(++++) ACROSS THE CENTURIES

When We Were Very Young: Centenary Facsimile Edition. By A.A. Milne. Decorations by E.H. Shepherd. Farshore/HarperCollins. $35.

     Some children’s literature is, if not eternal, certainly very long-lasting, and likely to remain so. A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh books fall into that category – but some adults may be surprised to learn that the two Pooh-focused story collections, Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, were not where Milne introduced the always-amiable “bear of little brain” with a name taken from the one Milne’s real-world son, Christopher Robin, bestowed upon his real-world stuffed bear. Pooh Bear was in fact introduced in the poetry collection When We Were Very Young, and that book has now been around for a full century – making it probably inevitable that a keepsake volume would emerge.

     It is here now, and this “centenary facsimile edition” is in fact a wonderful piece of Pooh memorabilia for adults who grew up loving Pooh and have enjoyed passing along his stories (whether in Milne’s versions or in others, notably the animated ones from Disney) to new generations. It is worth emphasizing the point that this book is clearly not an offering for kids: unless a contemporary child is a tremendous lover of both Pooh and old-fashioned ink-on-paper stories, the care with which this lovely edition of When We Were Very Young was produced will go unnoticed and unappreciated. Not to mention potentially damaged: the book itself, with its gilded page tops and the elegant slipcase into which it fits, is designed from the start as a collector’s item, one that it is quite fine to read with suitable care but not one to be tossed about hither and thither and treated as if it is just another book for kids.

     The original publication date of When We Were Very Young was November 6, 1924, and the “centenary facsimile edition” makes no attempt to provide anything beyond what was in Milne’s book on that date. Notably, the illustrations by E.H. Shepherd, so charmingly labeled “decorations,” are the original black-line ones, not the much-more-familiar colored ones into which Shepherd’s creations have morphed over the years, courtesy of various colorists. Also, there is no attempt to update, explain or provide commentary on any of the poems in the book, only one of which is actually about Pooh – where he is called “our Teddy Bear,” “Teddy,” and “Mr. Edward Bear.” Pooh, never so named, does show up elsewhere in the book’s illustrations, but none of the other poems is actually about him. And the poems are quite unapologetically British: a bat refers to a cricket bat, the many references to money deal with shillings and pence (this was long before decimalisation), and it does not hurt to know what a porringer is.

     There are poems here reminiscent of the work of Lewis Carroll – “The Dormouse and the Doctor,” for example. And there are some that are real-world scenes, with Milne himself appearing with Christopher Robin beside him: “Sand-Between-the-Toes.” And there are a few with an underlying thoughtfulness that remains suggestive, 100 years after their creation, of family life in the 1920s: “The Wrong House,” with its not-entirely-lighthearted refrain of contemplation, “It isn’t like a house at all.”

     There is also something here that adults enjoying this lovely re-creation of When We Were Very Young are likely to find quite surprising indeed. It appears at the book’s very beginning, in the short introduction called “Just Before We Begin,” wherein Milne addresses readers directly and opens with a reference to William Wordsworth, an altogether different sort of poet whose name will likely be quite unknown to young children just encountering Milne’s writing. It is not the Wordsworth comment that will bring adults up short, however, but the discovery in this introductory matter of the name Pooh. Yes, here is Pooh – but the name is not attached to Mr. Edward Bear by any means, being instead the moniker that Christopher Robin has assigned to…a swan. And the whole “Pooh” name makes sense as a British-swan reference, since “if you call him and he doesn’t come (which is a thing swans are good at), then you can pretend that you were just saying ‘Pooh!’ to show how little you wanted him.” And there, resplendent in its nicely gold-edged binding and slipcased form, you have the very earliest Pooh-ness of all, before “Pooh” became a term of endearment and brought us where we are now, a century later.

     Of course, it is not necessary to possess the “centenary facsimile edition” of When We Were Very Young to have the introductory material in which the word Pooh appears – any complete version of the book contains the introduction – but there is something extra-special about having this small piece of history in a form quite similar to the one it possessed before the book, and the bear within it, became small pieces of history. Nostalgia runs thick here; indeed, it almost seems as if the “we” in When We Were Very Young refers not only to Christopher Robin Milne (1920-1996) and by extension to his father A.A. (Alan Alexander) (1882-1956), but also to any modern grown-up fortunate enough to encounter this memorable memorial edition and use it to reminisce, however briefly, about a childhood now faded, hopefully with a certain degree of gentility, into once-upon-a-time.