they are also the only characters with carnivorous real world counterparts makes plain the

effort to distance them from the dangerous species they are modeled after.

Milne’s early determination of his tiger as harmless is equaled by Kipling’s

eagerness to establish his tiger as menacing. Demanding his “quarry”—the human boy

                                                                                                               71 A.A. Milne, “Tigger Comes to the Forest and has Breakfast” in The House at Pooh Corner (New York: Dutton, 1993), 21-37.

 

 

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Mowgli who has escaped him—from the wolves, Shere Kahn’s entrance into The Jungle

Book narrative is immediately threatening.72 Father Wolf defies Shere Kahn, responding,

“The Wolves are a free people. They take orders from the Head of the Pack, and not from

any striped cattle-killer. The man’s cub is ours—to kill if we choose.”73 It is unclear

whether Father Wolf would be so bold if not for the fact that Shere Kahn is too large to

enter the wolf den. But Shere Kahn’s outraged reply, punctuated by a roar that, “filled the

cave with thunder,” suggests he is not accustomed to being denied.74 The accompanying

illustration (figure 23) visually asserts Shere Kahn’s menace. The tiger’s head alone (all

that he can comfortably fit through the cave entrance) is shown as nearly half the size of

Father Wolf’s whole body.

Shere Kahn’s opening scene not only depicts the tiger as threatening, but also

describes the whole environment as perilous. Though the readers know from a few pages

before that the Father Wolf is inclined to protect Mowgli, his ominous assertion that the

boy is the pack’s, “to kill if we choose,” highlights the fact that the these stories are

unfolding in a place fraught with danger, particularly for a human child. Kipling’s

illustration further clarifies this perspective. For though the tiger’s ruthless enormity

dwarfs Father and Mother Wolf, their bared teeth and tense muscles are in turn a striking

physical contrast to Mowgli’s small vulnerable body. The man-cub is just barely

decipherable from the litter of wolf cubs in the darkened background of the image. As a

whole, the scene confirms that these animals are in fact wild.

                                                                                                               72 Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1925), 10. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid.

 

 

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The wildness of Kipling’s animals and the contrasting tameness of Milne’s

becomes more interesting when considering the history of animal keeping in England. In

1826 the London Zoological Gardens was opened by the city’s Zoological Society under

the auspices of scientific research and interest. Stephen Bostock summarizes the history

of animal keeping in England in his 1993 work, Zoos and Animal Rights, noting that the

London Zoo was the first menagerie to explicitly define itself in these terms.75 The

collection and caging of exotic animals had been practiced throughout the ages as an

elaborate form of souvenir or trophy gathering. These menageries, which were primarily

in the possession of wealthy rulers, were stocked for the most part by species captured or

delivered during economic conquest in distant lands.76 The London Zoological Society

had ample access to foreign animals through imperial channels, as had the London

Menagerie preceding it, but was distinct in its proposed aim to prepare the species they

housed for breeding, domestication and general integration into the English landscape.77

Though this particular goal was thankfully never successfully realized, the desire to

civilize foreign wildlife for the benefit and adornment of the domestic landscape seems to

return as an echo in the fictional boundaries of the Hundred Acre Wood where the tiger

and bear have assimilated quite comfortably.

Kay Anderson writes of the zoo as an institution with which Western civilization

has sought to confront its fears and distrust of nature, an operation that applies a

contrived system of organization and control to the inherently disorganized state of

                                                                                                               75 Stephen St. C. Bostock, Zoos and Animal Rights: The Ethics of Keeping Animals, (London: Routledge, 1993) 26-30.  76  Ibid.   77 L.H. Matthews, “The Zoo: 150 Years of Research” Nature, 261 (1976): 281-284.

 

 

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nature.78 The separation by species to a cage, and the presentation of each animal as a

specimen or representative example stripped of context, are forms of control that are

deeply rooted in in an imperial mentality of privilege and authority that denies the

autonomy of foreign bodies. Harriet Ritvo similarly discusses the zoo in Victorian

England as an emblem of colonialism, exploring the parallels between those structures

through their conquer and capture of foreign bodies.79 Ritvo also sees the zoo as an

institutional reflection of the colonial impulse to establish and maintain a social and racial

hierarchy. It seems significant that Milne presents his updated version of the zoo, wherein

the specimens from each of the British colonized continents are allowed to exist

compatibly together in an environment that suspends practical needs and physical

realities. The Hundred Acre Wood appears to embody the English colonial fantasy

wherein the civilizing influence of Englishness overcomes all natural and cultural

barriers, so thoroughly succeeding in “taming” the wild variations of non-English nature

that cages are no longer needed. But here it is important to note that Milne does not hide

the fantastic elements of this narrative. By using stuffed animal toys to act out this

fruition of colonial ambition, Milne qualifies it as childish and unattainable without

relinquishing the romantic appeal of that fantasy.

                                                                                                                78Kay Anderson, "Culture and Nature at the Adelaide Zoo: At the Frontiers of 'Human' Geography," Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 20, no. 3 (1995): 275-294.    79  Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).  

 

 

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Ruling the Inland Empire

In addition to the hyperbolic difference between Kipling and Milne’s animal

representation is an equally radical disparity between their structuring of the role of

human to animal. Kipling’s Mowgli is raised among a litter of wolf cubs, and further

educated in the laws of the jungle by Baloo and the panther Bagheera. His survival is

contingent on his ability to adapt to the conditions of the natural world, and most

importantly, to discern the presence of danger posed by the animal kingdom, and

personified in the tiger Shere Kahn. By contrast Christopher Robin, who is of average

intelligence for his six years, is nevertheless the most sensible and capable figure in

Winnie-the-Pooh, and is frequently compelled to solve the dilemmas of his animal

companions.

In fact, if we compare character role functions rather than species in The Jungle

Book and Winnie-the-Pooh, the menagerie becomes more complicated. As the characters

central to most of the action, and frequently in need of aid or advice from other cast

members, it is Mowgli and Winnie-the-Pooh who have the most in common. The bear’s

clumsy body can also be seen as a parallel to Mowgli’s weakness among the powerful

jungle animals if we compare the stuffed protagonist to Christopher Robin. For if we look

at Winnie-the-Pooh as mirroring Mowgli’s initial helplessness, then Christopher Robin is

a more apt reflection of Kipling’s panther Bagheera. Both characters act as the oracles of

sense and wisdom within their respective narratives. And, if Mowgli’s human body was

inferior to that of the agile jungle cat’s, Christopher Robin’s boyish body is far superior

to the comical form of Winnie-the-Pooh.

 

 

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The issue of race further complicates the differing ways that Mowgli and

Christopher Robin engage with animals and nature. The man cub Mowgli is introduced in

the first chapter of The Jungle Book when “Father Wolf” discovers a “naked brown baby

who could just walk.”80 Though Kipling wrote Mowgli’s adventures to appeal to a British

audience, and was himself an English representative of Britain in India, it is important

that he immediately establishes the child as not white. Shortly after Father Wolf discovers

the baby, the tiger Shere Kahn arrives looking for him. With the questionable explanation

that the boy’s parents have “run off,” Shere Kahn seeks to claim the man cub as his

property…soon to be dinner. 81 No matter how much young English readers sympathize

with Mowgli’s character, or even envy his adventures, the acceptance of his origin story

would be very different if he was a white baby with English parents who had either

abandoned him or been murdered. Mowgli’s plight suggests carelessness or neglect on

the part of his non-English/non-white parents, and by extension confirms the imperialist

attitude that painted cultural and economic invasion as an act of benevolent adoption. So

much of the British imperial project was promoted and justified by an almost evangelical

conviction that Englishness was a supreme state of racial and cultural authority, and that

their intrusion in other nations was in fact a charitable extension of their superior

governing skills and civilizing moral influence, that it would have been near treasonous

for Kipling to suggest that this sort of chaos could befall the progeny of English parents.

So too, Mowgli’s status as a “native” colors the way his engagement with nature

must be read. As Kutzer points out in Empire’s Children, the trope for adventure stories

                                                                                                               80 Kipling, The Jungle Book, 8-9 81Ibid.,10.

 

 

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starring English boys in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was for any young

Briton in a foreign land to escape or overcome any difficulty with his own innate good

sense and exemplary practical capability.82 In contrast, Mowgli is utterly vulnerable,

physically disadvantaged and mentally reliant on his animal mentors. Christopher

Robin’s physical and intellectual superiority to his stuffed animal companions maintains

the standard literary construction of English dominance over nature in this respect, but

the description and character of the animals themselves suggests an alteration in the way

the English viewed their post-WWI role to nature and other.

Even though Mowgli’s role as equal participant, rather than ruler, of the natural

kingdom he inhabits is tinged by his “brownness,” it is still significant that all of The

Jungle Book’s characters possess depth, intelligence, and in some cases even wisdom and

nobility. If Mowgli’s status as essentially one of the animals was an indication of his

perceived racial inferiority, the fact remains that during the height of British power in

India depicting the natives of that land (both man and animal) as strong and sometimes

dangerous was, by extension, a testament to the might and intelligence of the English

who managed to subdue them. The soft shrunken imperial counterparts found in Winnie-

the-Pooh, when England’s imperial grip on the world and India particularly was straining

and slipping, are depicted as sweet and foolish.

The reversal of human-animal relations shown between The Jungle Book and

Winnie-the-Pooh highlights an evolution in attitudes toward nature when considered in

their historic context. The Jungle Book, written in 1893 at the height of imperial

dominion in India, depicts the danger and strangeness of foreign wildlife in terms that

                                                                                                               82 Kutzer, Empire's Children, 1-11.

 

 

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would have understandably fascinated young British citizens by allowing them a taste of

the excitement and exultation in dominating an exotic land.

This chapter has discussed the imperial history (and literary ancestors) of Winnie-

the-Pooh’s inhabitants as evidence of the Empire’s continuing influence on English

notions of childhood, as well as how the manifestation of its influence evolved to reflect

the fissures in British colonial endeavors. Viewed in light of what takes place between

The Jungle Book and Winnie-the-Pooh, it doesn’t seem coincidental that the most popular

post-war children’s literature promoted a much gentler engagement with foreign bodies,

this time safely enclosed on English soil.

 

 

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CONCLUSION

Winnie-the-Pooh’s significance to post-WWI English identity is complex. The

thematic content diffused throughout the pages of the children’s picture book make it a

veritable network of culturally potent signs. The interactions between text and

illustration, and between the reading/looking adult and listening/looking child, form a

nexus for the layers of cultural, geographic and ideological messages found in Winnie-

the-Pooh to be absorbed by its audience. As a parent or guardian read the picture book, in

many cases repeatedly, to a child, the stories’ content would be implicitly affirmed and

sanctioned through the caretakers’ voice. Its historic context, and the plurality of

communications intrinsic in the process of sharing a picture book with a child is enough

to mark Winnie-the-Pooh for scholarly interest, or at least curiosity. But the shades of

change in English imperial and pastoral identity revealed in the stories fix it firmly as a

document worth exploring.

Winnie-the-Pooh stands out as a vessel of the English population coming to terms

with the failings of past national identity and how to introduce this legacy to the next

generation. Childhood, which was largely regarded as merely a state of physical

immaturity for much of the eighteenth century, had developed to become a legally

protected and culturally invested period of mental development by the end of the

nineteenth century. The visual and material culture that developed along with the modern

conception of childhood became increasingly expressive of the values and aspirations

 

 

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that an adult society wished to impart to its youth. Winnie-the-Pooh’s popularity for a

post-war society thus speaks with particular potency as a record of how England chose to

introduce their children to the world at a moment when the adult population was forced to

radically reassess their own worldviews. In a single generation immediately preceding

Winnie-the-Pooh, England underwent a shift from being the authoritative governing head

of an ever expanding lucrative empire, to a nation physically and economically crippled

by a war that left it struggling to rebuild its own island nation and unable to manage its

increasingly burdensome imperial interests. The way that nature was restructured in this

inter-war context is inevitably reflective of a nation that can no longer assert extensive

control over nature (or all non-Western organic life).

Winnie-the-Pooh’s young readers were introduced and endeared to a version of

the English landscape that maintained its gentle romantic pre-war character, but did so in

almost hyperbolic terms. The presentation of English nature through Winnie-the-Pooh’s

narrative appeals not only to the pre-war reverence for homogenous domestic landscape,

but emphasizes this habitat as an insular haven, utterly protected from the unknown

dangers of the external world hinted at through the mysterious existence of the “jagular.”

The trauma that Milne and all of his adult audience experienced in World War I, a brutal

lesson in the consequences of nations seeking to extend their dominion, paints Winnie-

the-Pooh’s narrative almost as cautious propaganda for the post-war generation.

Similarly the Hundred Acre Wood’s population consisting of stuffed toy

representatives of British imperial reach was a careful introduction to Britain’s fading

imperial legacy for a generation that needed to understand Britain’s global identity in

terms very different from those their parents were raised to assert. The fundamentally

 

 

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make-believe nature of Winnie-the-Pooh’s stuffed bear, tiger and kangaroos’, and their

placid adventures in idyllic English seclusion was formulated to acknowledge the

grandeur of the imperial past, to introduce children to the chief characters in the drama of

British conquest—represented by an English boy and the docile imperial animals who

revere him—but did so in such a way that when the child was ready to leave the nursery

the fairy-tale of Britain as a righteously appointed world rulers would be left behind with

the rest of their childish illusions.

It was at this critical historic moment when England had refocused its energy and

interest inward to its own domestic boundaries that Winnie-the-Pooh offered more than

just a humorously narrated tale of childish adventure. Between the lines of the episodes

of a young English boy and his animal companions existing in arcadian isolation is an

alternate narrative. Read in the context of all the changes and trauma that lead to its

creation, Winnie-the-Pooh tells the story of a nation in the process of restructuring a once

grand reality to a fondly recalled memory. Winnie-the-Pooh and Tigger, the bear and the

tiger, are the benign souvenirs of imperial power that may still be visited, but only in the

imaginative confines of the gentle English landscape.

 

 

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FIGURES

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Figure 1. E.H. Shepard, Illustration for Punch, April 11, 1934, pg. 417.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  87  

 

Figure 2. Photograph, Piglet, Kanga, Winnie-the-Pooh, Eeyore and Tigger, New York Public Library, New York.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  88  

Figure 3. Francisco Goya, The Family of the Duke of Osuna (1786). Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain.                                  

  89  

   Figure 4. Replica of Steiff Bear, PB 55, Steiff Museum, Geingen, Germany.                            

  90  

 Figure 5. Capability and Lancelot Brown, Blenheim Park and Grounds, 1760s, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom.                                              

  91  

   Figure 6. E.H. Shepard, Illustration for A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, New York: Dutton, 1926.

  92  

Figure 7. John Constable, A View of Salisbury, 1st quarter of nineteenth century, Musée de Louvre, Paris.

                                             

  93  

   Figure 8. John Constable, Hampstead Heath, 1820-22, Musée Bonnat, Bayonne, France.

  94  

Figure 9. E.H. Shepard, Drawing from Sketchbook, EHS/E/9, Pg. 31, From the E.H. Shepard Archive, Copyright of E.H. Shepard, early twentieth century, Archives and Special Collections, University of Surrey, Surrey, UK.                  

  95  

   Figure 10. E.H. Shepard, Drawing from Sketchbook, EHS/E/9, Pg. 38-39, Panoramic Landscape, From the E. H. Shepard Archive, Copyright of E. H. Shepard, early twentieth century, Archives and Special Collections, University of Surrey, Surrey, UK.                                                  

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   Figure 11. James Ward, Theophilus Levett and a Favorite Hunter, 1817, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut.                                    

  97  

 

   Figure 12. Francis Calcraft Turner, The Berkeley Hunt, 1842, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut.

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Figure 13. E.H. Shepard, Illustrated map for A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, New York: Dutton, 1926.                                          

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   Figure 14. Ambrosius Holbein, Woodcut for Utopia by Thomas More, 1518.                            

  100  

 

   Figure 15. E.H. Shepard, Illustration for A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, New York: Dutton, 1926.    

  101  

 Figure 16. E.H. Shepard, Illustration for A.A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner, New York: Dutton, 1926.                                                          

  102  

 Figure 17. E.H. Shepard, Illustration for A.A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner, New York: Dutton, 1926.

  103  

Figure 18. E.H. Shepard, Illustration for A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, New York: Dutton, 1926.      

  104  

   Figure 19. E.H. Shepard, Illustration for A.A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner, New York: Dutton, 1926.  

  105  

 Figure 20. E.H. Shepard, Illustration for A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, New York: Dutton, 1926.                                    

  106  

 Figure 21. E.H. Shepard, Illustration for A.A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner, New York: Dutton, 1928.                                              

  107  

 Figure 22. John Lockwood Kipling, Detail of “Baloo” from illustration for Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, Garden City: Harper & Brothers, 1893.            

 Figure 23. John Lockwood Kipling, Detail of “Shere Kahn” from illustration for Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, Garden City: Harper & Brothers, 1893.    

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 Figure 24. John Lockwood Kipling, Illustration for Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, Garden City: Harper & Brothers, 1893.