Now for our modern sensibilities, The Family From One End Street might very well sometimes feel a bit politically and socially awkward and uncomfortable, but for its time, for 1937, it was indeed and truly an absolute break-through in British children's literature, being one of the very first novels conceptualised for children that did not specifically focus on upper middle and/or aristocratic characters, but on the labouring classes, on a working class family with seven children where the father is a dustman and the mother a washerwoman.
And therefore, even though more and more recent literary critics (as well as political activists) have increasingly faulted and even at times actively and vociferously condemned the author for supposedly sporting and promoting a patronising and paternalistic attitude towards the Ruggles (towards the main protagonists of The Family From One End Street), which according to them, to these theorists and activists, is meant to keep the family firmly in place as members of the labouring classes, as members of the so-called working poor, the portraits of the Ruggles family, as presented in The Family From One End Street are all and sundry realistically drawn for and according to the novel's time and its place, from the dialogues, the words uttered by the family to their relationships and antics, their various adventures and numerous varied escapades. Eve Garnett's 1937 novel The Family from One End Street might well read a bit too obviously episodically for those readers who always do desire and crave a specific and mostly straightforward plot line in a novel, and is also and indeed (as well as naturally) an object, a book of its time, of late 1930s England (and as such a time when there was still a very real and palpable societal and cultural attitude of not striving too much to rise above one's supposed station, one's place in a stratified society).
0 kommentar(er)
