Enid Blyton: The Factory That Called Itself a Dream
She described her method to the psychologist Peter McKellar in terms that sound closer to mediumship than authorship. "I shut my eyes for a few minutes, with my portable typewriter on my knee — I make my mind a blank and wait — and then, as clearly as I would see real children, my characters stand before me." Then she typed between six and ten thousand words, and did it again the next day. Over a career she produced more than six hundred books and sold more than six hundred million copies. In 2008 a Costa Book Awards poll named her Britain's best-loved author, ahead of Roald Dahl, J.K. Rowling, Jane Austen and Shakespeare. For most of her working life the BBC would not broadcast her, on the grounds that the work had no literary merit.
Dulwich, and a Father Who Left
Enid Mary Blyton was born on 11 August 1897 in East Dulwich, London, the eldest child of Thomas Carey Blyton, a cutlery salesman, and Theresa Mary Harrison. She had two younger brothers, Hanly and Carey. Shortly after her thirteenth birthday her father left the household to live with another woman — the wound at the centre of a body of work obsessively concerned with self-sufficient children who solve everything themselves while adults are conveniently absent.
She attended St Christopher's School in Beckenham from 1907 to 1915, excelled at writing, and became school tennis champion and lacrosse captain. In 1916 she trained at Ipswich High School, completing the National Froebel Union course that September, and took her teaching certificate in 1918 with distinctions in zoology and educational principles and first-class marks in botany, geography and classroom teaching. This is the fact most often skipped in accounts of Blyton: she was a professionally trained specialist in how children learn.
Teacher, Then Machine
She taught at Bickley Park School in Bromley from January 1919, then spent 1920 to 1924 as nursery governess to the four sons of the architect Horace Thompson in Surbiton. Her first poems appeared in *Nash's Magazine* in March 1916; she won a *Saturday Westminster Review* essay competition in 1921; and in 1922 published *Child Whispers*, a twenty-four-page collection of verse.
In 1926 she took over the children's magazine *Sunny Stories*, renamed *Enid Blyton's Sunny Stories* in January 1937, and edited it until 1952. From 18 March 1953 she produced the fortnightly *Enid Blyton Magazine*, which she wrote in its entirety. At her peak in the early 1950s she published more than fifty books a year.
The series arrived in waves. *The Faraway Tree* began in 1939, drawing on Norse mythology. *St Clare's* ran from 1941 to 1945, the Famous Five from 1942 to 1963 across twenty-one books whose characters became household names in Britain, the Five Find-Outers from 1943, the Adventure series from 1944, *Malory Towers* from 1946 to 1951, and both the Secret Seven and Noddy from 1949. Noddy alone sold 26 million copies by 1962; by the early 1960s 146 companies were licensing him. She wrote *Tales of Ancient Greece* (1930), *The Land of Far-Beyond* (1942) and *The Children's Life of Christ* (1943). Her work now exists in ninety languages, making her the fourth most translated author in the world.
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Take the IQ test →She married Hugh Alexander Pollock on 28 August 1924 and divorced him in 1943; their daughters were Gillian, born 1931, and Imogen, born 1935. On 20 October 1943 she married Kenneth Fraser Darrell Waters, who died in September 1967.
The Case Against Her
It is long and much of it is fair. From the 1930s to the 1950s the BBC refused her work. The children's critic Margery Fisher called her books "slow poison." Libraries and schools banned them. She was accused of snobbery and of writing prose that made no demands on a reader.
The racism charges are specific and documented. *The Little Black Doll* (1937) features a black doll named Sambo whose "ugly black face" is washed clean by magic rain, after which he is accepted. The Noddy books set blonde children against black golliwogs in imagery critics have called deeply racist. *The Island of Adventure* (1944) makes a black servant, Jo-Jo, its cruelty. On gender, critics noted that the girls of the Famous Five either imitate boys or are patronised — though George, the tomboy, was Blyton's self-portrait, "short-haired, freckled, sturdy" and "bold and daring." Macmillan rejected *The Mystery That Never Was* in 1960, citing its old-fashioned xenophobia in casting foreigners as inherently criminal; her agent George Greenfield observed that she was "part of that middle class which believed that foreigners were untrustworthy."
From the mid-1950s rumours spread that so much output could only be ghostwritten. She denied it furiously, went to law in 1955, and in early 1956 forced a librarian to apologise in open court.
Later publishers sanded her down. Golliwogs became teddy bears and goblins from 1986; Dame Slap became Dame Snap; Dick and Fanny became Rick and Frannie; spankings vanished from *Malory Towers* and *St Clare's*; in 2010 Hodder turned "mother and daddy" into "mum and dad." In 2016 Hachette abandoned the revisions after readers rejected them.
Why Enid Is Called a Genius
The honest case for Blyton has nothing to do with literary quality, which is genuinely poor, and everything to do with an almost pathological instinct for what a child's mind wants. She was a trained Froebel teacher who understood developmental pacing, and she married that training to a compositional process that bypassed conscious craft altogether — no planning, no research, what she called her "under-mind," characters appearing behind closed eyes at the rate of ten thousand words a day. Her daughter Gillian said she "never knew where her stories came from." The result is prose engineered, apparently without deliberation, to the exact frequency of a seven-year-old: short sentences, food described in detail, absent adults, a puzzle solved by children with no help. Six hundred million copies is not a marketing achievement. It is evidence of an unconscious mechanism operating at a level of accuracy no committee has replicated.
Helena Bonham Carter, who played her in the 2009 BBC Four film *Enid*, described the other half of it: "a complete workaholic, an achievement junkie and an extremely canny businesswoman" who grasped personal branding decades before the phrase existed. She built clubs — the Busy Bees, the Famous Five Club, the Enid Blyton Magazine Club — that reached half a million members by the late 1950s and raised £35,000 for sick animals, children with cerebral palsy, Great Ormond Street and Stoke Mandeville.
The counter-case is severe and cannot be argued away. The work is racially ugly in places, class-bound throughout, and stylistically inert; Fisher's "slow poison" was not hysteria but a serious critic's judgment about what a diet of Blyton does to a developing reader. And the same absence of self-examination that made the flow possible is what let the prejudices onto the page unexamined. Her genius is real, narrow and involuntary — a mechanism for reaching children that its owner neither designed nor fully controlled.
Legacy
Blyton's health declined from 1957; by 1960 she showed signs of the Alzheimer's disease that killed her. Greenfield found it unthinkable that the most famous children's author alive should be losing her mind in her mid-sixties. Three months after her husband's death she entered a nursing home, and she died at Greenways in Hampstead on 28 November 1968, aged 71.
Her daughters never agreed on her. Gillian remembered "a fair and loving mother, and a fascinating companion." Imogen, in her 1989 memoir *A Childhood at Green Hedges*, called her "arrogant, insecure, pretentious ... and without a trace of maternal instinct," a woman who loved children through her books and found actual children intrusive.
The Royal Mail issued centenary stamps in 1997; blue plaques mark Chessington and Beaconsfield; Seven Stories in Newcastle holds her papers, including the unpublished *Mr Tumpy's Caravan* found in 2011. Jacqueline Wilson, Adèle Geras and Stieg Larsson all cite her — Larsson most often of all. The books keep selling.
