"The Young Pretenders" (1895) is a children's book whose
sophistication, humour and ironies are nowadays appreciated by both
children and adults. Babs lives most contentedly in a large house
in the country with her grandmother, her nanny and her brother
(their parents are in 'Inja'). Then their grandmother dies and they
are sent to live in Kensington with their uncle and his wife.
Having run wild in the country, spent hours with the gardener (very
like the gardener in "The Secret Garden") and had a great deal to
do and to think about, suddenly they are abandoned in a world of
artifice and convention and are expected to behave artificially and
conventionally. 'It all came of so much pretending. But then it was
simply impossible for the children not to pretend. It would have
been so dull to have lived their child lives only as the little
Conways, when they might be pretending that they were such exciting
things as soldiers or savages, cab-horses or mice.'Babs cannot, of
course, stop playing, and the central theme of the book is that she
has not learned how to dissemble (as opposed to playing 'let's
pretend') but must learn how to do so. However, as Charlotte
Mitchell, the Preface writer, says, this is not a solemn book, on
the contrary, 'its great characteristic is a gay malicious irony'
as Babs misunderstands the adult world and fails to conform to
adult norms. 'As anyone who has tried to bring up children knows,
you spend a good deal of time teaching them to be insincere, to
simulate gratitude or contrition, and not to repeat other people's
comments at the wrong moments. Many of the jokes depend on the fact
that Babs has yet to learn these lessons.'The focus, and the star,
of "The Young Pretenders" is Babs. She is intelligent, fun, kind,
lively and honest and it is hard to think of a heroine in
children's fiction (that is, fiction written for children but
enjoyed equally as much by adults) who is like her. Her most
touching characteristic is her openness and her complete lack of
fear. "'What was we naughty about?'" she asks her brother after
their uncle scolds them: 'The children could not know that some
very persistent tradesmen had insisted on immediate payment of
their bills.' When the news comes from India that they have a new
sister Babs thinks of a name for her - Mrs Brown. Her aunt slaps
her down, saying that it's not a name but Babs persists, "'It is, I
know it is, 'cause nurse has a sister-in-law what's called it.'"
Then she 'began to think so hard that she refused a second helping
of pudding' eventually announcing, to renewed scorn, that "'I'd
like her to be called Strawberry Jam.'"
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