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Enid Mary Blyton 1897 - 1968
Enid Mary Blyton was born
on 11th August, 1897 in a flat above a shop in East Dulwich, London, the first child of Thomas Carey Blyton and
Theresa Mary Blyton. Enid's father was a cutlery salesman, and a self-educated man in many and varied fields, whilst her mother
was a traditional home-maker who believed that was always the woman's role.
After a series of house
moves, reflecting the family's increased prosperity, they eventually lived in Beckenham, Kent, where Enid was educated at
St. Christopher's School for Girls, where she excelled at both academic and sporting subjects.
Enid's relationship with
her mother was always a difficult one, as Theresa saw her daughter's time spent on matters other than housework, and particularly
her passion for writing, as wasted in a girl. However, Enid was encouraged in her activities by her father, with whom she
had always felt a great rapport.
Trouble between Thomas
and Theresa had been brewing for some time, when, in 1910, Enid's father left Theresa, Enid and her two younger brothers to
set up home with another woman, an act which in those days was a considerable scandal, and for which the adolescent girl never
quite forgave him.
Enid had been training
for some years to become a professional musician, but for some reason, her commitment was not as great as it should be, and
in the summer of 1916, whilst on holiday with friends at a farm in the country, and after helping out with the children at
a local Sunday school, she realised that what she really wanted to do was to teach children, and by so doing, perhaps learn
how to write the things they wanted to read.
In September of 1916,
with her father's permission, Enid enrolled at Ipswich High School as a trainee Froebel teacher in the kindergarten department,
and by the end of 1918, her course was completed, with one distinction (zoology), three first-class passes, (geography, botany,
handwork), and two second-class passes, (mathematics, and surprisingly, literature).
In January 1919, Enid joined
the teaching staff of Bickley Park School for Boys, where she had charge of around six juniors, whom she taught general subjects,
and she also taught English to the older boys. She stayed at Bickley Park for just a year, leaving at the end of 1919 to become
a nursery governess at Southernhay in Surbiton. The small group of children in Enid's charge soon began to increase, and it
eventually became a small school in its own right as local parents asked for their children to be included.
But Enid's greatest love
was writing, and her first success came with a little book of children's verse Child Whispers which was published in
1922. In addition to writing books and verses for children, and her teaching work, she was a columnist in the magazine Teacher's World from 1923 to 1945. She was
also editor and sole contributor to Sunny Stories magazine from 1926 to 1952.
Enid's
popularity and consequent fame increased, reaching a peak in the 1940s with her two most popular series The Famous Five,
making its publishing debut in 1942 and Noddy in 1949. By the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century,
Enid Blyton was the best known and loved children's writer of all time, selling millions of books worldwide, and translated
into many languages.
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| THE LITTLE BLACK DOLL. A reprint of a short story originally written in the 1940s |
But
fame never comes without drawbacks, and Enid Blyton had more than her fair share of detractors. She was criticised for being
racist and sexist, long before the terms came into popular usage, (see the picture in the margin - a story which caused such
a furore that it was rewritten later with a more acceptable ending). Her characters were said by some of the literary great
and good to be stereotyped and two-dimensional. It might be argued that some of the criticism may have had a grain of justification,
but there is no doubt that a great deal was completely over the top, with words like "nauseating" and "poisonous" used by
those who really should have known better. In the 1960s, her work was removed from some public library shelves for a variety
of nonsensical reasons though the practice was not as widespread as is popularly believed. Outwardly, Enid was unperturbed:
if the children could not borrow her books, they would, she argued, save up and buy them, and so it proved.
In
breadth of output, Enid Blyton has always been unrivalled. From text books to fairy tales to adventure stories, her work was
almost always phenomenally successful, and her influence on children's education in the twentieth century was enormous. It
is impossible to give an accurate figure of the number of books published, but 750 is a good estimate. As far as sales figures
is concerned, she continues to sell, thirty-five years after her death, in numbers that would turn most professional authors
green with envy.
Enid
Mary Blyton died peacefully in her sleep in a nursing home on 28th. November, 1968.
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