William - the Outlaw
Richmal Crompton
Macmillan Children's Books. First published 1927.
Not many children now-a-days find these books interesting. If they are still in print, maybe it's because of people like me - the kind of adult readers who like Dickens and Austen and so on. This is the seventh in the series, but except that it does not mention TV or spaceships, the stories do not date themselves very differently from the rest of the canon. Nor are the 'stories' all that different from each other. There are a few standard templates - William exposing a fraud; William unwittingly helping out; William organizing a show or a contest; William meaning to do well but failing badly; and so on. In this book alone, both the first and the last stories describe how William gets the better of a couple of 'well-behaved' children, who are paragons of virtue in adult eyes. But of course, one does not read William for the stories - the conversations, especially those between William and his peers, are brilliant, and the fads and foibles of the British middle classes in the inter-war years are characterized well. Crompton, and thus the reader, are far more sympathetic to William than all the adults who appear in the books. Occasionally, when we find a person in the story whom we like, he or she usually ends up becoming William's friend. So, annoying and disreputable though he may be, William is always likable, and the books are always readable. Again and again.
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