10.24053/ REAL-2021-0004 i ngo b erensMeyer “Round Many Western Islands”: Children’s Adventure, Empire, and Rereading in Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons (1930) - for Talli and Christoph, who know - Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, first published in 1930, is one of the undisputed classics of British children’s literature, but it has fared less well internationally� Early translations into Spanish, Dutch, and Swedish, for example, have apparently not been reissued since the 1950s, and the German translation was last seen in print in 1966 (its success probably not exactly promoted by the German title Der Kampf um die Insel)� 1 Ransome continued to write eleven more novels in this series until 1947, all published with Jonathan Cape, and they have never been out of print since� In this contribution, I am focusing on the first volume, a very early, if not the first, historical example of the subgenre of the children’s holiday adventure� Its innovative blend of genres mixes elements of the robinsonade with stories of pirates and treasure hunting� As the classical instance of the children’s holiday adventure, Swallows and Amazons also resonates with ideas of Britishness and the Empire during the interwar period� Children’s versions of the robinsonade have a long history in the wake of eighteenth-century popular chapbooks and ballads inspired by Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719)� 2 Adapted into a mixture of adventure novel and pedagogy, Defoe’s novel of shipwreck and hard work was transformed into essential reading for children in books such as Joachim Heinrich Campe’s Robinson the Younger (Robinson der Jüngere, 1779-80) and Johann David Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson (Der Schweizerische Robinson, 1812, written 1794-98)� Next to Robinson Crusoe, obvious inspiration for Swallows and Amazons came from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1882), William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), and Erskine Childers’s Riddle of the Sands (1903)� After a 1 See translations by Fronemann and Gradmann-Gernsheim� I have derived bibliographical information on translations of Swallows and Amazons from allthingsransome�net (accessed 17 Jan� 2020)� It is quite likely that young readers of the German version were encouraged to associate this with Felix Dahn’s popular book Ein Kampf um Rom (A Struggle for Rome), first published in 1876. 2 For a detailed account of this correlation, see O’Malley� 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0004 74 i ngo b erensMeyer 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0004 chequered literary career, Ransome found the winning formula for lasting success in the late 1920s, towards the end of a period often described as the ‘golden age’ of children’s literature� The Swallows and Amazons series presents children experiencing adventures during their summer holidays in the Lake District; these adventures are deeply influenced by the books these children have read and the poems they have been taught� Children’s literature, including Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island as well as poems like Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”, forms a textual filter through which the children make sense of their world� Events that occur are always already interpreted with the aid of fictional or historical adventures so that the novel turns into a sort of meta-adventure novel� Moreover, the British Empire and colonial attitudes are a pervasive presence in this world� Imperialist concepts are taken up by the children in the novel both playfully and with all appropriate seriousness as a way of seeing (and making) the world into which they are about to grow up� A few brief remarks on the author’s life - an adventurous life indeed - may serve to relate this book more closely to its historical context� Arthur Michell Ransome (1884-1967) was born into an upper-middle-class family in Leeds, where his father was a professor of history and modern literature at Yorkshire College (now the University of Leeds)� His grandfather, Thomas Ransome, had been an inventor and scientist; his cousin, Laurence Binyon, is well-known as the author of the poem “For the Fallen”, which is still regularly recited on Remembrance Day, 11 November, in memory of the soldiers who died in the Great War� Young Arthur Ransome was taught to skate by none other than the famous Russian anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin� Ransome read Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe at the tender age of four and was then presented with a copy by his father (Chambers 18)� 3 After attending Rugby public school and studying science at Leeds for two terms, he tried to gain a foothold in the literary world of London� For twelve years, he muddled through as a publisher’s assistant, author, book reviewer, and ghostwriter� One of his early books bears the telling title Bohemia in London (1907)� Ransome gained some notoriety as the author of the first critical biography of Oscar Wilde in 1912, and even more because he was immediately sued for libel by Wilde’s former lover, Lord Alfred Douglas� The trial received a lot of public attention and ended with his acquittal. It was the first time that Wilde’s De Profundis, the letter he wrote to Douglas from prison, became publicly known� Unhappily married, Ransome decided to go to Russia in 1913, initially to edit a volume of Russian fairy tales� He soon wrote dispatches for the Daily News and later the Manchester Guardian. His personal closeness to the Bolshe- 3 Biographical information is based on this and on Avery� See also Lovelock� Children’s Adventure, Empire, and Rereading 75 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0004 viks, in particular to Lenin and Karl Radek, led to his writing a number of texts in support of the Russian revolution� It took until 2002 for evidence to appear that Ransome was in fact employed as an agent for the British Secret Service to infiltrate revolutionary organizations. In 1924, he married Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina, Trotsky’s former secretary� He wrote for the Manchester Guardian from Estonia, also undertaking journeys to Egypt and China for the paper� Having moved back to England, he began writing Swallows and Amazons in March 1929 in his cottage near Windermere in the Lake District� A year earlier, he had spent a holiday there in the company of the family of W� G� Collingwood, a painter and disciple of John Ruskin� A lifelong sailor, Ransome taught the Collingwood grandchildren to steer their small sailboat, the Swallow, on Coniston Water: Taqui, Susie, Mavis - known as ‘Titty’ - and Roger� Readers of the novels will recognize the names Susan, Titty and Roger; only Taqui was changed into the more conventional ‘John’� Published by Jonathan Cape in 1930, the first novel did not sell at first; success came, however, with the third volume in the series, Peter Duck (1932), which Ransome also illustrated� He received an honorary doctorate from Leeds University in 1952 and was made CBE in 1953; he died in Manchester in 1967� Headstone of Arthur and Evgenia Ransome, Rusland, Cumbria� Photograph: Ingo Berensmeyer, 2019� 76 i ngo b erensMeyer 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0004 All play begins with the imagination� In its opening paragraph, Swallows and Amazons celebrates this by allowing us to share in the joy of transcending boundaries between reality and fantasy, and between human beings and nonhuman objects, as we witness Roger, the youngest child of the Walker family, running uphill and playing at being a yacht - the Cutty Sark, no less: Roger, aged seven, and no longer the youngest of the family, ran in wide zigzags, to and fro, across the steep field that sloped up from the lake to Holly Howe, the farm where they were staying for part of the summer holidays� He ran until he nearly reached the hedge by the footpath, then turned and ran until he nearly reached the hedge on the other side of the field. Then he turned and crossed the field again. Each crossing of the field brought him nearer to the farm. The wind was against him, and he was tacking up against it to the farm, where at the gate his patient mother was awaiting him� He could not run straight against the wind because he was a sailing vessel, a tea-clipper, the Cutty Sark. (Ransome 15, italics in original) The famous Cutty Sark, now a tourist destination in Greenwich, was used as a cadet training ship in Cornwall in the 1920s� It had been open to the public since 1924 (“Cutty Sark”), so Roger may have seen it during a previous holiday� “Sail was the thing” (Ransome 15): sailing is the central activity around which the entire novel is constructed� This initial appearance of the recollection of an old “tea-clipper” stimulating a boy’s imagination sets the scene for the novel’s continuous blurring of reality and imagination, of action in the real world and its accompanying “luminous halo” (Woolf 9) of imaginary adventures� More romantic than “steamships”, which, according to Roger’s elder brother John, “were just engines in tin boxes” (Ransome 15), the sailboat is an apt metaphor to describe the innocence of the children’s adventures on the lakes, which turn into a world in miniature� The sailboat can be read as an ambiguous object and image, harking back to an exciting past of pirates and treasure while also looking forward to a future of work and real politics� The children’s activities are play, but they are also preparations for more serious maritime exploits in connection with a seafaring nation (or at least a testimony to the persistence of naval power in Britain’s national mythology): ‘Britannia, rule the waves’� Yet Roger’s delightful imitation of the Cutty Sark, in his “zigzags, to and fro, across the steep field” also resembles a reader’s movement across the page: the repeated, boustrophedonic ‘turning and crossing’ that itself resembles the movement of a plough drawn by oxen� Land and sea, running and sailing, writing and reading, reality and fiction become interchangeable, joyously joined together� Hard-and-fast distinctions are dissolved by nothing other than the sheer power of literature� The literariness of this dynamic is Children’s Adventure, Empire, and Rereading 77 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0004 enhanced even more by the chapter title, “The Peak in Darien”, and the epigraph, giving us the last four lines of Keats’s sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”: “Or like stout Cortez” etc� The lyric and the epic are another pair of opposites to be conjoined here, and with that sonnet, land, sea and sky are opened up to the history of imperial discovery and conquest, venture capital as well adventure, “eagle eyes” staring “at the Pacific” (ll. 11-12), travelling “in the realms of gold” (l� 1) and “[r]ound many western islands” (l� 3)� Importantly, however, the sonnet is also the record of an intense reading experience, written immediately after Keats and his friend Charles Cowden Clarke read “the ‘famousest’ passages” (Clarke 129) of Homer in a borrowed copy of George Chapman’s translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey� While not a Lake Poet himself, Keats also evokes English Romanticism, which is centrally associated with the Lake District� The children’s summer holidays are thus imbued not only with a sense of maritime adventure but also with the historical association of the Lakes as a culturally central, albeit geographically marginal, site of English literature� The world the children experience is a microcosm of Englishness, full of cultural memory, of reading and rereading or vaguely remembering something read within a distinctly English literary tradition� Ransome’s novel emphasises the symbolic nature of this location by the very fact that it does not strictly adhere to the Lakes’ geography but is set in a fictional version with invented place names and different lakes. The children are allowed to camp for a few days and nights on an island in the lake, which they name Wild Cat Island� They have secured their father’s permission to sail in a small boat, the Swallow� At the same time, the children’s father also happens to be on board ship, sailing from Malta to Hongkong: Commander Walker is securing the perimeters of the British Empire on a Royal Navy destroyer� His permission comes via telegram: “BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WONT DROWN” (Ransome 16)� Their mother, meanwhile, is taking care of baby Vicky and occasionally delivers food to the island� Since the children, in their play-world, have assumed the identities of sailors, explorers and pirates, the grown-ups around them act as “natives” (Ransome 48, 61, etc�)� The real adventure begins when the Walker children meet the Blackett children, Nancy and Peggy, who are also pirates and have a boat named Amazon. They wage a ‘war’ against each other during which the Swallows manage to capture the Blacketts’ boat using a trick� Then they form an alliance against the Blacketts’ uncle, Mr Turner, whom they refer to as ‘Captain Flint’ in accordance with Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Mr Turner, who lives on a houseboat and is writing his memoirs there, had unjustly suspected the Swallows of committing an act of vandalism� United, the children defeat him in a naval battle and make him walk the plank, pirate-style� 78 i ngo b erensMeyer 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0004 Shortly after, there is a burglary on the houseboat in which Mr Turner’s memoirs are stolen� Titty coincidentally overhears the thieves talk about where they have hidden the manuscript, and she manages to locate this ‘treasure’ in a buried chest on an island� Full of gratitude, Jim Turner - whose character resembles the author, Arthur Ransome - gives her his green parrot as a present� As this brief summary of the plot reveals, the novel is a clever combination of realism and fantasy, frequently echoing Stevenson and Defoe� In its language, it is much closer to Defoe, using fairly short words, simple syntax, and precise descriptions of objects and actions, with many nautical terms like ‘painter’ or ‘thwart’ thrown in� Like Defoe, Ransome is a writer of “literal-minded prose” (Moretti 63), interested in details, disenchantment, and mastery, choosing “productivity” over “meaning” (66)� 4 Despite the rather narrow environment of the lake and the island, Ransome’s prose opens up the children’s world to include distant regions, from the “peak in Darien” to “the Indies” and “Sydney Harbour” (Ransome 27-28)� The horizon of the novel’s world, and its “structure of feeling” (Williams 132), 5 are circumscribed by a particularly British outlook on life during the interwar years: “nothing ever changes, and foreigners are funny” (Orwell 196-197)� George Orwell’s analysis of the “Boys’ Weeklies” sums up this zeitgeist and ethos extremely well, and he is not far off the mark in describing, quite unintentionally, Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons: a mixture of “team spirit”, “the Boy Scout movement” and “Admiralty advertisements” (191, 193)� John, the eldest boy of the Walker family, is - obviously and naturally - the leader and captain of the Swallows, whereas Susan, the oldest girl, is the first mate� Although this technically casts her in a male role, she is almost exclusively in charge of provisions and cannot seem to think of anything else than preparing food� Little Roger - who plays Cutty Sark at the beginning - is ship’s boy� Yet, the most interesting character emerging in the course of the story is able seaman Titty, whose bravery and intelligence are rewarded at the end� Also, despite the otherwise typical gender roles and clichés in the novel, John finds his equal in Nancy Blackett, the captain of the Amazon. 6 4 This description of Defoe’s prose can be found in Moretti, 25-66� 5 As defined by Raymond Williams in Marxism and Literature: “characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone […] not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity” (132)� The concept was taken up by Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism to show how literature “participat[es] in Europe’s overseas expansion, and […] creates what Williams calls ‘structures of feeling’ that support, elaborate, and consolidate the practice of empire” (14)� 6 On gender in mid-twentieth-century children’s novels, see Poynter� Children’s Adventure, Empire, and Rereading 79 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0004 This is a world that is at once both realistic and far-fetched; its relationship to the real world, though innocent enough, is filtered through a British public-school mindset as well as through the model of Robinson Crusoe and its reception as children’s literature, combining amusement with instruction� As early as in Rousseau’s treatise of education, Robinson Crusoe (if in an edited version) is the first book that little Émile will be made to read and emulate: Since we must have books, there is one already, which, in my opinion, affords a complete treatise on natural education. This book shall be the first Emilius shall read. In this, indeed, will, for a long time, consist his whole library, and it will always hold a distinguished place among others� […] It will serve as our guide during our progress to a state of reason; and will even afterwards give us constant pleasure, unless our taste be totally vitiated� You ask impatiently, what is the title of this wonderful book? Is it Aristotle, Pliny, or Buffon? No� It is Robinson Crusoe� (333-334) Obviously, Ransome’s bunch of adventurous children have read Robinson Crusoe with an equally “constant pleasure”, complemented by works by Captain Marryatt, R� M� Ballantyne, and Robert Louis Stevenson� At the very least, if they have not read them, the children definitely know of them as indispensable parts of the ‘structure of feeling’ of early twentieth-century Britain� The children’s awareness of Keats’s poetry, moreover, is substantiated explicitly by the narrator: “[Titty] had heard the sonnet read aloud at school, and forgotten everything in it except the picture of the explorers looking at the Pacific Ocean for the first time” (Ransome 17). 7 The children not only name a promontory in the Lake District after the “peak in Darien”, a province of Panama where Balboa (not Cortéz) became the first European to see the Pacific Ocean in 1513� Keats’s comparison of the discovery of a literary world (Homer’s Iliad as translated by Chapman) to the discovery of the Pacific is paralleled in the Swallows’ exploration of Wild Cat Island through the filter of English literature, including Keats as well as Defoe� The main adventure in Swallows and Amazons, then, is one of conquering the world by means of, or at least with the help of, literature� Despite Ransome’s communist sympathies, his view of the world remains firmly that of a late Victorian public school boy. “BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS! ” (Ransome 16), the father’s telegram resounds through the novel, “loud and bold” (Keats l� 8)� It resonates down the ages even beyond the Second World War, by which time Swallows and Amazons has become a part of the tradition of British children’s fiction and can in turn inspire the stranded children in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies 7 The ‘school’ here is a boarding school� Strictly speaking, of course, the explorers in the poem are looking “at each other” while Cortéz alone “star’d at the Pacific”; see Bode 26. 80 i ngo b erensMeyer 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0004 (1954), next to Treasure Island and Coral Island (Golding 38). By then, it is fit to serve as a foil for Golding’s bitter revision of the entire tradition of maritime children’s fiction as he “seeks to dispel [its] intertextual glamour with grim realism” (Singh 206) and as he “deflates and diminishes the heroic occasion and mode” (208) of earlier boys’ adventures (and, at least indirectly, to condemn its involvement with colonial violence)� 8 In the microcosmic world of Swallows and Amazons, the idea of Britain as a naval power is foregrounded, advanced by practical skills of navigation and unflagging ‘team spirit’. Even though the dangers involved in these children’s holiday pastimes are limited by the relative safety of a lake, it is the sea that actually inspires their reading as well as the way they perceive their own adventures� The sea is mapped onto the lakes in a manner best explained by recourse to Fredric Jameson’s analysis in “Modernism and Imperialism” (154-158): in modernist narrative texts by Kipling, Conrad, and others, the colonial other is masked and rendered invisible by a trick of representation that makes use of spatial effects of dislocation, blocking awareness of colonial exploitation by focusing on narratives of imperial rivalry� As the homely Swallows and their classically inspired rivals, the Amazons, fight it out on the lakes, they mirror geopolitical imperial conflicts in a nutshell (or a dinghy) while the ‘natives’ sit idly by and function as little more than ornamental elements in a pseudo-colonial tapestry rather than being agents within the narrative� 9 For a literary naval power as the one envisaged in Swallows and Amazons, it goes without saying that any ship, be it ever so small, has to have a library, be it ever so tiny. So which book is the first to be taken on board? Not the German Dictionary, even though that might come in handy when talking to ‘natives’ since “[i]t’s full of foreign language” (Ransome 33)� The dictionary would be too heavy for the boat� To quote Rousseau again: “No� It is Robinson Crusoe” (334)� This is because Defoe’s novel is the best survival manual there is: “It tells you just what to do on an island” (Ransome 33)� Motifs from Robinson Crusoe and the genre of the robinsonade pervade Swallows and Amazons: there are pirates, ‘natives’, and ‘savages’, the island is deserted but then turns out not to be entirely uninhabited. Similar to Robinson, who finds a mysterious footprint, the Swallows detect traces of earlier occupants on Wild Cat Island� Also, in parallel to Defoe, they have to make themselves at home on the island, though they do so as a group and not as a solitary individual� 8 Though Singh describes Lord of the Flies as “written out of the agonized consciousness of England’s [sic] loss of global power” (207), she does not countenance the possibility of a postcolonial reading� 9 On ‘ornamental’ aspects of Empire, see Cannadine� Children’s Adventure, Empire, and Rereading 81 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0004 The actual robinsonade of the novel begins in chapter 18, when the Swallows want to go to battle against the Amazons and Titty has to remain behind to keep watch on the island� The reference is unmissable not only because this chapter is called “Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday” (Ransome 199) but also because it is made explicit by the narrator: “The able-seaman watched them with the telescope until the brown sail disappeared behind the Peak of Darien� She then became Robinson Crusoe, and went down into the camp to take command of her island” (198)� It takes some effort for Titty, however, to make the world around her fit her self-fashioning as Robinson Crusoe. What bothers her, at first, is that there are two tents on the island when “a shipwrecked mariner on a desert island ought only to have one” (199)� But then she decides to leave both of them standing since one of them could serve as “Man Friday’s tent” (ibid�)� She muses: “Of course I haven’t discovered him yet� But it’s ready for him when the time comes” (ibid)� Evidently, she has some trouble fitting into the mould of Robinson. Moreover, in her opinion, the Robinson story has one crucial flaw: the rescue. As she exclaims: “who would wave a flag to be rescued if they had a desert island of their own? That was the thing that spoilt Robinson Crusoe. In the end he came home� There never ought to be an end” (200)� For the child adventurer, the inevitable ending of the story and the physical limits of the book must be a let-down, as must be the irrevocably approaching end of the holidays, which is why the desire is so strong to keep the adventure a ‘neverending story’, as it were� For the novel, this also means that it takes place in a state of exception, outside of the normal routines of everyday life� The next novel, one year later, will pick up where the first one has to leave off; the holiday promises a serial escape from reality, as does the book series� Similarly, perhaps, the imperial arena may have served at least some of its colonial agents as a welcome escape from their lives at home� The part of ‘Man Friday’ has to be played by the children’s mother, who, on finding Titty alone on the island, immediately joins her role-playing. Like the children, and like mother and daughter at this point, the narrator maintains the fusion of fantasy and reality when he tells us in a surprising sentence that “Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday then kissed each other as if they were pretending to be Titty and Mother” (203)� Having adopted new identities in the mode of play, they need to ‘pretend’ to be who they are in reality because play and imagination take precedence� Fiction and reality have changed places to the extent that the logic of make-believe, expressed in the conjunction “as if”, is reversed� This role-playing is kept up throughout the chapter, with ‘Man Friday’/ Mother telling ‘Robinson Crusoe’/ Titty about her/ his childhood and youth in the sensational style of one of Defoe’s novels: for example, “how 82 i ngo b erensMeyer 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0004 she had nearly been eaten by savages, and had only escaped by jumping out of the stew-pot at the last minute” (205)� Switching to Mother, she goes on to tell Titty about her childhood on an Australian sheep farm before saying goodbye and leaving her alone again on the island� In this central sequence, which roughly marks the novel’s mid-point, Swallows and Amazons briefly stages a robinsonade or, rather, self-reflexively incorporates the robinsonade into its own web of maritime adventure narratives� In the subsequent chapters, after the children have reunited, the model of Treasure Island takes over to propel the plot forward� As we read in chapter 23, for example: “We’ll go to a desert island, a really desert island, not this one, and there we’ll dig for treasure buried by pirates� For a long time we shan’t find it. They never do. But then, at last, there will be a hollow sound under our pickaxes, and thousands of gold pieces will be rolling about in the sand” (Ransome 267)� They declare Cormorant Island, one of the nearby smaller islands, “Treasure Island” (268)� They draw up a map, similar to the one that is printed on the book’s endpapers; this reminds Roger of “Daddy’s chart of the China Seas” (270), once more evoking the context of Empire� If the British Empire is represented and consistently doubled in the Lake District, so that the charcoal burners of Cumbria are turned into ‘savages’ who live in wigwams (how the children see and interact with members of the rural labouring classes could be the subject of a different essay), and if the lake is turned into a miniature ocean and Titty into Robinson Crusoe, the book’s author, Arthur Ransome, is represented in the character of the Blackett girls’ uncle, the author Jim Turner� Mr Turner, in turn, plays the role of Captain Flint, while his parrot mimics Long John Silver in Stevenson’s Treasure Island by shouting “Pieces of eight” (Ransome 318)� Similar to Commander Walker, the children’s father, Mr Turner has a significant connection to the Empire: the reader learns that he has just returned from ‘the East’ a year earlier, from where he has brought with him a Siamese flag. As an author, Mr Turner is writing his memoirs, titled “Mixed Moss, by ‘A Rolling Stone’” (286)� These are stolen by burglars, buried on Cormorant Island, and later discovered by Titty. What could be more fitting for a novel such as this one than that the treasure to be dug up is not one of silver or gold but one of literature, a book? “And after all, even if her treasure was not Spanish gold, it was a book, and a pirate book” (302)� Yet what might interest us even more than the content of this book is its packaging: the suitcase it rests in is a treasure chest full of exotic signs that draw attention to the imperial world� These signs are listed by the narrator almost in the form of an epic catalogue: Children’s Adventure, Empire, and Rereading 83 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0004 It was entirely covered with labels� There were labels showing ‘P� and O� First Cabin’� There were labels of the Bibby Line, of the Dollar Line, of the Nippon Yusen Kaisha� There was a label with palm trees and camels and a river from some hotel in Upper Egypt� There were labels showing the blue bays and white houses of Mediterranean seaports� There was a label saying, “Wanted on the Voyage”� There were labels with queer writing on them, and no English writing at all except the word Peking� There was a label of the Chinese Eastern Railway� There were labels of hotels in San Francisco, Buenos Ayres, London, Rangoon, Colombo, Melbourne, Hong Kong, New York, Moscow and Khartoum� Some of them were pasted over others� Some were scratched and torn� But each one delighted the able-seaman and the boy� In the middle of the lid were two letters, “J� T�” (332-333) This suitcase with its labels pasted one over the other is legible as a palimpsest of early globalization as seen by the English, namely as pure ‘ornamentalism’� 10 The ‘exotic’ place names, including London itself as the Empire’s distant capital city, are a source of enthusiasm because they promise that no distance is ever too far, nothing unattainable� They invite whoever reads them to embark on a journey “[r]ound many western [and eastern] islands” (Keats l� 3), a journey whose sole purpose is for the traveller/ adventurer to connect otherwise unconnected destinations - “New York, Moscow and Khartoum”� Incidentally, they may also remind readers of Defoe’s continuation of the Crusoe story, the Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), which lead his protagonist as far as Moscow and Arkhangelsk� Historically, Ransome’s use of Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe still needs to be seen in the context of Victorian adventure literature for children and young adults, particularly boys - writings such as R� M� Ballantyne’s Coral Island, G� A� Henty’s colonial stories, Kipling and other literary feeders of the imperialist imagination� For these, Defoe’s classic novel can be regarded as a forerunner: “the prototype of literary imperialism” (Green 5)� This was still a typical way of reading Robinson Crusoe around 1900� In this year, we find a Cambridge edition of the novel introduced as follows: One great secret of the charm of Robinson Crusoe is that in the hero of the story we recognize those qualities of resourcefulness, activity and practical common sense that have made Great Britain the greatest colonizing power in the world� The act of ‘making the best of things’ was one that Englishmen had to learn when they went out to plant the flag of England in the waste places of the earth. […] And so the simple story of a man who by labour and patience conquered despondency and doubt can never lose its charm for those who know that labour and patience - effort 10 For this term, see Cannadine� 84 i ngo b erensMeyer 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0004 and faith - are still the forces that overcome the world� (Masterman, qtd� in Blewett 188n49) Labour and patience, effort and faith - Victorian colonial adventurers liked to recognise themselves in such descriptions� British publishers saw clear advantages in presenting explorers’ exploits within such a framework - a framework that accomplishes one thing above all: to accentuate a clear divide between white Englishmen and people of different skin tones, or between civilisation and savagery� This interpretation of Robinson Crusoe as a story of “resourcefulness, activity and practical common sense” has its own resourcefulness as a template for the narrativisation of explorers’ accounts in the form of heroic adventure stories� To give just one example: David Finkelstein, in his history of the publishing house of Blackwood, has demonstrated how the Blackwoods in the early 1860s went to great lengths to turn the hardly readable account written by the African explorer John Hanning Speke into “a most quaint, interesting Robinson Crusoe like narrative” (Finkelstein 57)� In another letter, John Blackwood characterises the merely functionally literate Speke as follows: “He certainly has not the pen of De Foe [sic] but he has the heart of Robinson Crusoe with a dash of Friday about him” (67)� Their ‘resourceful’ hiring of a ghostwriter helped make Speke’s Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (1863) into a bestseller: “Within a year of initial publication, the work had sold 7,600 copies and gone through three editions, and foreign rights to the work had been negotiated in France, Germany, and the United States” (68-69)� “Activity and practical common sense” - similar to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, whom Ransome got to know at the tender age of four, these are certainly qualities that Ransome’s child pirates also cultivate, especially as their reading of novels is almost overshadowed by more practical books on navigation or birdwatching� This is reading “for action” (Jardine and Grafton) and, quite obviously, this sort of education prepares them for future roles in an imperial context� As minor would-be explorers and colonizers in the microcosm of the Lake District, aren’t they destined to grow into actual colonizers? Well, not exactly� Few childhood Jim Hawkinses will turn into adult buccaneers� But doesn’t its imperial context mean that Ransome’s robinsonade and treasure hunting story had better be kept away from children nowadays? Should it be a cause for concern that Swallows and Amazons is still selling well, apparently, in times of Brexit, when there are renewed attempts to re-heroicise British history? In a Britain haunted by “postimperial melancholy” (Baucom 284), 11 11 Baucom’s term has since been adopted to describe (part of) the structure of feeling in contemporary Britain, especially England; see Gilroy� Children’s Adventure, Empire, and Rereading 85 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0004 the book’s success is perhaps no surprise� Is Swallows and Amazons nothing more or better than a fantasy of imperialist hubris? I think this interpretation would fall short of the novel’s potential� Why? Ever since the publication of Martin Green’s trailblazing study Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire in 1980, adventure and the adventure novel have been regarded as the “energizing myth of empire” (xi). But a superficial reading of Swallows and Amazons as a jingoistic paean to imperialism would miss this novel’s deliberate self-reflexiveness, which foregrounds above all the reading of adventure stories as a mode of interpreting the world, the self, and the “imagined communities” (Anderson) of family, peer group, and nation� Their reading allows the children in the novel to expand their imagination, to take on different roles as adventurers - but also to give them up again after a while, and thus to test them and question them in the mode of play� The intertextual references in the novel enable readers to engage in second-order observation and rereading, observing how these children interact with their world using literature as a springboard or sounding board for playful simulations� There is, then, no “political unconscious” (Jameson, Political Unconscious) to detect here in the analytic mindset of a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ 12 - both the political direction of the novel and its own questioning of this direction in a mode of playful engagement or even at times of parody are overt, on the surface, and do not require additional efforts of decoding or unmasking� Swallows and Amazons is not an imperialist adventure novel but at best (or worst) a ‘meta-imperialist’ meta-adventure novel� 13 It toys with key questions of authority and power in the interwar years as well as issues of powerlessness, law and injustice, freedom, and violence� It does so not with a ‘critical’ intention, not in the way that Orwell, for instance, a few years later condemned the British colonial regime in Burma in his essays “A Hanging” (1931), “Shooting an Elephant” (1936) and the novel Burmese Days (1934), where the focus is on the corrupting effects that colonialism has on the colonizers themselves� Unlike Orwell, Ransome was not a political realist but, in the final account, a political dreamer and fantasist. His world is above all a highly artificial and literary one, mediated and filtered by poems and novels. Swallows and Amazons views real life through the filter of adventure stories. It is a book about the power of books� For Ransome’s protagonists, this is lib- 12 The expression ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ is usually traced back to Paul Ricœur’s Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. 13 A few of the later novels in the series are even more explicitly metafictional, as when Peter Duck (1932) includes a yarn about an imagined adventure in the Caribbean (Poynter 7)� 86 i ngo b erensMeyer 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0004 erating because it grants them agency and greater degrees of freedom� They and their readers can at least temporarily forget who they really are or are supposed to be� A liberal utopia, perhaps, this transgression of boundaries (at whose cost? ); but then again, is the achievement of not always taking oneself too seriously so despicable? Also, there is no ‘health and safety’ on Wild Cat Island� The children test their own limits and make their own rules - a formula that many writers have followed in various ways, from Enid Blyton’s Five on a Treasure Island (1942) and many subsequent books in the Famous Five series to more recent examples of the genre such as Simon Cherry’s Eddy Stone and the Epic Holiday Adventure (2018)� Another aspect to consider in Ransome’s favour is that he “never mentions gender as an obstacle to action” (Poynter 59) and that he “has, perhaps surprisingly, more girls than boys in general” (Poynter 49)� Arguably, the main protagonist in Swallows and Amazons is Titty, the ‘Robinson’ on the island� In contrast to the long tradition of “Tom Brown’s imperialist sons” (James), Ransome breaks up at least some of the gender stereotypes of the adventure genre� The metafictional references to Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island distance the novel from an all too literal reading of these pre-texts as imperialist templates in the Masterman fashion� There is no appeal to the ideology of “possessive individualism” (Macpherson) or the representation of a homo oeconomicus or even a homo imperialis that generations of readers have detected in Robinson Crusoe. Ransome’s novel calls up its literary pre-texts in a reflexive way, without bigotry or preaching� It returns something of their original freshness to these pre-texts and even gains some ironic distance to the Empire by shrinking warships into sailboats and oceans into Northern English lakes� Its references to Empire can thus also be turned the other way, as if viewing them through an inverted telescope� Swallows and Amazons allows its readers sufficient freedom to question the norms that shape the way we see and make the world and that filter reality for us just like the genre conventions of robinsonades and pirate stories� Dreaming of the possibility of an island is not the worst experience a reader can have; reality will wake us up again soon enough� It is certainly one of the functions of literature to help us find a different outlook on the world. 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