Little People in British Children's Books during the Cold War: PhD thesis Macquarie University Department of English 2007

Ursula Dubosarsky

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A study of works of British children's fiction published in the period 1945 to 1963 which all feature characters who, while otherwise being more or less ordinary human beings, are very small. A little person in art inevitably carries a variety of metaphoric and sometimes allegoric connotations, as found both in the recurring motif of the frequently magical little person in folk culture across the centuries and most famously in formal literature by Johnathan Swift in Gulliver's Travels . In these mid-twentieth century works for children by T H White, Mary Norton, Rumer Godden and Helen Clare/Pauline Clarke, however, I argue that the post-1945 period of publication pivotally focused the metaphor so that the little person can be read as representing the perils and contradictions of belonging to a literal minority group within a dominant big culture. The little people here are versions of refugees diminished and displaced by trauma of war and persecution, standing like Paddington Bear on railway platforms, homeless, rootless and culturally anxious. The innocuous and fantastic miniature human becomes an almost secret metaphor to describe the consequences of war in the language and symbolism of children, and far more freely and indeed sometimes more grimly than writers of explicit war stories for children of the period.Chapter 1: Introduction -- PART Lilliputans and Borrowers -- Chapter 2: T H White's Mistress Masham's Repose -- Chapter 3: Mary Norton's Borrowers Series -- PART Rumer Godden's Doll Stories -- Chapter 4 -- PART In the service of the the dolls and soldiers of Helen Clare and Pauline Clarke -- Chapter 5 -- Conclusion -- Bibliography