More than Mary Poppins: The Archive of P.L. Travers and Mary Shepard at Cotsen Children’s Library

Posted on January 22, 2016 by Ian Dooley

The below post was kindly provided by Miranda Marraccini, a Princeton University graduate student in the English department. In addition to specializing in Victorian poetry and the history of radical lady printers, Miranda works with us at Cotsen and, as you will see, lends us her more than capable scholarly and archival skills.

More than Mary Poppins: The Archive of P.L. Travers and Mary Shepard at Cotsen Children’s Library

by Miranda Marraccini

Mary Poppins is one of the most recognizable characters in English children’s literature. Most of us who have seen the 1964 Disney film imagine her looking and sounding like Julie Andrews: holding out a spoonful of sugar, then flying off over the rooftops with the aid of her parrot-handled umbrella. But what happens after Mary flies out of our lives? What is the consequence of her stern magic, the residue of her mysterious influence?

Well, as one collection at Cotsen shows, what happens post-Poppins is just as interesting as the familiar story of the book and film. In the 1990s, Cotsen acquired a collection of papers belonging to P. L. Travers, the author of Mary Poppins, and illustrator Mary Shepard. The collection contains personal letters, annotated drafts of stories, artist’s proofs of illustrations, legal documents, family photographs, and interesting scraps of every description.

Cotsen’s newly created Mary Shepard and P. L. Travers Archive is only a fraction of the global Travers archive. In 1989, when she was 90 years old, Travers sold most of her papers to the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, near her birthplace (Lawson 350). Cotsen’s collection, though smaller, is still illuminating. Consisting mostly of materials from her later life, it shows the post-Poppins Travers as she was: a deep and mystical thinker, a conflicted mother, a harsh critic, and unrelenting on what she considered points of principle.

AE (George Russell) at Ilnacullin, in County Cork, Ireland, where Travers spent a holiday in 1929 (Lawson 120). (Box 7, Folder 28)

Travers and AE at Pound Cottage, Mayfield, Sussex, in August, 1933 (Lawson 129). (Box 7, Folder 28)

These photos from our collection show Travers as a young woman. She moved to England in 1924, and spent formative time in Ireland with the writer and mystic George Russell, known as AE. AE fostered what became Travers’ lifelong passion for mythology. At different periods, she studied with gurus in India, lived on a reservation in the American Southwest, and was a dedicated student of the esoteric Russian spiritual teacher George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. Travers saw commonalities in the fairy tales and ancient stories that children know around the world. She later developed her deeply personal theories in articles for Parabola Magazine, collected in What the Bee Knows: Reflections on Myth, Symbol and Story (1989).

Draft of a story for What the Bee Knows, “The Interviewer”. (Box 1 Folder 21)

Draft of a story for What the Bee Knows, “The Endless Story”. (Box 1, Folder 20)

Travers always imagined Mary Poppins as more than a children’s story. Mary herself, Travers believed, emerged from a rich tradition of female wisdom, living outside of time and somehow beyond the reach of human perspective (Lawson 155). Travers used the eight Mary Poppins books to reach a wider audience with her ideas about mythology. Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane (1982) is Travers’ most myth-infused story, and also the most well-represented book within the Cotsen collection. In this story, Mary Poppins leads the Banks children on an adventure on Midsummer’s Eve, “the most magical night of the year.” It’s a night when the laws and rules dissolve like rain in the grass, and when anything can happen, possible or impossible.

A scratchboard drawing for Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane by Mary Shepard showing Mary Poppins along with some of the other characters in the story, who are constellations: Ursa Major (the bear), Orion, and Vulpecula (the fox). (Box 5, Folder 18)

In the sketches below by Poppins illustrator Mary Shepard, the Park Keeper of the story, normally a sensible man, begins to believe in the power of “Old Wives’ Tales,” which “were apt to turn out to be true.” The lovelorn Park Keeper follows the directions of a wiser character, who advises: “… if you walk backwards on Midsummer’s Eve, after putting an herb or two under your pillow—Marjoram, Sweet Basil, no matter what—you’ll back into your own true love as sure as nuts are nuts” (27).

An early sketch for the scene, which appears on page 31 of first American edition (Box 3, file 18).

An early sketch for the scene, which appears on page 31 of first American edition (Box 3, folder 18)

a later version, with comments by both Mary Shepard and P. L. Travers in the margins. (Box 5, file 11)

A later version, with comments by both Mary Shepard and P. L. Travers in the margins. (Box 5, folder 11)

Disappointingly, the Park Keeper backs into Mary Poppins, who is as likely to be his true love as a “gooseberry bush.” Shortly, however, he stumbles into a nighttime world of celestial magic, where constellations come down to Earth to gather herbs for their midsummer revels. By the end of the story, the Park Keeper recovers his childhood knowledge: his belief in magic, the mystery of the universe, and the possibility of impossibility. In the familiar sunlit park, he had forgotten. “It needed the dark to show things plain” (63).

The Park Keeper bumps into Mary Poppins. (Box 5, File 10)

The Park Keeper bumps into Mary Poppins. This illustration appears on page 35 of the first American edition. (Box 5, Folder 10)

the park keeper cries in the Bird Woman’s lap while Orion looks on, (Box 5, File 8). This illustration appears on page 49.

The park keeper cries in the Bird Woman’s lap while Orion looks on. This illustration appears on page 49. (Box 5, Folder 8)

In the sketch on the right above, the Park Keeper is overwhelmed by the rediscovery of his childhood knowledge: “He had known those figures when he was a boy, and many more besides. And he had forgotten what he had known, denied it, made it a thing of naught, something to be sneered at! He put his hands up to his eyes to hide the springing tears” (60).

The visible back-and-forth between P.L. Travers and Mary Shepard (later Mary Knox) in the margins of these sketches suggests that the two collaborated very closely on the Poppins illustrations. By all accounts, this is true. Our collection includes many professional letters between Travers and Shepard, from 1935, when the partnership started with Mary Poppins, onward. There are also tender personal letters in which Travers inquires after the health of Shepard’s husband, E. V. “Evoe” Knox.

The author/illustrator collaboration was not always amicable, however. Our collection documents a particularly longstanding disagreement between author and illustrator: the issue of copyright for the Mary Poppins illustrations. Although Travers maintained strict control of the content, Mary Shepard always retained the copyright on her own illustrations. Yet after the Mary Poppins movie came out, Shepard did not receive any portion of the multimillion dollars in box office profits (Lawson 257-258). (See Box 1, File 34.)

The dispute ended in Mary Poppins’ toes. In their original discussions about the first book, Mary Shepard had suggested that Mary Poppins should stand with her feet turned out in the “fifth position” of ballet, while Travers imagined them at right angles (Ross Lipson). In the movie, Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins stands with her feet in the fifth position. Shepard eventually won a small payment as compensation for this artistic contribution. The image below shows a legal decision in our collection, on the first page of which Mary Shepard explains the outcome of the case (with a sketch of Mary Poppins’s feet).

“Mr Knight [Shepard’s literary agent] succeeded by using Mary Poppins’s feet—my addition to her appearance—in the 5th position. Not mentioned here I received £1,000.” (Box 1, Folder 26)

If Travers’ interactions with Mary Shepard are sometimes thorny, so were her letters to other acquaintances. Our collection includes dozens of letters that Travers wrote to schools and amateur theaters refusing their requests to stage Mary Poppins plays and musicals.

Travers refuses permission to adapt Mary Poppins into a play. She writes “You cannot mix two media without failing to do justice to both. It doesn’t work”. (Box 1, Folder 5)

At crux of this refusal was the Mary Poppins film. Travers feared that any musical or play might mix elements from her books with popular elements from the film (for instance, the songs). For her this fusion was an unacceptable compromise. Since Travers held the rights to the story, Disney referred all requests to her. And she turned them all down, firmly. Travers’ relationship with Disney was chronicled in the recent film Saving Mr. Banks (2013).

Business correspondence like this makes up about half of our collection. Some documents in the collection, however, are intensely personal. P. L. Travers was always close-lipped about her private life, believing that her stories spoke for themselves. She once told an interviewer that her favorite author was “anonymous.” In Cotsen’s documents Travers emerges in slips and scraps, on hotel stationery and in ragged journals.

Image from Travers dream journal. (Box 2, Folder 34)

In her typewritten dream journal Travers records the nocturnal presence of important people in her life: her family, left behind long ago in Australia, as well as mystics Gurdjieff and AE. But she also dreams about “minced meat” and the Prince of Wales. One of her dreams (above) has an “erotic overtone.”

Overtones aside, Travers seems to have been involved in romantic relationships with women and men (Lawson 117). She was very close to, and lived with, her friend Madge Burnand. Among the houses they shared was Pamela’s idyllic Pound Cottage in Mayfield, Sussex.

Madge signs this photo of herself “Yours sincerely,” and Pamela labels it “a present.” (Box 7, Folder 29)

Madge and Pamela lived together at Pound Cottage before World War II. (Box 7, Folder 29)

Our archive contains other records of P. L. Travers’ family life. In 1939, months after war had been declared, Travers adopted a son, Camillus, from a family she had known in Ireland. The baby’s grandfather, Joseph Hone, had been an important publisher and biographer working with Ireland’s most illustrious literary figures, including AE (Lawson 189). Travers consulted an astrologer in California who told her Camillus was a better match for her than his twin brother. She took Camillus back to England. Some of the pictures below are from the war period, when Travers and her son were evacuated to New York.

All 4 pictures depict Camillus Travers as a young child. (Box 7, folder 31)

Our archive compiles evidence of what was at times a complicated relationship between Camillus and his mother. It includes dozens of letters that Camillus wrote home from school, telling his mother about his grades and his classes, his little worries and triumphs. It includes a document Travers signed, releasing Camillus from jail where he was held on a drunk driving charge as a young man. And it includes a letter to Camillus that Travers wrote in the last year of her life, in the loose, unspooled writing of very advanced age. She begs Camillus to come see her, reminding “I will be 96 in August—not long!”

Letter from a teenage Camillus Travers at school to his mother. He writes “My Darling Mother, Please forgive me for not writing before—I have had another attack of torpidity.” (Box 2, File 22)

Record of Camillus Travers’ arrest and release on a drunk driving charge or “moving offence”. (Box 2, Folder 22)

Letter from Pamela Travers to her son, Camillus. “Darling Camillus, Do come & see me. I need to talk to you. I will be 96 in August—not long! Your faithful & loving M.” (Box 2, Folder 22)

Travers felt that young Camillus connected her with the world of fairy tale, which lives on in the imaginations of children, through generations. As a character in Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane explains: “Didn’t your grandmother tell you nothing? Mine told it to me and hers told her. And her grandmother told it to her, and away and away, right back to Adam” (28).

In Cherry Tree Lane, “night changes the world and makes the known unknown” (75). Our archive makes us rethink the familiar, brightly colored world of Mary Poppins, shadowing it with the obscurities of myth and symbol that absorbed Travers all her life.

_________________________________________________________________________

Sources

Lawson, Valerie. Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P. L. Travers. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.

Ross Lipson, Eden. “Mary Shepard Dies at 90; ‘Mary Poppins’ Illustrator,” New York Times, October 2, 2000. http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/02/arts/mary-shepard-dies-at-90-mary-poppins-illustrator.html.

For more information about the paper of P. L. Travers see the guide to her papers in the Mitchell Library of New South Wales:

http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/mssguide/ptravers.pdf

You can find Cotsen’s Mary Shepard and P. L. Travers archive on the Princeton University Library Finding Aids website at:

http://findingaids.princeton.edu/collections/COTSEN2

On the Road with the Cotsen Library, or, Some Independent Bookstores Are Alive and Well

Posted on August 20, 2015 by Jeff Barton

My father used to talk about taking a “busman’s holiday” –that is, doing pretty much the same thing on vacation that he did at work (and no, he wasn’t a busman himself, but rather someone who worked in an office). A great phrase, as I hope you’ll agree!

With that in mind, have you ever wondered what a bibliophile or a librarian who is interested in children’s books does while on vacation? Well, some of us like to look at bookstores and libraries (along with doing other things too, I hasten to add!).

Thus, the recent ALA Annual Conference and Rare Books & Manuscripts “Preconference” in San Francisco and Oakland, respectively, provided a jumping-off point for later sight-seeing — and, in the process, happening upon some amazing small bookshops, run by real book-lovers, by pure serendipity. (For all the great aspects of having the world of books accessible via online shopping, nothing quite compares to just stumbling upon a bookstore or catching a glimpse of an attractive book cover or dust-jacket you’ve never seen before, does it?)

First, there was Village Books, in Ukiah, California, about 100 miles North of San Francisco. We spotted this small shop across the street from our lunchtime retreat from 100+ degree heat. As soon as we entered, I knew we’d found a great bookstore! Even the check-out counter was covered with books, as you can see:

Village Books, Ukiah, California

That introductory “prologue” was certainly borne out by another look around:

Books from floor-to-ceiling, convenient reading spaces throughout… a bibliophile’s delight… mostly used books, but some new ones too.

Of particular interest to me were the sections with children’s (and young adult) books, packed almost to the rafters:

And especially eye-catching was a dedicated children’s reading area, clearly meant to welcome young readers into a comfortable setting and encourage them to sit and read books of all sorts:

But this is a bookstore after all, not a library, so what did we buy?

Upper cover of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, with color-printed paper onlay (Harper & Bros., 1911) author’s collection

To name just a few, some nice French-language children’s books (for a YA reader learning French), a vintage copy of Lord of the Flies (bought by an adult for aforementioned YA reader, since Lord of the Flies seems to have fallen off the assigned list of books for middle schoolers), and a very nicely illustrated 1911 edition of Tom Brown’s School Days, with artwork by Louis Rhead, and a paper onlay on the upper cover that reminds us reminded me just how much work went into late 19th- and early 20th-century publisher’s bindings.

Tom Brown’s School Days (1857) is one of those “children’s classics,” hugely-influential and once widely read, but seldom read by child readers any more. (Actually, a surprising number of “children’s classics” fall into the category of well-known but not much read now.) It’s a landmark example of a “school story,” fiction focusing on children or adolescents within a school context (usually a boarding school), a genre especially popular in England from the mid- to late-1700s through the mid-1940s. Some other prominent examples include: Sarah Fielding’s The Governess (1749) and Kipling’s Stalky & Co. (1899).

Think school stories are utterly passé? Well, think again… J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels drew heavily on the genre — Hogwarts, focal point of the action, is, after all, a school, and most of the main characters are students or masters there — and many critics have discussed how Rowling both made use of and extended the school story genre. Like Tom Brown, Harry Potter comes somewhat timidly to a new school, has to learn the ropes, and undergoes various trials and bullying in the course of making moral choices, learning about himself, and growing up.

As that venerable and learned poet…says

Poor old Benjy!

Although Tom Brown is set in Thomas Arnold’s reform-oriented Rugby School of the 1840s, the story details quite a bit of unruly hijinks by the boys, as well as a lot of fighting and some harrowing bullying — all of which no doubt fascinated boy readers, at whom the book seems clearly aimed. Rhead’s full-page illustrations in this edition compellingly depicted many of these events, and in addition, he provided small historiated letters at the beginning of chapters, which I particularly like. A real window onto another era.

But time to move on… How about continuing our bibliographic travelogue and moving from Northern California to Seattle … and from school stories to Wonderland?

Again, serendipity plays a major role in the story — sometimes you find bookstores where you would least expect to find them, as was the case for us in Seattle. Seattle’s Pike Place Market is famous: the usual tourist souvenirs, fresh fruit and veggies, and lots and lots of fresh fish, including “flying fish,” tossed around by energetic fishmongers! (This fish-tossing is so renowned that it serves as the subject of a movie titled “FISH!,” which is about improving customer service, workplace morale, and motivating workers. If you don’t believe me, do a quick online search!)

A fun place to visit — but hardly a place you’d expect to find a bookstore… But tucked away in a downstairs corridor, around the corner from a cookie shop, a coffee bar, and a take-out food place, we happened to see a brightly-colored bookstore wedged into a space not much more than ten or fifteen feet wide: Lamplight Books.

A glimpse inside the shop…

Lamplight Books, Seattle Market.

Cover of Through the Looking-Glass (Dodge & Co., 1909?) author’s collection

Sightseeing again took a back-seat to book-browsing, as we went through the hidden garden gate or down the rabbit hole into another magical world of books…

Among the books we discovered was a hard-cover second printing of one of Durrell’s Alexandra Quartet novels, well-read but still with its original dust-jacket — and still cheaper than a new paperback edition elsewhere — and an even more well-read 1909 edition of Through the Looking Glass by American publisher Dodge & Co., which interested me for several reasons.

First, the illustrations by Bessie Pease Guttmann present Alice as a dark-haired girl — quite unlike Tenniel’s depiction, but much like Carroll’s own artwork in his original Alice manuscript edition — with the Queen of Hearts as the blondie — and one looking very much like Tenniel’s chess piece depiction in Looking Glass, not a playing card or Queen Victoria parody a la Alice in Wonderland.

But even more arresting were the unique markings and colorings in this copy of the book, presumably made by a child-reader. As we see on the pictorial endpapers, printed in a blue-outlined pattern, an apparently quite young reader has “embellished” things! (I’d say she/he was young, based on the roughness of the coloring.)

Blue-printed patterned endpapers colored by child reader.

And this embellishment continues throughout the book, whose blue-printed outline borders were apparently irresistible to the reader. Sometimes, the child embellisher fully colored the illustrations on an entire page, and sometimes he/she has focused in only on details apparently of particular interest to him or her, as we can see in the instances below:

Instances of selective coloring by child reader

This is pattern of varied “levels” of markings in children’s books is something I’ve observed before and discussed here on the Cotsen blog. Was the reader of this book simply focusing on things of particular interest to her/him, or responding to the story and somehow trying to foreground characters and aspects discussed on particular pages by coloring them in there — in effect providing a reader’s commentary of sorts? Of course, there’s no way to be sure. But since identifying agency by child-readers and making sense of reader-response is certainly a topic of considerable interest to those analyzing child readership today, I wonder if patterns of marking like those found in this book might conceivably shed some light on these areas of inquiry?

This copy of Through the Looking Glass also manifests evidence of another possible sort of reader “appetite” on quite a number of pages, as we can see on the example below:

It’s a little hard to tell what these are? Bite-marks? If so, made by a child? By several different children? By the family dog? Or just marks of rough handling? They certainly look like bite marks to me! And if so, what might this suggest to us about the reader(s) of this book or child readers, in general? Along with the markings, this definitely suggests that this copy of Through the Looking Glass did indeed “find its reader” who extensively handled and “interacted with” the book in several ways, even if we can’t be sure that he/she necessarily read the text on the pages.

I think the signs of book use here also underscore an important aspect of children’s use of books; it’s frequently unpredictable — often spontaneous and unplanned — and thus it can be hard to “interpret” what this “evidence” means, as well as dangerous to read too much into this by adults who are coming along later and trying to investigate child reading. Child readers leave a lot of clues, but how can we be sure that we’re “reading” them accurately from our adult critical vantage-point? There’s always an element of speculation in this critical approach, isn’t there?

Apart from an opportunity to think about children’s marks in books and talk about a couple of interesting editions of children’s “classics,” I guess the broader “moral” of my story here is really to highlight that independent bookstores — and great ones too! — can still be found out there, sometimes when and where you least expect them. There’s real pleasure to be had in browsing them with no particular book or aim in sight, especially if you’re a book-lover. Sometimes you find amazing things that you had no idea you were looking for! There can be real serendipitous pleasure in simple serendipity…

If you can’t pass by a bookstore without walking in, you can read posts by Andrea and Minjie about their adventures in Cape Cod, Los Angeles, Shanghai, and Abu Dhabi…