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[shewhomust]

So, the great Mary Poppins re-read.

Do I need to say that if there can be spoilers, there will be? Mary Poppins arrives; she departs; in between, things happen. This holds true for more than the first book.

sartorias starts us off with a bit of throat-clearing. Even without going beyond the first few pages, she touches on two things that I wanted to talk about.

The first is the illustrations, line drawings by Mary Shepard (there are some examples here, as well as some interesting discussion); she was the daughter of the much better known illustrator E.H. Shepard. her obituary in the New York Times suggests that her father was P.L. Travers's first choice as illustrator, and her work has a certain resemblance to his. She has a lightness of touch, and a perceptive eye, which together convey both the fantasy and the domesticity of Mary Poppins's adventures.

sartorias is also taken aback to discover that the Banks family, apparently not just ordinary but quite modest, runs to four servants: she discusses the first appearance of the household, who live in the smallest house in Cherry Tree Lane, and the most dilapidated, the one that needs a coat of paint. Mr. Banks had told Mrs. Banks that "She could have either a nice, clean, comfortable house or four children. But not both, for he couldn't afford it." Not having things you can't afford is something that both of us, as children, recognised, and it is something that Travers expected her child readers to understand. But that smallest house contains, as I commented when I first wrote about the books, Mrs Brill the Cook, Ellen the parlourmaid and Robertson Ay, as well as Katie Nanna (Mary Poppins's predecessor).

I quoted then an article by Kathryn Hughes, who takes all this as social realism: "No 17 Cherry Tree Lane is clearly in the midst of what was known by the interwar period as 'the servant problem'. With young working-class people more and more reluctant to 'go into service', the middle classes were obliged to run their houses with the help of a dwindling cohort of increasingly bolshie staff who weren't about to put up with any nonsense from their 'betters'. And that, surely, is the point Travers is making when Mary Poppins turns up from nowhere and refuses to provide references. Hysterically grateful that anyone at all is prepared to work for her, a cowed Mrs Banks immediately agrees to waive the formalities." But this treats Mary Poppins as a symptom, rather than as the Great Exception, which can't be right. Even if we assume that Mr Banks's position at the Bank is not quite as lowly as he implies (he is, we later learn, sufficiently senior to finish work early enough to be taken out for tea and shortbread biscuits, as a Treat), his is an extablishment that Mr Pooter, writing his Diary of a Nobody some forty years earlier, would have envied: the Pooters have one "servant", Sarah, plus a charwoman who a quick dip into the book reveals to have finished off the cold pork. Mrs Pooter is sometimes seen doing unspecified things in the house, whereas there is no indication of who does the heavy housework at Number Seventeen (though Ellen dusts the books in Mr Banks's study).

valydiarosada suggests that since these introductory pages, like much of the book, are written from a child's point of view (the deadpan acceptance of how Mr Banks makes money by cutting out coins, the capitalisation of the Policeman, the Park, Next Door, each person and location unique, the description a personal name), the omission of matters like housework simply reflects that they don't much interest the children. More to the point, they don't much interest the author. What does Mrs Banks do with her time? She advertises for, and appoints, Nannies, she thinks about "the Laundry Bill and Michael's new overcoat and where was Aunt Flossie's address, and why did that wretched Mrs Jackson ask her to tea on the second Tuesday of the month when she knew that was the very day Mrs Banks had to go to the Dentist's?" She visits the nursery and deludes herself that she can comfort her children, she looks in on them when they are asleep. But when she is left in the lurch by a Nanny, it is Mrs Brill or Ellen who has to give the children their supper or put them to bed (Mrs Banks may have to go out to dinner).

How old are the Banks children? We know from the start that Jane is the eldest, then Michael, and the Twins have their first birthday in the course of the book. Trying hard to think sad thoughts, Michael "thought of school, and that one day he would have to go there." On first reading I took this to mean that he was not yet attending primary school, and must therefore be five at the oldest (and indeed, since school is never mentioned, Jane can't be more than five, and Michael younger); now I wonder whether school is just another of those things which are not interesting enough to be mentioned, and what Michael is thinking about is being sent away to school. Jane's sad thought is "I shall be grown up in another fourteen years!" But how old is "grown up"? Eighteen? Twenty one? From the pictures, Jane could be seven and Michael five or six. (There's another child in the Banks family, which is Mr Banks, but most of the evidence for this comes later.)

The blurb of my copy of Mary Poppins, which is the Puffin reissue with the film tie-in cover, says "Specially commended for mothers, and for children from seven to eleven." I am not convinced by this.

Comments

[vschanoes.livejournal.com]

I loved those books as a kid, and when I re-read them ten years ago, I loved them so much that I cried at Mary's inevitable departure, especially the third one, which I knew to be the final.

You make good points. I think that when I was a kid, everything about these kinds of families in books was so alien to me--the servants, the slang, the big houses, etc., that I just took for granted that four servants was no big.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Oh, as a child I took it completely in my stride: fiction is another country, they do things differently there. Not to mention the past, of course. Whereas reading as an adult, I think "But it's not that distant a past!"

[fjm.livejournal.com]

A boy of that class would start prep school at 7.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Thank you - I was sure somebody would know! And before that, no primary school? And what about Jane? There's a governess in a later book, during the interregnum, but she doesn't last long.

But this confirms my guess at their ages.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

A prosperous family might have a governess but my guess is that nanny or mother would teach a child to read, count and tie his own shoe laces.


Re the servants by the way: always worth remembering the sheer volume of work a middle class house in 1910 needed. Cooking was still on closed ranges, washing was still done with a copper and mangle. American households outsourced things like clothes washing with a woman who came in once a week, but British ones didn't. So the comment about nice house v four children is probably accurate as they can afford the servants or a nice house, but not both. Also, by this time there would be *girls* school fees to save for also.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Well, up to a point. (You say '1910', by the way, which I think is when the film is set - when you go on to say 'by this time', I take it we're thinking of the book and the early 30s. It's one of the things that always throws me.

Then if you look at the division of labour at Number 17, Mrs Brill is the cook - but she's more likely to be called away from the kitchen to mind the children than Mrs Banks is to do it herself. Ellen is described as doing things like dusting and setting the table: should we assume that the heavier cleaning is part of her work, but invisible? The style is that people are described as doing certain things rather than having job titles, so I'm guessing a bit here. The Laundry Bill is one of the things Mrs Banks has to think about, so there's some outsourcing going on there...

None of which is to deny any of what you and other people are saying about housework - just that I don't think that this is any part of what Travers is interested in.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

About the only household change I think is that there might be a gas oven. Otherwise not much. The book Can Any Mother Help Me? Is very clear how onerous housework remains.

The age of maids often indicated a family's finances. Young = cheap.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I was thinking not so much of the need for domestic servants as their availability: seeing the War as the Great Divide. You can tell this isn't my period, can't you?

Thank you for taking time to contribute to this: it's very much appreciated.

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

I think the war was a death knell, but the 30s were notorious for household help being more difficult to get. I wish I could remember where I read it, but someone complained that their people were behaving just like Australians, with no understanding of their station and far too many demands for days off.

[heliopausa.livejournal.com]

The Bankses are pretty much at the same level as the Provincial Lady's family, I think, at pretty much the same time (though urban). The Provincial family had several servants but thought they were short of money.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I haven't read the Provincial Lady - would you recommend her?

[heliopausa.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, very much! It's cheerful, very deftly written light satire, very funny, in a 1930s well-bred Punch column way.
And as well, genuinely an insider's view of a particular literary-intellectual upper-middle-class life (though she downplays her own strong literary career in this book, in order to make the persona of Provincial Lady) with lots of reflections on fine social distinctions.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Michael Banks has his sixth birthday at the very end of the second book, Mary Poppins Comes Back.

Mchael took the last chocolate out of the box Aunt Flossie had given him for his sixth birthday last week.

But time is very hazy in this series: the seasons rock back and forth, with November skipping next to May.

Nine

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Thank you - I'm midway through the second book, and trying not to anticipate, so this is helpful.

I hadn't noticed that about the seasons: the weather is often quite vividly present, but I hadn't spotted that it was non-sequential.

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

As a child, I thought that the ages of the children were carefully left hard to measure, just as most of the daily life aspects were not quite there. It was more about Mary Poppins turning the world of the children inside out than about their ordinary lives,so the everyday was only referenced as an anchor. Mind you, this is me running on memory - no doubt I'll have an entirely different opinion when I can get the book. I do remember though, thinking about all the missing elements and trying to work out how my childhood related to theirs and thinking "This is not what the story's about." It was more surreal than real to me as a child.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

What a wise child you were!

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

I bet you I didn't articulate it terribly well back then, though.

[nipernaadiagain.livejournal.com]

While I do believe the drawings by Mary Shepard show Mary Poppins more as she was written, for me she will always look like in the Estonian translation I read (must show them in my LJ)

"What does Mrs Banks do with her time?" - I suddenly realized that, as a child in 1971, I simply assumed Mrs. Banks worked outside the home. As I did not know any women, who were not of retirement age, around me who did not work (Soviet Union), so I expected she had a profession.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I hope you will post some pictures of the Estonian Mary Poppins: I would love to see them.