Favourite Children's Authors: William Mayne

William Mayne: Low Tide (1993)

William Mayne's Low Tide interested me a lot when I first read it in the 1990s. It's set in New Zealand - which always tends to pique the interest of locals such as myself, and while I'm not sure that he does a great job of reproducing our manners and mores, the story itself is an arresting one. This is how Google Books describes it:

Set in New Zealand at the turn of the century, this exhilarating story of survival and adventure finds Charlie Snelling, his sister, and his Māori best friend swept up in a giant green tidal wave that carries them up high in the mountains to the old wild man called Koroua. What must they do to survive and find the way home?

Spoiler alert: They do eventually make their way down to the shore, only to find their town completely deserted and filled with sand and silt. But there's something just a little bit ... off about it. It looks similar, but not exactly the same.

To make a long story short, it turns out that there are two virtually identical towns set on different inlets. The one they live in was built after the other one was abandoned for various safety reasons. The new town was constructed on precisely the same model as the old one, though, which explains that strange moment of déjà vu when they stumbled into the latter by mistake, and found all their friends gone and the buildings half-buried by the tsunami.

It's a typically tricksy and laconically narrated William Mayne story: quite demanding even for its intended audience of older children, but also satisfactory in that he doesn't talk down to his readers.

William Mayne (1928-2010)

He looks harmless enough in the picture above, doesn't he? Almost like an old basset hound, with those two white sidelocks for ears. However:

In 2004, Mayne was charged with eleven counts of indecent assaults of "young girl fans" aged between eight and sixteen. At trial one victim gave evidence of events some forty years in the past. According to The Guardian, the prosecutor said Mayne had "treated young visitors as adults". He was described in the courtroom as "the greatest living writer of children's books in English". Mayne had pleaded guilty to the charges, but his solicitor said he had done so while under huge stress and would try to clear his name. On conviction, Mayne was imprisoned for two and a half years and was placed on the sex offenders register for life. According to The Guardian, "Mayne's books were largely deliberately removed from shelves from 2004 onwards", as a result of his conviction.

- Wikipedia: William Mayne

It's rather like Low Tide: two towns, side by side on almost identical inlets, one full of bustle and life, the other completely deserted and left to the mercy of wind and weather. The first is his stellar reputation before the scandal; the second his status as a cancelled individual afterwards.

Trying to reread William Mayne now forces you to shift from that lively village of swift empathetic insights and strange, sometimes supernatural, fun, to the other town: the one where you have to hang your head in shame and watch armfuls of books being plucked from the shelves before being sent off to the nearest landfill for composting.

As for Mayne himself, he was "found dead at his home in Thornton Rust, North Yorkshire, on the morning of 24 March 2010." There were, we're informed, no suspicious circumstances; in other words, no reason to suspect suicide or foul play.

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William Mayne: All the King's Men (1982)

I think that the first book I ever read by William Mayne was All the King's Men. It's a very odd book indeed, a collection of three longish short stories. The first, title story concerns the doings of a group of dwarfs who feel more and more oppressed by the lack of respect they're shown at court, despite being known as the "King's Men." When they're shifted to a nearby hunting lodge, they're not even fed and housed properly, but are forced to fend for themselves.

Unlike the hero of Edgar Allan Poe's grand guignol classic "Hop-Frog," Mayne's protagonists are eventually helped out by the kindly Archbishop, who makes time to listen to their grievances and share them with the king.

The mockery and neglect they suffer is certainly very real, but there seems some slight prospect of betterment by the end of the story. The story gripped me at the time because of Mayne's obvious empathy with his characters and sympathy for their dilemma. Like Jack London's equally moving "Told in the Drooling Ward," it's never really left my mind since.

It convinced me, among other things, that Mayne was a man of strange understandings and considerable delicacy of mind: another reason that the news of his conviction for indecent assault hit me and his other readers so hard.

About a year ago I wrote a piece, "Must We Burn Alice Munro?", about this same dilemma of whether or not we can continue in good conscience to read authors who've been outed in such a way. Can I, for instance, keep on enjoying Neil Gaiman's work after all the allegations of sexual misconduct which have surfaced recently?

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Neil Gaiman: The Sandman (2025)

Clearly no simple, off-the-cuff answer to so loaded a question can be expected to apply to every situation. I was forced instead to conclude my piece with a series of further questions:

Did Dickens lose any readers over the revelation of his cruel, public rejection of his wife in order to pursue an affair with the young actress Nelly Ternan? Nelly, it seems, had little choice in the matter - neither did Mrs. Dickens. His saccharine morality showed its pinchbeck quality once and for all in his later life. And yet we continue to pore over the complexities of his last fictions, full of young heroines sacrificing themselves for self-pitying older men.

In other words, while "there may be a few temporary blips in sales ... more readers are drawn to turbulent, demon-ridden souls such as Dostoyevsky and Dickens than they are to the sanity and order of better-balanced authors."

Maybe it shouldn't be so - but it is. Whatever (for instance) your opinion of J. K. Rowling's views on tne inviolability of gender roles, Harry Potter remains a fixture on our shelves and our streaming services.

Neil Gaiman (2013)

The interesting thing about Gaiman, in particular, is that these details about his private life have given me a number of new insights into his work. He sounds like a pretty sick bastard to me - in particular, if the accusations about his conduct with a young New Zealand nanny are accurate: "Call me Master" indeed! But then so is Dream, the protagonist of his Sandman stories, both as he appears in the the late 80s / early 90s comics and in the more recent 2022-25 TV series.

Dream (or Morpheus, as I suppose we should call him) sends a woman who rejects him to hell for ten thousand years as revenge for her presumption. Another of his ex-lovers, the muse Calliope, is repeatedly raped by a young writer in order to help him gain inspiration. She remarks, when Dream eventually decides to save her from this fate, that he must have changed over the past century or so. The older version would have refused to help her on principle.

The more closely you look, the more obvious it is that Gaiman has been half-condemning, half-defending his own sexual peccadilloes throughout his whole career. The disguise, now, seems as paper-thin as Dickens' series of late novels defending the idea of young women becoming enamoured of older men.

Whether or not Gaiman manages to extricate himself from his present difficulties concerns only him and his publicist, I would say. But, if anything, his work has become more interesting now it's revealed to have been so profoundly personal all along. I find I can continue to read it - mainly because Gaiman the writer is superior to Gaiman the man. The ugly face of libertinism, its callous cruelty, is shown in his fiction - not, I think, because Gaiman is a lying hypocrite, but because the logic of the story and the reality of his characters forces him to do so.

Neil Gaiman: A Game of You (1991)

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William Mayne: A Game of Dark (1971)

There's an interesting attempt to summarise the case against Mayne in John Clute's Encyclopedia of SF:

Soon after [the success of his "pared to the bone and fantasticated" later work], Mayne's life and work were tragically darkened – a tragedy first and foremost for his victims – when he was charged with child abuse in 2004 and imprisoned for two and one half years. His oeuvre went out of print, his books were removed from libraries, which was expectable; but his name was also conspicuously cancelled from the influential 1001 Children's Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up (2009) edited by Julia Ecclestone, an erasure with grave implications. His death may eventually have the effect of allowing his books to live again.

As usual with this most fascinatingly layered of reference works, there's a lot going on in this short paragraph. There's a (parenthetical) acknowledgment that Mayne's abuse was "a tragedy first and foremost for his victims," but the burden of the piece seems, nevertheless, to be on the cost to him and his oeuvre. That last sentence sounds far more heartfelt: "His death may eventually have the effect of allowing his books to live again."

There's also a sideswipe at Julia "Ecclestone" (a misprint for Eccleshare), and her decision to "cancel" Mayne so conspicuously "from the influential 1001 Children's Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up (2009)", which the authors of the entry describe as "an erasure with grave implications."

Interestingly enough, this same Julia Eccleshare wrote the Guardian obituary for Mayne roughly a year after the publication of 1001 Children's Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up. Like most such long and well-considered assessments, it shows signs of having been written long before the eruption of the scandal, then recast in a hurry with a eye to those details:

William Mayne, who has died aged 82, was one of the most highly regarded writers of the postwar "golden age" of children's literature. His output was huge – well over 100 titles, encompassing novels and latterly picture books, rich in a sense of place and feel for the magical, and beautifully written. He wrote several books a year in a career that spanned more than half a century and won him the Carnegie medal and the Guardian children's fiction prize.

That first paragraph could have been written at any time; the next one, however, shows signs of having been hastily supplemented with new details to undermine any notion of a Mayne "comeback":

Although never widely popular and sometimes thought of as inaccessible for his young readers, his distinctive, allusive and spare writing had considerable influence and, despite being sometimes out of fashion, his books were often thought due for a comeback. That was never to happen. Instead, Mayne's books were largely deliberately removed from shelves from 2004 onwards following his conviction and prison sentence for indecent assault on children.

William Mayne: A Swarm in May (1955)

The rest of the obituary runs through his career more or less chronologically, from his early choir school stories, "based on his own experiences as a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral from 1937 until 1942, the only part of his education he valued," to the more fantastic and supernatural themes he explored from the mid-1960s onwards.

William Mayne: Chorister's Cake (1956)

Numerous encomia are quoted along the way:

A Swarm in May was hailed as a "minor masterpiece ... one of the 20th-century's best children's books" by Frank Eyre in British Children's Books in the Twentieth Century (1971).
... Mayne also received great praise for Choristers' Cake. A review in the Times Literary Supplement highlighted the already clearly recognisable qualities of Mayne's writing while also pointing out the difficulties:

Its virtuosity and verbal richness, as well as the undoubted oddness of many of its characters, put it beyond the range of the average reader. But for the child who can meet its demands it will be a deep and memorable experience. In insight, in gaiety, in exuberance of idea and language, it is in a class apart. Mr Mayne is certainly the most interesting, as the most unpredictable, figure in children's books today.

William Mayne: Cathedral Wednesday (1960)

He's also described as "a master – the master in contemporary English writing for children – of setting". At length, though, the scandal must be faced again:

In 2004, Mayne was convicted of 11 charges of sexual abuse with young girls and was sentenced to two and a half years in prison and placed on the sex offenders' register for life. It was a death knell for his books, but it did not stop Mayne from writing and he was still doing so at the time of his death. Print on demand had recently helped Mayne, with reprints of some of his titles due to become available on Faber Finds.

How different is the tone of that "It was a death knell for his books" from the SF Encyclopedia's "His death may eventually have the effect of allowing his books to live again" ...

Eccleshare's obituary concludes as follows:

The son of a doctor, Mayne was born in Hull and lived in the Yorkshire Dales for most of his life. He was famously reclusive. When asked if he would be interviewed for a children's books magazine, Mayne replied: "I am sure this sort of thing never works. I shall go nowhere to accomplish it and I'm sure others would find it unrewarding to come here. I have not sensed the lack of my not appearing in your neologies ... but if you find it necessary to molest my ancient solitary peace for the sake of your new, maddening piece, I am prepared to tolerate for a short time some person guaranteed not to be strident."

While the obituary as a whole was presumably composed for The Guardian's file of pre-cooked celebrity obituaries sometime before 2004, the choice of this particular quotation for its last paragraph does sound a bit pointed: the term "molest", in particular, seems a strange one for Mayne to have chosen, and given that it was a series of young fans and visitors "guaranteed not to be strident" he was eventually convicted of abusing, the irony is probably intentional.

Clearly the omission of Mayne from Julia Eccleshare's 1001 Children's Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up wasn't accidental.

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William Mayne: Earthfasts (1966)

Which leaves us where, exactly? This is certainly not the piece I would like to write about William Mayne, teasing out the subtleties and constant spirit of experiment to be found in his fiction, old and new. As Julia Eccleshare puts it:

in general in Mayne's books, the characters are quiet and gentle. There are no heroics. If there is power, it usually lies within the land and its past; it can temporarily be used by humans passing through. This absence of heroes and the lack of major dramatic focus, combined with increasing obliqueness, caused Mayne to become less popular with children by the mid-1960s as his slower-paced stories failed to chime with the expectations of his readers. But, even before then, Mayne was always admired more by adults than children.

Different children have different expectations. I, too, found Mayne's books and elliptical dialogue difficult to follow at times, but for me that was a refreshing change from the "chosen one" action-hero fantasies which were the norm even then.

Nor did Mayne seem to have a distinct ideological axe to grind:

A recurrent theme of Mayne's stories was how children could see and accept magic and magical explanations, while the adults around them create rational stories to explain the same outcome. There was no sentimentality around Mayne's sense of children's belief. Instead he simply posited that children are as at home with unreality as reality, while adults take a different view. Mayne somehow seemed able to take both views himself, perhaps because he described his writing by saying: "All I am doing is looking at things now and showing them to myself when young."

He may have been - was, in fact - a flawed, childish man, but that is one of the reasons he was able to write so well from a child's perspective, without sentimentality, as Eccleshare admits above.

That trait of being able to take two views at once is crucial to understanding and appreciating his books. They're not action-packed - the land is more of an actor than the characters most of the time, as Eccleshare reminds us.

Like her, I doubt that there'll ever be a full-fledged Mayne revival. He never really was a bestseller, and his books were "always admired more by adults than children." I gather, though, that he's already finding his way back to a quiet vogue as a concocter of subtle and psychologically acute supernatural stories.

If the Weird Tales community can forgive H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard their multiple personal and stylistic transgressions, I can't foresee William Mayne having too much trouble.

BBC: Earthfasts (1994)

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William Mayne

William James Carter Mayne
(1928-2010)

Novels:


1. Follow the Footprints (1953)
   • Follow the Footprints. Illustrated by Shirley Hughes. 1953. Oxford Children’s Library. London: Oxford University Press, 1958.
2. The World Upside Down (1954)
   • The World Upside Down. Illustrated by Shirley Hughes. London: Geoffrey Cumberlege / Oxford University Press, 1954.
3. Choir School Series (1955-1963)
   1. A Swarm in May (1955)
      • A Swarm in May. Illustrated by C. Walter Hodges. 1955. Oxford Children’s Library. London: Oxford University Press, 1962.
   2. Choristers' Cake (1956)
      • Chorister’s Cake. Illustrated by C. Walter Hodges. 1956. London: Oxford University Press, 1960.
   3. Cathedral Wednesday (1960)
      • Cathedral Wednesday. 1960. Leicester: Brockhampton Press, 1972.
   4. Words and Music (1963)
4. The Member for the Marsh (1956)
   • The Member for the Marsh. Illustrated by Lynton Lamb. 1956. London: The Children’s Book Club, 1956.
5. The Blue Boat (1957)
6. A Grass Rope (1957)
7. Underground Alley (1958)
8. [as 'Dynely James'] The Gobbling Billy (1959)
   • [with Dick Caesar] The Gobbling Billy. 1959. Knight Books. Leicester: Brockhampton, 1969.
9. The Rolling Season (1960)
10. The Changeling (1961)
11. The Glass Ball. Illustrated by Janet Duchesne (1961)
12. The Twelve Dancers (1962)
    • The Twelve Dancers. Illustrated by Lynton Lamb. 1962. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964.
13. Sand (1962)
    • Sand. Illustrated by Margery Gill. 1964. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967.
14. Plot Night (1963)
15. The Changeling (1963)
16. A Parcel of Trees (1963)
    • A Parcel of Trees. Illustrated by Margery Gill. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.
17. Underground Alley (1963)
18. Whistling Rufus (1964)
19. No More School (1965)
    • No More School. Illustrated by Peter Warner. 1965. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.
20. Pig in the Middle (1965)
21. Earthfasts Series (1966-2000)
    1. Earthfasts (1966)
       • Earthfasts. 1966. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
    2. Cradlefasts (1995)
    3. Candlefasts (2000)
       • Candlefasts. London: Hodder Children’s Books, 2000.
22. The Battlefield (1967)
    • The Battlefield. Illustrated by Mary Russon. 1967. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.
23. The Old Zion (1967)
24. Over the Hills and Far Away [aka 'The Hill Road']. Illustrated by Krystyna Turska (1968)
25. The House on Fairmount (1968)
26. The Hill Road (1969)
27. Ravensgill (1970)
    • Ravensgill. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1970.
28. A Game of Dark (1971)
    • A Game of Dark. 1971. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.
29. Royal Harry (1971)
30. The Incline (1972)
31. [as 'Martin Cobalt'] The Swallows [aka 'The Pool of Swallows'] (1972)
32. Skiffy Series (1972-1982)
    1. Skiffy (1972)
       • Skiffy. Illustrated by Nicholas Fisk. 1972. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980.
    2. Skiffy and the Twin Planets (1982)
33. The Jersey Shore (1973)
34. A Year and a Day. Illustrated by Krystyna Turska (1976)
35. It (1977)
    • It. 1977. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980.
36. Max's Dream. Illustrated by Laszlo Acs (1977)
37. While the Bells Ring. Illustrated by Janet Rawlins (1979)
38. The Patchwork Cat. Illustrated by Nicola Bayley (1981)
39. Winter Quarters (1982)
    • Winter Quarters. Illustrated by Margery Gill. 1982. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.
40. Salt River Times. Illustrated by Elizabeth Honey (1982)
    • Salt River Times. Illustrated by Elizabeth Honey. 1980. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.
41. The Mouldy. Illustrated by Nicola Bayley (1983)
42. Hob Series (1984-1997)
    1. The Blue Book of Hob Stories. Illustrated by Patrick Benson (1984)
    2. The Green Book of Hob Stories. Illustrated by Patrick Benson (1984)
    3. The Red Book of Hob Stories. Illustrated by Patrick Benson (1984)
    4. The Yellow Book of Hob Stories. Illustrated by Patrick Benson (1984)
    5. The Book of Hob Stories. [Omnibus]. Illustrated by Patrick Benson (1991)
    6. Hob and the Goblins. Illustrated by Norman Messenger (1993)
    7. Hob and the Peddler. Illustrated by Norman Messenger (1997)
43. Drift (1985)
44. Gideon Ahoy! (1987)
    • Gideon Ahoy! Illustrated by Chris Molan. 1987. Plus Fiction. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989.
45. Kelpie (1987)
    • Kelpie. London: Jonathan Cape, 1987.
46. Tiger’s Railway (1987)
    • Tiger’s Railway. Illustrated by Juan Wijngaard. London: Walker Books, 1987.
47. Antar and the Eagles (1989)
    • Antar and the Eagles. London: Walker Books, 1989.
48. The Farm that Ran out of Names (1990)
    • The Farm that Ran out of Names. 1990. A Red Fox Book. London: Random Century Children’s Books, 1991.
49. The Men of the House. Illustrated by Michaela Stewart (1990)
50. Low Tide (1992)
    • Low Tide. 1992. A Red Fox Book. London: Random Century Children’s Books, 1993.
51. Oh Grandmama. Illustrated by Maureen Bradley (1993)
52. Cuddy (1994)
53. Bells on her Toes. Illustrated by Maureen Bradley (1994)
54. Fairy Tales of London Town Series (1995-1996)
    1. The Fairy Tales of London Town: Upon Paul's Steeple. Illustrated by Peter Melnyczuk (1995)
    2. The Fairy Tales of London Town: See-Saw Sacradown. Illustrated by Peter Melnyczuk (1996)
55. Lady Muck. Illustrated by Jonathan Heale (1997)
56. Midnight Fair (1997)
57. Captain Ming and the Mermaid (1999)
58. Imogen and the Ark (1999)
59. The Worm in the Well (2002)
    • The Worm in the Well. Hodder Silver Series. London: Hodder Children’s Books, 2002.
60. The Animal Garden (2003)
61. Emily Goes To Market. Illustrated by Sophy Williams (2004)
62. Jubilee's Pups (2004)
63. Every Dog (2009)

Short Stories:


64. All the King's Men (1982)
    1. All the King's Men
    2. Boy to Island
    3. Stony Ray
    • All the King’s Men. London: Jonathan Cape, 1982.
65. A Small Pudding for Wee Gowry; and Other Stories of Underground Creatures. Illustrated by Martin Cottam (1983)
66. The Blemyah Stories. Illustrated by Juan Wijngaard (1987)
67. The Second Hand Horse (1990)
    • The Second Hand Horse and Other Stories. 1990. Mammoth. London: Mandarin Books, 1992.
68. The Fox Gate and Other Stories. Illustrated by William Geldart (1996)

Edited:


69. Book of Kings (1964)
    • [with Eleanor Farjeon] The Hamish Hamilton Book of Kings. Illustrated by Victor Ambrus. London: Hamish Hamilton Children's Books Ltd., 1964.
70. Book of Queens (1965)
    • [with Eleanor Farjeon] The Hamish Hamilton Book of Queens. Illustrated by Victor Ambrus. London: Hamish Hamilton Children's Books Ltd., 1965.
71. Book of Heroes (1967)
    • A Book of Heroes. Illustrated by Krystyna Turska. 1967. Puffin Books, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.
72. Book of Giants (1968)
    • A Book of Giants. Illustrated by Raymond Briggs. 1968. Puffin Books, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.

William Mayne (16 March 1928 - 24 March 2010)

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The (Daft) Afterlife of Doctor Dee

Dr John Dee (1527-1609)

When local poet James Norcliffe published the collection Letters to Dr Dee in 1993, he thought it necessary to add the following explanatory note about his title:

Despite the oriental sounding name, the Dee I write to in these sequences is not Van Gulik's Chinese Magistrate of the Tang Dynasty, but John Dee, the Elizabethan magus. Dee was a man who straddled the medieval and modern worlds, a true alchemist of the crystal ball gazing type, a searcher of the philosopher's stone, the astrologer for Elizabeth I; and yet probably the foremost mathematician of his day, the man whose navigational assistance helped Frobisher in his search for the North-West Passage. Dee was reported to have had the largest personal library of any contemporary European at his home in Mortlake. I had been reading about this odd combination of mystic and rational man and I found it interesting to address my notes to him.

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura: James Norcliffe (1946- )

James Norcliffe. Letters to Dr Dee. Hazard Poets. Christchurch: Hazard Press, 1993.

I'm not sure if Norcliffe would run into the same difficulties with name recognition now as he did then. I've already had my say on the subject of "Van Gulik's Chinese Magistrate of the Tang Dynasty," Judge Dee, so I thought this might be the moment to extend the same courtesy to Dr John Dee, Norcliffe's "Elizabethan magus."

Or rather, what interests me here is not so much Dr Dee himself, fascinating - albeit distinctly dodgy - figure though he undoubtedly was, but the various roles he's been allotted in popular culture since his death in penury, a forgotten man, in 1609 (or was it toward the end of 1608? Nobody seems to be quite sure).

Peter French: John Dee (1972)

Peter French. John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus. 1972. New York: Dorset Press, 1989.

One of the most vital building blocks in Dee's posthumous reputation is the book above, which I was fortunate enough to find a second-hand copy of the other day (though I'd known of its existence for many years). It's referred to repeatedly in the later works of Frances Yates, undoubtedly one of the most influential modern historians of the Hermetic and esoteric strains in Renaissance thought.

Frances Yates: Theatre of the World (1969)

Frances Yates. Theatre of the World. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969.

The last paper Yates gave in her lifetime was on, in fact, on John Dee, and he played an increasingly important (some would say deleterious) role in her thinking from the 1970s onwards. In brief, her contention was that his acknowledged skill as a mathematician and scientist should not be overshadowed by his popular reputation as a kind of Doctor Faustus, consorting with demons and spirits for dubious ends.

Frances Yates: The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (1979)

Frances Yates. The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age. 1979. Ark Paperbacks. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.

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Méric Casaubon: A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits (1659)

Meric Casaubon. A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits. 1659. Kila, MT: Kessinger Publishing LLC, n.d.

The tone of the earlier writing about Dr Dee was largely set by the book above, Méric Casaubon's rather sensationalist tome recording the experiments Dee performed with his personal medium Edward Kelley, a dubious con-man who persuaded Dee that he could not only establish contact with spirits, but that this knowledge could be used to achieve the Philosopher's Stone.

Dr John Dee and Edward Kelly call up a spirit (1825)

The two scholars did a kind of European tour through the lands of the Holy Roman Empire in the mid-1580s, during which:

They had audiences with Emperor Rudolf II in Prague Castle and King Stephen Báthory of Poland, whom they attempted to convince of the importance of angelic communication.

They were suspected, however - probably justifiably - as passing on information to Queen Elizabeth's spymaster Francis Walsingham at the same time as pursuing their alchemical researches, which may explain some of the suspicion with which they were treated.

In 1587, at a spiritual conference in Bohemia, Kelley told Dee that the angel Uriel had ordered the men to share all their possessions, including their wives ... The order for wife-sharing caused Dee anguish, but he apparently did not doubt it was genuine and they apparently shared wives. However, Dee broke off the conferences immediately afterwards. He returned to England in 1589, while Kelley went on to be the alchemist to Emperor Rudolf II.

Emperor Rudolf II (1552–1612)

Kelley eventually fell from grace when he failed, despite all his grandiose promises to the Emperor, to produce gold from base metal. He died trying to escape from prison sometime around 1597-98.

Dee, too, had a rather unfortunate time of it in his later years:

Dee returned to Mortlake after six years abroad to find his home vandalised, his library ruined and many of his prized books and instruments stolen. Furthermore, he found that increasing criticism of occult practices had made England still less hospitable to his magical practices and natural philosophy.

The accession of the rabid witchhunter and demonologist King James to the throne in 1603 was not good news for Dee. While Elizabeth had continued to back her old astrologer and adviser to some extent, even when he fell from favour everywhere else, James did not feel similarly inclined.

Dee was, it seems, forced to sell off most of the remainder of his once awe-inspiring library to provide for daily necessities for himself and his daughter Katherine.

John Dee memorial plaque (Mortlake, 2013)

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Colin Wilson: The Occult (1971)

Colin Wilson. The Occult: A History. 1971. Occult Trilogy #1. New York: Vintage Books, 1973.

For a spirited (if somewhat sensationalist) account of all these doings, you could do worse than read the relevant section in Colin Wilson's bestselling page-turner The Occult. Nobody ever accused Wilson of not knowing a good story when he ran across it, and much of the subsequent palaver about Doctor Dee is probably based on the information included in his book.

Benjamin Woolley: The Queen’s Conjuror: The Life and Magic of Dr Dee (2001)

Benjamin Woolley. The Queen’s Conjuror: The Life and Magic of Dr Dee. 2001. A Flamingo Book. London: HarperCollins, 2002.

If, however, you'd like to read something a bit more reliable about the life and times of this extraordinary man, the book above might be a better place to go. If you'd like even more detail than that, however, I'd recommend a perusal of his surviving diaries.

Edward Fenton, ed.: The Diaries of John Dee (1998)

Edward Fenton, ed. The Diaries of John Dee. Charlbury, Oxfordshire: Day Books, 1998.

There's an edition of Halliwell's nineteenth-century edition of Dee's private diary available online, also well worth a look:

James Halliwell: The Private Diary of Dr John Dee (1842)

The Private Diary of Dr John Dee, and the Catalogue of His Library of Manuscripts. Ed James Orchard Halliwell. London: Printed for the camden Society, 1842.

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Christopher Marlowe: Doctor Faustus (1594)

Dee's credibility problems began pretty early. Already, in his own lifetime, he was popularly regarded as a sinister occultist, and there are many reasons to suppose that Doctor Faustus in Marlowe's play is at least partly based on him and his jaunts with Edward Kelley - his Mephistopheles - around Central Europe.

Elizabeth appointed Dee Warden of the sternly Protestant Christ's College, Manchester in 1595, shortly after the first performances of Marlowe's masterpiece, and it's tempting to conjecture that this may be one of the reasons "he could not exert much control over its fellows, who despised or cheated him."

William Shakespeare: The Tempest (1610-11)

Was the magician Prospero, exiled Duke of Milan, in Shakespeare's penultimate play The Tempest similarly based on Dee? The answer is probably yes. The latter had, after all, recently died, which made him fair game for an enterprising playwright. And, after all, what other models for a old-school Renaissance Magus were to be found in Jacobean Britain?

After that the trail went cold for a bit until the appearance of Méric Casaubon's immensely damaging account of Dee's séances with Edward Kelley (mentioned above) in 1659. This may not have been Casaubon's intention, but it did mean that Dee was now considered just one more name on a long list of credulous alchemists and occultists (Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, Ficino, Cagliostro) whose ideas had been swept into oblivion by the new experimental science of the Enlightenment.

Dee was, accordingly, the obvious suspect to have formerly owned the famously indecipherable Voynich manuscript:

The Voynich Manuscript (c. 15th century)

Dee has often been associated with the Voynich manuscript. Wilfrid Michael Voynich, who bought the manuscript in 1912, suggested that Dee may have owned it and sold it to Rudolph II. Dee's contacts with Rudolph were less extensive than had been thought, however, and Dee's diaries show no evidence of a sale.

Similarly, H. P. Lovecraft felt no qualms about dubbing him translator of the English version of his imaginary forbidden tome, the "Mad Arab" Abdul Alhazred's Kitab al-Azif, or Necronomicon:

Dr. John Dee, trans.: The Necronomicon (1596)

It wasn't until later in the twentieth century that scholars began to pay him serious attention again. But the appearance of various studies of his influence on the English Renaissance by by Frances Yates and her successors was, unfortunately, accompanied by some rather less flattering portrayals.

Sandman fandom wiki: John Dee

The character John Dee (aka Doctor Destiny), for instance, appeared in the first, 1988-1989 story-arc of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman as a psychopathic killer, the son of Aleister Crowley-like Magus Roderick Burgess and his absconding lover Ethel Cripps. At the end of his rampage in the comic he's returned to a cell in Arkham Asylum.

Sandman fandom wiki: David Thewliss as John Dee (Netflix, 2022)

Neil Gaiman. The Sandman Library I: Preludes & Nocturnes. [Issues #1–8, 1988–1989]. 1991. New York: Vertigo/DC Comics, 1995.

Peter Ackroyd's contribution to this thriving sub-genre is not really much better. His House of Dr Dee lacks the dramatic energy and interest of previous efforts such as Hawksmoor (1985) or Chatterton (1987). It's almost as if he expects the famous house at Mortlake to supply the plotting for him. Even Wikipedia is hard put to it to sum up the point of it all:

The novel is a mix of the two men's stories as Palmer continues to find out more about the doctor. As the investigation continues, it is revealed that both men are similar in that they are both selfish and would rather be left to themselves.

A little like their author, one is tempted to add.

Peter Ackroyd: The House of Dr Dee (1993)

I won't go into all the other movies, fictions and video games inspired by - or including - Dr Dee. Some of the brighter spots are John Crowley's four-volume novel-sequence Ægypt (1987-2007); Michael Scott's six-volume fantasy series The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel (2007-12); and Phil Rickman's The Bones of Avalon (2010), where Dee plays an undercover secret agent turned detective.

You can find a more comprehensive list here.

Perhaps the most intriguing of the bunch to date is Blur-alumnus Damon Albarn's 2011 opera Dr Dee:

Damon Albarn: Dr Dee: An English Opera (2011)

There was once an Englishman so influential that he defined how we measure years, so quintessential that he lives on in Shakespeare’s words; yet so shrouded in mystery that he’s fallen from the very pages of history itself.
That man was Dr Dee – astrologer, courtier, alchemist, and spy.

The opera was originally conceived as a collaboration with comics-maestro (and self-styled modern Magus) Alan Moore, who initially suggested this choice of subject. The collaboration soon broke down, but Albarn persevered with the project.

Not having seen it, I can't comment further, but:

The Guardian gave the Manchester production four stars, saying that it "reaches to the heart of the tragedy of an overreaching intellect destroyed by a deal with a second-rate Mephistopheles". The Independent also awarded four stars, saying that the production was "mostly a triumph ... Rupert Christiansen in The Daily Telegraph gave the same star-rating, describing the opera as "fresh, original and heartfelt". The NME described it as "visually sumptuous and musically haunting".

Mind you, there's a rather amusing rant on a blog called The Renaissance Mathematicus entitled "Mythologizing John Dee" which sets out to unpack all the half-truths and false assumptions in the blurb above, sent out by the Manchester Festival.

Let’s take a look at how many of the facts ... are correct. John Dee did not define how we measure the years. He was consulted by the court on the possibility of introducing the Gregorian Calendar into England ... Far from being so shrouded in mystery that he’s fallen from the pages of history I can think of no other minor figure from the Elizabethan Age, and let us not fool ourselves in comparison to many others Dee in a very minor figure, who is so present in the pages of history. In not just British but European literature Dee is THE Renaissance Magus, minor and major figure in novels, films and theatre.
The list, astrologer, courtier, alchemist and spy, leaves out his principle [sic. - for "principal"] occupation: mathematician. Dee was one of the leading mathematical practitioners of the age known and respected throughout Europe. Also calling him a courtier is not strictly correct as although he was often consulted by the court as an expert on a wide range of topics he never succeeded in his aim of receiving an official appointment at court, Elizabeth and her advisors preferring to keep him at arms [sic] length ...
Lastly we turn to his supposed inspiration of Shakespeare and Marlow [sic]. The claim that he was the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Prospero is a rather dubious supposition with no proven basis in fact. This claim seems to have been fuelled by Peter Greenaway basing his Prospero, in the film Prospero’s Books, at least partially on Dee.

Peter Greenaway, dir. : Prospero’s Books (1991)

Peter Greenaway. Prospero’s Books: A Film of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1991.

It's somehow comforting to know that Dr Dee can still rouse such passions after all these years! (And no doubt few of my own blogposts are free from typos, either ...) Is that true about Prospero’s Books, though? Did it really suggest the Dee-as-Prospero theory? It may have popularised it, but it certainly didn't start it:

In an analysis of The Tempest, Frances Yates writes: “It is inevitable and unavoidable in thinking of Prospero to bring in the name of John Dee, the great mathematical magus of whom Shakespeare must have known, the teacher of Philip Sidney, and deeply in the confidence of Queen Elizabeth I."

Yates's book Shakespeare's Last Plays: A New Approach was first published in 1975, long before Greenaway's film.

Another blogger sums up the present situation as follows:

It is popular to run to the historical visage of the famous physician, astrologer, and scrier, John Dee, as a probable influence whenever the stereotype of the bearded, crystal gazing, and be-robed wizard appears in literature or mythology. Dee has been suggested for Soloman of Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, Prospero of the Tempest, Faust of the Faust legends, and many other similar wizard-like personages over the centuries.

Why can't we just give the poor guy a rest? "You were silly like us," as Auden said of W. B. Yeats, another inveterate Occultist:

ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
[In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming]

- H. P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928)

"In his house at Mortlake dead Dee waits dreaming." All he ever wanted, apparently, was just to read his books in peace and quiet, whilst conferring with angels or spirits from time to time by means of his Enochian tablets ...

John Dee: Enochian tablets

Favourite Children's Authors: Joan Aiken

Joan Aiken: The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (1963)

Edward Gorey's hand is unmistakable in the cover above. The first, British edition was illustrated throughout by Pat Marriott, whose sketchy, almost Phiz-like graphic style has become almost inextricable from Joan Aiken's children's books, new and old. But there's perhaps something even more appropriate about this juxtaposition with the mad, campy, Gothic spirit of Gorey.

As long as I can remember, I've been reading and collecting Aiken's work. Ever since I first entered her strange alternate universe, an early nineteenth-century world situated somewhere between Jane Austen's home counties and Charles Dickens' London, I've felt at home there. As she explains at the opening of the Wolves of Willoughby Chase:

The action of this book takes place in a period of English history that never happened - shortly after the accession to the throne of Good King James III in 1832. At this time, the Channel Tunnel from Dover to Calais having been recently completed, a great many wolves, driven by severe winters, had migrated through the tunnel from Europe and Russia to the British Isles.

The Wolves Chronicles, her most famous novel-sequence, could, I suppose, be described as proto-steampunk in its obsession with the backwards view of what might have been the great nineteenth century if only King James hadn't been forced to flee from his kingdom in 1688, leaving no Dutch King William to win the Battle of the Boyne.

However things might have turned out, they would at the very least have been different.

The Battle of the Boyne (1690)

From book to book, setting to setting - colonial America in Night Birds in Nantucket; a mythic version of Wales in the The Whispering Mountain; the imaginary "Roman American" realm of New Cumbria in The Stolen Lake - there's never a pause in the madcap pace of these adventures. More to the point, as the series progressed over the decades, Aiken was able to use her licence to rewrite history to critique not only Victorian laissez-faire industrialism, but also the brutal colonialism of that and other times.

•

The Wolves Chronicles
[in - approximate - sequential order]:

Joan Aiken: The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (1962)


1. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (1962)
   • The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. Illustrated by Pat Marriott. 1962. The Wolves Chronicles, 1. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.

This book, the first to be written, is still the most popular for many readers. It's quite restrained by the standards of what was to come from the depths of Aiken's imagination, but that early scene with a prissy young girl being threatened by wolves in a railway carriage has remained in my memory long after the rest of its somewhat melodramatic plot has faded. Evil governesses, haunted mansions, oppressive orphanages, and the constant threat of lethal violence from human and animal alike all feature as motifs in the story, though not nearly in as fully developed a form as they would eventually attain in the later volumes.


Joan Aiken: Black Hearts in Battersea (1964)


2. Black Hearts in Battersea (1964)
   • Black Hearts in Battersea. Illustrated by Pat Marriott. 1965. The Wolves Chronicles, 2. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.

The fact that in Aiken's world the Protestant "glorious revolution" of 1688 clearly never took place opens up all sorts of plot possibilities. The second book in her roman-fleuve, Black Hearts in Battersea, concerns a cabal of Hanoverian revolutionaries in London, plotting to bring over Bonnie Prince George, the "true" heir to the throne. There are air balloons, bomb-plots, and missing heirs a-plenty. Simon, the ostensible hero, introduced as a mysterious wild boy in The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, turns out (unsurprisingly) to be of noble birth - as well as a dab hand at painting. More to the point, it's this book which introduces the true protagonist of the series, the cheeky and endlessly resourceful Dido Twite.


Joan Aiken: Night Birds on Nantucket (1966)


3. Nightbirds on Nantucket (1966)
   • Night Birds on Nantucket. Illustrated by Pat Marriott. 1966. The Wolves Chronicles, 3. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.

Shifting the scene to America, and providing Dido Twite - missing, presumed drowned, at the end of the previous book - with a ten-month period of hibernation on a whaling ship, provides Aiken with scope to introduce even more material from her stock of nineteenth-century fictional tropes. Moby-Dick is firmly in her cross-hairs (though this time the whale is pink - and friendly), but so is the giant gun from Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon. Aiken's cannon is pointed at London, however, and threatens not only to end the Stuart dynasty but - even worse - to propel the island of Nantucket onto the Jersey Shore!


Joan Aiken: The Whispering Mountain (1968)


4. The Whispering Mountain (1968)
   • The Whispering Mountain. Illustrated by Pat Marriott. 1968. The Wolves Chronicles, 4. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.

Though often described as hors-série, given that The Whispering Mountain concerns the doings of Owen Hughes, son of Captain Hughes of the Thrush, the ship which transports Dido Twite from Nantucket to England, it seems only proper to place it here, fourth in the series as well as in order of publication. It can also be seen as the moment when Aiken's somewhat chaotic mélange of styles finally begins to come into balance. Ancient Welsh legends and Bardic lore combine with a race of mysterious dwarfs from Central Asia to tip us from one crisis to another. Only the courage and never-say-die attitude of Owen Hughes and his friend Arabis can save the Harp of Teirtu from the machinations of the callous Marquess of Malyn. It's no surprise that, as well as winning the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, this book was a runner-up for the Carnegie Medal.


Joan Aiken: The Stolen Lake (1981)


5. The Stolen Lake (1981)
   • The Stolen Lake. Illustrated by Pat Marriott. 1981. The Wolves Chronicles, 5. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.

Twite's long - and frequently interrupted - voyage home to Britain after her sojourn on Nantucket allowed Aiken scope to "follow Dido Twite around the world." The first of these interludes, The Stolen Lake, is:

set in an imaginary South American country near Hy Brasil, where a Lost Race civilization is nearing meltdown due to the insatiable demands of its ruler, Queen Ginevra (i.e. Guinevere), who has been drinking the blood of virgins to maintain her Immortality; but the coming of King Arthur returns the tale to ethical normalcy.

- John Clute, "Joan Aiken." Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

This complex tale resembles The Whispering Mountain in many ways, but the unabashedly supernatural nature of many of the events shows a certain shift in the tone of the series. What Aiken once played largely for laughs has now become rather more serious.


Joan Aiken: Limbo Lodge (1999)


6. Limbo Lodge [aka "Dangerous Games"] (1999)
   • Limbo Lodge. 1999. The Wolves Chronicles, 6. London: Red Fox, 2000.

I suppose I had assumed that Aiken's "Wolves" stories might begin to lose their focus as the decades went by, given her creator's decision to leave Dido Twite still caught in essentially the same net of improbabilities that entangled her in the 60s and 70s. Nothing could be further from the truth. It's hard to avoid the suspicion that Aiken had been reading Ursula Le Guin's 1972 Vietnam parable The Word for World is Forest before venturing into the dark thickets of Limbo Lodge. In some ways this is my favourite of all of her works. Her detestation of the gloomy practices and ideologies of colonialism is spiced with a fascinated exploration of the complex world of the forests of Aratu, island of the Pearl Snakes. The references to "Angria," the Brontës' imaginary kingdom in Africa add piquancy to the usual Aikenian phantasmagoria.


Joan Aiken: The Cuckoo Tree (1971)


7. The Cuckoo Tree (1971)
   • The Cuckoo Tree. Illustrated by Pat Marriott. 1971. The Wolves Chronicles, 7. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.

So, to make a long story short, Dido Twite appears to have left Nantucket on the English sloop Thrush, commanded by the "lively, imperturbable" Captain Osbaldeston, who (now styled Osbaldestone with an 'e') was succeeded in Bermuda by the "tall, stern" Captain Hughes (father of Owen, the hero of The Whispering Mountain) who, in his turn, was ordered to set sail for South America, then on to the Pacific in pursuit of the errant Lord Herodsfoot; she then took a side-trip on the Siwara to the island of Aratu, then rejoined the Thrush for the long voyage home to England with the now badly wounded Captain Hughes. Dido seems as imperturbable as ever when confronted by Highwaymen on the road back to London, however. Nor can witches, missing heirs, and hallucinogenic nuts prevent her from once again saving the day for the new king, Richard the IVth.


Joan Aiken: Dido and Pa (1986)


8. Dido and Pa (1986)
   • Dido and Pa. Illustrated by Pat Marriott. 1986. The Wolves Chronicles, 8. London: Red Fox, 1992.

This book follows hard on the heels of The Cuckoo Tree. In fact, it begins with the conversation between Simon (now 6th Duke of Battersea) and Dido Twite intimated at the end of the previous book. For anyone weary of Hanoverian plotters, it comes as a bit of a relief to hear of the death of "Bonnie Prince Georgie" over the sea in Germany. Unfortunately he has a successor in the even more ruthless Margrave Wolfgang von Eisengrim, first cousin to the Pretender. A Prisoner of Zenda-like plot follows, with the attempted fabrication of a gullible double for the newly crowned King Richard, and a series of grim and violent adventures, with an even higher body count than usual. It's good to have roving packs of wolves back in the limelight, and particularly pleasing when they devour Dido's callous and duplicitous father Abednego Twite (whose catchy tunes - and more serious music - may, it is hinted, survive him). Once again virtue triumphs: but only just ...


Joan Aiken: Midnight is a Place (1974)


9. Midnight is a Place (1974)
   • Midnight is a Place. Illustrated by Pat Marriott. 1974. The Wolves Chronicles, 9. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.

Like The Whispering Mountain, this book is generally considered hors-série. If it's to be placed anywhere in the sequence, though, it probably has to be here. It's set (for the most part) in the Dickensian industrial town of Blastburn, which played a similar role in The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. We're also given a precise date for once: Lucas Bell's first diary entry is dated 1842. Towards the end of the book Murgatroyd's mill has been bought by Lady Murgatroyd's cousin Lord Holdernesse, who seems to be promising a new era of fairness and justice in its appalling confines. It's certainly a very spirited tale, with a good deal of interesting information about Victorian mudlarks and the whole economic machinery of generating cash from scraps and refuse - a process explored with more symbolic intent in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend.


Joan Aiken: Is (1992)


10. Is [aka: Is Underground] (1992)
    • Is. Illustrated by Pat Marriott. 1992. The Wolves Chronicles, 10. London: Red Fox, 1993.

Is ... is set at a time when the north of England has seceded from the south, and a grim gradgrind Dystopia feeds (almost literally) on duped children to fuel its industrial mania.

- John Clute, "Joan Aiken." Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

What Clute describes as the "Steampunk atmosphere of this tale" perhaps explains Aiken's choice of Is, Dido's younger sister, first introduced (under the name of "slut") as a lowly, starved servant girl in Dido and Pa, as a more appropriate protagonist than her increasingly high-toned sister. It must come after Midnight is a Place, as its principal setting, Blastburn, "has had its name changed to Holdernesse" [p.34], and Lord Holdernesse was just beginning to buy up the area at the end of the previous book. Since then, however, the whole town has been moved underground, and only the ruins of the old order are left outside its grim gates. With a combination of telepathy, grit, and guile, Is manages to upset the plans of her uncle, Roy Twite (otherwise known as "Gold Kingy"), find her missing cousin Arun - but not, unfortunately, his friend Davie Stuart, the heir to the throne, who died in one of the blast furnaces of the new order. The tidings of his death are so shocking to his father, King Richard, that he promptly dies, leaving the throne to descend to his cousin Simon, Duke of Battersea.


Joan Aiken: Cold Shoulder Road (1995)


11. Cold Shoulder Road (1995)
    • Cold Shoulder Road. 1995. The Wolves Chronicles, 11. London: Red Fox, 1996.

Cold Shoulder Road follows straight on from Is. The two cousins, Is and Arun, have gone south in search of the latter's mother, and are promptly swept up in a conspiracy to smuggle goods through the Channel Tunnel by a group called the Merry Gentry. Is's abilities as a telepath, developed during his servitude in the mines in the previous book, are one of the few cards LOMAK [the League of Mothers and Kids] have to play in their struggle against all this negative male energy. Truth and justice do eventually prevail, but at a fearful cost in lost lives.


Joan Aiken: Midwinter Nightingale (2003)


12. Midwinter Nightingale (2003)
    • Midwinter Nightingale. The Wolves Chronicles, 12. New York: Delacorte Press, 2003.

Some useful details about Aiken's alternative history were revealed in the previous book: for instance, the fact that Charles I was beheaded in this timeline, too, despite his wife Henrietta Maria's attempts to bolster the cause with a ship full of treasure. Midwinter Nightingale is equally informative about the early days of King Richard IV's reign: for instance, that his son Davie Stuart (who died in the north in Is) was the result of an earlier marriage. His new wife, Adelaide, also has children from a previous union (though this was concealed from the King), a fact which provides the narrative impetus for this new story, which runs more or less in parallel with Cold Shoulder Road. Dido is her usual resourceful self, though this time she has werewolves to contend with as well as the more common would-be usurpers.


Joan Aiken: The Witch of Clatteringshaws (2005)


13. The Witch of Clatteringshaws (2005)
    • The Witch of Clatteringshaws. 2005. The Wolves Chronicles, 13. A Yearling Book. New York: Random House Children's Books, 2006.

The dynastic and social details in this, Aiken's final novel, have begun to mount up into a kind of anarchy of warring nations and plotters. The scene has shifted to Scotland, which gives her scope for even more experiments with regional vernacular. Short though it is, it contains enough plot for a much longer novel. The witch herself, and her gossipy letters to her various cousins, are perhaps its strongest point. Beyond that, it's clear that even with a new king on the throne - not Simon, who's mercifully been spared the burden - there'll never be peace in the British Isles at this rate. If a little less than an entirely satisfying conclusion to so long and baroque a narrative odyssey, The Witch of Clatteringshaws is a fine book in itself: though possibly intended for slightly younger readers than some of the earlier titles in the series.

Mary Thaler: My Wolves First Editions (2018)

A Few Notes on Chronology:

To say that the timeline of these books is a bit confusing would be to put it mildly. In the first of them, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (1962), it's stated that the action "takes place ... shortly after the accession to the throne of Good King James III in 1832."
The next clear set of dates are given at the beginning of Dido and Pa (1986), where the updated "family tree of the Dukes of Battersea" gives 1818 as the birthdates for Simon, the 6th Duke, and his twin sister Sophie. It also gives 1840 as the date of the death of the 5th Duke. However, partway through the same book, Sophie states "Next year when I am eighteen ... my money comes out of trust and the lawyers can't stop me using it." [p.262].
There are various problems here. For a start, if the action of Dido and Pa is taking place in 1835 [1818 + 17 for Simon & Sophie's coming of age "next year"], then that means that "Good King James" only reigned for three years, 1832-35. This doesn't seem to fit in very well with the numerous contextual references to the "old King" and his long reign. Above all, it can't be reconciled with the 5th Duke's, Simon's "Uncle William," having "died of the quinsy last winter" [p.11] - i.e. 1834-35. Yet his death date is clearly given as 1840 in the Battersea family tree.
Midnight is a Place is also firmly dated to 1842 by a note in Lucas Bell's diary. So presumably this is meant to be a little later in the reign of Richard IV - or "Davie Jamie Charlie Neddie Georgie Harry Dick Tudor-Stuart" - heir to the throne in The Whispering Mountain (1968), and crowned at the end of The Cuckoo Tree (1971). He dies of grief at the news of the loss of his son and heir Prince Davie at the end of Is (1992), leaving his cousin Simon to take the throne as King Simon the First.
It's hard to see how any of these royal personages can be reconciled with the actual "Old Pretender" James III (1688-1766), or his son Charles III, "Bonnie Prince Charlie" (1720-1788). James II must presumably have continued his reign long after 1688 (he did, after all, live in exile in our own universe until 1701), and must have been succeeded by various "Tudor-Stuart" kings not named James or Richard - though there could certainly have been a few extra Charleses (perhaps four, to match the four Georges?) to bring us all the way to the 1830s. But there's a rather disconcerting aside on p.123 of The Stolen Lake (1981), where King Arthur's wife Queen Ginevra is described as having "very little chin ... like Queen Victoria." So maybe the latter, too, needs to be folded back into the succession: as a wife rather than a reigning monarch, perhaps?
The opening of the Channel Tunnel also seems to shift around in time. It's stated to have recently taken place at the beginning of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, but Arun says, at the beginning of Cold Shoulder Road (1995), "They were still digging it when I ran away from home" [p.2], which is confirmed, in context, to be no more than "five years agone". We're still very much in the era of the original Wolves novel, it would appear, despite all these changes of monarch and scene ...
Clearly Joan Aiken wasn't one of those Emily Brontë-like authors who plot out their timelines with precision in an almanac before sitting down to write. On the contrary, she scattered round dates and dynasties with the careless profusion of an Arthur Conan Doyle, whose "Sherlock Holmes" chronology has baffled experts for well over a century. Nevertheless, I'd like to start the ball rolling with something along the following lines:

A Tentative Wolves Timeline:
[firm dates / conjectured dates]

• 1818 - Hanoverian wars / Simon & Sophie born
• 1820 - accession of James III to the throne (wrongly dated to 1832)
• 1830 - opening of the Channel Tunnel
• 1832 - events of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase
• 1833 - events of Black Hearts in Battersea
• 1833 - Dido Twite's ten-month coma aboard a whaling ship
• 1834 - events of Night Birds on Nantucket
• 1834 - events of The Whispering Mountain
• 1834 - Dido Twite starts her voyage home on the Thrush
• 1834 - events of The Stolen Lake in South America
• 1834 - events of Limbo Lodge in the Pacific
• 1834 - Death of William, Duke of Battersea (wrongly dated to 1840)
• 1835 - Dido Twite returns to England on the Thrush
• 1835 - events of The Cuckoo Tree / Coronation of Richard IV
• 1835 - events of Dido and Pa in London
• late 1830s - secession of the North, East and West from the rest of England
• 1842 - events of Midnight is a Place in Blastburn
• 1843 - events of Is in Holdernesse (the new name for Blastburn)
• 1843 - events of Cold Shoulder Road / Accession of Simon I
• 1843 - events of Midwinter Nightingale
• 1844 - events of The Witch of Clatteringshaws / Accession of Piers Ivanhoe le Guichet Crackenthorpe (aka "Woodlouse" or "Cracky Billy") to the throne of England

•

Giles Gordon, ed.: Shakespeare Stories (1982)

One of Aiken's daughters lives in an old pub nearby - she had to sign a paper saying she wouldn't sell liquor to her guests.

- Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell (July 30th, 1964)

This comment comes in a letter where Bishop is extolling to Lowell the homely atmosphere of the England she's just been visiting: "exactly like being in the pages of a Beatrix Potter book ... all the individual well-known animals, the rabbits playing at evening, all the old characters around."

Everything so minute, and built of flints - looking like soiled ancient hail-stones, to me. But you probably have seen all this long ago.

- Words in Air (2008): 545

Bishop's reference to "Aiken" is (of course) to the poet Conrad Aiken (1889-1973), Joan Aiken's father, now largely forgotten but once a bit of an up-and-comer in the modern poetry stakes, a classmate of T. S. Eliot's at Harvard, and author of Earth Triumphant (1914), along with many other collections of semi-traditional verse.

Aiken married [Canadian poet] Jessie MacDonald in 1912, and the couple moved to England in 1921 with their older two children; John (born 1913) and Jane (born 1917), settling in Rye, East Sussex (where the American novelist Henry James had once lived). The couple's youngest daughter, Joan, was born in Rye in 1924. Conrad Aiken returned to Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a tutor at Harvard from 1927 to 1928.

The couple divorced in 1929. All three of their children became writers, John as a SF writer and editor, Jane Aiken Hodge as a novelist, and Joan as a novelist and children's writer.

This rather checkered heritage does, however, offer certain clues to the distinctly transatlantic flavour of much of the latter's writing. Though born in the English Home Counties, she never seemed quite native to the place - she sounded more like a writer-in-residence than a born-and-bred insider.

Perhaps that's what appealed to me so much about her when I first read her work as a child. She didn't seem to belong - an important attribute for all us deracinated colonials, scattered across the globe by the imperial whims of our forebears.

I remember once, in some anthology in the School Library, running across a story by Joan Aiken about the discovery of a lost play by Shakespeare - a version of "Robin Hood", no less - which came to light in a lumber room and was sold to prevent the demolition of the old stately home it was in. This story delighted me greatly - especially the pieces of incidental pastiche she quoted from "The Tragicall Historie of Robin Hoode."

Act I, Scene I. Sherwood Forest. Enter John Lackland, De Bracy, Sheriff of Nottingham, Knights, Lackeys and attendants.

John L.Good sirs, the occasion of our coming hither
Is, since our worthy brother Coeur de Lion
Far from our isle now wars on Paynim soil,
The apprehension of that recreant knave
Most caitiff outlaw who is known by some
As Robin Locksley; by others Robin Hood;
More, since our coffers gape with idle locks
The forfeiture of his ill-gotten gains.
Thus Locksley's stocks will stock our locks enow
While he treats air beneath the forest bough. ...

I looked for it in vain in the rather po-faced pages of the collection pictured above, Shakespeare Stories, full of rather contorted tales-obliquely-invoking-the-Bard by what was then, half a century ago, considered the cream of the British literary establishment.

Joan Aiken: All But a Few (1974)

I did eventually locate it, though, as "A Room full of Leaves", right at the back of her early book All But a Few. It was worth ten of any of the efforts in the more official volume (though one or two of them weren't so bad, either).

Joan Aiken: The Haunting of Lamb House (1991)

She didn't quite fit - and that was her charm. She wasn't high culture, but she wasn't simply a children's writer, either: there was, after all, that Henry James connection. She even wrote a novel about him:

The Haunting of Lamb House ... set in the actual Lamb House in Rye, exposes two of its real-life inhabitants – Henry James ... and E. F. Benson – to the ghost of an eighteenth-century child who has had to endure the breakup of his family.

Perhaps it did all have something to do with the strange, haunted restlessness of her father Conrad. It's not as if it was unmotivated:

On February 27, 1901, [Conrad's father] William Ford Aiken murdered his wife and then committed suicide. According to his 1952 autobiography, Ushant, Aiken, then 11 years old, heard the two gunshots and discovered the bodies immediately thereafter.
... Though Aiken was reluctant to speak of his early trauma and ensuing psychological problems, he acknowledged that his writings were strongly influenced by his studies of Sigmund Freud, Carl G. Jung, Otto Rank, Ferenczi, Adler, and other depth psychologists. It was not until the publication of his autobiography ... that Aiken revealed the emotional challenges that he had battled for much of his adult life.

Joan Aiken timeline (2019)

It's hard to know just what effect these revelations had on his children - though there may be some clues in Joan's rather sinister novella Voices, set in a haunted house in the imaginary town of Dune, which seems to parallel the role of Rye in her own life (as does the absentee writer father of the narrator).

Fortunately, by then Joan had already begun to carve out her own career as a writer:

Writing stories from an early age, she finished her first full-length novel when she was sixteen and had her first short story for adults accepted for publication when she was seventeen. In 1941 her first children's story was broadcast on the BBC's Children's Hour.
Aiken worked for the United Nations Information Centre (UNIC) in London between 1943 and 1949. In September 1945 she married Ronald George Brown, a journalist who was also working at UNIC. They had two children before he died in 1955.

Joan Aiken & Ron Brown (1945)

After her husband's death, Aiken joined the magazine Argosy, where she worked in various editorial capacities and, she later said, learned her trade as a writer. The magazine was one of many in which she published short stories between 1955 and 1960. During this time she also published her first two collections of children's stories and began work on a children's novel, initially titled Bonnie Green, which was later published in 1962 as The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. By then she was able to write full-time from home, producing two or three books a year for the rest of her life ...

Whatever the motivations behind it, Joan Aiken's writing is a joy. I'd feared, when starting to reread it in preparation for this post, that the enchantment might have worn off since I first encountered it. But it doesn't seem at all pinchbeck to me. Maybe you had to be there, but for the bookish child of today, I suspect she could still be a shining star.

Perhaps that great enthusiast John Clute puts it best, in his SFE article:

Throughout her career Aiken generated work of an almost relentless fertility. There is a passionate knowingness in her invention of small details that is clearly a matter of her own satisfaction – few young readers would know, for instance, that the "hobey" played by Dido Twite's father is an oboe, the French hautbois having, in this world, been differently Englished. Her feverishness may derive to some degree from the example of her father, though she maintained strict professional control over even the most exuberant moments; the loving urgency of her depiction of character and landscape and plot seemed an intrinsic gift.

Peace to her ashes. But then, like all true writers, she can't really be said to be dead. Her work will certainly survive her.

Joan Aiken & family in their caravan (1951)
l-to-r: Joan Aiken, Taffy the cat, John & Elizabeth, Ron Brown

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Rod Delroy: Joan Aiken

Joan Delano Aiken
(1924-2004)

Novels:

The Paget family (1978-82):


1. The Smile of the Stranger (1978)
2. The Lightning Tree [aka "The Weeping Ash"] (1980)
3. The Young Lady from Paris [aka "The Girl from Paris"] (1982)

"Jane Austen" novels (1984-2000):


4. Mansfield Revisited (1984)
5. Jane Fairfax: The Secret Story of the Second Heroine in Jane Austen's Emma (1990)
6. Eliza’s Daughter (1994)
7. Emma Watson: The Watsons Completed (1996)
8. The Youngest Miss Ward (1998)
9. Lady Catherine's Necklace (2000)

Miscellaneous:


10. The Silence of Herondale (1964)
11. The Fortune Hunters (1965)
12. Trouble With Product X [aka "Beware of the Bouquet"] (1966)
13. Hate Begins at Home [aka "Dark Interval"] (1967)
14. The Ribs of Death [aka "The Crystal Crow"] (1967)
15. The Embroidered Sunset (1970)
16. The Butterfly Picnic [aka "Cluster of Separate Sparks"] (1972)
17. Died On A Rainy Sunday (1972)
18. Voices in an Empty House (1975)
19. Castle Barebane (1976)
20. The Five-Minute Marriage (1977)
21. Last Movement (1977)
22. Foul Matter (1983)
23. Deception [aka "If I were You"] (1987)
24. The Haunting of Lamb House (1987)
25. Blackground (1989)
26. Morningquest (1992)

Children's Books:

Wolves Chronicles (1962-2005):


27. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (1962)
    • The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. Illustrated by Pat Marriott. 1962. The Wolves Chronicles, 1. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.
28. Black Hearts in Battersea (1964)
    • Black Hearts in Battersea. Illustrated by Pat Marriott. 1965. The Wolves Chronicles, 2. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.
29. Nightbirds on Nantucket (1966)
    • Night Birds on Nantucket. Illustrated by Pat Marriott. 1966. The Wolves Chronicles, 3. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.
30. The Whispering Mountain (1968)
    • The Whispering Mountain. Illustrated by Pat Marriott. The Wolves Chronicles: prequel. 1968. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
31. The Cuckoo Tree (1971)
    • The Cuckoo Tree. Illustrated by Pat Marriott. 1971. The Wolves Chronicles, 6. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.
32. Midnight is a Place (1974)
    • Midnight is a Place. Illustrated by Pat Marriott. The Wolves Chronicles: outlier. 1974. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.
33. The Stolen Lake (1981)
    • The Stolen Lake. Illustrated by Pat Marriott. 1981. The Wolves Chronicles, 4. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.
34. Dido and Pa (1986)
    • Dido and Pa. Illustrated by Pat Marriott. 1986. The Wolves Chronicles, 7. London: Red Fox, 1992.
35. Is [aka: Is Underground] (1992)
    • Is. Illustrated by Pat Marriott. 1992. The Wolves Chronicles, 8. London: Red Fox, 1993.
36. Cold Shoulder Road (1995)
    • Cold Shoulder Road. 1995. The Wolves Chronicles, 9. London: Red Fox, 1996.
37. Limbo Lodge [aka "Dangerous Games"] (1999)
    • Limbo Lodge. 1999. The Wolves Chronicles, 5. London: Red Fox, 2000.
38. Midwinter Nightingale (2003)
    • Midwinter Nightingale. The Wolves Chronicles, 10. New York: Delacorte Press, 2003.
39. The Witch of Clatteringshaws (2005)
    • The Witch of Clatteringshaws. 2005. The Wolves Chronicles, 11. A Yearling Book. New York: Random House Children's Books, 2006.

Arabel and Mortimer (1972-95):


40. Arabel's Raven (1972)
41. Escaped Black Mamba (1973)
42. The Bread Bin (1974)
43. Mortimer's Tie (1976)
44. Mortimer and the Sword Excalibur (1979)
45. The Spiral Stair (1979)
46. The Mystery of Mr Jones's Disappearing Taxi (1982)
47. Mortimer's Portrait on Glass (1982)
48. Mortimer's Cross (1983)
49. Mortimer Says Nothing [stories] (1985)
50. Arabel and Mortimer (1992)
51. Mortimer's Mine (1994)
52. Mayhem in Rumbury (1995)

The Felix trilogy (1978-88):


53. Go Saddle the Sea (1978)
    • Go Saddle the Sea. Illustrated by Pat Marriott. 1978. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.
54. Bridle the Wind (1983)
    • Bridle the Wind. Illustrated by Pat Marriott. 1983. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.
55. The Teeth of the Gale (1988)
    • The Teeth of the Gale. Illustrated by Pat Marriott. 1988. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990.

St Ives Series (2000-02):


56. In Thunder's Pocket. Illustrated by Caroline Crossland (2000)
57. The Song of Mat and Ben. Illustrated by Caroline Crossland (2000)
58. Bone and Dream. Illustrated by Caroline Crossland (2002)

Miscellaneous novels:


59. The Kingdom and the Cave (1960)
60. Night Fall (1969)
61. The Shadow Guests (1980)
    • The Shadow Guests. 1980. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.
62. The Erl King’s Daughter. Illustrated by Paul Warren (1988)
63. Voices [aka "Return to Harken House"] (1988)
    • Voices. Hauntings, 3. London: Hippo Books, 1988.
64. The Shoemaker’s Boy (1991)
65. The Midnight Moropus (1993)
66. The Cockatrice Boys (1996)
67. The Jewel Seed (1997)
68. The Scream (2001)

Stories:


69. All You've Ever Wanted and Other Stories (1953)
    • Selected in: All But a Few. Illustrated by Pat Marriott. 1953, 1955, 1971. A Puffin Book. 1974. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
70. More Than You Bargained For and Other Stories (1955)
    • Selected in: All But a Few. Illustrated by Pat Marriott. 1953, 1955, 1971. A Puffin Book. 1974. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
71. Armitage, Armitage, Fly Away Home (1968)
72. A Small Pinch of Weather and Other Stories (1969)
73. The Windscreen Weepers (1969)
74. Smoke from Cromwell's Time and Other Stories (1970)
75. All and More (1971)
    • Selected in: All But a Few. Illustrated by Pat Marriott. 1953, 1955, 1971. A Puffin Book. 1974. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
76. The Green Flash (1971)
77. A Harp of Fishbones (1972)
    • A Harp of Fishbones and Other Stories. Illustrated by Pat Marriott. 1972. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.
78. All But a Few [aka "Not What You Expected"] (1974)
    • All But a Few. Illustrated by Pat Marriott. 1953, 1955, 1971. A Puffin Book. 1974. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
79. A Bundle of Nerves (1976)
    • A Bundle of Nerves: Stories of Horror, Suspense & Fantasy. 1976. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
80. The Faithless Lollybird and Other Stories (1977)
81. The Far Forests (1977)
82. A Touch of Chill (1979)
83. A Touch of Chill: Tales for Sleepless Nights (1980)
84. Up the Chimney Down (1984)
85. A Goose on Your Grave (1987)
86. Deception [aka "If I Were You"] (1988)
87. Return to Harken House (1988)
88. A Foot in the Grave (1989)
89. Give Yourself a Fright (1989)
90. Shadows & Moonshine (1990)
91. A Fit of Shivers (1990)
92. The Winter Sleepwalker. Illustrated by Quentin Blake (1991)
93. A Creepy Company (1993)
    • A Creepy Company. 1993. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995.
94. A Handful of Gold. Illustrated by Quentin Blake (1995)
95. Dead Man's Lane (1995)
    • Included in: A Creepy Company. 1993. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995.
96. Moon Cake and Other Stories (1998)
97. Ghostly Beasts (2002)
98. Snow Horse and Other Stories (2004)
99. Serial Garden: The Complete Armitage Family Stories [Virago Modern Classics] (2008)
100. The Monkey's Wedding and Other Stories (2011)
101. The Gift Giving [Virago Modern Classics]. Illustrated by Peter Bailey (2016)
102. The People in the Castle: Selected Strange Stories (2016)
103. Stoneywish and Other Chilling Stories (2020)
104. A Ghostly Gallery and Fantastic Fables [E-book]. Cover illustration by Pat Marriott (2023)
105. Siren Stories & Weather Witches and Wise Women [E-book]. Cover illustration by Pat Marriott (2023)
106. Tales of London Town. Illustrated by Annabel Pearl (2024)

Picture Books:


107. A Necklace of Raindrops (1968)
     • A Necklace of Raindrops and Other Stories. Pictures by Jan Pienkowski. 1968. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
108. The Kingdom Under the Sea and Other Stories (1971)
     • The Kingdom Under the Sea and Other Stories. Pictures by Jan Pienkowski. 1971. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.
109. Mice and Mendelson. Illustrated by Babette Cole (1974)
110. Tale of a One-Way Street. Illustrated by Jan Pienkowski (1978)
111. The Kitchen Warriors (1983)
112. Fog Hounds Wind Cat Sea Mice [aka "Fog Hounds and Other Stories"] (1984)
113. The Last Slice of Rainbow and Other Stories (1985)
114. Past Eight O'Clock. Illustrated by Jan Pienkowski (1986)
115. The Moon's Revenge. Illustrated by Alan Lee (1986)
116. Helena and the Wild Man [Oxford Reader] (2000)
117. Serve Me Stefan [Oxford Reader] (2000)
118. Wise Girl [Oxford Reader] (2000)
119. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Illustrated by Belinda Downes (2002)
120. The Wooden Dragon. Illustrated by Bee Willey (2004)

Plays:


121. Winterthing & The Mooncusser’s Daughter (1972 & 1973)
     • Winterthing & The Mooncusser’s Daughter: Two Plays for Children. Music by John Sebastian Brown. 1972 & 1973. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.
122. Street (1978)
123. The Tinker’s Curse (1978)
124. Moon Mill (1982)
125. Hatching Trouble (BBC: 1991)

Poetry:


126. The Skin Spinners (1976)

Non-fiction:


127. The Way to Write for Children (1982)
128. [with John & Jane Aiken Hodge] Conrad Aiken Remembered (1989)

Translation:


129. The Angel Inn [Translated from the Comtesse de Ségur] (1976)

Lizza Aiken: Joan Aiken's books (2024)

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