Swallows and Amazons (1930/2016).

They call it the Lake District.  It's something in the way of being a Storied Place.  Take a map of England, and then spread it open.  Note the location of it's central hub, in London, situated in the Southeast.  If you start from that point, and make your way on a more or less steady Northwestern line of travel, sooner or later you'll notice how all the signs of metropolitan life begin to drop off and fade away the further you get from the locations of Downing, Buckingham, and Windsor.  For a while you'll notice remnant signs of our first carbon footprint is you tread your way through the Country's industrial centers.  These are what someone once referred to as the lands of dark, satanic mills.  Most of these business establishments have overrun the countryside that used to reign like an undisputed green monarch long ago.  Now all of that has been eclipsed by factory towns like Birmingham, Liverpool, Northampton, or Manchester.  The curious traveler will have to make their way through or past some of these points of interest in order to reach the main locale I have in mind.  It's a hilly area located near the Northwesternmost edge of England proper.  It's not too long after you've past this particular region that you'll come to that demarcation point where Britain ends and Scotland begins.  Should you choose to take the travel route known known as the A591 past Helsington Laithes, you'll soon find yourself moving through the county known as Cumbria.

This is the spot on the map where are destination is located.  Even before we've reached the neighborhood we're looking for, however, the attentive traveler will begin to notice a further change in the landscape.  If you can manage to make your way past the various industrial centers that have come to make up a great part of the modern identity of Britain, and if you know where to look for it, you might just be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of the land's other face.  This is true of places like Cumbria.  It's here that the signs of modernity begin to drop off in a meaningful way, the kind that forces you to notice almost without being aware of it.  One moment you'll find yourself surrounded by skyscrapers, however modest, and yet after a while these begin to fall back, and it's like someone was kind enough to introduce you to the idea of a natural landscape.  It's a process that begins well before you reach sight of Cumbria, though you'll have to make your way past places like Manchester first.  Once that's done, it's almost like watching a slow burn magic trick.  It becomes a game of first you don't see it, and now you do.  Traveling toward and then through the English Countryside is akin to starting out in the confines of real life, and then slowly entering the remnants of a storybook.

You get the impression that if you hang around a location like Cumbria long enough, you'll almost begin to understand how the ancestor's of the people who live here could believe that creatures like elves and dryads made their homes in trees and moors that surround you on all sides, or that you occupy what's left of the homes of a race of giants, and other things.  Such folkways appear to have come easy to a people of Cumbria.  They like to tell how it's the true location of King's Arthur's Camelot.  They'll be more than happy to point the tourist out to the site of the Round Table, or the home of the Lady of in the Lake.  As enticing as all of this neighborhood lore might be, it's still just the appetizer for the location in mind.  Moving further into the heart of Cumbria reveals a setting which is almost as near to that of a storybook as anyone is ever likely to achieve in whatever it is we think of as real life.  This would be not one, but rather a series of simple small towns with names like Grasmere, Keswick, Hawkshead, and Ambleside.  The one trait that each of them shares is just this.  The Lake District is an old place, and yet it's people have kept up with the times, by and large.  Odds are even if you're invited into any one of the quaint looking cottages that dot this landscape, you'll be treated to the comforting sight of what's become the standard setup of the modern household.  A widescreen TV that's barely used, and more than one Personal Computer and/or Laptop, complete with a corner Wi-Fi modem.

The funny thing is how even this doesn't seem to detract from the sense that we're witnessing a place that's always somewhat out of time.  You can't call the District a living relic, not by a long shot.  At the same time, there's the general impression that the hours of a man's hours are able to take their time here.  The pacing of daily life is, or can be slower than in London.  I'm not sure if there is any spot left where the air is clear, yet this place comes pretty close.  Also there's the general look of the towns about the Lakes.  What I'm about to say next is a cliche, yet it's true enough.  The Lake District really is perhaps the closest England will ever have to its own Hobbiton.  It's just possible that the ability to link this real life location with one of the most famous and well liked settings in the history of Fantasy fiction is also not a chance piece of similarity.  I have called the Lake District a storied place.  The full meaning of that description stems from the fact that it's also something of the birth place for the Romantic Movement.  In 1799, one of the District's longtime citizens took up residence in the somehow aptly named Dove Cottage, located in Grasmere.  His reason for doing this was simple enough.

This guy wanted to be a writer.  Not just any penny-a-page wordsmith, either.  This fellow had set his sights on being a full-time professional poet.  His name was William Wordsworth.  I'm not sure it's correct to label him as the Father of Romanticism in English Letters.  For one thing, while the authors that comprised the the group might have agreed that together they constituted a new Movement in the arts, they were generally averse to the idea of having any of one of them becoming a public figurehead.  In general, they tended to guard their artistic freedom very well, and none of them (least of all William Blake) would have taken kindly to the idea that the group should have its Inspiration subordinated to the whims of any one of them.  That would have been a recipe for disaster.  Wordsworth wasn't even the first one of them to start writing poetry.  That honor goes to the pioneering efforts of Blake.  Instead, it seems more accurate to say that Wordsworth was the one who came closest to giving the Romantic Poets something a like a spiritual home.  A place where like minds could gather and compare notes and share ideas and philosophies with one another.  This seems to have been the function for places like Dove Cottage and other spots along the banks of the District.  A collective writer's retreat which in time became something of a literary hub from which the ideas of Romanticism emerged and began to spread.

The story I want to talk about today is one that owes something of an eternal debt to the shared home of the Romantic Movement.  It's main setting is on the shores of the Lake District, and it serves as something of a love letter to the place.  It has the advantage of being written by an author who has gone on to be considered something of an honorary local son.  The kind of artist who is able to produce a work that is of such quality that he often gets a spot for himself on the same shelf as works like Songs of Innocence and Experience.  The story itself fits into the category of an ode.  It's a tribute to the kind idyllic childhood Summers when your family would take you on a vacation, and rather than any National Lampoon style nightmare lying in wait for you, everything just somehow turned out right.  It was never a matter of perfection.  Instead, it was about having the kind of experiences that you knew was always going to somehow define that part of your life.  The kind of experiences where can still recall the feel of it all, even after the memories of the events and what little photographic evidence you had of is has begun to fade.  Written by Arthur Ransome, this is the tale of Swallows and Amazons. 

The Story.

I never had the chance to experience my father's childhood.  That's not so surprising when you think about.  It's no great secret waiting to be uncovered.  I'm not sure it counts even as a revelation or any kind of truism.  It's just one of those facts of life that no one bothers to think about.  Another way to think of it is as a tabula so rasa that the vast majority of us will live out the entirety of our lives without ever bothering to consider such a fact.  If I had to come up with any excuse for why anyone would want to mull over such a fact now, then perhaps it's best to blame it on the benefits of a Classical education.  I'm one of those chaps who makes their way through University, then spends all of a month or two out in the real world before realizing the Halls of Academe are the closest I've ever felt comfortable since I was a child.  And so, here I sit gathering dust along with all the other volumes of curricula that I'm forced to unload now and then on my own students.  For better or worse, such a choice of career has also left me plenty of time for reflection.  English may be my subject, yet if you should ever attain the same vantage point that I have, you'll soon be surprised just how often the subject of philosophy is able to intrude on the merest studies of the written word.  Some authors encourage it, while the rest just tend to find themselves stumbling into that other Art almost as a kind of inevitable side effect of the job.

I know that's true of all the ink stained wretches who make up the topic of my class.  It also doesn't surprise me to learn that in making a successful bid to have them and their work as my ideal subject of study, all I was doing in the end was trying to keep hold of the boy I used to be.  Perhaps its the memories of my father that I've been able to maintain all this time.  I know most of us are never blessed with the sort of childhood like the one my parents gave me.  Knowledge like this is what enables me to count myself lucky, even as I can't help wondering just how fair such might be compared to others less fortunate.  Maybe that's another reason I've chosen a particular branch of Poetry as my teaching subject.  Perhaps it's all a fumbling attempt at penance, a means of paying back a near lifetime's full of experience by trying in whatever way I can to share it with others who never got the chance.  At least there's one explanation for why I sometimes think about my father, and the life he had as a child.  It's impossible for me to ignore on account of the way he always strove to pass on the life of his own youth to the rest of us.  It's not the sort of thing you figure out while you're in the middle of it.  Instead, it's later that you realize just how much your parents were trying to give what they had to their kids.

That's what my father tried to do when he took us to the places he used to know as a boy.  He was a Commander in the Royal Navy at the time I'm thinking back on now.  There were four of us in all.  Just me and my three siblings: Susan, Mavis, and Roger.  Then there was Nan and Peg, of course, and their Uncle Jim.  I'll never be able to forget any of them.  However, I am perhaps getting ahead of myself, so let's back it up a bit.  My father used to spend a great deal of his time near the Lakes when he was my age.  Gran and Gramps had a summer place they kept a lease on all year round, and when Spring had done it's job and the Earth began to awaken in full, they would pack father up in the family wagon and set a course for this simple looking cottage spread on banks of Coniston, near Windemere.  It was one of those places that might have belonged to one of the landed gentry back during the days of Spenser and Shakespeare.  By the time my father's grandparents knew it, however, it was already owned and operated by Mr. and Mrs. Jackson.  They were godparents to us in all but title.  Mr. Jackson was a fellow who seemed to have natural a affinity for the District.  Both he and his wife were born and raised there.  By the time me and the sibs came along, the area had become something of a like friend to him.

Mrs. Jackson was always something of a showman, in her way.   There's nothing she enjoyed than good grumble in her sleeves.  If you came bounding down the stairs of a morning in high spirits she wouldn't tell you to keep the noise down.  Instead, she'd do something like thank her husband for being charitable in letting the barnyard share the guest beds.  She'd practiced the role of affected sourness to the point where she had the whole act down to an artform all it's own.  She liked playing the house frump for whatever reason, yet she was never that good at hiding the affection for the children under her care (or as she liked to call it, an enlightened monarchy, and don't you forget it).  If she were here to see these words now she'd probably tell me not to go "actin' all smart an' such".  It was Mr. Jackson and Gramps who showed father how to live on the Lake.  It's from them he got his love of sailing and the sea.  They would take our old man out for pleasure boating in the Windemere portion of the Lakes.  Sometimes if the weather was good they'd pitch anchor and rough it out in the middle of the water he under the stars.  My father said it was like watching the universe unfold right in front of you.

He always claimed those were the best years of his life.  It's why he took us back to Holly Howe once Sue, Rog, Maeve, and me came along.  He wanted all of us to have as much of his childhood as he could possibly give us.  It goes back to what I said about anyone being able to have their parent's experience.  I can't say that I ever got close to a full knowledge of what father's childhood was like.  Perhaps the best any of us can do on that score is the merest fleeting glimpse.  However, I suppose it's possible to say that we Walker children were given something of a rough idea, of sorts.  He was able to give us a lifetime of memories, at least, from his childhood home in the Lake District.  That's how we got to know father best of all.  From being allowed to ramble through the paths and byways that he used to take when he was our age.  We'd been going there for several summers when we first met the Amazons.  It was also the year we became Swallows.  That was the year father was called away to serve on patrol duty, leaving mother to take us Holly Howe on her own.  They must have told the Jacksons ahead of time, because when we got there Mr. Jackson took us to the boat house and gave us a gift.

That's how we met the Swallow.  She was just there, parked and waiting for her new owners to set sail.  She was just a dinghy, really.  You can still see replicas of the same make and model trawling a path through the English waterways to this very day.  They're also something of a perennial fixture along the Lake District.  I know this for a fact, because I've kept the lease for Holly Howe.  You can still see them pass to and fro across the waters just like Sue and the bunch us used to.  The first time we were granted the opportunity to take a boat out on the the Windemere on our own was like being handed the key to Eden.  At least that's what it felt like later on.  First there the fact that none of us till then had ever handled a boat in our lives.  To his everlasting credit, that's what Mr. Jackson was there for.  He put us through our paces like the veteran of the Lakes that he was.  He taught how to steer a ship's rudder, and the proper way to handle the sails.  It was a bit touch and go there to start with, however we all found our sea legs soon enough.  It wasn't long before we'd taken the Swallow on her first journey up the Amazon River, past Cape Horn, and on into the vast embrace of the perilous Red Sea.  At least that's what Mae wrote down in her journal.  She's was always the real creative in the family.  Perhaps you're familiar with some of her novels?  Anyway, that's where it all go started, sailing the Lake District.

Mavis liked to pretend the water byways between Windemere and Coniston where really the grand spectacle of the open oceans, all gathered right at our doorstep, just waiting for us.  It's the sort of fancy that only really young children are able to enact with complete sincerity.  Somehow my siblings and I must have been the lucky ones.  Sue and I were getting on in years when the story I have to relate had begun, and yet to my own amazement I can still recapture what it felt like to enter into my little sister's game.  Maybe all it really amounts is a mere testament to the gifted qualities shared by all real artistic talents.  It's not just a matter of telling, but also of knowing how to show the story to its listeners.  Mae seems to have had that in spades, even during her first girlhood.  She still does, so far as I'm concerned.  Though that's the part where bias makes testimony unreliable.  A lot of it came from the books she liked to read as a youngster.  In particular, she wasn't a fan so much as the household authority on all things related to Robert Louis Stevenson.  Mae was more or less potty on the subject.  It got so that at one point later on the youngest girl in the family had a closet in her room devoted not to clothes but to volumes of Stevenson's works.  It's the sort of behavior that's marked as eccentric to most folks.

Or at least that's how it all goes these days.  The way I look at it, at least she never let any of it go to waste.  Her biography on the author of Treasure Island has since become one of the standard commentaries that helped frame the critical reputation of the Teller of Tales ever since it's publication in 61.  It was also thanks to Stevenson that us Walker children had our own private vocabulary for the Lake District.  Nowhere was this more obvious than with our exploits on the island.  "Looking down" from a specific high spot (which Maeve designated as the Peak of Darien), "in the evening of the day on which" mother had taken us to Holly Howe, we'd all of us seen "the lake like an inland sea".  All four of us were filled with the same idea in that moment.  "It wasn't just an island.  It was the island, waiting for" us!  "It was" our "island.  With an island like that within sight, who could be content to live on the mainland and sleep in a bed at night".  We'd gone back and told mother of our discovery, "and begged that the whole family should leave the farmhouse the next day, and camp on the island for ever (15-16)".  She was reluctant at first, of course.  Becoming a parent has a way of simplifying one's priorities to a great extent.  It's with personal experience of that title that I'll have to both give her credit for saying yes in the end, and also forever be curious about what on Earth she was even thinking?!

At the same time, I can also recall how different things were back then, even when it came to raising a family.  Perhaps not all of it was for the best, yet the one thing I do think my own children miss out on most is the greater sense of freedom that parents were willing to grant their offspring in an age before the invention of fire from the sky taught everyone that the monsters had escaped from their hiding places in the old storybooks.  Let that stand as explanation enough for how far times have changed.  Still, if there's one thing I'm determined to do is to see to it that my own little boy and girl get a chance to find their place amongst the environs of Windemere and Coniston.  It's why I've booked a vacation for us all at the Howe during the Summer holidays.  Perhaps we'll even be lucky enough to find that the Island is still there, after all these years.  On the day we made our first acquaintance with the place, it really did seem like we were the first humans to ever set foot on a piece of uncharted land.  There was no one else there that we could see for miles around.  Not at first, anyway.  In the beginning it was just the four of us, the Swallow anchored in a perfect harbor in the surf, and an almost sublime stillness.  There was nothing to hear except for the sound of birds in the trees, and the far of drone of motors on the Lake.  For a time, we might have found the last remaining speck of King Arthur's Old Albion.  

Not long after, we spotted a pirate ship on the lake.  It was a gloomy looking vessel, complete with a canon and a parrot.  Not too long after that Mae, Sue, Roger, and I found we weren't the first explorers to set foot on the Island when we met our first Amazons.  Their leader claimed to belong to a tribe that lived nearby.  She called herself Nancy Blackett, and her fellow Amazon was her sister, Peggy.  Together, they claimed we were trespassing on their home turf, and pretty soon was the sort of row that involves daily rivalries and competitions to see who could earn the right to the title of owner of the Isle.  Then we met Captain Flint, the piratical owner of the houseboat.  From there, it didn't take long to learn that he kept a precious treasure buried somewhere on the ship.  We found this out when some men stole onto Flint's vessel and plundered his ship, making off with the treasure.  It didn't take Sue, Roger, or me long to find out about all of this, because the Captain showed up at our doorstep to accuse us all of stealing his possessions.  Now us Swallows and Amazons had to team up together to reclaim Captain Flint's stolen treasure, and rescue the Island from a peril none of us could have foreseen.

An Overlooked Children's Writer.

One of the Lake District's Favorite Sons was never born there.  His life began in Leeds, to start with.  A boy was born in January of 1884 to a couple known as Edith Baker Boulton and Cyril Ransome.  He wasn't the couple's only child, yet he was their first.  In time, he became the eldest in a group of four siblings in all.  The Ransomes settled on Arthur as a good name for their first child.  According to scholar Hugh Shelley, "The Ransomes were first millers, then agricultural engineers in East Anglia, but Arthur Ransome's great-grandfather was a surgeon (and one of the founders of the Manchester Medical School); his grandfather, a not very successful scientist-inventor, but a first-rate filed naturalist, and his father, Professor of History at Leeds.  Arthur Ransome, after the death of his father, was sent to school at Rugby, which he left to work in a publisher's office in London.  He admits that he always lived for his holidays, and they have almost always been spent - as have his happiest years as a writer - in the Lake District among the hills and becks and tarns, and beside Lake Windermere itself, scene of the early exploits of his Swallows and Amazons.  He remembers how as a small boy, the moment he and his family arrived at the farmhouse where they spent their holiday, he would run down to the lakeside and in ritual plunge his hands into the water (9)".  This is personal testimony with good back up to it.

In the course of a BBC documentary, we're told how "The story of Swallows and Amazons has its roots in Ransome's own childhood...His father, a keen country man, introduced him to the Lake District from a young age.  Ransome, in a later Preface to Swallows and Amazons, pays an emotional tribute to this unique landscape.  'We adored the place.  Coming to it, we used to run down to the lake, dip our hands in and wish, as if we'd just seen a new moon...Swallows and Amazons grew out of those old memories.  I couldn't help writing it.  It almost wrote itself (web)'.  Shelley continues.  "Inevitably then, Arthur Ransome's holidays have been by the water.  And it will be plain to those least familiar with his books that he has never really been happy out of a boat.  The last adult book he wrote before beginning the saga of Swallows and Amazons was 'Racondra's' First Cruise, the story of his sailing the Baltic in a boat he had built on its shores, in the years immediately following the first world war...and it is of interest to the adult reader of the 'children's' books for the light it throws on it's authors views on life in, out of, and all around and about boats.  It begins, 'Houses are but badly built boats so firmly aground that you cannot think of moving them.  They are definitely inferior things, belonging to the vegetable, not the animal world, rooted and stationary, incapable of...transition.'  We'll come back to that phrase.

For now, it's enough to note Shelley's own commentary on the matter.  For now, Ransome continues.  'The desire to build a house is the tired wish of a man content thenceforward with a single anchorage.  The desire to build a boat is the desire of youth, unwilling yet to accept the idea of a final resting place.'  I have met Arthur Ransome at only two periods of his life", Shelley tells us, "and both of them late.  The first was some eight years ago when he blew in to the bookshop I had with a friend in Littlehampton.  I say 'blew in' advisedly, for he was in full sail under a voluminous oilskin, a nautical Chesterton.  And he had to come down to Littlehampton because, within hailing distance of seventy, he was building yet another boat.  The next time I saw him was a year ago, when an accident bound him to London, and he couldn't return to the Lake District.  Yet even in London he was by water.  His windows overlooked the Thames at Putney, where small boys in canoes, small boys fishing and large men in coracles little knew under what accurate observation they messed about in boats (10-11)".  There are two things that stand out about the author in all of that summation.  The first is how it seems to have been the Lake District itself which functioned as Ransome's first major impression of world and life.

It's as if the geographical and thematic home of the Romantic Poets acted for him in much the same way that the small and unremarked village of Sarehole, Birmingham did for J.R.R. Tolkien.  Much like the creator of Middle Earth, or first Wordsworth and then Coleridge, Ransome seems to be following in a familiar pattern of experience that almost qualifies as prototypical of certain Imaginative types.  It's the case where an artist is able to discover for themselves a geographic icon.  In other words, they are able to find a sense of place that manages to become, in their mind, a living image of all that can be called Ideal.  This is what Sarehole Village and it's water mill were like for Tolkien.  It's the function which the Lake District as a whole served for the Romantics, or what Walden Pond was like for Henry David Thoreau.  I almost want to say that Arthur Ransome comes very close to giving us an idea of who and what Thoreau might have been like if he'd been born an Englishmen.  Both writers are fixated on the idea of Living Authentically.  They seem to hold this shared maxim that living a full life is an actual possibility of existence.  However most of us choose to wall ourselves off from it, for one reason or another.  Like Thoreau, Ransome seeks to break down these barriers of perception, and he believes that locations such as the Lake District can serve as a vital spring for just such a psychological clarification.

What it results in is the idea that explains the artist's exploits.  In his writing above, Ransome talks of seeking a sense of "transition".  He frames this idea as a fundamental desire of youth, and as a way of refusing one's final resting place.  It calls to mind Dylan Thomas's maxim of never going gentle into that long goodnight, or Ray Bradbury's constant invocation to "Live Forever".  Much like those other writers, Ransome is concerned with his audience finding whatever ways and means they can of breaking down the blinder of whatever daily routine might happen to keep them from recognizing the fundamental glories of reality that lies in wait for everyone.  It therefore makes perfect sense to claim him as almost natural born inheritor of the Romantic strain in English Letters.  The writer appears to be engaged in carrying forward the Lake Poets spirit in the form of his books for children.  Nor is this such an unfitting way to pass on the torch.  For it just so happens that writers like Coleridge, and even the often "out there" Blake retained a lifelong fondness for the tales each of them first learned in the Nursery.  As such, they might not have minded all that much to see their ideas reworked into a novelistic form that children could understand and enjoy.  It was a commonplace of their writings.

It seems to be very much as Prof. Nicola J. Watson observes in the aforementioned BBC documentary.  "The Lake District has long been a source of Inspiration for writers...I think really it's just been a very beautiful place for a long time.  It starts off in the 1720s regarded as a very ugly and dangerous place...By the middle of the 1700s and on into the late 18th century, it becomes known as this famous place to go and admire the Picturesque.  To go in for sketching.  That brings Wordsworth.  That brings a whole new" philosophy "of childhood and nature...That's why, for a children's writer, the Lake District has been a wonderful place to work (web)".  It seems, in fact, to have been a constant, and continuing tradition over the years, and Ransome was never the first, and probably won't be the last artist to be Inspired by this particular stretch of the English countryside.  Shelley provides the best summation of all this.  For Ransome, "The only alternative to the ignominy of ordinary life, 'civilized' life, or as the children so happily call it, 'native' life, is to have canvas rather than plaster and slate between themselves and the sky.  And, as in The Picts and the Martyrs, even a deserted stone hut proved better than a four-square modern residence with all the usual comforts, sit-down meals and the wrong sort of aunt.  We have established one thing at least: not just that holidays but the right sort of holidays are the setting and in great part the substance of Arthur Ransome's books (12)".

Conclusion: A Nice Bit of Romanticism for Kids. 

There's a very specific sub-genre of writing that describes the kind of book or story we've got on our hands here.  It's gone by various names, so while it's easy to point to the sort of work I'm thinking of, finding the right name for it can be sketchy.  We tend to label it as Holiday Fiction, Summer Reading, or Beach Reads.  A book like Swallows and Amazons tends to fit the last two name tags best, though the first one is also acceptable.  The point is how this really is the sort of text you can picture a child pouring through while on vacation in places like the coast of Malibu, as much as any spot on the Lake District.  It really is a textbook example of a Beach Novel for Young Adults.  At the same time, it is possible to make a case that this is the sort of book that is able to transcend the category of a light read.  For one thing, it's clear we're dealing with a text whose overall quality is able to surpass the sort of content you're likely to find in the work of the typical Beach Read.  It's may not be as high concept as anything by Don DeLillo or Tom Wolfe.  At the same time, it's clear we're dealing with the kind of story that can surpass the type of quality to be found in anything by Tom Clancy in terms of quality.  I'm not just talking about the absence of swear words, either.  There's a literacy to Ransome's words and story.

A lot of it has to do with the awareness it's author has about the setting.  Ransome appears to have a keen and unspoken knowledge of the storied nature, or poetic aspects of the Lake District.  He is able to imbue these qualities into the novel's descriptions, lending the action not just an idea of lived in verisimilitude, but also the weight of history that comes from an intimate understanding of a sense of place.  One of the ways he does this is through the carefully signaled use of literary allusion.  On one of the very first pages, we're given this following piece of description.  "A path ran down the field from the farm to the boathouse.  Half-way down the field, there was a gate, and from that gate another path ran into the pinewoods that covered the southern and higher promontory.  The path soon faded away into nothing, but on the evening of their first coming, a fortnight before, the children had found their way through the trees to the far end of the promontory, where it dropped, like a cliff, into the lake.  From the top of it they had looked out over the broad sheet of water winding away among the low hills to the south and winding away into the hills high to the north, where they could not see so much of it.   And it was then, when they first stood on the cliff and looked out over mile upon mile of water, that" Mavis "had given the place it's name.  She had heard the sonnet read aloud at school, and forgotten everything in it except the picture of the explorers looking at the Pacific Ocean for the first time.  She had called the promontory Darien.  On the highest point of it they had made their camping place, and there Roger had left them when he had come through the tree to the fields and, seeing his mother at the gate, had begun his voyage home (12-13)". 

There are a number of things to notice about this passage.  To start with, it seems to be operating in two stylistic modes at once.  On the on hand, Ransome's prose tends to a rather straightforward, economical approach.  This can be observed from the way he lets his words determine the book's sense of pacing.  Most of the description above tends to be terse, and quick.  There's the impression of immediacy to it that doesn't have all that much time for frills or grand poetic gestures.  It might almost be described as the style of a man who likes his books the way he prefers all of his boats.  Sturdy, well made, and ship-shape.  In that sense, the novel has this admirable practicality to it.  On the other hand, there is in fact a very deliberate introduction of the poetic element into the text.  It comes in the form of reference to cite name of poet and poem, with the allusion to Darien.  It's the first time a reference to mythology appears in the proceedings.  Nor will it turn out to be the last.  Technically, the presence of myth has already made itself felt in the very title of the book.  This is merely the moment when the author draws our attention to this aspect of his novel.  Ransome does this in a way that's reminiscent of a well-played Poker hand.  He lays his first card down in such a way as to get our attention.  It comes first in the name of Darien, only after that word has been written does he allow the faint trace of lyricism into his prose.  

Yet he does this with a subtlety that doesn't need to shout or overstay its welcome.  It's just one of the characters remembering something she read in an old John Keats poem.  That's all it is as far as the characters are concerned.  It's also the first mythological note sounded by the author.  It starts out as nothing more than a brief flair seen in the distance.  As the story progresses, these motifs drawn from the world of Homer, Virgil, and Keats will begin to multiply until it becomes clear that the author means us to be aware of the mythic or Romantic backdrop that undergirds the entire tale.  Ransome means to tell the tale of warring, Classical tribes from the days of Chapman, Ulysses, Helen, and Menelaus (the Battle of the Amazons and Chelidons, in other words) as they make contact with each other first as enemies, and then as slow growing allies against a greater encroaching threat.  It's the sort of tale that you might find spun from the mind of Tolkien, Keats, or perhaps even Homer himself.  The novel twist comes from having this fundamentally Epic idea successfully transplanted into a group of English schoolchildren straight out of the pages of Edith Nesbit and Mark Twain.  It's even possible to posit a third unspoken influence from the work of Jane Austen that we'll get to in a minute.

For the moment, it's enough to note this Classical-Romantic undercurrent that operates as the unseen yet always referenced core of Ransome's text.  It's an extra mile of literary effort that you probably won't see all that much from stories like this if they're written by most of today's YA authors.  Ransome came from a time when a bit of learning under the lid went a long way toward helping the quality of your writing.  It's the same thing that happened with the likes of Nesbit and Tolkien.  It's also what leads us to the second aspect of Ransome's prose.  His book was published in the year 1930.  The Hobbit wouldn't see the light of day till seven years later.  The connection between these two seemingly disparate texts is that the interim between can be taken as a sign of stylistic development.  The Hobbit shares one thing in common with Ransome's Holiday Adventure in that both books read as if they're written for children, yet a little bit of attention reveals a surprising amount of sophistication going on underneath.  Tolkien's first published novel is little else except a re-writing of Beowulf, while Ransome's is something of a tribute to both the Romantics and the mythology that Inspired them.

The key to note is that the style he uses to tell all this makes for an interesting snapshot in light of what was just around the corner.  What I mean is that if you come to this book with a bit of an understanding of how Children's Lit developed in the wake of novel's like this and the first public appearance of Middle Earth, you can being to see the faint lines of development going on.  While Ransome's prose is never quite as polished and developed as Tolkien's, there are aspects of it which make it possible to claim his formatting and descriptions might have served as an example of the kind of baseline prose that Tolkien might have known about (whether indirectly or not) and used as a springboard to build off of.  In other words, we're seeing the style of the Children's Book as it undergoes a metamorphoses from the Victorian to the Modern.  In terms of pure stylistics then, a text like this gives us a nice incidental look at that moment of transition.  It's the sort of thing which, if Ransome's own testimony is anything to go by, he might have appreciated.  The sophistication doesn't end when it comes to the book's plot. 

I've called this book a tribute to the Lake Poets who created the Romantic Movement.  I'm willing to let that stand as the central claim of this review.  However, in order to understand how this Young Adult homage works, you kind of have to pay attention to the two other literary pathways that the author uses to funnel the tropes of Keats, Wordsworth, and Coleridge into a medium that's understandable to modern child readers.  The way he does that is through a clever use of two other sources.  Just a minute ago I name dropped the byline of another writer for kids, Edith Nesbit.  Before that, I also brought up Jane Austen, one of the longest lasting standbys of Classic Literature outside of Dickens.  I'm convinced that Ransome is using the techniques and plot points of these two other artists and combining them with the conceits of the Lake Poets in order to weave together his own artistic pattern of dedication to the Romantics and their writings.  In other words, if you want to examine the thematic content of a book like Swallows and Amazons you have to realize that what you're looking at is a plot with a collection of characters who are all about three layers deep in their composition and execution.  All of these layers have been brought together and melded into one.  Yet all exist in the service of what can only be described as a modern day prose version of the literary panegyric.  This is how it all outlines.

It almost helps to think of the book as a house or maybe artistic memorial that Ransome is building both for his audience and his Lake District Inspirations.  This house, or memory museum, is made up of three floors.  Once you've grasped the content of each floor, then it becomes possible to have at least as clear an idea of as we're likely to get of the kind of book that Ransome was writing.  On the ground floor we have the specific Literary Tradition that the novel was written in.  The nature of this Tradition is one that was established by none other than E. Nesbit during the closing days of the Victorian Era.  It therefore makes sense to claim that Ransome has written a book that fits in with The Nesbit Tradition.  This Tradition is defined by a familiar setup, one that has by now sort of become a kind of de facto outline for a lot of children's media.  I'm sure all of us can point to a favorite movie revolving around a child protagonist who starts out as just this ordinary kid from Anywhere in Particular before stumbling upon some great secret, or seeing something out of the ordinary and from there finds themselves drawn into the kind of adventure that can involve anything from Crime, to Fantasy, and elements of Horror.  All of us know this basic outline on some level.  It's so generic as to encompass a whole swath of films from our own childhood.  It's also a Tradition with it's start in literature and Nesbit was its pioneer.

It is this Tradition which Ransome has wound up using in the construction of the adventures of the Walker and Blackett children.  In their case, this Tradition plays out on somewhat familiar lines.  You've got this group of kids who are obsessed with the kind of games of make-believe that could only have belonged to an earlier analog age, when no one could ever conceive of a World Wide Web.  It's the basic idea of Let's Pretend, where every child participant takes on the role of their favorite heroes, while everyone also tries to avoid having to play act the role of the villain.  Ransome's young cast of characters are obsessed (as is fitting for a tribute to the Romantics) with ancient Greek Myths as channeled to modern readers through the efforts of George Chapman and John Keats.  The initial concept is simple enough.  All the writer has done now is to take the tropes establish by Keats, Chapman, and Homer, and then transmit them to his contemporary readers with the help of Nesbit's Tradition.  This results in a fascinating combination of elements.  We have a pair of Classical tribes straight from the Age of Homer, and yet each of them has been remixed and shuffled through at least four other shaping hands into a form that would be familiar to any fan of Spielberg's E.T.  And yet the original Archetypes are still able to maintain their basic outlines throughout this entire transition.

It really is one of the most impressive feats of literary transmutation and communication of a Classical trope for modern ears that I've ever run across.  It's also a bit unfair, in a way.  We all know Tolkien better than Ransome.  That's not without a lot of fair cause.  However, just because was able to do the exact same thing for the Norse Myths that Ransome did for the Greco-Roman ones is not the same as giving license to forget the hard work of the latter author at the expense of the more notable former.  This is especially true if you consider the possibility that Tolkien might have learned and perfected his own techniques as a literary translator through a close study of Ransome's efforts.  Whatever the case might be there, I know this modern day retelling of Homeric myth on the shores of the Lake District is one of those simple, almost quaint seeming packages (the sort of book that Walt Disney might have turned into a film during the early to mid-60s) that nonetheless manages to contain a surprising amount of thematic depth.  This sense of profundity continues on as we reach second level of Ransome's memorial palace.  It's here we see Ransome taking Inspiration from a source that may sound surprising at first.  The second level is taken up by the writer Jane Austen, and her novel Northanger Abbey.

In order to understand how one of the most famous English novelists aside from Charles Dickens could act as a springboard for Ransome's children's adventure, we need to have a certain understanding of that earlier text in mind if we want to see where went with it all.  Northanger Abbey is novel that is very much in dialogue with the Gothic genre of its day.  The initial chapters even read as if Austen was having a bit of fun at it's expense.  The plot centers around Catherine Moreland.  Much like a protagonist in either Nesbit or Ransome, she's this bright, precocious girl who thrills in the Tomboy lifestyle, and is a voracious reader of Gothic thrillers.  Her favorite at the moment is Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, though she is also has a keen liking for Necromancer of the Black Forest.  With a title like that, it becomes very easy for the modern reader to understand just what sort of character Austen has given us.  Cathy isn't just a bookworm, she's a Geek.  The kind of fangirl who in a modern setting might be found wearing the whole goth aesthetic, while hunting down old copies of Fangoria Magazine and vintage issues of Tales from the Crypt, along with collectables and memorabilia from her favorite Horror movies.  It's always been a commonplace, even in Austen's day.  She was just one of the first writers to bring this then scandalous fact of life to the world's attention.

To give an idea of how influential this idea of the Horror fangirl is, Ray Bradbury also made this same character the focus of his short story "The Screaming Woman".  All he had to do was just give her an appropriate fashion and vocabulary update for the near post-war 1940s and 50s American landscape.  Austen isn't the first writer to tap into this long lived trope, though she has since become one of the most famous.  In terms of Northanger's relation to the Walker and Blackett clans, Cathy is very much like the both of them in her desire to impose the world of the book's she read onto whatever setting or situation she finds herself in.  For instance, when she goes to stay with friends over the Winter holidays in Bath, Cate it delighted to discover that the landscape of the countryside is as perfect a match for the Black Forests and Haunted Castles of her books.  She begins to get an even greater enthusiasm for her predicament when a lot of the people she meets begin to act like the heroes, heroines, and villains of her favorite novels.  Everyone else around her, meanwhile, assures her that stuff is all just pure fiction.  One of her recent friends, Henry Tilney, even appears to be playing an elaborate prank on the new kid.

He tells Cathy about a secret black chest hidden away in the Gothic country house she's staying at.  He gives her such over-the-top instructions about how to find it, and what to expect inside, that it's clear to the reader, if not Catherine, that the guy is pulling her leg.  So anyway she follows his instructions to the letter (even down to waiting for an appropriately dark and stormy night on which to commit the deed) and discovers the trunk he's talking about.  Instead of some secret document, or a cursed artifact and/or forbidden necromantic text, all Cate finds is just a bunch of old household bills.  Some of them are even from the local laundry.  Up to this point in the novel, Austen has played everything very tongue-in-cheek.  You get the sense of the writer having fun poking holes in the very idea of the then burgeoning Horror story.  Austen's sympathies seem to lie squarely with the commonsensical attitudes of Catherine's friends and caretakers that there is a world of difference between real life, and the make-believe drama of books.  For a moment, it even seems as if Cathy is willing to take their advice, and put away childish things.  There's the distinct possibility that the whole work is going to end as a down to Earth satire of the Gothic story.  Then Catherine become privy to a few tell-tale pieces of information.

Once she's assembled all these bits of plot that she was hitherto unaware of, it sends her racing back to that dark, hidden away chest.  She goes through those old papers again, and first to her own astonishment, and then later those around her, Cathy finds herself as the heroine of her favorite reading material.  It's with this second visit to that hidden chest and its content that Northanger Abbey undergoes a discernable tonal shift.  The initial satirical element never goes away entirely.  However it does begin to find it's place in the novel usurped and subordinated to the very Gothic conventions that were made fun of in the book's opening half.  With the discovery of the full meaning of the chest and its contents, dancing mockery goes from glib to paused.  After being checked, this element turns to cautious skepticism.  It transitions from there to the stunned silence of belief.  When the novel's note of satire returns, it's voice and mannerisms have changed.  This shift in satirical tone matches well with the overall feel of the landscapes and settings of Gothic fiction.  Despite Catherine's predicament, it's clear that Austen has painted her secondary world in warm and inviting shades.  Her fictional version of Bath is meant to be a nice place to settle down and raise a family in.

It's basically a faint echo of the English setting that will one day become the town known as Hobbiton.  A better way to put it is that Austen has given readers a prototype of the Shire that's waiting patiently for the Fantastical element to mature, catch-up with, and eventually inhabit and define it.  The best Austen can give her readers on that score is to showcase her skills in turning the Idyllic into the Gothic.  It's something of a marvel to see the author turn her cozy country lanes from the perfect places to take a quiet even stroll through into a rough and treacherous terrain where one false step can get you lost and "off the path" (at best), or else strand you broken and dying of exposure in a ditch (at worst).  Meanwhile, that forest bordering the village estate goes from a pastoral paradise in which to explore or else just relax and repose in and becomes the collective repository for all of the elements found in the Tales of the Brothers Grimm.  Once normal pathways become vague and indistinct.  The trees are full of creatures that might be just bats, or maybe something else.  A normal wood owl goes from a mere bird into a harbinger of possible doom and terror.  Normal sounds have a way of distorting into sinister echoes.  Worst of all is that the forest turns from an inviting shelter into a pile of wicked looking trees. These are the kind with gnarled, twisted branches, that look like they want to reach out and gobble you.  Austen's novel has transformed from a simple  comedy of manners into a legitimate Gothic novel.

The best way I can suggest what Austen was up to with Northanger Abbey is to compare it to, of all things, Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead.  That's another creative effort which starts off making you think you're going to see one kind of a story, only for it to turn into something else by the end.  When I first heard of the Simon Pegg flick, the last film I'd seen that tried to tackle Horror in a humorous vein was the original Scary Movie.  That was a film that left a lot to be desired, so I went into Wright's project with next to no high hopes.  I thought it would just be one of those slacker dude-bro comedies where the Horror elements are used as an excuse for all kinds of forgettable crude humor, and I'd have basically pissed away an hour and a half of my life.  So if you've seen that Pegg movie, I guess you can imagine my surprise when Wright and his partners in crime sort of pulled the rug out from under me in the best way.  It starts out giving you the implication that it's going to be a knock-off comedy in the vein of Scary Movie, albeit perhaps a bit more well mannered.  However, as things go on, the film grants you one pleasant surprise after another.  The comedy is genuinely smart, for one thing.  Wright and Pegg are no strangers to the tropes of slacker humor, yet they never quite leave things a such a simple level.

Instead, they inject a bit of heart into the characters and the comedy that emerges from them.  The director can tell the difference between humor that's endearing, as opposed to it being just merely amusing for the moment.  It's the first major playing card in the trick hand Wright has delt us.  His real trompe l'oeil move comes with the mere flick of a literal light switch which catapults the audience headlong into the film's third and final act.  It's here that all the humor of the previous staves of the picture come back in a way that turns out to be somewhat literally haunting.  A number of previous plot points are revisited in such a way as to achieve the same level of generic transition that Austen pulls off in her imaginary version of Bath.  Like her, Wright goes from poking fun at the Horror genre, to utilizing his humor in the service of the Gothic effect.  In other words, the satire goes from poking fun at the tropes associated with the Zombie Apocalypse film to being used as a means to convey the sub-genre's themes about how the Living Dead are really just a thematic reflection of various human failures and corruptions.  The overall goal of the humor in the film's third act is not to mock but participate in the themes and tropes of the Zombie film of forcing the failures of human society out into the open, and thus by giving them an appropriately Gothic airing, bring the thematic crisis to a close.

For my own part, it's useless to ask which artist does the transition from Humor to Horror better.  I refuse to be a snob about things like this.  I am able to like a book as sophisticated as Northanger Abbey and a cinematic gore and schlock fest like Shaun of the Dead in equal measure.  What matters for the purposes of this article is that moment of generic shift that takes place in each work.  Both Austen and Wright are able to utilize the conventions of a popular genre in such as way as to serve a dual function.  Their shared narrative strategy might be termed this way.  What starts out as parody sooner or later turns into straight-forward drama, and sometimes even Epic.  I'm probably doing more than just discussing one creative approach out of many, here.  I almost want to say this could very well be the fate of all stories.  That with the passage of time, even comedy can take on the proportions of Myth.  If I had to take a guess why that should be, then I'll swear I haven't got a clue.  It's probably something to do with the fundamental contours of the human Imagination, or something like that.  Perhaps sooner or later the need for some form of Enchantment tromps all the other methods and ways of storytelling, and so we return to the realm of Myth due to some sort of internal True North compass point in our psyches.  It's just possible Arthur Ransome believed in something very close to an idea like that one.

What I am able to say with a fair degree of certainty is that he appears to have been a smart enough reader to both see and appreciate the narrative strategy of inverted satire that Austen gave her audience in Northanger Abbey and so found a way to apply it in a different generic setting.  This time, the mode of the story is that of the High Seas Adventure, with a bit Classic Mythical tags serving as the novel's undergirding overlay.  Much like with Austen's precocious Gothic hero, the Swallows of the Walker family are a clan of enthusiastic readers of novels like Treasure Island and Kidnapped.  In addition to the presence of Austen, it is the work of Robert Louis Stevenson who provides the penultimate Inspiration for the adventures that Ransome's child protagonists find themselves in.  Much like how Austen does with the gothic genre of her day, Ransome starts out on a similar satiric note.  Everything begins with the implication that the author is here to poke fun at the tropes and artistic methods of the type of Adventure yarns that Stevenson had long since made a household name by then.  Also, just as Austen kept name dropping The Mysteries of Udolpho as one of the primary source texts for her own novel, Ransome has characters keep mentioning elements from Stevenson's books.  When the crew of the Swallow first spot an unknown houseboat and it's mysterious inhabitant, Roger insists they've found a pirate.  It's not just any scurvy sea-dog, however.  This is none other than Captain Flint in the flesh!

In the same vein of Austen's over-imaginative protagonist, John and his little brother and sisters are admonished by the adults around them to not go making such foolish accusations about their very own neighbors who make their homes on the Lake.  That suspicious looking man in the houseboat is not a pirate at all.  He's just old Mr. Jim Turner.  He's the uncle to a family of girls who live not far from here, that's all.  You shouldn't go around making up stories about real people.  Others might come to mistake you for a born liar, and what not.  That's the basic gist of the message that all the "commonsense" folk tell the children.  Roger, however, remains adamant.  Old Man Turner really is a pirate.  He's got a parrot and everything.  He's even got a canon on his boat that fires real shot!  For his siblings part, John, Sue, and Mae can at least to grant their little brother this much.  There is something fishy about Mr. Turner and his actions.  Besides, it's not like you need to dress or act the part in order to qualify for a pirate in this day and age.  Perhaps he's some nefarious crook who's chosen to hide away on the Windemere until the heat is off?  Either way, the Swallows come to an agreement that he bears watching.  Not even the protestations of the Amazons are enough to deter the brave warriors when they learn that Mr. Turner is Nancy and Peggy's own uncle.  And so the mystery continues and deepens.

In the same vein as Northanger Abbey, the most imaginative Swallow tribe is proven somewhat correct, after a fashion.  There really are pirates of a sort lurking about, and the need to catch them and make things right comes to a head in the final chapters of the book, when the thieving marauders make off with Captain Flint's prized treasure, and both the Blackett girls and their rival friends the Walkers get the blame for it.  So now it's a race against time to capture the thieves in the act, clear their name, and ensure that it will always be possible for both Swallows and Amazons to ride the tides of the Lake District forever.  All of these aspects of Ransome's book are a dead ringer for the strategy found in Austen's.  So I can't help but think that in addition to Stevenson, there is a well kept secret tribute to the author of Pride and Prejudice tucked away within the structures of this simple seeming YA yarn.  In many ways, Swallows and Amazons counts as an example of the layered novel.  This is a title that applies to any work of fiction, regardless of genre, where a careful excavation to the roots of a narrative can sometimes reveal the ingredients from the Cauldron of Story that went into the finished product.

When you apply this to Ransome's novel, you'll find the kind of book that is almost eager to shares its hidden thematic riches with its audience.  In spite of this willingness of the story to invite its readers to explore its submerged depths, it's surprising to learn just how few of even the author's most adoring critics have seen or felt the need to make such an effort.  The mid-century children's librarian and scholar Marcus Crouch, for instance, limits his examination of Swallows to the merest following of observations on Ransome's strategy as an author.  "He chose to write sincerely and modestly about things that mattered to him personally, and to associate them with children whom he knew and liked.  The result was startlingly original.  Here were stories about children passionately concerned with realities.  We see them at play for they are always on holiday, but it is a serious play, applying hard-won skills to difficult and responsible tasks (18)".  Crouch is right to note there is a practical side to the novel.  Many readers have come away surprised to discover that they've almost received a complete education in the art or craft of sail boating.  However Crouch is very mistaken when he assumes that a concern with "realities" is all that matters, whether this applies the characters or their author.

Crouch, in other words, is convinced that he is reading a YA novel based around social realism.  He seems to view Ransome's efforts from a very particular perspective.  The first is with an eye to what came after Swallows in the history of children's fiction.  The second is that the critic's focus remains centered on the kind of literature that he felt was "appropriate" for young readers.  In Crouch's mind, this has always remained the tale of social realism for growing minds.  He's the type of critic, in other words, who is always concerned with making sure that "nothing bad gets in" when it comes to a child's choice of reading material.  A lot of this focus can be explained by the fact that he used to be one of the premier children's librarians in the Country.  In fact, I think he might have earned the title of spokesman for the American Library Association.  If that's the case, then no offense, but as someone who defends libraries, I also think they could have done better back then.  Like a lot of "concerned guardians" Crouch has difficulty grasping the import of fiction like Ransome's.  Here's a guy who by his own admission is not concerned with lecturing or talking down to his young charges in any shape of form.

Hugh Shelley gives us a snippet commentary which explains his approach with some darn good succinctness.  Shelley writes of how it's "worth stopping to consider how Arthur Ransome" was "by nature a romantic (31)".  It's a valuable observation for gaining a clear understanding of just what sort of artist Ransome was, and the ultimate value of the book he'd written.  The frustrating part about this is while Shelley has been the one to notice the key fact about Ransome and his artistry as contained in that single word, Romantic, he doesn't seem to give the term as full a literary excavation and application to the author's life and writings as it deserves.  The closest he gets is with one telling detail about Ransome's Lake District series that we'll return to after a crucial observation.  It's that the best discovery of the artist's Romantic streak was openly acknowledged by the writer himself.  It's found in the author's Long-lost Study of Robert Louis Stevenson.  This unfinished text belongs to a long ago aborted project.  Before his career got its real start in storytelling for young readers, Ransome was commissioned to publish a series of popular biographies of literary figures.  The two titles of this series that are still available concern the life and work of writers like Oscar Wilde and, more intriguingly, Edgar Allan Poe.  In fact, a quick side glance into this study gives us our first clue to Ransome's artistic bent.

On page 109 of the Poe bio, we find the creator of Swallows and Amazons pre-empting H.P. Lovecraft's definition of Weird Fiction by about 18 years (Edgar Allan Poe was published in 1915, and was written sometime before that year; Lovecraft debuted the term in American in 1933).  Ransome tells his opinions about the Horror genre as follows: "The effect of the weird is not very old in story telling, though the terrible and the monstrous have long been motives of narrative. Its appearance is almost synchronous with the eighteenth century birth of the Romantic movement. Its first thrill has been traced to a passage in one of Smollett’s novels. It does not necessarily use the supernatural, although it perhaps implies an appeal to those half-forgotten states of mind that would once have so considered the details that stimulate it. It is possible that for the weird, as for many other romantic effects, like those of the clash of sword and of the hunting of beasts, our ancestors thrill within us, and communicate their shudders to ourselves. It is worth while, in thinking of Poe’s use of it, to consider its short history in art (109)".  He then goes on to give us a surprisingly good survey of the emergence of the Gothic story as it existed in his time.  We even get a welcome re-appearance of Jane Austen's literary model, Ann Radcliffe, along with some very useful vintage insight into the fabulist fiction of E.T.A. Hoffmann.

Ransome gives the following judgement call in this section of the Poe study that is pertinent to the outlook he followed in composing his modern day Myth of the Lake District.  " For there is no untruth in fairy tale so long as we can be made to believe in it and do not require to have it reduced to terms of" Literary Realism of Naturalism (111).  In putting these thoughts on paper, it is possible to criticize the author in terms of a distinct lack of originality.  All Ransome has managed to do here is echo one of the defining maxims of the very group of English Poets who made their homes and living along the banks of Coniston and Windemere.  At the same time, originality is a pathetic fallacy that Ransome is smart enough not to burden himself with.  It's enough for the writer to plant his flag in allegiance to that same Romanticism of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and which exercised a lasting influence on fantasists like Poe and Robert Louis Stevenson.  In the unfinished manuscript devoted to the creator of Long John Silver and the original Captain Flint, we find Ransome once more giving acknowledgment to that "Romantic attitude which no close attention to technique was to divert into a realism (55)".

What all of these scattered fragments of observation reveal is the third and final level to the house of Swallows and Amazons.  It really is just a repeat of what was said before at the outset of this section.  All Ransome amounted to was a latter day Romantic inspired by the Poets of the Lake District.  The Story of John Walker and Nancy Blackett is little more than a prose tribute to the kind of poetry the author enjoyed in his youth.  This influence can be observed in a bit of behind the scenes trivia that makes its way into one of the other volumes of the Lake Series.  It's a later installment with the Beatrix Potter style title of Peter Duck.  The main protagonist of that book is a made up character conjured by the Imagination of Mae Walker, and the fantastic adventures she envisions him having on the high seas.  According to Hugh Shelley, the figure of Peter was "to some extent...based on...the classic (Baltic) old salt, who crew'd for Arthur Ransome" on one of his own lifelong sailing voyages.  The Romantic element in this bit of trivia comes in once you realize the title that Ransome liked to use when referring to this long-gone shipmate.  The writer used to refer to him as "The Ancient Mariner (35)".

And we're given as close to a complete circle as we can make on this voyage in Swallows and Amazons.  It's the kind of book that best described as a loving tribute to the literature and subject matter that Ransome was Inspired by as a boy.  Even if this is all it amounts to, then I'm afraid I'll have to give the author very high marks for his artistry.  If it makes sense to view this book as a layered tribute to the likes of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats, then the way the writer goes about it is what makes his final product a marvel of sophistication.  I have established a metaphorical diagram of all these elements that go together to make up the completed novel.  When all the pieces of this tributary "household" are assembled, it lets us arrive at the conclusion that, much like with Tolkien or Nesbit, what Ransome has constructed amounts to little else a hybrid text that counts as both it's own new narrative for the modern era, while also containing Classical elements that allows it to be described as a form of re-telling.  What Ransome has done is to ransack the almost endless library of sources the Lake Poets used to craft their most famous works, and put them to his own use.  In doing this, his two main sources seem to be contents from both John Keats, and George Chapman.  In particular, one poem which finds very specific echoes in the general layout and nature of the novel is On Reading Chapman's Homer.

It's one of Keats' best efforts, and it seems to have found a new home for itself in the forms of the imaginary Walker and Blackett clans.  Ransome has taken the Amazons of Classical Myth and given them a pair of fitting Edwardian incarnations with the sisters Nan and Peg.  They're the two characters who often come off winning their way into the hearts of readers, and their author has chosen well by, at least in part, drawing them from the realms of Aesopian fable and fantasy.  While I'm prepared to stick by the idea that Ransome ultimately went back to library of Keats and Chapman in order to fashion his 20th century Amazons, what initially Inspired him to do so is described by Roger Lancelyn Green, who writes: "But the Amazons, yes, even Captain Nancy, who is probably the most memorable character in any of the books, were created by one of what Matthew Arnold called 'those Heaven-sent moments' needed for 'this skill': one day, as he was sailing on Lake Windermere, two girls, dressed exactly as the Amazons are on their first appearance, swung out round Ramp Holme in their boat, flashed past him, and disappeared from view.  He never met them, or even saw them again, nor discovered who they really were: but we know that they were Nancy and Peggy Blackett, the Amazon Pirates, slipped for an instant out of the Paradise of Fiction, to supply the great moment of inspiration (43-44)".

That passage came from Green's Authors and Places (1963).  I'm more than willing to give credence to the idea that this chance encounter served as the Inspiration for Peggy and her feisty, adventurous sister.  I just add the addendum that being a Romantic by nature isn't the same as not being smart.  If these children gave Ransome the idea that the Amazons had found a new home for themselves on the Lake District, then he was sharp enough to realize a bit of homework would come in handy here.  Hence his taking further Inspiration from the original Greek Myths as funneled through Homer, Chapman, and Keats, then wedding it to the prose Romanticism of Stevenson.  All he had to do after that was to give the Amazons a new adventure to have.  This eventually came in the form of a new tribe of warriors and sea-farers to share the story with.  This is how we got the Clan of the Chelidon, or (translated from the original Greek) the Swallows and their ship of the same name.  As I've said, their shared yarn is a Classical Myth at its core, with Stevenson providing the merest Victorian-Edwardian overlay to the proceedings.  In other words, Ransome has come as close as any author will toward an idea what a Middle Earth adventure would look like stripped of its Fantastic elements, yet still maintaining it's fundamental grounding in the world of Myth.  This is what keeps the novel alive.

I'd argue that without this Mythic element to undergird the plot, Ransome's tale of first the rivalry and then the friendship between the Chelidons and Amazons would have been forgotten not long after its publication.  The kind of light entertainment that you might page through once, then toss away and let it get lost in the ever-present glut that was getting churned out by the YA field even back in his day.  Instead, Ransome let's these Myths and Romantic aspects imbue the narrative with a Classical level of quality and sophistication that is able to pull even the most wary skeptic into the overall charm of the book.  It was this winning sense of enchantment which both allowed Swallows to be the kind of breakout success that turns into the first of many.  Again, much like with Tolkien, the profits from the first book allowed Ransome the chance to pen many more books detailing the exploits of the Walker Children and the Blackett Sisters.  It's earned him the reputation of National Treasure in his native England.  It's also responsible for him becoming something of a niche writer, which is a bit unfair.

I'd never even heard of Arthur Ransome up till now.  It wasn't until I decided to turn my attention to his most famous work that I ever began to get even the first clue of what kind of skills he had as a writer.  I think I'd heard his most famous work mentioned in passing here and there.  Yet it was always as just one name among many.  Part of a list of old standbys that academic scholars could point to as example of what the Victorian Fantasy was like, and that'd be the end of it.  It's not an unfair description.  It's just that basic summaries can never really suggest the full scope of a work under close critical scrutiny.  It's been cited as one of the great examples of Summer Holiday reading, yet that doesn't quite do the facts justice.  Giving a Close Reading treatment to Ransome's most famous book reveals the entire meaning of Marcus Crouch's description of the writer's achievement.  It's the sort of book that "shows with beautiful clarity and conviction how children grow by contact with one another and with their environment, submitting to their own voluntary disciplines while retaining their personal integrity.

"Like a good novelist, too, he uses the setting of his stories as if it were an actor in them.  He writes only about places for which he has a strong feeling, like the Lakes - their topography drastically reshaped but their spirit faithfully portrayed - and the Broads and the estuaries of Suffolk.  To each of these settings his characters react according to their natures and according to the nature of the landscape.  For the first time in children's literature...Ransome showed not only what happened but how it happened.  He and his characters are deeply concerned with" the Romantics "of living (18-19)".  It's the closest I think I'll be able to get to explaining why this book turns out to work so well as it does, even in the face of what some readers may think of as a fairly low-stakes story.  This is a complaint the filmmakers of the 2016 adaptation saw fit to address.  They took the plot of a Summer Idyll and turned it into something more akin to The Goonies.  Some will complain about this, yet I'm not prone to gripe too much on that score.  Whatever happens in any adaptation won't be enough to tarnish the content of the original.  As for any thoughts I could give to the movie version, all I can think to say here is that it's not the worst, or the best.  Nor will it be the first or the last time someone tries their hand at this book.

If I had to any advice to give to a would-be filmmaker who wants to see if something can be done with a book like this, then I'd remind them what it felt like to see Mary Poppins for the first time.  You'd basically have to take that vibe and then tone things down just a bit.  Ransome's story is something of a close neighbor to the Poppins series.  He doesn't really need any explicit statement of the Fantastic in order to get across the kind of artistic effect he's after.  This is the sort of text that relies on a delicate note of balanced repose and excitement.  On the one hand, you've got the cast of kids and the excitement they have in playing, exploring, and even being heroic together.  On the other hand, it's all sort of filtered through the kind of relaxed nostalgia that should be familiar to anyone whose read through Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine.  It's the sense of looking back on Summers past as reflected through the amber apple glow of the Autumn of one's years.  This imparts a quiet and low key atmosphere to things.  In other words, the tone of any adaptation of a novel like this is going to have to find, not the right way to balance these intertwined notes of action-adventure with the much slower pace of this almost meditative nostalgia.  It's just going to be a matter of discovering (not knowing before hand) what's the best possible approach to the blended tone of the text on screen.

Perhaps a good place to start on that score is with the following bit  of thought experiment.  Ask yourself one simple question.  What would an adaptation of Swallows be like if Walt Disney himself ever got around to making a version of it in the wake of Mary and her time with the Banks Children?  For one thing, I can see how there would be room for at least one carryover from the previous entry.  This is the kind of story where it easy to imagine David Thomlinson, the actor who played Mr. Banks, in the role of Ransome's Captain Flint.  Meanwhile, I can see how veteran character actors like Roy Kinnear and Victor Spinetti could handle themselves well as the Marauders.  Let those ideas be something like a guide post to the way a film like this should be made.  Beyond that, there's still the book itself.  This has turned out to be one of those cases where the story I'm covering manages to offer one pleasant surprise after another.  Anyone who comes into this expecting a light read will also be able to come away feeling like you've just gained respect for a new friend.  At least that's the overall effect this somewhat overlooked children's novel has left me with.  It's a classic case of picking up something you've heard about in passing on account of there's nothing else going on at the moment.  When you're finished it's amazing how little time you've wasted in discovering a rich new secondary world.

The bonus pleasure of this YA text is that the setting can't be confined between the book's covers.  The Lake District was and remains a very real location with a strong sense of place and history to it.  It's the storied quality of this history that makes the Lakes something of a pilgrimage for lovers of both poetry and literature in general.  It's this storied feature and the names who helped make the District's history that account for the existence and nature of Swallows and Amazons.  The ultimate reason Arthur Ransome had for creating his modern Myth in the guise of a Summer Idyll is because on some level he was hoping to pay tribute to the Romantic Poets who helped put his beloved District on the map.  By setting the action of his plot in the confines between Windermere and Coniston, the author has allowed the Lakes to become just as much a character in the novel as its human cast.  It also doesn't stop at just being a tribute.  Ransome wants the book to awaken his readers to the possibilities of having a Romantic outlook on the order of things.  Much like Keats or Coleridge, Swallows and Amazons implores the reader to learn about the magic that's hidden within everyday things.  It does this job so well that I can say without hesitation that this is a very easy book to recommend for others.