Family Roundabout

Detail from a 1928 Southern Electric Railway poster 'Kentish Hills & Surrey Dales' by Ethelbert White

PREFACE BY JULIET AYKROYD
384pp
ISBN 9781903155134

Richmal Crompton created William, the pugnacious anti-hero of thirty books selling over 8 million copies in her lifetime. We publish the best of her forty novels for adults, a 1948 book about the life of two families during the inter-war years. Instead of seeing William at odds with adults, we are shown the matriarchs around whom their families spin; but whether they direct their children gently or forcefully, in the end they have to accept them as they are.

We see that families can both entrap and sustain; that parents and children must respect each other; and that happiness necessitates jumping or being pushed off the family roundabout.

Endpaper

An example of 1940s 'peasant-art' style, the fabric shows prancing roundabout horses on a striped background; the faded pink is typical of the period (Mrs Fowler, one of the matriarchs, is especially fond of her 'faded cretonnes').