Favourite Children's Authors: T. H. White

Sylvia Townsend Warner: T. H. White: A Biography (1967)

The blurb for a recent reprint of Sylvia Townsend Warner's biography of her old friend Tim White claims that:

Warner treats White's repressed sexual predilections with humane understanding in this wise portrait of a tormented literary giant, written by a novelist and a poet.

Certainly he had his oddities - as did Sylvia Townsend Warner, for that matter - but it seems rather a strange way to characterise him: "When did you stop beating your wife?" - or, as in this case, repressing your sexual predilections?

T. H. White: The Master (1957)

I suppose that it highlights a problem with T. H. White's body of work as a whole, though. Just what exactly was he? As a writer, that is. We tend to see him as a children's author nowadays - if we think about him at all.

And, certainly, a couple of his books - The Sword in the Stone (1938) and Mistress Masham's Repose (1946) - have become children's classics. Confining him to that pigeon-hole seems more than a little reductive, however.

T. H. White: Mistress Masham's Repose (1946)

Actually I could easily have listed him under either of the other two categories of writer I've been compiling occasional posts about on this blog: Ghost Story Writers, or SF Luminaries.

The Master (1957) is - more or less - SF; and there are a number of ghost stories included in Earth Stopped (1934) and his other short story collections, some of them ("Soft Voices at Passenham") very good indeed.

T. H. White: The Maharajah and Other Stories (1981)

Perhaps he was primarily a fantasy writer, then? Certainly his most famous book, The Once and Future King (1958) is more fantasy than anything else. It is, in fact, probably the most influential retelling of the Arthurian legend since Tennyson's Idylls of the King - and, like Tennyson, its principal source of both raw material and inspiration is Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur (1485).

T. H. White: The Once and Future King (1958 / 1967)

I remember the blurb on the back of my paperback copy referring to White's tetralogy as "a glorious dream of the Middle Ages as they never were but should have been." That strikes me as a pretty accurate description.

In form, The Once and Future King masquerades as a kind of modern commentary on Malory's translation/adaptation of his original French sources in the 13th-century Vulgate Cycle. But it's that pretence which allows White to soar into complex realms of psychology visible only by implication behind the conventions of late medieval romance.

T. H. White: The Sword in the Stone (1938)

I once examined an Honours essay on The Once and Future King. In pursuit of their thesis, this particular student had examined quite closely the extensive revisions White made in both The Sword in the Stone and The Witch in the Wood in order to fit them into the more ambitious, interlinked structure of the larger collection.

T. H. White: The Witch in the Wood (1939)

I see that I said in my comments:

I’m particularly impressed by the textual comparisons this student has made between the initial and revised versions of the first two volumes of the tetralogy (or set of five books: depending on whether or not one counts the Book of Merlyn). The points he makes about the changes in the 1958 text are worked seamlessly and tellingly into his overall argument.

I recommended the highest possible grade for the essay, perhaps partially because I'd been longing to make that comparison myself ever since I learned that there was an earlier version of "The Queen of Air and Darkness", Part Two of The Once and Future King.

T. H. White: The Goshawk (1951)

To complicate things still further, White's initial successes were in the field of outdoorsy, sporting adventure. England Have My Bones (1936) was his first bestseller. It was followed by Burke's Steerage (1938), and then by his masterpiece in the genre, The Goshawk - the terrifyingly intimate and (at times) shocking account of his largely unavailing attempts to tame a wild raptor.

T. H. White & Brownie

As far as his personal life goes, if White ever had a great love, it was definitely for his Irish setter Brownie. He tried to explain the intensity of his feelings for her in a letter to his friend David "Bunny" Garnett:

It is a queer difference between this kind of thing and getting married ... married people love each other at first (I understand) and it fades by use and custom, but with dogs you love them most at last.

Garnett wasn't having any. A real and lasting relationship with an animal was, to him, absurd. In response he lectured White on the immaturity and childishness of so extravagant an overreaction to the "natural" death of a pet.

Still, the poignancy of White's letter about his beloved dog's last days has to be read to be believed:

[November 1944]

Dearest Bunny,

Brownie died today. In all her 14 years of life I have only been away from her at night for 3 times ... but I did go in to Dublin about twice a year to buy books ... and I thought she understood about this. To-day I went at 10, but the bloody devils had managed to kill her somehow when I got back at 7. She was in perfect health. I left her in my bed this morning, as it was an early start. Now I am writing with her dead head in my lap. I will sit up with her tonight, but tomorrow we must bury her. I don’t know what to do after that. I am only sitting up because of that thing about perhaps consciousness persisting a bit. She has been to me more perfect than anything else in all my life, and I have failed her at the end, an 180-1 chance. If it had been any other day I might have known that I had done my best. These fools here did not poison her — I will not believe that. But I could have done more. They kept rubbing her, they say. She looks quite alive. She was wife, mother, mistress & child. Please forgive me for writing this distressing stuff, but it is helping me. Her little tired face cannot be helped. Please do not write to me at all about her, for very long time, but tell me if I ought to buy another bitch or not, as I do not know what to think about anything. I am certain I am not going to kill myself about it, as I thought I might once. However, you will find this all very hysterical, so I may as well stop. I still expect to wake up and find it wasn’t. She was all I had.

love from TIM

Another letter followed hot on its heels:

Dear Bunny,

Please forgive me writing again, but I am so lonely and can’t stop crying and it is the shock. I waked her for two nights and buried her this morning in a turf basket, all my eggs in one basket. Now I am to begin a new life and it is important to begin it right, but I find it difficult to think straight. It is about whether I ought to buy another dog or not ... I might not survive another bereavement like this in 12 years’ time, and dread to put myself in the way of it. If your father & mother & both sons had died at the same moment as Ray, unexpectedly, in your absence, you would know what I am talking about. Unfortunately Brownie was barren, like myself, and as I have rather an overbearing character I had made her live through me, as I lived through her. Brownie was my life and I am lonely for just such another reservoir for my love. But if I did get such reservoir it would die in about 12 years and at present I feel I couldn’t face that. Do people get used to being bereaved? This is my first time. I am feeling very lucky to have a friend like you that I can write to without being thought dotty to go on like that about mere dogs.
They did not poison her. It was one of her little heart attacks and they did not know how to treat it and killed her by the wrong kindnesses.
You must try to understand that I am and will remain entirely without wife or brother or sister or child and that Brownie supplied more than the place of these to me. We loved each other more and more every year.

... All I can do now is to remember her dead as I buried her, the cold grey jowl in the basket, and not as my heart’s blood, which she was for the last eight years of our twelve.

- Quoted from The Futility Closet (17/10/2014)

Angelica Garnett: Deceived with Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood (1984)

Knowing what we now do about the perversity of some of David Garnett's own relationships - his curious April-November marriage to his male lover Duncan Grant's young daughter Angelica Bell, for instance - it's hard not to see his indignation at White's confessions as the pot calling the kettle black.

But then, in this as in so many other matters, White seems to have been ahead of his times rather than - as the censorious Garnett implied - behind them. Such intense love for an animal companion: especially, as in this case, a dog who had been by White's side, through thick and thin, for fourteen years, surely no longer requires an apology?

There were, to be sure, other aspects to White's "repressed sexual predilections" - most of them innocuous enough to a modern reader - but for more detail on that I'll refer you to the White / Garnett Letters or, preferably, S. T. Warner's biography.

T. H. White: The Elephant and the Kangaroo (1947)

Mind you, White's generic and stylistic experiments certainly could lead him astray at times. His account of a new great flood, set in Ireland, where he lived during most of World War II, was greatly resented by his local hosts, who felt that it depicted them as ignorant peasants.

White was horrified by this - as he saw it - misreading of a light-hearted fantasy. but the fact remains that he was no longer welcome in this home away from home. The disposition to turn everything you encounter into copy is, I suppose, the writer's curse: but particularly so in White's case, since it took so long for each of his books to accrete.

Maybe he's not a great writer. Maybe he is. It's hard to take much interest in such matters of literary taxonomy. Above all, he was a great original, and each of his books takes a strikingly different approach to the question of how to live on this earth. His inability to fit into any particular category or mold is probably why they remain so lively and intriguing sixty years after his death.

I'm very fond of Sylvia Townsend Warner's writing, too. All things considered, given her own political and social leanings, I'm not sure she was best placed to interpret her friend Tim. She certainly did her best, however - throwing up her hands at times to admit her perplexity - and her biography remains an indispensable adjunct to the body of his work.

All of it, imho, deserves to be read, reread, and treasured.

Sylvia Townsend Warner: T. H. White: A Biography (1967 / 2023)

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T. H. White

Terence Hanbury White
(1906-1964)

Books I own are marked in bold:

Poetry:


1. Loved Helen (1929)
   • Loved Helen and Other Poems. London: Chatto & Windus, 1929.
2. The Green Bay Tree (1929)
3. A Joy Proposed. Ed. Kurth Sprague (1980)
   • A Joy Proposed: Poems. Ed. Kurth Sprague. 1980. London: Secker & Warburg, 1982.

Fiction:


4. [with R. McNair Scott] Dead Mr Nixon (1931)
5. [as James Aston] First Lesson (1932)
6. [as James Aston] They Winter Abroad (1932)
7. Darkness at Pemberley (1932)
8. Farewell Victoria (1933)
   • Farewell Victoria. 1933. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1945.
9. Earth Stopped (1934)
   • Earth Stopped, or Mr. Marx’s Sporting Tour. London: Collins, 1934.
10. Gone to Ground (1935)
11. The Sword in the Stone (1938)
    • The Sword in the Stone. 1938. London: Collins, 1945.
12. The Witch in the Wood (1939)
13. The Ill-Made Knight (1940)
14. Mistress Masham's Repose (1946)
    • Mistress Masham’s Repose. London: Jonathan Cape, 1947.
15. The Elephant and the Kangaroo (1947)
    • The Elephant and the Kangaroo. London: Jonathan Cape, 1948.
16. The Master: An Adventure Story (1957)
    • The Master: An Adventure Story. 1957. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.
17. The Once and Future King (1958)
    1. The Sword in the Stone (1938)
    2. The Queen of Air and Darkness (1939)
    3. The Ill-Made Knight (1940)
    4. The Candle in the Wind (1958)
    • The Once and Future King. London: Collins, 1958.
    • The Once and Future King. 1958. Fontana Books. London: Collins, 1967.
18. The Book of Merlyn (1977)
    • The Book of Merlyn: The Unpublished Conclusion to the Once and Future King. Prologue by Sylvia Townsend Warner. Illustrations by Trevor Stubley. 1977. London: Fontana / Collins, 1978.
19. The Maharajah and Other Stories: from Earth Stopped (1934) and Gone to Ground (1935). Ed. Kurth Sprague (1981)
    • The Maharajah and Other Stories. Ed. Kurth Sprague. 1981. London: Futura, 1983.
20. The Once and Future King (1996)
    1. The Sword in the Stone (1938)
    2. The Queen of Air and Darkness (1939)
    3. The Ill-Made Knight (1940)
    4. The Candle in the Wind (1958)
    5. The Book of Merlyn (1977)
    • The Once and Future King. 1939, 1940, 1958, 1977. HarperVoyager. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1996.

Non-fiction:


21. England Have My Bones (1936)
    • England Have My Bones. 1936. St. James’s Library. London: Collins, 1952.
22. Burke's Steerage, or, The Amateur Gentleman’s Introduction to Noble Sports and Pastimes (1938)
23. The Age of Scandal (1950)
    • The Age of Scandal: an Excursion through a Minor Period. 1950. London: Jonathan Cape, 1951.
24. The Goshawk (1951)
    • The Goshawk. 1951. With diagrams from sketches by the author and specially illustrated for RU by Ralph Thompson. London: Readers Union Ltd. / Jonathan Cape, 1953.
    • The Goshawk. 1951. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.
25. The Scandalmonger (1952)
    • The Scandalmonger. London: Jonathan Cape, 1952.
26. The Book of Beasts (1954)
    • The Bestiary: a Book of Beasts. 1954. New York: Capricorn Books, 1960.
27. The Godstone and the Blackymor (1959)
    • The Godstone and the Blackymor. Illustrated by Edward Ardizzone. 1959. London: The Reprint Society, 1960.
28. America at Last (1965)

Letters:


29. The White / Garnett Letters. Ed. David Garnett (1968)
30. Letters to a Friend: The Correspondence Between T. H. White and L. J. Potts (1984)
    • Letters to a Friend: The Correspondence between T. H. White and L. J. Potts. Ed. François Gallix. Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1984.

Secondary:


31. Warner, Sylvia Townsend. T. H. White: A Biography. London: Jonathan Cape / Chatto & Windus, 1967.

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Favourite Children's Authors: John Masefield

John Masefield. The Midnight Folk (1927)
[Illustrated by Rowland Hilder (1931)]

When it comes to favourite children's authors, John Masefield's classic kids' book The Midnight Folk, along with its even stranger and more magical sequel The Box of Delights, must certainly have earned him a place in the pantheon.

John Masefield: The Box of Delights (1935)
[Illustrated by Judith Masefield (1935) & Faith Jaques (1984)]

I remember recommending these books to Professor D. I. B. Smith while he was supervising my Masters thesis on the novels of John Masefield. Don couldn't see much in them. "Maybe you had to be there," he said. I suppose he meant that unless you read such books at just the right age, when their mixture of talking animals and ambiguous dreamscapes can be assimilated at face value, they're unlikely ever to exert the same charm.

That may be so. But I was brought up on them, and for me they're just as compelling as Through the Looking Glass or The Wind in the Willows (or, for that matter, Norman Lindsay's The Magic Pudding, another staple of our Antipodean childhood).

What I liked best in The Box of Delights were the little vignettes which could only be reached by means of the mysterious box itself. Riding with Herne the Hunter, observing the aftermath of the Siege of Troy, and visiting the court of King Arthur, were all seemingly real experiences sealed within this strange miniature world created by the (fictional) Medieval Magus Arnold of Todi.

Francisco Ribalta: Ramon Llull (1620)

The Punch-and-Judy man Cole Hawlings, who guides Kay for much of his quest is, we eventually learn, a contemporary of Arnold's, Ramon Lully - or Ramon Llull (1232-1316): a real person this time - who'd attempted to swap his own elixir of life for the box many centuries before.

I'd never heard of Llull before reading The Box of Delights, and when I began to find out more about him years later, reading France Yates's The Art of Memory, I felt as if the hidden depths of Masefield's book were finally beginning to reveal themselves to me.

Renny Rye, dir.: The Box of Delights (BBC, 1984)

If only these mysteries had formed more of a part of the BBC TV adaptation of the book, I would probably have enjoyed it more. As it is, I kept on waiting for my favourite scenes to appear, and was immensely disappointed when they didn't. I'm sure it has its charms for those who watched it as children, but - rather like Don Smith with the book itself - it holds less appeal for me.

In his excellent essay on this particular "musty book" on his Haunted Generation blog, Bob Fischer sees the narrative as one long warning against dwelling too much in the past:

Our collective concept of the past is idealised, even mythologised, and allowing it to intrude into modern life at the expense of the present (no matter how dreary the latter may seem) will inevitably lead to sickness and corruption.

Certainly the temptation to freeze the past in a single small compass - as both Arnold and Ramon have attempted to do - is seen as a vital mistake in Masefield's book. It may not be necessary to go as far as Maria, the youngest of the Jones children, who are staying with Kay for the holidays:

Christmas ought to be brought up to date. It ought to have gangsters and aeroplanes, and a lot of automatic pistols.

This atmosphere of 1930s pulp fiction, too, is shown to have its perils, when Maria is herself kidnapped by the desperate gang who are after the box. If there is an overall theme in the book, it might be the importance of maintaining a live tradition - the tradition of Christmas in the Cathedral, for instance - rather than neglecting it either through soul-sapping nostalgia or blatant greed.

Andrew Skilleter: Cover for The Box of Delights (2024)

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David Llewellyn Dodds, ed. Arthurian Poets: John Masefield (1994)

In keeping with this idea of the need to maintain live traditions, another important creative resource for Masefield throughout his career was the Arthurian legend. There's a definite overlap between his work purely for children, and his work in this particular part-historical, part-fantastic region of the imagination.

The Knights of the Round Table appear in some of Kay's magical journeys in The Box of Delights, and the stories of King Arthur and Camelot also formed a major component of Masefield's fascination with the psychogeography of English places: his birthplace Ledbury, in Herefordshire, for instance, as well as Boar's Hill, near Oxford, where he lived after the First World War.

My own interest in Arthur, sparked by an early reading of the book All About King Arthur by historian (and mystic) Geoffrey Ashe, may seem rather more anomalous, given I was born and brought up in the South Pacific. Whatever the motivations behind it, though, it led me to look out for as many versions as possible of the Arthurian mythos in everything I read subsequently.

The story itself - with its strong underpinning of jealousy, betrayal, and ultimate doom - is, I would have to concede, not one that's entirely comprehensible to children. How are they meant to empathise with characters such as Guinevere, Iseult, or (for that matter) Mordred?

I certainly didn't. But the attempt to do so helped me a lot with my own growing up. Neither Rosemary Sutcliff's Arthur nor Mary Stewart's Merlin - not to mention T. H. White's "Ill-made knight" Lancelot - were straightforward characters, and the stories about them were not especially easy to fathom.

John Masefield: Tristan and Isolt (1927)

Masefield's version of the Arthurian legend was equally curious and offbeat. On the one hand he seemed determined to claw back to the fifth century roots of these stories. On the other hand, he was drawn to the melodrama of Tristan and Lancelot and the preset, fatalistic love stories they seemed doomed to reenact.

Hence his attempt at the first of these stories in the play Tristan and Isolt. Hence also his attempt at a more complete Arthurian cycle in Midsummer Night and Other Tales in Verse.

John Masefield: Midsummer Night and Other Tales in Verse (1928)

This theme in his work would culminate in his last novel, Badon Parchments.

John Masefield: Badon Parchments (1947)

Masefield's fascination with Byzantium was at its height when he wrote this book, so the form that it takes, a series of reports sent back to the Imperial court by Byzantine envoys to the last surviving embers of Roman Britain, in the person of King Arthur and his army, is not as counter-intuitive as it might otherwise appear.

As a novel, though, it's almost nouveau roman-like in its dryness and avoidance of melodrama. Perhaps it was just that he was exhausted with narrative prose by this point - it had, after all, been forty years since he published his first novel, Captain Margaret, in 1908 - or perhaps it was just an experiment that didn't quite come off, but Badon Parchments still seems a curious coda to these two deep fixations of his: Constantinople and King Arthur.

Adam J. Goldwyn & Ingela Nilsson, ed.: Reading the Late Byzantine Romance (2018)

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John Masefield: Martin Hyde: The Duke's Messenger (1910 / 1925)

Which is perhaps as good a reason as any to shift our discussion to that earlier era, when Masefield as a young writer was experimenting with different forms of expression - both in order to define the nature of his own talent, and to make a living in pre-war Grub Street. Children's fiction must have seemed, at that time, one of the more obvious genres for him to try.

It's pretty impressive, even so, that he managed to publish no fewer than four boys' books in the years 1910-1911, before the immense success of his first long narrative poem, The Everlasting Mercy, set him on a more individual path.

The first of them, Martin Hyde, is a rather Henty-esque historical novel about the Monmouth rebellion in the 1680s.

It's an interesting book insofar as it attempts to parallel the romantic atmosphere of Martin's experiences ("We were off. I was on my way to Holland. I was a conspirator travelling with a King. There ahead of me was the fine hull of the schooner la Reina, waiting to carry us to all sorts of adventure ...") with the rather more prosaic nature of everyday life aboard ship:

There you are,' said the mate of the schooner. 'Now down on your knees. Scrub the floor here. See you get it mucho blanco.'
He left me feeling much ashamed at having to work like a common ship's boy, instead of like a prince's page, which is what I had thought myself.

The older Martin, who is narrating the story of his earlier life, has various sage reflections to make on this experience, but is honest enough not to attribute them to his younger self.

I will not tell you how I finished the deck. I will say only this, that at the end I began to take a sort of pride or pleasure in making the planks white. Afterwards, I always found that there is this pleasure in manual work. There is always pleasure of a sort in doing anything that is not very easy.

As for the book itself, its main virtue is the various ingenious ways Masefield finds to undermine the more facile traditions of boys' adventure fiction, as established by authors such as Ballantyne and Stevenson, with a dose of cold reality: 'You don't know what an adventurous life is', the narrator informs us:

I will tell you. It is a life of sordid unquiet, pursued without plan, like the life of an animal.

John Masefield: A Book of Discoveries (1910)

Its successor, A Book of Discoveries, is more in the tradition of books like Richard Jefferies' Bevis: The Story of a Boy (1882) or Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill (1906) than adventure yarns such as Treasure Island or King Solomon's Mines. It's a kind of bildungsroman, depicting the everyday adventures and explorations of two young boys, Mac and Robin, "on a tributary of the River Tame in the village of Water Orton in Warwickshire."

Their mentor, Mr. Hampton, who catches them trespassing on his land, is (depending on how you look at it) either a tediously didactic and crotchety taskmaster, who lectures the boys incessantly, or an idealised self-portrait of the author himself, itching to correct the erroneous attitudes of the younger generation with a good dose of hard work. Take your pick. Here's a sample of his conversational style:

Xenophon, in his OEconomicus, praises the beautiful order of a big Phoenician ship which he saw at Athens. He makes it clear that even then ships were fitted 'with many machines to oppose hostile vessels, many weapons for the men, all the utensils for each company that take their meals together,' besides the freight of merchandise, and the men themselves. Yet all these things, he says, 'were stowed in a space not much larger than is contained in a room that holds half a score dinner-couches.' How big do you suppose that would be, eh?

I like that little "eh?" at the end, as if that's sufficient to transform it all into light banter. Admittedly, it's not all as dry as that, and the boys' finds throughout the book, which include a cave with a number of interesting flints and inscriptions, along with the remnants of a Roman pay-chest surrounded by small heaps of coins, go a long way towards proving Hampton's contention that:

the wonderful discoveries lie under our noses all the time, if we only had the sense to make them.

John Masefield: Lost Endeavour (1910)

I love stories. I prefer them to be touched with beauty and strangeness. I like them to go on for a long time, in a river of narrative; and I like tributaries to come in upon the main stream, and exquisite bays and backwaters to open out, into all of which the mind can go exploring after one has learned the main stream.

This passage from a 1944 essay of Masefield's with the Blakean title "I Want! I Want!" is a good description of Lost Endeavour, to my mind the richest - though possibly the least popular - of his pre-war boys' books.

In the chapter of my 1984 MA thesis on Masefield devoted to these books, I describe it as "a Treasure Island as Masefield felt it ought to be":

The parallels are very close – even down to the actual treasure on an island – but Masefield is concerned to show what such a life might actually have been like to experience. None of his villains are likeable – unlike Long John Silver – and his pirates in particular are potrayed as brutal ruffians and animals.

His twin protagonists, the gloomy boy Charles and the irresponsible grown-up dreamer Theo, reverse the pattern of the romantic Jim Hawkins and the business-like Squire Trelawny. The pattern of the successful quest for riches characteristic of such tales is also inverted in Masefield's novel, where "the meaning shows in the defeated thing" (as he out in in his much-anthologised poem "The Wanderer").

The value of the book lies in its incidental details, such as this description of a tropical forest:

All a wilderness of green things, a chaos of vegetables. No, it is not a chaos, it is a world of the most exquisite order. Every leaf is turned so as to catch life from its surroundings; the greatest and sweetest and fittest kind of life, either of sun or air or water. Not a blossom, not a twig, not a fruit there but has striven, I will not say with its whole intellect, but with its whole nature, to make of itself the utmost possible, and to give to itself in its brief life a deeper crimson, a more tense, elastic toughness, a finer sweetness and odour. Ah! the life that goes on there, the abundant torrent of life, the struggle for beauty and delicacy ... Ah! that forest. It was cool within there, out of the sun, so cool that it was like walking in a well; a dim, cool, beautiful well, full of pale green water from the sea. The flowers called to me: 'I am crimson,' 'I am like a pearl,' 'I am like sapphires.' The fruits called to me that they tasted like great magical moons.

"Tell me of your cities", concludes Masefield's narrator, "I tell you of the garden and the orchard, where life is not a struggle for wealth, but for nobleness of form and colour."

John Masefield: Jim Davis (1911)

Unfortunately these poetic extensions of the possibilities of children's fiction were not really built on in Jim Davis, Masefield's final pre-war essay in the genre.

Like its predecessor Martin Hyde, it's a

traditional boys' book in form – told in the first person by the eponymous hero – and the action unfolds in an early nineteenth century Devonshire village.

This time, however, it's a story about smugglers. To do him justice, Masefield tries to stress the reality rather than the romance of so stressful a trade. In fact:

so accurately are Jim's reactions to his sufferings depicted, that at times the book becomes a little too poignant to bear. Jim's solitary march to London, to 'see the Lord Mayor' is a case in point, and I suspect that both Masefield and his readers rejoiced when he decided to bring the book to a swift conclusion ... There is no real leavening of 'romance' in the book.

Even Jim's protector Marah Gorsuch, though quite an attractive figure, is hardly a trustworthy one:

I had never really liked the man – I had feared him too much to like him – but he had looked after me for so long, and had been, in his rough way, so kind to me, that I cried for him as though he were my only friend.

In fact, as I commented in 1984, "Jim Davis ... reads almost like a tract against adventures."

John Masefield: Jim Davis (1911 / 1975)

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John Masefield: Dead Ned: The Autobiography of a Corpse (1938 / 1974)

It's nice to record that Masefield's penultimate children's book, Dead Ned, written some thirty years later, and subtitled "The Autobiography of a Corpse Who Rediscovered Life Within the Coast of Dead Ned and Came to What Fortune You Shall Hear", is in many ways the most vivid and enthralling of all his many novels.

John Masefield: Dead Ned: The Autobiography of a Corpse (1938)

His grasp of eighteenth century idiom is far superior to that of subsequent writers such as Leon Garfield or Philip Pullman. It certainly helps to have a poet's sensitivity to language when your material - murder, prison, execution, slave ships - is as melodramatic as this.

There's something of the atmosphere of a nightmare or a fever dream about Ned Mansell's story. It's not so much an escape from the horrors of the late 1930s, as an attempt to see them from a different angle.

John Masefield: Dead Ned: The Autobiography of a Corpse (1938)

John Masefield: Dead Ned & Live and Kicking Ned (1938-39)

Unfortunately its eagerly awaited sequel, Live and Kicking Ned: A Continuation of the Tale of Dead Ned, cannot really sustain the pace and excitement of the original.

The material - a search for a mysterious lost city in the depths of darkest Africa - is as good as ever. Rider Haggard thrived on just such plots. Pierre Benoît's famous (and much filmed) novel L'Atlantide (1919) is a classic piece of French adventure fiction.

John Masefield: Live and Kicking Ned: A Continuation of the Tale of Dead Ned (1939 / 1975)

I was a little shocked when I found out that the Puffin edition of the novel had been abridged . It was, admittedly, done by Vivian Garfield (neé Vivian Alcock), Leon Garfield's second wife, and a successful children's author in her own right. When, however, some years later I managed to locate:

a copy of the original novel, I began to understand the motives of the editors at Puffin Books in abridging it. Certainly it read better in its original form, but there was a great deal of unnecessary detail about the bureaucratic infighting in the Lost City, which was threatened by an imminent invasion. Clearly Masefield meant this as satire on the unpreparedness of England for the oncoming Second World War, but it did have the effect of undercutting the realism of the rest of the narrative.

I'm not sure that the novel really works very well in either form. There's a lot of great material there, though.

John Masefield: Live and Kicking Ned: A Continuation of the Tale of Dead Ned (1939)

•

John Masefield with his daughter Judith, illustrator of The Box of Delights (1927)

How, then, should one conclude? Eight of Masefield's lifetime total of 23 novels were written for children - that's (roughly) one in three. He was not perhaps so well suited to the form as, say, Rudyard Kipling, who found it the ideal way to convey his somewhat reactionary views without the full apparatus of authoritarianism and militarism which pervades so much of his writing for adults.

The Masefield of the children's books is not really that different from the one we meet in the rest of his work - witness the recurrence of many of the themes and characters we encounter in The Midnight Folk and its sequel (Abner Brown, for example: along with the imaginary South American country of Santa Barbara) in earlier "grown-up" novels such as Sard Harker and ODTAA.

I suspect that the children's books have dated better, though. The genre of the "rattling good yarn", one of Masefield's specialities, has now been superseded by more brutal and pitiless thrillers. But I'm pretty sure that books such as Dead Ned and The Box of Delights will continue to delight imaginative children as long as there are libraries with long dusty sets of shelves to discover them in ...

Stockcake: Free Child among Books

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John Masefield (1912)

John Edward Masefield
(1878-1967)

Children's Books:


1. Martin Hyde: The Duke's Messenger (1909)
   • Martin Hyde: The Duke’s Messenger. 1910. Redhill, Surrey: Wells Gardner, Darton and Co. Ltd., 1949.
2. A Book of Discoveries (1910)
   • A Book of Discoveries. Illustrated by R. Gordon Browne. London: Wells, Gardner Darton & Co., 1910.
3. Lost Endeavour (1910)
   • Lost Endeavour. 1910. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, n.d.
4. Jim Davis (1911)
   • Jim Davis. 1911. Illustrated by Mead Schaeffer. London: Wells Gardner, Darton and Co. Ltd., 1924.
5. The Midnight Folk (1927)
   • The Midnight Folk. 1927. Illustrated by Rowland Hilder. World Books Children’s Library. London: The Reprint Society, 1959.
   • The Midnight Folk. 1927. Abridged by Patricia Crampton. 1984. Fontana Lions. London: William Collins Sons & Co Ltd., 1985.
6. The Box of Delights: or When the Wolves Were Running (1935)
   • The Box of Delights, or When the Wolves were Running. 1935. Illustrated by Judith Masefield. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1958.
   • The Box of Delights; When The Wolves Were Running. 1935. Illustrated by Faith Jaques. Abridged by Patricia Crampton. 1984. Fontana Lions. London: William Collins Sons & Co Ltd., 1984.
7. Dead Ned (1938)
   • Dead Ned: The Autobiography of a Corpse Who recovered Life within the Coast of Dead Ned and came to what Fortune you shall hear. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1938.
   • Dead Ned: The Autobiography of a Corpse Who Recovered Life within the Coast of Dead Ned and Came to What Fortune you shall hear. 1938. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.
8. Live and Kicking Ned (1939)
   • Live and Kicking Ned: A Continuation of the Tale of Dead Ned. 1939. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1939.
   • Live and Kicking Ned: A Continuation of the Tale of Dead Ned. Abridged by Vivian Garfield. 1939. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.

Books about King Arthur:


9. Tristan and Isolt: A Play in Verse (1927)
   • Tristan and Isolt: A Play in Verse. London: William Heinemann, 1927.
10. Midsummer Night and Other Tales in Verse (1928)
    • Included in: The Collected Poems. 1923. Enlarged Edition. 1932. Enlarged Edition. 1938. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1941.
11. Badon Parchments (1947)
    • Badon Parchments. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1947.
12. Arthurian Poets: John Masefield. Ed. David Llewellyn Dodds (1994)
    • Arthurian Poets: John Masefield. Ed. David Llewellyn Dodds. Arthurian Studies, 32. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1994.

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David Llewellyn Dodds, ed. Arthurian Poets: John Masefield (1994)

Arthurian Poets Series:
[1990-1996]

Arthurian Poets: Matthew Arnold & William Morris (1990)



1. Arthurian Poets: Matthew Arnold & William Morris. Ed. James P. Carley. Arthurian Studies. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1990.

Arthurian Poets: Edwin Arlington Robinson (1990)



2. Arthurian Poets: Edwin Arlington Robinson. Ed. James P. Carley. Arthurian Studies. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1990.

David Llewellyn Dodds, ed. Arthurian Poets: John Masefield (1994)



3. Arthurian Poets: John Masefield. Ed. David Llewellyn Dodds. Arthurian Studies, 32. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1994.

Arthurian Poets: Charles Williams (1995)



4. Arthurian Poets: Charles Williams. Ed. David Llewellyn Dodds. Arthurian Studies, 24. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1995.

Arthurian Poets: Algernon Charles Swinburne (1996)



5. Arthurian Poets: Algernon Charles Swinburne. Arthurian Studies. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1996.

•

Favourite Children's Authors: Peter Dickinson

Peter Dickinson: The Changes Trilogy (1975)

When Robert Lowell's groundbreaking collection Life Studies first came out in the UK in 1959, "the British reviews were fairly tepid." After listing the reservations of such luminaries as Al Alvarez, G. S. Fraser, Roy Fuller, Frank Kermode, and Philip Larkin, Lowell's biographer Ian Hamilton throws in as a parthian shot:

... and someone called Peter Dickinson in Punch announced that "few of the poems are in themselves memorable."

- Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell: A Biography (1982): 269.

Nice going. They didn't call Hamilton "Mr. Nasty" for nothing. That "someone called Peter Dickinson" was, admittedly, not very well known for anything much at the time - besides being the literary editor of Punch, that is.

His first detective novels were still some years in the future, and it'd be another decade before he started publishing the children's books which would, eventually, make his name. But even so ... "Do you have to leave blood on the floor at the end of every meeting?" as an academic of my acquaintance once said to an up-and-coming careerist in the same field.

Fay Godwin: Peter Dickinson (1975)

I used to wonder why Dickinson used to claim, at the end of his "About the Author" blurbs:

His main interest, he says, "is writing verse. A lost art, in the way I do it. I feel like a man making wooden carriage wheels for the one customer who wants them."

A collection of these "verses", The Weir (2007), was eventually published by his four children as a birthday tribute a few years before his death. Here's a sample, from an advertisement for the book:

Self-published (thus not quite print-on-demand) it is attractively printed and is to be had from 1 Arlebury Park Mews, Alresford, Hants. S0 24 9ER – an address celebrated in the final Palinode:

Surely the quack must yearn just once to heal,
The falsest prophet hanker to reveal.
And should the poetaster* still refuse
To hope The Mews has welcomed in the Muse.

*untrue. Ed.

Hmmm. "More plaintive than constructive," I fear - to borrow a phrase from John Wyndham's The Kraken Wakes - certainly not particularly instructive. The only other set of verses I've managed to locate online come from the "faq" section of Dickinson's own website:

Peter Dickinson

Frequently Asked Questions

Note

If you’re upon a School Assignment
You won’t be wanting this refinement.
Cheer up! There’s stuff about each book
Elsewhere, if you would care to look.


Do you put people you know into your books?

Where was she from, the woman in the tower?
I pushed a doorway on the winding stair,
Stole hesitantly in, and she was there,
An absolute presence, filling the room with power,
Her life a moment in my sleeping brain —
I know her, though we never meet again.

By contrast, those I see from day to day
I know by fits and snatches at the most,
A fluid jigsaw, many pieces lost.
What their real self is, who am I to say?
Though she’s the one with whom I share my life,
Can I be truly said to know my wife?


Have you any advice for a young writer?

Perfection? There is no such stuff.
But good enough is not enough.


What is your favourite book?

What is your favourite kind of food? say I.
If you have one — just one — you’re worth a sigh.


How did you become a writer?

It isn’t something I became —
It is the only life I know.
If you could somehow dam the flow
I’d be a writer just the same.

The condor in your local zoo,
Caged, wing-clipped, fed — what is it for?
It is a creature made to soar,
A dot on the enormous blue.


Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

A money spider hanging in mid air.
Like a retinal fleck it dangles from the lamp
In the blank bathroom, neither here nor there.
You reach to take the thread. Your fingers clamp

On nothing — nothing to feel or see — and yet
The thread is there, because the spider heaves
Beneath your hand. You take and loose it at
The sill, to live what life a spider lives.

A symbol surely, or a metaphor
At least. The groping mind grasps nothing. Still,
Some line of thought must have existed, for
This fleck now dangles here, this page its sill.

This I rather like, I must confess. It's not especially polished, but definitely good-humoured and interesting. I can see that it's not quite what editors were expecting in the age of Lowell and Plath, though. It sounds more like John Masefield, or one of the Georgians.

Peter Dickinson

In any case, whatever you think of him as a poet - or, for that matter, a judge of poetry - here's the rest of that bio-note, from the back of one of my old Puffin Books:

Peter Dickinson was born in Livingstone, Zambia, and was educated at Eton and King's College, Cambridge. He spent his early childhood in Northern Rhodesia and South Africa, though his roots are in Gloucestershire. He comes from a political family with a long radical tradition, and, in fact, 1960 was the first Parliament since the Reform Bill in which he had no relation.
While doing research at Cambridge, Peter Dickinson was offered a job at Punch, and he became literary editor - he remained there until he decided to live entirely by his writing. He started writing detective novels in his spare time, and it was while he was stuck on one of these that he started to write children's books. His first children's book, The Weathermonger, was published in 1968. It is very unusual in that he dreamed the first chapter in its entirety and wrote it down. Since then he has written several more detective stories and children's books. He is the only crime writer to have been awarded the Golden Dagger of the Crime Writers' Association in two successive years.

- "About the Author." Peter Dickinson, The Blue Hawk (1976): 237.

And here's a more up-to-date account of him, written some forty years later, from Ethan Iverson's obituary, "An Unusual Blend of Poetry and Fantasy":

Peter Dickinson was born in Africa, but raised and educated in England. From 1952 to 1969 he was on the editorial staff of the British satirical magazine, Punch, and since then has earned his living writing fiction of various kinds for adults and children.
Amongst many other awards, Peter Dickinson has been nine times short-listed for the prestigious British Carnegie medal for children’s literature and was the first author to win it twice. He has won the Phoenix Award twice for The Seventh Raven and Eva. He won the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Chance, Luck and Destiny. Eva and A Bone from A Dry Sea were ALA Notable Books and SLJ Best Books of the Year. The Ropemaker was awarded the Mythopoeic Award for Children's Literature and was a Michael L. Printz Honor Book. Peter's books for children have also been published in many languages throughout the world. His latest collection of short stories, Earth and Air, was published in October and his latest novel, In the Palace of the Khans was published in November.
Peter Dickinson was the first author to win the British Crime-Writers Golden Dagger for two books running: Skin Deep (1968), and A Pride of Heroes (1969). He has written twenty-one crime and mystery novels, which have been published in several languages.
He has been chairman of the UK Society of Authors and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was awarded an O.B.E. for services to literature in 2009.

Website: www.peterdickinson.com

The Carnegie Medal

Dickinson was quite a one for prizes, really. They say above that he was "nine times short-listed for the prestigious British Carnegie medal for children’s literature and was the first author to win it twice."

What's more, he won it sequentially: for Tulku (1979) and City of Gold and Other Stories from the Old Testament (1980). He was also highly commended for Eva (1988), and commended for:

1. The Devil's Children (1970)
2. The Dancing Bear (1972)
3. The Blue Hawk (1976)
4. A Bone from a Dry Sea (1992)

The other two occasions he was on the short-list do not appear to have resulted in any commendations or awards. Nor are they included in the wikipedia page on the topic.

You'll note from the listings below that I own copies of - and have read - most of his 24 children's novels (not counting picture books, short stories, or edited collections). If I had to note a single dominant characteristic among them, it would be variety of theme and subject matter.

Peter Dickinson: The Flight of Dragons (1979)

There was never any guessing where Dickinson would go next. He started off with a strong bent towards fantasy, in such books as The Gift (1973), and (of course) the Changes trilogy (1968-70). This could be said to have culminated in his mock-serious biology textbook The Flight of Dragons (1979), which inspired the 1982 animated film of the same name.

Peter Dickinson: AK (1990)

He was also very interested in politics and activism: Annerton Pit (1977), AK (1990), and Shadow of a Hero (1993) and are all examples of that.

Peter Dickinson: A Bone from a Dry Sea (1990)

Then there was his fascination with prehistory and early man: A Bone from a Dry Sea (1992) and The Kin (1998) both dealt with that.

Peter Dickinson: Tulku (1979)

What else? Tibetan Buddhism in Tulku (1979); Lewis Carroll-like inventiveness in A Box of Nothing (1985); dystopian SF in Eva (1988); even a kind of epic fantasy in The Ropemaker (2001) and its sequel Angel Isle (2006) ...

Peter Dickinson: The Ropemaker (2001)

Perhaps that was his figure in the carpet, in fact: an impatience with creative straitjacketing and the commercial imperative to repeat the same kind of success over and over again.

What is your favourite kind of food? say I.
If you have one — just one — you’re worth a sigh.

Could that have accounted for his lukewarm response to Life Studies, way back in 1959? As Elizabeth Bishop said of her friend Robert Lowell's sense of "assurance" (by which I suspect she may actually have meant entitlement):

I feel I could write in as much detail about my uncle Artie, say, - but what would be the significance? Nothing at all. He became a drunkard, fought with his wife, and spent most of his time fishing ... and was ignorant as sin. It is sad; slightly more interesting than having an uncle practising law in Schenectady maybe, but that's about all. Whereas all you have to do is put down the names. And the fact that it seems significant, illustrative, American etc. gives you, I think, the confidence you display ...

EB to RL (December 14, 1957)

Dickinson, too, came from a reasonably eminent background: "He comes from a political family with a long radical tradition, and, in fact, 1960 was the first Parliament since the Reform Bill in which he had no relation", as he comments in the first of the bio-notes quoted above. But it's not, I think, something he ever plumed himself upon.

Nevertheless, that underlying radicalism does seem to have come through in his choice of touchy and difficult subjects - unusual in the kinds of children's books I (for one) was reading at the time: eco-terrorism in Annerton Pit, child mercenaries in AK, the perils of AI in Eva. One could call that being ahead of his time, but perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he was of his time in a way the conservative, rural English children's writing of the time simply wasn't.

Does this in itself make him worthy of our attention? Certainly - in terms of literary history. However, I suspect that this particular aspect of his books may fade away over the years, leaving behind only their solid storytelling credentials. The Changes trilogy still seems very relevant to me, more than half a century after its first appearance. I know. I reread it quite recently.

Peter Dickinson: The Weathermonger / Heartease / The Devil's Children (1968-70)

I guess what interests me particularly about these three books is the way in which we can see Dickinson evolving and discovering new aspects of himself as a writer as the series continues. The first one, The Weathermonger, is full of fantasy and magic. It draws on an almost T. H. White-like vision of the Arthurian legend to explain the death of the everyday technology we've become so used to that it's hard to imagine life without it.

In the second book, Heartsease, Dickinson begins to flex his novelist's muscles a little more. The characters are far more interesting and complex, and the moral dilemmas more human-sized and realistic. The "change" from a technical to an agrarian society is now so ingrained in this Britain that it's hard for the characters to see any alternative.

The third book, The Devil's Children, is the one where we really see the mature Dickinson arrive. The travelling community of Sikhs twelve-year-old English girl Nicola finds herself adopted by have their own traditions, but they've also been forced to make adjustments to the dominant culture around them. She, in her turn, is forced to accommodate herself to this, much against her will. You could, if you wished to, see it as a little fable about multiculturalism disguised as an adventure story, but that would be simplistic. These are real, living characters, and the world they move through is as terrifyingly vivid as any dystopic landscape before or since.

The books move in backwards chronological order. Nicola in The Devil's Children is at the beginning of a set of cultural changes which will subsequently involve Margaret in Heartsease and which will be brought to an end by Sally in The Weathermonger. Unusually for male writers at the time, adolescent girls appear to have been Dickinson's protagonists of choice at this early point in his career, but (like most generalisations about him) that would not hold steady for long.

Peter Dickinson: A Box of Nothing (1985)

Not all of his complex and varied oeuvre is as good as this first, intensely gripping trilogy, but there are few really negligible titles there. One I read for the first time last year was the bizarrely inventive A Box of Nothing.

It seems to me every bit as good as Norton Juster's Phantom Tollbooth - possibly even on a par with visionary British writers such as David Lindsay or Mervyn Peake. It's not really characteristic of the rest of his work - but then, what is? Like any true gourmet, he didn't have one favourite food but many.

Peter Dickinson: Skin Deep / The Glass-sided Ants' Nest (1968)

•

Jack Manning: Peter Dickinson (1986)

Peter Malcolm de Brissac Dickinson
(1927-2015)

Children's Novels:


1. The Changes Trilogy
   • The Changes Trilogy: The Devil's Children; Heartsease; The Weathermonger. 1970, 1969 & 1968. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.
   1. The Weathermonger (1968)
      • The Weathermonger. 1968. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.
   2. Heartsease (1969)
      • Heartsease. 1969. Illustrated by Robert Hales. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.
   3. The Devil's Children (1970)
      • The Devil's Children. 1970. Illustrated by Robert Hales. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.
2. Emma Tupper's Diary (1970)
   • Emma Tupper's Diary. 1971. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.
3. [with Lois Lamplugh] Mandog (1972)
4. The Dancing Bear (1972)
   • The Dancing Bear. Illustrated by David Smee. 1972. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.
5. The Gift (1973)
   • The Gift. Illustrated by Gareth Floyd London: Victor Gollancz, 1973.
6. The Blue Hawk (1976)
   • The Blue Hawk. Illustrated by David Smee. 1976. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.
7. Annerton Pit (1977)
   • Annerton Pit. 1977. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987.
8. Tulku (1979)
   • Tulku. 1979. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988.
9. The Seventh Raven (1981)
   • The Seventh Raven. 1981. A Puffin Plus. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.
10. Healer (1983)
    • Healer. 1983. A Puffin Plus. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.
11. A Box of Nothing (1985)
    • A Box of Nothing. Illustrated by Ian Newsham. 1985. A Magnet Book. London: Methuen, 1987.
12. Eva (1988)
    • Eva. 1988. London: Corgi Freeway, 1992.
13. AK (1990)
    • AK. 1990. London: Corgi Freeway, 1992.
14. A Bone from a Dry Sea (1992)
    • A Bone from a Dry Sea. 1992. London: Corgi Freeway, 1994.
15. Shadow of a Hero (1993)
    • Shadow of a Hero. 1994. London: Corgi Freeway, 1996.
16. Time and the Clock Mice, Etcetera (1993)
17. The Kin (1998)
    1. Suth's Story
    2. Noli's Story
    3. Ko's Story
    4. Mana's Story
    • The Kin. Illustrated by Ian Andrew. 1998. London: Macmillan Children’s Books, 2001.
18. The Ropemaker (2001)
    • The Ropemaker. Illustrated by Ian Andrew. 2001. Macmillan Children’s Books. London: Macmillan Publishers Limited, 2002.
19. The Tears of the Salamander (2003)
20. The Gift Boat [aka 'Inside Granddad'] (2004)
21. Angel Isle [The Ropemaker, 2] (2006)
    • Angel Isle. Illustrated by Ian Andrew. 2006. Macmillan Children’s Books. London: Macmillan Publishers Limited, 2007.
22. In the Palace of the Khans (2012)

Mystery Novels:

James Pibble series:

Skin Deep [aka 'The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest'] (1968)

A Pride of Heroes [aka 'The Old English Peep-Show'] (1969)

The Seals [aka 'The Sinful Stones'] (1970)

Sleep and His Brother (1971)

The Lizard in the Cup (1972)

One Foot in the Grave (1979)

23. The Green Gene (1973)
24. The Poison Oracle (1974)
25. The Lively Dead (1975)
26. King and Joker (1976)
27. Walking Dead (1977)
28. A Summer in the Twenties (1981)
29. The Last Houseparty (1982)
30. Hindsight (1983)
31. Death of a Unicorn (1984)
32. Tefuga (1985)
33. Skeleton-in-Waiting (1987)
34. Perfect Gallows (1988)
35. Play Dead (1991)
36. The Yellow Room Conspiracy (1992)
37. Some Deaths Before Dying (1999)

Picture Books:


38. The Iron Lion. Illustrated by Marc Brown & Pauline Baynes (1973)
39. Hepzibah. Illustrated by Sue Porter (1978)
40. Giant Cold. Illustrated by Alan Cober (1984)
41. Mole Hole (1987)
42. Chuck and Danielle (1996)

Short Stories:


43. City of Gold and Other Stories from the Old Testament. Illustrated by Michael Foreman (1980)
44. Merlin Dreams (1988)
45. The Lion Tamer's Daughter and Other Stories [aka 'Touch and Go'] (1997)
46. [with Robin McKinley]. Water: Tales of Elemental Spirits (2002)
    • [with Robin McKinley]. Elementals: Water. 2002. London: Corgi Books, 2003.
47. [with Robin McKinley]. Fire: Tales of Elemental Spirits (2009)
48. Earth and Air: Tales of Elemental Creatures (2012)

Non-fiction:


49. Chance, Luck and Destiny (1975)
50. The Flight of Dragons. Illustrated by Wayne Anderson (1979)

Poetry:


51. The Weir: Poems by Peter Dickinson (2007)
52. A Closer Look At Me: A Collection of Poems Which Cover Everything from Love & Life to Serial Killers (2019)

Edited:


53. Hundreds and Hundreds (1983)
    • Hundreds and Hundreds. 1983. A Puffin Original. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.

Peter Dickinson, ed.: Hundreds and Hundreds (1984)

•