Winnie-the-Pooh
Classic Collection. By A.A. Milne. Decorations
by E.H. Shepard. Farshore/HarperCollins. $35.
When it comes to children’s literature, a few books have gained the
designation as classics and retained it for many generations of young people –
often aided over time, for retention purposes, by transformation into new
media, as J.M. (James Matthew) Barrie’s Peter Pan changed from a character in a
novel for adults to the central character in a stage play to the protagonist of
a novel for young readers. Barrie himself spurred and managed that evolution,
and after the death of Barrie (1860-1937), many other hands shaped and reshaped
the Peter Pan character in a wide variety of media. But unlike Peter Pan,
described by Barrie in his play as “the boy who wouldn’t grow up,” real-life
children do age through and eventually past childhood – a circumstance notably
relevant to A.A. (Alan Alexander) Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh.
Winnie’s wonderful adventures were always intertwined with the life of
Milne’s son, Christopher Robin, for whom Milne created the character – named
Winnie because real-life Christopher met a tame London Zoo bear called Winnipeg
and was enchanted by the encounter. It is the enchantment that père Milne transferred so beautifully to
his stories of Winnie and his friends, which take place in the Hundred Acre
Wood, derived from the Five Hundred Acre Wood in real-world Sussex, England.
And it is the enchantment that continues to imbue Pooh’s world even long after
the time of A.A. Milne (1882-1956) and Christopher Robin Milne (1920-1996). It
is a continuing pleasure to introduce children to Winnie and the other denizens
of the Hundred Acre Wood, and that pleasure is in full flower with this
handsome slipcased Classic Collection
of all four books in which Winnie-the-Pooh appears: the poetry collections When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six, and the story
collections Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner.
Adults who buy this delightful set for today’s kids (or for themselves!)
may be surprised if they remember Pooh and his friends primarily from the
animated Disney versions of their adventures. Those are great fun on their own,
and do a good job of maintaining much of the spirit of Milne’s writing, but the
balancing act between narrative and art is quite different in the original
books – with their utterly adorable “decorations” by E.H. (Ernest Howard)
Shepherd. Instead of looking like roly-poly cartoon characters and more-modern
stuffed toys, Pooh and friends are imagined by Shepherd in a style that fits
with the original teddy bear, which dates to 1902; indeed, real-world Christopher
Robin actually named his toy bear Edward before later calling it Winnie. Interestingly,
the bear that Shepherd used as a model for his art was not the one belonging to
Milne’s son but one owned by his own son, Graham, because it seemed more cuddly
(although it was named Growler). The drawing style used by Shepherd now evokes
a much earlier time, although it was aptly contemporary when the Pooh books
were first published. As a result, there is nostalgia associated with the Pooh
stories in their original form that accentuates the emotional content that they
always included.
That emotion always had real-world elements – Milne’s focus on the
stories as relating to his son never wavered – but the connection became
especially close and a touch tear-stained by the end of the last of the four
books, The House at Pooh Corner. It
is worth remembering – adults may not recall this and may even be surprised to
find it out from this four-book set – that Pooh first emerged (as Edward) in a
single poem in When We Were Very Young
(1924). The story collection Winnie-the-Pooh
appeared in 1926, after which Pooh showed up 11 times in the 35 poems contained
in Now We Are Six (1927) – and then,
at last, came The House at Pooh Corner
(1928). None of this history and intertwining of poetry and prose is necessary
for today’s children to meet and enjoy Winnie and his friends, but adults may
want to consider it when engaging with all the non-Pooh poetry in the two verse
collections – a great deal of which is, like the Pooh material, thoroughly
charming. Milne had a lovely concept of Pooh as “a bear of very little brain”
who is nevertheless thoughtful and friendly and a reasonably talented poet. The
message of being true to oneself, no matter what one’s gifts may or may not be,
carries down through the decades very effectively, and the underlying kindness
of all the characters’ interactions is a form of sensitivity that retains its
relevance today – and may perhaps be needed now more than ever.
Children do grow up, though, and the bittersweet conclusion of The House on Pooh Corner – which Milne apparently did not intend as being anything more than a pleasant farewell now that real-world Christopher Robin was growing older – will likely affect today’s readers at least as much as it did those of 1928. In the last story, Christopher Robin has to leave the Hundred Acre Wood – the reason, his aging out of early childhood, is never explicitly stated – because he cannot simply “do nothing” anymore; the animals disappear one by one until only the boy and his bear are left in “an Enchanted Place” in the forest and go off together. Wistful and hopeful at the same time, this final scene may be one that modern parents need to absorb and digest on their own before reading it to or with children: it really does bring on tears, even if that was not its intent. The Pooh poems and stories fully deserve to be deemed classics of children’s literature as well as souvenirs of a time long ago when there was still magic in stuffed animals – a type of magic that, however greatly transformed and updated in the 21st century, can still captivate children who are privileged to encounter it in the guise of the Hundred Acre Wood a hundred years in the past.
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