Terrance had written numerous children’s books for Piccadilly since it was launched in 1984, and before that worked with the company’s founder, Brenda Gardner, at both Target Books and Pepper Press. This run of comedy titles seem to have been a conscious effort to try something a bit different, aimed at a broader and more grown-up audience than the usual fare.
The first, Europe United (published 10 October 1991) was well timed given the imminent signing of the Maastricht Treaty, and was well received, too. In the Sunday Times, Harry Enfield called it, “The best Eurobook … bright and amusing … intelligent and great fun.” In the Guardian, Stephanie Nettle said it had, “A snappily amusing style”. They’re cited on the back of this follow-up.
As with Europe United, A Riot of Writers was illustrated by Ray Jelliffe, a former creative director in a large advertising agency who now, in his retirement, kept busy illustrating books and greetings cards. My suspicion, based on previous books by Terrance, is that the writer didn’t brief the illustrator. Instead, Jelliffe would have received the manuscript and then devised his cartoons, as a sort of commentary on the text.
The book is a guide to what Terrance calls “Eng Lit”, as though this is revision for an exam. It provides potted biographies of 30 writers, from Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400) to Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961), or to JRR Tolkien (1892-1973) if reckoning by the subject latest to die. Of this 30, there are four entries on women: Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters (sharing a chapter), George Eliot and Virginia Woolf.
It’s interesting to compare Terrance’s choice of canonical authors with the much shorter list compiled by FR Leavis, Terrance’s tutor at Downing College, Cambridge, in the 1950s. In The Great Tradition (1948), Leavis decided that the canon of Great Authors comprised Austen, Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad, though he also allowed a single book by Dickens, Hard Times. Terrance skips James and Conrad entirely, and clearly doesn’t think much of Eliot, though conceding that Middlemarch is a “masterpiece”.
Throughout, the style is chatty and irreverent, reminiscent of the later Horrible Histories books by Terry Deary (the initial pair of which were first published a year after this book, in June 1993). The humour is a bit end-of-the-pier, akin to Terrance’s early days in radio comedy, and sometimes a bit bawdy. For example, in the entry on Byron, we’re told:
“Fashionable hostesses were delighted to have him — and not just for dinner” (p. 46).
There are jokes, too, about bisexuality and homosexuality (the Bloomsbury group, for example, had enjoyed a “gay old time”), which all seems a bit mature for a title from a children’s publisher by a well-known children’s author, even if this isn’t explicitly marketed as a children’s book. It’s a kind of humour, and a book, from another time.
Terrance acknowledge’s Kipling’s chauvinism, and provides examples, but his attitude to Carrie Kipling is a bit judgemental.
“Kipling married Carrie — or perhaps she married him. She certainly ran his life from then on, doing his accounts, fixing his appointments, protecting him from visitors” (p. 120).
The sense is of a domineering figure, rather than this being something Kipling might welcome, or need. There is something similar going on in descriptions of both Chaucer’s Wife of Bath (p. 3) and Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth (p. 7) as being “an early feminist” — the gag feels all the more condescending because it’s repeated so soon.
The only mention of Henry James in the whole book is his reference to George Elliot as “magnificently ugly” (p. 83). Yes, this is Terrance reporting what was said at the time, but other authors are are not judged on their looks. In his entry on George Bernard Shaw, for example, he could have cited the famous story about Isadora Duncan suggesting that a child of theirs would inherit her beauty and his brains; Shaw quipped that it might be the other way round.
Terrance mentions that The Invisible Man by HG Wells was adapted for television, but not that he worked on this production. Several of the authors in his canon here were dramatised under Terrance’s era as script editor then producer of the BBC-1 Classic Serials: Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Doyle, Kipling and Wells.
I’ve seen paperwork in which Terrance says he didn’t think Austen was suitable for the Sunday teatime serial, so it’s interesting to see here his evident admiration of her work. He also admires Shaw for the strident women at the forefront of many plays. Terrance, of course, borrowed from Pygmalion in Doctor Who, with the character arc of Jo Grant. Like Eliza Doolittle, Jo outgrows her tutor and leaves him heartbroken. But Terrance often downplayed his role in that and the creation of Sarah Jane Smith, who began life stridently championing women’s lib to sisters in the middle ages and in outer space.
He also quotes a line from Shaw’s Arms and the Man with approval — it’s a very Terrance sentiment:
“You can always tell an old soldier … The young ones carry pistols and cartridges, the old ones grub” (p. 108)
There’s a joke on p. 10 at the expense of Jonathan Miller, who had repeatedly criticised the Classic Serials, Terrance apparently still rankled about it. Some of what’s here helpfully confirms my theories about Terrance’s views on particular authors or modes of writing. I’m delighted to find, for example, that he did have a contemporary drama in mind when commissioning his first Classic Serial, Kipling’s Stalky & Co:
“The Grange Hill of its day, it was severely criticised for the ‘horrible vileness’ of its picture of English public school life” (p. 121).
His thoughts on other writers are interesting, too. While Terrance was at Cambridge, his tutor FR Leavis published DH Lawrence, Novelist (1955), and I’ve evidence that Leavis passed on his enthusiasm for Lawrence to his students. Yet Terrance was not persuaded, or reassessed Lawrence in the years afterward.
He speaks — presumably from first-hand experience — of the “well-thumbed, smuggled-in copies” of Lady Chatterley’s Lover that were all that were available until Penguin published its paperback edition in 1960. Then he shares his judgment:
“Lawrence describes their love-making in graphic detail, using well-known four-letter words in the process. Despite its lurid reputation Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a worthwhile attempt to describe physical love in plain and honest language. To be honest, it doesn’t really work. Tweeness keeps creeping in. The couple refer to their respective naughty bits as ‘John Thomas’ and ‘Lady Jane’ and there’s an incident with a daisy-chain you’ll never see demonstrated on Gardeners’ World.” (p. 145)
Then there’s his assessment of Lawrence as a whole:
“He was a genuine pioneer, and his reputation has suffered ever since. Despite some weird, almost fascist ideas about the deep dark stirrings in the blood, and the need for an intellectual elite, Lawrence at his best is a wonderful writer. The characters he creates, their emotional relationships and the worlds they live in are real and solid, completely convincing.” (p. 144)
There are several places here where I disagree with Terrance and a couple of occasions where he’s misremembered the details of a classic text (he says, of The Time Machine, that the Eloi prey on Morlocks, not the other way round). But this is a fascinating account of what Terrance thought constituted great writing: basically, a good story grounded in real characters and real situations. For example, he suggests that the power of The Hobbit, and why it still sits above its many imitators, is not the epic imaginative fantasy, but the relatable stuff.
“Small, tubby and timid, caught up in the wars of great men and magical beings, the hobbit makes the most reluctant of heroes. All he asks is to survive and to get home to a blazing fire, a pipe, a flagon of ale and four square meals a day.” (p. 149)
It’s exactly what I’ve seen in his Doctor Who novelisations. You can judge the best of English literature by its meals.
***
For more of this kind of thing, see my big list of the 236 books written by Terrance Dicks, with links to posts about them. My biography, Written by Terrance Dicks, will be published by Ten Acre Books later this year.
Here are some posts about books by authors in Terrance’s canon of Eng Lit:
