I wonder if children still read a genre I enjoyed a lot?
Books by Rider Haggard (King Solomon’s Mines and She), Conan Doyle (The Lost World), Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan), and Kipling (Mowgli). I enjoyed them all. I never read, or had even heard of, Green Mansions by WH Hudson. His Mowgli or Tarzan is a girl called Rima in a jungle somewhere in South America. Good news: no need to go to SA to look for a fictional character he wrote about in 1904.
Children like seeing the kitsch Peter Pan bronze in Kensington Gardens and why not. I doubt Nanny takes them across the road to Hyde Park to see Rima. For one thing she is in the altogether, for another she is sculpted by Jacob Epstein in a style controversial in 1924: “take this horror out of our park” (Daily Mail) : “artistic anarchy” (Conan Doyle); “the Hyde Park atrocity” (Morning Post)”. Good to know the DM was as populist and unwilling to champion anything its readers could not understand a century ago, as it is today. But make your own mind up.
It’s for the birds, you may idiomatically exclaim; and how right you are. It is in a bird sanctuary in Hyde Park. The only birds I saw were pigeons but I like to think smaller birds can nest in this small, safe space unmolested. Why is Epstein’s sculpture depicting a fictional South American girl here? It is a tribute to WH Hudson, naturalist and ornithologist, author of Green Mansions.
It’s happened before and I hope it happens again. CB writes a piece on something old which is new to him and I find that I have been down exactly the same rabbit hole about the time of his adventures there.
Jacob Epstein’s mid-1920s tribute to W H Hudson’s 1904 “Green Mansions” and its heroine, Rima, in Hyde Park, did indeed create controversy. Amongst Epstein’s supporters were The Times’s art critic. Also in the trenches on his side was my grandfather, Stanley Kennedy North (1887-1942), who would in the 1930s become a controversial art conservator but who was already a keen Medievalist (making illuminated manuscripts and stained glass works) but also what might be called a Polite Modernist, with a striking illustrations for a 1914 “Child’s Alphabet of the War” and a 1924 schematic London transport map to his name, and Shell motoring posters to come.
SKN wrote a Letter to the Editor of The Times (26 May 1925) supporting the paper’s progressive stance over the Epstein sculpture. He also wondered how many amongst the public had actually read the Hudson book (subtitled: “A romance of the tropical forest”), and expressing pleasure that the row might produce new readers for one of his heroes.
BTW: As a boy I adored “She”.