Winnie the Pooh

 

Image credit: World of Books

Still suffering from a short attention span and feeling like a wrung-out towel, we have moved up from Milne’s poetry and have just closed the cover on a series of short stories featuring one of children’s literature’s most beloved protagonists: Winnie the Pooh.

Told in ten chapters, Winnie the Pooh is a series of short, bedtime stories featuring Christopher Robin, his favourite bear, and all their friends from the Hundred Acre Wood. The group have many adventures together, in which they hunt woozles, capture heffalumps, go on an expedition to find the North Pole, play a joke on Kanga, and save Piglet from a flood. 

Aided by E. H. Shepard’s delightful illustrations, Winnie the Pooh very sweetly depicts just how infectious and glorious the imagination of a child is. Told as bedtime stories to Milne’s son, with his teddy bear and other stuffed toys making up the central cast, this book is a delightful return to the traditional method of telling stories. Reading it is easy enough, but I can imagine that more magic comes from the chapters being read aloud, just as traditional fairytales were. 

Image credit: Wikipedia

While the narratives themselves are very simple and sweet, there is a certain level of grown-up intellect that occasionally creeps in, reminding us that the narrator is most likely an adult  -the author- and therein lies a warmer and sweeter part of the book in that you can hear the relationship between the author and Christopher Robin when the two converse. 

Having missed out on Winnie the Pooh as a child, I can still say that I enjoyed it as an adult, which is testimony to the longevity of the characters, the prose, and the simple creative infectiousness of anything concerning childhood. 

Author: A. A. Milne, 1926

Published: Methuen & Co. Ltd (Great Britain), 1926