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the experience of reading in Britain, from 1450 to 1945...

Reading Experience Database UK Historical image of readers
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Listings for Author:  

Beatrix Potter

 

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Beatrix Potter : [unknown]

'The Bermant family arrived in Scotland when Chaim was eight: before his ninth birthday he had mastered enough English to read Beatrix Potter in the Mitchell Library. Her stories were not so alien to him as one might imagine: somehow the animal characters reminded him of the Latvian village from which he had come. Chaim soon became a fan of the Beano's Lord Snooty, an aristocrat who inexplicably consorted with a gang of working class kids: the strip fulfilled every schoolboy's fantasy of finding himself among wealthy people in a noble setting"...[as] young Bermant... followed the progress of the Second World War on the Glasgow Herald and the Manchester Guardian [he felt a strong sense of British identity]. The war, the school, the boys' weeklies were all "building up new obsessions to replace the old and drawing reassurance and pride from the Empire".'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Chaim Bermant      Print: Book

  

Beatrix Potter : Peter Rabbit

[L.M. Montgomery] 'read a great deal; she mentions fifty different authors in her journal which covers the years 1910 to 1921. Titles range from Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" to Beatrix Potter's "Peter Rabbit" and Thackeray's "Vanity Fair". She also read many female writers, such as George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Edith Wharton and Olive Schreiner'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Lucy Maud Montgomery      Print: Book

  

Beatrix Potter : unknown

'My mother started to read to me when I was very young indeed. She read aloud beautifully and never got tired, and she would never, from the first, read anything that she could not enjoy herself, which cut out all the poor quality writing which every right-minded child loves when he can get it. Her only concession was one weekly comic, "Rainbow". But apart from that, I was reared on a fine mixed diet of Beatrix Potter, A.A. Milne, Dickens, Stevenson, Hans Andersen, Kenneth Grahame and Kipling – especially Puck of Pook’s Hill whose three magnificent stories of Roman Britain were the beginning of my own passion for the subject, and resulted in the fullness of time in The Eagle of the Ninth. Hero myths of Greece and Rome I had, in an unexpurgated edition which my mother edited herself as she went along, and Norse and Saxon and Celtic legends. There were Whyte Melville’s The Gladiators and Bulwer Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii and Weigal’s Egyptian Princess; for my mother loved historical novels – history of any kind, though her view of it was always the minstrel’s rather than the historian’s.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Rosemary Sutcliff      Print: Book

 

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