ABSTRACT
Arthur Ransome is the last writer I will discuss in detail. He wrote just before and during World War II, and is the last children’s writer to reflect issues of empire in easily recognizable and definable ways. But the desire for empire does not go away after World War II-or perhaps it does, to be replaced by its close cousin, nostalgia for a lost and more powerful Britain and a more perfect British past. Empire becomes generalized into a longing for past glories. Fred Inglis, writing of Kipling’s Puck books, asserted that “The idea of England transcends the real history of empire, devastation, invasion, and colonization,”1 a statement that applies as readily to later twentieth-century British children’s books as to Kipling’s.
