Prompted by the recent thread concerning one of Enid Blyton’s “Noddy” books: this is about another series by Blyton, which I wonder whether other Brit (or otherwise) participants than me, remember, and have liked. (I was never into Noddy and his Toytown milieu – having even as a small child, regarded him as a most twee little wretch – but am aware that very many felt otherwise.)
The series concerned, is Blyton’s “Br’er Rabbit” books – which as a child in the 1950s, I read and greatly enjoyed. There were IIRC, about half a dozen books – all of them, made up of short stories – in the series: she took Joel Chandler Harris’s basic “Br’er Rabbit” idea, and “ran far away” with it. With time passing, the details are blurred; but, I seem to recall, the basic idea was largely kept: about Br’er Rabbit doing a lot of outsmarting of his other animal associates. Some of the original other characters were retained – including, I’m sure, Br’ers Fox / Bear / Terrapin – but I seem also to recall many other animal characters, by no means all of which were real-life North American fauna. From what I recall, the stories had a basic “everywhere-and-nowhere”, rather than specifically North American, setting.
The whole thing went very far away from the original; but I seem to remember, as a kid, finding the stories witty and entertaining – how they’d feel if read nowadays, would likely be very much something else. I just wonder whether this stuff has ever come any other Dope participant’s way?
It occurs to me to wonder whether with these doings, Blyton was risking getting in bother over copyright matters; or might it be – with her writing these stories in the 1950s – J.C. Harris was essentially then too long ago, for this to be an issue?
I’m Australian, and I believe I still own my copies. I haven’t read them since I was a child, but I remember liking them, and I still remember a few of the distinctive scenes - Br’er Rabbit picking a fight with an effigy made of tar and begging somebody not to be thrown into a briar patch.
The first of the Blyton versions appeared in 1934. Harris’s books would then still have been under copyright in the UK and, on the assumption that their copyright had been renewed, I’m guessing also in the USA. A quick check of the British Library catalogue reveals that some of Harris’s book were still being published in Britain in the 1930s, suggesting that he hadn’t been forgotten. But it’s not as if the stories had originated with him, so Blyton would have been in the clear.
I do seem to remember reading some Br’er Rabbit story as a child, but I have no idea which version it was and my memory of it is now mashed up with what little I remember of Song of the South.
Thanks – so, Blyton is “off the hook” because of the whole thing being folk-tales long pre-dating Harris. I had no idea that Blyton was onto the Br’er Rabbit theme as early as you cite – personal ignorance, with my having been born in 1948 and having discovered Enid’s Br’er R. stuff in the 50’s – one should have it in mind that the world existed, and stuff was going on in it, before one was born !
I have an illustrated book – dating from the 1920s I guess (it contains no publication date), passed down in the family – of Harris’s genuine “Uncle Remus” stories. A beautiful thing; but, sadly, I just cannot handle Harris’s transcribed Southern Black dialect – makes it unreadable for me.