How Noddy and Big Ears conquered the world

Perhaps the funniest of the many funny jokes in Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ is its protagonist’s struggle with Enid Blyton. Having turned the corner into adolescence, Adrian is mortified by the Blyton characters on the wallpaper in his childhood bedroom and sets about repainting the room in black, the better to represent his turbulent soul. And yet, though he slaps on coat after coat of black paint, the shiny yellow bells on Noddy’s cap continue to show through. He’s reduced to colouring them in one by one. (‘Went over hat bells with black felt-tip pen, did 69 tonight, only 124 to go.’)

Adrian Mole wasn’t the only critic ever to have wanted to paint Blyton out of existence; nor the only to have been frustrated by the determination of those bells to shine through. She is and was, undeniably, a phenomenon in publishing: by 2019 she was reckoned to have sold 600 million books.

Can we call her a phenomenon in literature? Even in her heyday she was denounced for the tweeness and simplicity of her style. Colin Welch called Noddy ‘the most egocentric, joyless, snivelling and pious anti-hero in the history of British fiction’; a psychiatrist consulted for a magazine profile called him an ‘educationally subnormal nit’ and Big Ears a ‘ridiculous dwarf’. Noel Streatfeild sniffed that Blyton’s ‘very simple stories […] are meant for the less intelligent public’. The charge sheet — now that golliwogs, gender stereotyping and a generalised enthusiasm for the imperial project have gone even further out of fashion — has lengthened since then.

Even Maunder, who comes not to bury Blyton but to praise her, starts a bit on the back foot, saying in his introduction: ‘This book will also suggest that Blyton is occasionally a more complex writer than she appears.’