Dennis and I back in 2011 at Portsmouth Grammar School
A new book by children’s
literature history specialist Dennis Butts, includes a chapter dedicated to Percy F. Westerman and is now available from Amazon
Publishing.
In an age where writers such
as J.K. Rowling and the Harry Potter series have achieved global fame, this new
book The Vagaries of Fame: Some Successes
and Failures in Children’s Literature examines the lives and works of some
authors and their books who, having achieved popularity, have since disappeared
from bookshop shelves, libraries and publisher’s lists, never to return.
Dennis said, “This is a
topic that I have been considering for some while; to explore the ways certain
authors and their books, having achieved great success for a time, seem to have
disappeared from public favour, such as F. W. Farrar’s school-story Eric, or Little by Little first
published in 1858, it became enormously popular, selling thousands of copies,
and reaching a 43rd edition by 1919, but today it is almost forgotten.”
The Vagaries of Fame is a carefully considered collection of
informative essays discussing ephemeral successes, ranging from the
eighteenth-century poet Christopher Smart, taking in nineteenth-century writers
including William Brighty Rands, Percy F. Westerman and Dr Gordon Stables and
including such cultural phenomena as the juvenile drama Where the Rainbow Ends, children’s comics and the BBC’s Children’s Hour. Modern writers discussed include Gillian
Avery and William Mayne and a concluding chapter looks at ‘one-off’ successes,
such as Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty.
Ideological, technical
and generic factors all play their part in this consideration of the vagaries
of literary reputations, in an attempt to understand some of the reasons for
the failure and decline of what were once popular juvenile literary successes.
The Vagaries of Fame, priced at £10.00 is a print-on demand Amazon
Publication.
Dennis Butts is a former
chairman of the Children’s Books History Society and taught
children’s literature at
Reading University. He was a regular contributor to the Westerman Yarns Newsletters and was an ardent supporter of the Westerman Seminars. With a life-long
interest in the relationship between politics, society and literature he has
written on many aspects of children’s books.
His recent publications include Children’s
Literature and Social Change (2010), and with Peter Hunt, How Did Long John Silver Lose His Leg? and
Twenty-Six Other Mysteries of Children’s Literature (2013) and Why Was Billy Bunter Never Really Expelled?
and another Twenty-Five Mysteries of Children’s Literature (2019) (all
published by Lutterworth Press).
