Reflections on self publishing are on hold. Deadline this week to complete an article on Arthur Ransome. Here is the first page. The article will appear under the Mixed Moss heading in early June (available under the usual terms).
Normal service resumes next week.
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The Lost Girl: Themes of Abandonment in Swallows and Amazons
I am not the first to suggest that Swallows and Amazons is a novel filled with personal allusion. Brogan argues that its plot “recapitulates several of the most important dramas of its author’s life.”[1] Chambers, in a less sympathetic biography, is more explicit, “But while Titty Walker, so game and imaginative, was content to return Captain Flint’s past in exchange for the gift of a trained parrot, Ransome’s daughter did not relent so easily.”[2]
I want to argue that the creation of Titty Walker, the undoubted heroine of Swallows and Amazons, represents a lament for a lost daughter - the price Ransome paid for separating from his first wife. My claim is that the book was not written about Tabitha, but for Tabitha. It was a belated apology for her abandonment. Crucially, it was also an invitation for her to effect an escape of her own.
Ransome had remarkably little contact with his daughter after 1914 (when she was four) and virtually none after his second marriage. Christmas letters were exchanged and birthdays were marked with a letter and small gifts (usually a cheque). The early letters were deliciously illustrated, whimsical, engaging, and extremely affectionate; they must have been a delight to receive. However, Tabitha’s mother monitored her correspondence and as the years passed, she increasingly discouraged contact with her father. Incidentally, the charming account of the life Ivy and Tabitha led in Ransome at Home[3] contrasts rather sharply with Ransome’s own darker imaginings, born of two massive grievances – the cost of his divorce settlement and the loss of his substantial library of reference books.
He appears to have been content to wait for his daughter to make up her own mind about contact with him. The first time this presented as a serious possibility was in 1928 when she reached the age of 18 and the two actually met briefly in Salisbury. There is no account of how they got on but he wrote to her on December 21st, enclosing a cheque for a pound, and wishing her a merry Christmas.[4] He was at that time planning Swallows & Amazons and it is worth examining the letter in detail as an illustration of how Ransome achieved the mythological transformation of the real Tabitha into the fictional Titty.
It is a long letter, its length the more extraordinary because it is wholly concerned with the activities of birds around the feeding table at Low Ludderburn. The tone is whimsical, even a little childish ...
[1] Hugh Brogan, The Life of Arthur Ransome, Jonathan Cape, 1984, (p. 314)
[2] Roland Chambers, The Last Englishman. Faber and Faber, 2009, (p. 355)
[3] C. E. Alexander, Ransome at Home, 1996, Amazon Publications.
[4] Hugh Brogan, Signalling from Mars: The Letters of Arthur Ransome, Jonathan Cape, 1997, (p. 156).