So a mere 80 years after it was first published there is finally a movie version of Enid Blyton's The Magic Faraway Tree - the favourite book of my childhood. Having got too much to say about the film at this stage, I enjoyed its quite rightly modernised take and it certainly renders a very good tree. But does it fully explore the anarchist/communist tension of the Land of Do-as-you-Please vs the Land of Take-What-You-Want?! Luckily for you (!) I wrote 5000 words on the Enchanted Wood series of books as part of a 'children's literature and cultural diversity' module at Goldsmiths a few years ago, exploring among things its counter cultural influence and its utopian dimensions. This is slightly edited from text originally written in 2013.
Enid Blyton was the best selling British children’s author of the 20th century and nearly 50 years after her death remains in the top twenty most-borrowed children’s authors in British libraries (British Library, 2013). Nevertheless, her reputation has been controversial, with her work frequently criticised for its perceived lack of literary quality and later for its archaic treatment of class, gender and race (discussed in Ray, 1982, and Rudd, 2000).
This essay focuses on a series of Blyton’s fantasy novels known as the ‘Enchanted Wood’ or ‘Faraway Tree’ trilogy. Having established their popularity and influence, I will draw upon critical literature on fairy tales and children’s fantasy literature to explore whether these works can be dismissed as vehicles for socialising children into the dominant ideology or whether they provide scope for more utopian readings.
In the course of a writing career spanning almost fifty years, Blyton (1897-1968) covered most of the genres of children’s literature, including detective stories, holiday adventures and school stories. In an overview of Blyton’s work, Ray (1982) identifies another thread as being her ‘Fantasy World’ stories, starting with ‘Adventures of the Wishing Chair’ in 1937, in which two children travel to magical lands via a special chair. This was followed by the trilogy of ‘The Enchanted Wood’ (Blyton, 1939), ‘The Magic Faraway Tree’ (Blyton, 1943) and ‘The Folk of the Faraway Tree’ (Blyton, 1946).
In the ‘Enchanted Wood’ trilogy, a group of children who have recently moved from the city to the countryside discover a mysterious wood at the centre of which is ‘the oldest and most magic tree in the world’ (Blyton, 1939, p.16). This ‘Magic Faraway Tree’ is populated by various fairy tale-like characters and is the gateway to different lands which can be accessed from its upper branches as they pass by like clouds. Journeying into these worlds, the children have numerous adventures accompanied by Moon-face (a benevolent magician who lives at the top of the tree), his fairy neighbour Silky and the cookware-clad Saucepan Man.
The series does not tend to feature in the canon of children's fantasy literature conventionally taken to run from ‘Alice in Wonderland’ via the ‘Chronicles of Narnia’ on to Ursula K Le Guin's 'Earthsea' series and beyond. There is no mention of Blyton in Goldthwaite's 'The Natural History of Make-Believe' (1996) - a 'history of the world's imaginative literature for children' - or in Deborah O'Keefe's 'Readers in Wonderland: the liberating worlds of fantasy fiction' (2004).
Conversely, the books tend to be somewhat overlooked in works which focus on the life and writings of Blyton. They are mentioned only in passing in Duncan McLaren’s ‘Looking for Enid’ (2007) and Barbara Stoney’s standard biography of the author (Stoney, 2006). David Rudd’s ‘Enid Blyton and the Mystery of Children’s Literature’ (2000), which seeks to positively reconsider Blyton’s oeuvre, focuses primarily on the Famous Five, Noddy and Malory Towers books.
Nevertheless the Enchanted Wood novels have remained in print continuously and have had an enduring impact on the memories and imaginations of generations of readers. In 2003 for instance, The Magic Faraway Tree was the only one of Blyton’s books to feature in the UK Top 100 Best-Loved Books selected in the BBC’s Big Read survey (BBC, 2004). Recent spin-offs have included a 2000 audio book featuring the actress Kate Winslett, a 2004 animated TV series and a 2012 BBC radio adaption. The books featured prominently in a major exhibition in 2013, ‘Mystery, Magic and Midnight Feasts - The Many Adventures of Enid Blyton’ held at Seven Stories: the National Centre for Children’s Books. In the same year the national ‘Storytelling Superstar’ competition to mark World Book Day was won by somebody reading from ‘The Folk of the Faraway Tree’ (Bayne, 2013).
In his history of the fairy tale, Jack Zipes (2012. p.x) distinguishes between the oral storytelling of anonymous folk tales passed down through generations, and ‘literary fairy tales, which emanated from the oral traditions through the medium of manuscripts and print’ from the 16th century onwards. These literary tales were rarely if ever straightforward renderings of oral folklore, but involved the reworking and adapting of traditional material by named authors for diverse purposes. The classic rewriting of older folk tales developed into a wider genre in which new stories were, and continue to be invented along similar lines featuring characters, tropes, and situations from older stories combined with additional elements.
Fairy tales were at the heart of Enid Blyton’s early writing, including her own versions of classic stories such as Cinderella and the Sleeping Beauty in ‘Fairy tales for the Little Ones’ (1924) and new stories composed by Blyton herself in ‘Enid Blyton’s Book of Fairies’ (1924). She wrote numerous fairy-themed and fantasy stories for the ‘Sunny Stories’ magazine that she edited, and in which ‘The Enchanted Wood’ was first serialised in 1938.
Notwithstanding Rudd’s characterisation of Blyton’s style as closer to oral storytelling than the literary tradition (Rudd, 1997), the Faraway Tree novels can certainly be considered as literary fairy tales, as they are written texts within which Blyton blends folkloric and traditional fairy tale elements with the products of her own imagination to create new stories. In a manner which Hunt (2000) characterises as Blyton’s ‘pot pourri’ approach and Rudd (2008, p.263) interprets more generously as her ‘diffuse and extended’ intertextuality, we find traditional supernatural creatures such as fairies, gnomes and pixies; animal helpers and magical tools; and nursery rhyme characters such as the Old Woman who Lived in a Shoe. Perhaps most striking is the Faraway Tree itself - with its roots in the earth and its branches in the sky it recalls ‘Yggdrasil, the norse World Tree’, perhaps derived from Blyton’s childhood love of Norse mythology (Ray 1982, p.141). The novels also feature episodes and characters familiar from other literary fairy tales. For example McLaren (2007, p.274-277) suggests that the malevolent goblins in the stories may have been inspired by the book that Blyton declared was her favourite as a child – George MacDonald’s ‘The Princess and the Goblin’.
For Zipes (2012), literary fairy tales are used ‘either to bring about conformity or to question conformity to the dominant civilizing process of a society’ (xi); they may ‘reconcile us to our social conventions and religious beliefs’ or ‘project alternatives to the status quo’ (xii). Zipes argues that many of the classic literary fairy tales written by the likes of the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault and Hans Christian Anderson ‘function as part of the bourgeois socialization process’ (p.69) and ‘reinforce dominant religious and patriarchal attitudes about gender, mating, law and order’ (p.xi). On the other hand he identifies a body of ‘provocative counter-cultural fairy tales’ from the likes of Oscar Wilde, George MacDonald and L.Frank Baum which criticise social mores and aim at ‘inverting and subverting the world with hope’ (p.103). Alison Lurie (1990, pp.x-xi) likewise celebrates what she terms ‘subversive works of children’s literature’, loosely defined as texts that ‘mock current assumptions and express the imaginative, unconventional, non-commercial view of the world’.
Before moving on to consider where the Faraway Tree trilogy should be placed in relation to Zipes’ socialisation/subversion dichotomy, I have to acknowledge that much of what follows is based on adult reader reactions to the texts, and of course I too am approaching the subject as an adult. In fact over the course of my life I have read the Faraway Tree trilogy from several different subject positions – as a child reader, when these were among my favourite books; as a parent reading these books to my own children; and now from an academic perspective. In practice it is difficult to disentangle childhood and parental memories, nostalgia and apparently theoretically grounded interpretations. As Jacqueline Rose (1984, p.12) argues, part of what she terms ‘the impossibility of children’s fiction’ is that childhood ‘is never simply left behind’ but ‘persists as something which we endlessly rework in our attempt to build an image of our own history’. In reflecting on how Blyton’s work appeals to children, I recognise that I cannot avoid approaching the subject through the filter of my adult self with its own investment in my childhood and those of others.
Radical critics of Blyton from the 1970s onwards saw her work as situated firmly within the camp of reactionary socialization. Blyton was one of the main authors taken to task in Bob Dixon's 'Catching them young’, which sought to critique racism, sexism and class bias in children’s fiction. For Dixon (1977b), ‘What overwhelmingly pervades every aspect of Blyton’s work… is the insistence on conformity to the most, narrow, establishment-type beliefs, practices and values’ (p.68), the converse of which is ‘a fear of what is different or unusual… a fear of anything that’s new and threatens change’ (p.79).
Dixon (1977a, p.100) finds evidence of 'gratuitous racism' in Blyton’s Noddy books and elsewhere, with their golliwogs and their association of 'fear with black faces'. He also argues that Blyton’s works feature ‘culturally-conditioned “masculine” and “feminine” roles’’ (1977b p.66) and the presentation of ‘the middle-class English’ as the ‘assumed norm’ (p.68-9).
Dixon mainly draws his examples from Blyton’s Famous Five books. While it may be legitimate to criticise the author on the basis of this major series, it may also be true that not all texts in Blyton’s huge body of work treat race, gender and class in exactly the same way. I would argue that Dixon’s critique is not entirely accurate in relation to the Faraway Tree novels.
Firstly racism does not really feature in these stories, if only because the exotic otherness which Blyton and other authors of her time may have routinely projected on to ‘foreigners’ is supplied instead by supernatural and fairy tale creatures who do not seem to relate to any particular racial or national stereotypes.
In terms of gender stereotypes, there is a clear gender-based division of labour in the children’s household. ‘Mother’ looks after the house while the barely-mentioned Father goes out to some undefined job. As for the children, the very first paragraph of The Magic Faraway Tree tells us that ‘The girls had to help their mother in the house, and Jo help his father in the garden’ (Blyton, 1943, p.5).
Jo, the older brother of the siblings, tends to take the lead in the action and tell his sisters what to do. But the girl characters are hardly passive. They participate fully in most adventures, climbing the tree and sometimes initiating action. For instance, when Jo is taken prisoner by The Magic Snowman it is his sisters who come to his rescue, taking part in the giant snowball fight of the Battle of the Bears (Blyton, 1939, p.62).
We should also bear in mind that in writing stories in which girls and boys participated in adventures together, Blyton was amongst the authors breaking new ground in this period. Ray (1982, p.18) observes that ‘Before 1930, books about everyday life had tended to be about boys for boys or about girls for girls’ whereas subsequently ‘there was a definite trend towards writing books that would appeal to both boys and girls’.
If class snobbery is a feature of some of Blyton’s fictional worlds, it is less so in the Enchanted Wood trilogy. In the opening chapter of the series it is made clear that the children are from a relatively poor family whose ‘Mother hoped there would be some one to give her washing to do, then she would make enough money to buy a few hens’ (Blyton, 1939, p.8). While in other Blyton stories the main characters may sometimes seem to look down on children of a lower social class, in these stories it is the children themselves who are the subject of condescension. When their ‘stuck up’ cousin Connie comes to stay she looks down on them and their ‘country’ clothes (Blyton, 1946, Chapter One).
It is undoubtedly true that Blyton intended her work to put across a message about how she believed children should behave and to promote certain values. Blyton 'often builds the narrator into the text as an intrusive persona, by turns 'jolly' and insistently moralizing' (Hunt, 1994, p.38) and there are many examples in these stories of characters variously castigated as ‘naughty’ or ‘spoilt’, while unhappy outcomes sometimes ‘serve them right’.
In a 1949 article Blyton wrote that she was ‘not only out to tell stories’ but to ‘inculcate decent thinking, loyalty, honesty, kindliness, and all the things that children should be taught’ (cited in Stoney, 2006, p.195). While Blyton may have believed these were solid ‘British’ values, they are relatively politically neutral. The Enchanted Wood novels lack the explicit appeals to Empire, Queen and Country found in the fiction of some of her contemporaries, a fact that may explain the global success of many of her books in translation.
Moreover these ‘decent’ values do not always equate simply with ‘narrow, establishment’ ideology (Dixon, 1977b, p.68). When basic fairness is violated for instance, Blyton sanctions her characters’ disobedience and rebellion against authority. Unjustly incarcerated in ‘Dame Slap’s School’ with its regime of arbitrary violence and impossible to answer questions, the children throw down their pencils in protest at the ‘silly nonsense’ and escape (Blyton, 1939, p.127).
In any event, as Sarland (2005, p.46) notes, the notion that children’s fiction simply ‘constructs readers in specific ideological formations and thus enculturates them into the dominant discourse of capitalism’ has been challenged by a greater emphasis on the different ways texts are actually read and interpreted, with readers ‘not simply determined by what they read’. Judging by the reminiscences of adult writers, the Faraway Tree series is certainly not recalled as a narrow, conformist morality tale. New Zealand poet Bill Manhire (2000, p.56), choosing 'The Magic Faraway Tree' as the special book of his childhood, argues that the author’s 'imaginative power... makes the usual criticism of Enid Blyton - as stylist and moralist - irrelevant'. These stories were also amongst those children’s writer Susan Hill (2009, p.24-5) had in mind when she wrote that 'Enid Blyton excited us, took us into worlds of mystery, magic, adventure and fun’.
V for Vendetta - Evie gets a bedtime story from the Magic Faraway Tree
Intriguingly the Faraway Tree stories have achieved a particular cachet in British alternative political and cultural milieus. The Magic Faraway Tree is referenced in Alan Moore and David Lloyd's cult graphic novel ‘V for Vendetta’ for instance, a copy of the book being left as a gift by the anarchist main character who later refers in a speech to the Land of Do-as-you-Please and Land of Take-What-You-Want (Moore and Lloyd, 1990, p.195). Other examples include A Faraway Tree festival held in Suffolk in 2012 &13 and an Irish folk music collective, The Magickal Folk of the Faraway Tree (formed in 2002).
The novels also supplied imagery to the opponents of the Government’s road building programme in the 1990s who established direct action protest camps. A participant recalled that The Enchanted Wood was ‘One of the most popular books at Skyward camp at Newbury… At Fairmile in Devon, protesters referred to themselves as "Fairies." At the centre of the camp stood one large oak tree, complete with four tree houses, which, for protesters, came to resemble the magic faraway tree’ (Letcher, 2001,p.150).
With all this mind, I will now consider the extent to which the Faraway Tree books can be read as offering potentially utopian visions and to embody ‘the liberating potential of the fantastic’ that Jack Zipes (2012,p.168) identifies in some children’s stories.
At the heart of the Faraway Tree series is the possibility of escape from the everyday into other lands, some benign, some less so. Alternative dimensions directly accessible to children are a feature of popular fantasy literature, from the Narnia chronicles to the ‘differing space of multiple worlds’ (Cantrell, 2010, p.303) in Pulman’s His Dark Materials. Typically, the portal into these worlds is something relatively mundane – a wardrobe (C.S. Lewis), a knife (Pulman) or in Blyton’s case, a tree a short distance from the house.
The Enchanted Wood is a liminal space, reached by crossing a boundary – leaping over a ditch – and in which the rules of the everyday world are partially suspended. But as Manhire (2000, p.56) suggests, its appeal is partially that ‘Faraway is quite close by’, with Blyton overriding ‘our habitual distinctions between what is real and what is fantastic. If children can climb a ladder into other lands, the people of those lands can as easily descend to ours’.
This proximity carries with it the dream of escape. In Jacqueline Wilson's novel Best Friends (2004, p.74), the troubled narrator hides a letter 'between the pages of my best-ever book, The Enchanted Wood’ and wishes that she ‘could find the Enchanted Wood, climb up the Faraway Tree, and clamber up the ladder into the land above, and never ever come back' (p.74) [Wilson herself wrote 'The Magic Faraway Tree: a new adventure' in 2022]. Similarly, in her transgender memoir, Lo (2007, p.19) recalls a Singapore childhood reading Blyton on a balcony overlooking a forest: ‘I imagined that Moon-face and the Saucepan man were tucked away somewhere in the trees. I longed to find the Faraway Tree whose branches pierced the sky'.
If escapism is intrinsic to the pleasure of children’s fantasy literature, it is ‘not so much an escape from something as a liberation into something, into openness and possibility’ (O’Keefe, 2003, p.11). The Enchanted Wood is both a fantasy world of possibility in its own right, and a place from which the children can journey on to the other lands that pass by the top of the Faraway Tree. Some of these lands could be described as dystopian spaces where children are potentially in peril, such as the The Land of Tempers or The Land of Dame Slap. But many more of them are places where children’s wishes come true: there are Lands of Marvels, of Presents, Treats and Birthdays.
To what extent can this assemblage of lands be termed utopian? Bradford at al (2007, p.2-3) have sketched out what they term as ‘transformative utopianism’ in children’s literature, characterised as ‘fictional imaginings of transformed world orders… which propose new social and political arrangements’ but they also describe utopias more broadly as visions that ‘imagine a better world than the one that readers/audiences currently know’ (p.4).. In his 'Utopia and Science Fiction’ (1978) Raymond Williams likewise distinguishes between the 'systematic utopia' of new social structures and a looser 'heuristic utopia' in which 'the substance of new values and relations is projected, with comparatively little attention to institutions’.
In these stories, Blyton certainly does not propose a new political and social order as any kind of systematic/transformative utopia. In fact one feature of the Faraway Tree worlds is that it is not burdened by an over-arching cosmology or hierarchy. In some Lands there may be soldiers, policemen or wizards (easily befuddled by children where necessary), but it is unclear who, if anybody, is in charge in this parallel universe. In this respect, Blyton’s work is akin to the children’s literature of Victorian and Edwardian England which O’Keefe (2003, p.14) describes as featuring ‘loosely organised worlds where characters wandered through episodic adventures’.
The utopian aspects of the Faraway Tree books are more ‘heuristic’, for while Blyton does not delineate new social structures she does invite the reader to dream. If nothing else the multiplicity of different lands implies that other worlds organised on a variety of principles are imaginable and indeed in some cases desirable. As Fanny exclaims in The Magic Faraway Tree, it’s ‘so queer being awake and having dreams’ (Blyton, 1943, p.76).
Blyton’s utopian lands can be seen as part of a wider tradition of imagined worlds of abundance and license, perhaps best summed up in the names of two of the most vividly imagined lands at the top of the tree – The Land of Take-What-You- Want and The Land of Do-As-You-Please. In the former, as Moon-Face describes it, visitors can ‘take whatever you want for yourselves without paying a penny’ (Blyton, 1939, p.112), while in the latter the children are told ‘Just think of all the things you want to do – you can do them all in the Land of Do-As-You-Please’ (Blyton, 1943, p.80).
This ‘utopia of free consumption’, to use Raymond Williams’ term (1978) has echoes of Rabelais’ 16th century fictional Abbey of Theleme with its one Rule of ‘Do what thou wilt’ and its abundance of fine food, clothes and other pleasures (Rabelais, 2006, p.367-373). Echoes too of the Medieval trope of Cockaigne as the land of plenty, ’a realm of miraculous abundance’ in a ‘World Turned Upside Down’ where food and drink of every kind are freely to be had (Minton, 1991, p.39).
Blyton was certainly well-read enough to have been familiar with these antecedents, but the fantasy of plenty is one that might be expected to spontaneously arise wherever people are hungry and in this respect the period in which the books were written is surely significant. The Enchanted Wood was first serialised in the late 1930s, towards the end of a period of high unemployment and economic depression. The second two books were written during and immediately after the Second World War, when food shortages and rationing were a feature of everyday life. Before setting off to the The-Land-of-Take-What-You-Want we are told that ‘money was very scarce, and the children did not have as much to eat as they would have liked’ (Blyton, 1939, p.35). For children living through the austerity of this period the abundance of food in these books must have been tantalising, but even in relatively more affluent times the fantasy of an instant gratification of bodily appetites has a strong appeal. The books are filled with feasting featuring both familiar and fantasy foodstuffs, such as exploding ‘Toffee Shock’ sweets, ‘Pop Biscuits’ and sherbet-filled ‘Google Buns’.
Many children’s stories seemingly offer this kind of wish fulfilment only to teach a lesson that children cannot always have what they want, and must learn to control their appetites. In his Freudian account ‘The Uses of Enchantment’ (1976), Bruno Bettelheim argues that teaching such lessons is precisely the function of fairy tales – children are taught to temper the Pleasure Principle with the Reality Principle. Hansel and Gretel for instance forces ‘children to recognise the dangers of unrestrained oral greed’, with their eating of the gingerbread house provoking the witch as ‘personification of the destructive aspects of orality’ (p.162).
Blyton however allows her child characters to have their cake and eat it too. While they get into some scrapes in the The-Land-of-Take-What-You-Want they are able to return home with the goat and chickens that their mother had wished for to supply them with eggs and milk. And no harm comes to Bessie in the Land of Birthdays when her wishes are granted with ‘an enormous dish of strawberries’ and ‘jugs of all kinds of delicious drinks, and cakes and jellies and fruit’ (Blyton, 1939, p.182).
We can see parallels between the centrality of food in The Faraway Tree and the ubiquity of ‘banquet images – food, drink, swallowing’ that Mikhail Bakhtin (1984, p. 278) identified in the work of Rabelais and more broadly in carnivalesque popular-festive culture. For Bakhtin, ‘The feast means liberation’ and ‘is a temporary transfer to the utopian world’ (p. 276). Oittinen (2006, p. 86-7) argues that 'carnivalism (folk culture) and children's culture have many... things in common' (p.86) and sees Blyton’s focus on feasting as exemplifying a recognition of children’s culture, intrinsic to which is the fact that 'tastes are part of the child's world of experience, part of his/her emotional life' (p.87).
Other aspects of the ‘carnivalesque’ also feature in Blyton’s novels, perhaps helping to explain part of their appeal to children. The nonsense rhymes of the Saucepan Man and his humorous mishearing of other people’s remarks are ‘comic verbal compositions’ (Bakhtin, p.5) which play with language and laughter, and the adventures in many of the lands are essentially festive episodes of play and license where children can take-what-they-want/do-as-they-please in a carnivalesque ‘suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions’ (Bakhtin, 1984,p.10).
Fred Inglis (1997, p.131) remarks that Blyton’s work often features ‘a harmony of free, mutual life’ and we can identify this as a further utopian element in these texts. There is a harmonious relationship between humans and nature, with the children encountering various animal helpers, such as the rabbits that join the fight to save the faraway tree from destruction (Blyton, 1946, p.157). These relationships are an extension of those that exist between the children, who despite occasional bickering look after each other in unfamiliar situations away from adult supervision, and between the inhabitants of the Faraway Tree. The latter, including Moon-face, Silky the fairy, the Saucepan Man, the Angry Pixie and Dame Washalot, form a kind of alternative non-familial household of relative equals.
Writing about Blyton’s beloved ‘Princess and the Goblin’ by George MacDonald, Zipes (2012, p.111) notes that ‘There is never one hero, rather there are always male and female protagonists, who learn to follow their deep inclinations, respect each other’s needs and talents, and share each other’s visions’. Much the same could be said of Blyton’s approach of having a group of friends and/or siblings as a kind of collective hero in these and many of her books, providing too multiple points of potential identification for child readers of different ages and genders.
One of the ‘regressive’ aspects that Zipes (2012, p.176) identifies in classical fairy tales is that the ‘happy end’ is usually dependent upon ‘arbitrary authority (generally in the form of monarchs or monarchs in the making)’ whose ‘Raw power is used to right wrongs’. Blyton departs from this convention – when the future of the Faraway Tree is threatened by Trolls mining for jewels at its roots, it is the children and their animal and tree-dwelling friends who defeat them and save the tree without any recourse to external powers (Blyton, 1946, pp.138-157).
The woodland setting for such imaginings has a long history in English culture, including in the work of Shakespeare who sets his suspension of social norms in comedies such as ‘As You Like It’ and ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ in enchanted forests of his own. Northrop Frye’s influential interpretation of this as the ‘drama of the Green World’ can also be applied to Blyton’s Enchanted Wood, an ‘ideal world of innocence and romance’ away from the confines of ‘the normal world’ which is also linked ‘to the dream world that we create out of own desires’ (Frye, 1957, p.182-3). If in Shakespearean comedy the desires unblocked in the Green World are sexual ones, Blyton attends to the desires of young children – for endless treats, fairground rides, sweets and presents.
In fairy and fantasy stories there is typically a tension between what Tolkien (2006) termed the ‘primary’ world of the everyday and the imagined ‘secondary world’ of adventure and mystery which the characters slip into. The latter can be a frightening place, but Blyton always manages this tension in a way that ultimately reassures her young readers.
Within the various Lands the children visit, the main dangers are those faced by children everywhere – separation (as the Lands move on) and the unpredictable outbursts and occasional violence of beings larger than themselves. There is little sense of danger to life itself, and the supernatural creatures encountered tends to be mostly benign (brownies and elves), mischievous or disruptive (the ‘red goblins’) rather than terrifying or evil. Blyton’s fairies are of the whimsical kind criticised by the folklorist Katherine Briggs (1967), who noted the gradual diminution of literary fairies from the 19th century compared with their fearsome traditional counterparts.
To use one of Blyton’s own chapter headings in The Magic Faraway Tree, it is always the case that ‘Everything Comes Right’. However wild the adventures, there is always the comforting order of home where there is nothing more to worry about than helping out with chores – in the eternal holiday of these books, even school is never mentioned. As with many of the best children’s fantasy books ‘readers immerse themselves in the journey of characters… in doing so, they experience the same movement away from and back to daily life, and the same exciting interval in between, in a brave new place’ (O’Keefe, p.33)
When Jack Zipes writes about subversive/counter-cultural children’s literary fairy tales, the examples he gives are from writers who have ‘expressly tried to make their tales more emancipatory and critical’ (2012,p.170). As I have argued above there is ample material in the Faraway Tree books to enable utopian readings, but this does not mean that the author had any deliberate subversive intent. Blyton seems to have been commercially ambitious (and of course successful) and to have held fairly conservative views on matters such as Royalty, capital punishment and the family (Stoney, 2006). There was though at least one area where Blyton does seems to have had a broadly progressive intent – in relation to child development and the natural world.
Enid Blyton completed a National Froebel Union kindergarten teaching course in 1918 and long before she became a children’s novelist had achieved national recognition for her columns in ‘Teachers World’ magazine and other education writings. Frederick Froebel’s 'belief in the importance of understanding nature' and learning 'through spending time in gardens and forest' (Bruce, 2012, p.15) clearly influenced Blyton who designed nature lessons with the aim of arousing in the child ‘something that will stay with him and delight him all his life – a lasting love for Nature with its many beauties and wonders’ (Blyton cited in Cadogan, 1997, p.105). The wonder at the natural world certainly shines through in the Faraway Tree books.
Beyond this, a Froebelian influence can perhaps be discerned in Blyton’s child-centred approach to writing. Blyton famously listened to children’s feedback about her stories, and took inspiration for her work from her observations of and interactions with children. (Stoney, 2006). This market research may have been sound business sense, but it also reflected a belief that children were worth paying attention to. As Blyton wrote in an early Teachers World column, ‘A child’s mind is wonderful in its simplicity, directness and sensitiveness’ and ‘as Froebel knew, a child is always seeking to express himself’ (Blyton, 1923, cited in Stoney, 2006, p.186).
It would be oversimplifying matters to say that this perspective enabled Blyton to directly address children in a manner unmediated by ideology, in particular the social constructions of childhood prevalent at the time. As Nodelman (2008, p.5) observes, since adults usually buy children’s books, the writer must make judgments based ‘not on what they believe will appeal to children but rather on what they believe adult consumers believe they know will appeal to children’. However it is clear that for the most part Blyton’s implied reader is the child not the parent. She ‘writes uncompromisingly for a single audience, not winking over the children’s heads at other adults for approbation’ (Hunt, 2000, p.38). In doing so, Blyton sometimes breaks the rule ‘which demands that the narrator be adult or child, one or the other’ (Rose ,1984, p.69). While generally she takes the narrative position of an adult, at times she appears to slip into sharing a child’s language and view of the world. Blyton was criticised in this respect for ‘her irrationality as a child’ (Walter Hildick, cited in Rose, p.69), but this narrative device was perhaps a deliberate strategy to involve the child reader in a literary simulation of a peer-to-peer conversation. The final line of the trilogy is a striking example of this. After Connie wishes that she could live by the Wood and ‘go up the Faraway Tree whenever you like’ the narrator concludes: ‘So do I, don’t you?’ (Blyton, 1946, p.185).
Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree novels do not fit neatly into a typology which neatly divides children’s literary fairy stories into either conformist morality tales or subversive utopias. Blyton has a clear agenda of promoting children’s behaviours she approved of, and the novels reflect then-contemporary values in regard to gender even if the racist and class-biased attitudes critics have identified in some of her works are largely absent in these. On the other hand, she grants her child characters agency to act autonomously in utopian settings of companionship, abundance and freedom. While Blyton may not have had a subversive intent, if latter day eco-protestors, graphic novelists and others of a radical persuasion can draw positively on their childhood memories of these books it is not as a result of a wilful misreading of the texts. Blyton’s early Froebelian training and personal inclination led her to positively promote wonder at nature and to be attentive to children’s culture with its carnivalesque fantasies, and these found full expression in the worlds of the Faraway Tree.
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Reference :
Neil Transpontine (2026), ‘It was so queer being awake and having dreams’: social conformity and utopian subversion in the Magic Faraway Tree. https://history-is-made-at-night.blogspot.com/2026/04/it-was-so-queer-being-awake-and-having.html
