Here at World of Rare Books, we love to focus on the interesting lives of the greatest authors that this world has offered us. This year marks 50 years without this great children’s author who is best known for writing the Swallows and Amazons series.
Arthur Ransome was the son of Cyril and Edith Ransome, he was the eldest of four children, his brother sadly died in the First World War in 1918.
He was born on the 18th January 1884 and passed away on the 3rd June 1967. This series of books were about the school holiday adventures of children sailing, camping and fishing mostly in the Lake District and the Norfolk Broads. They remain popular today as the books are the basis for a tourist industry around Windermere and Coniston Water. Those are the two lakes that Ransome adapted as his fiction North Country Lake.
Arthur abandoned college and went to London to become a writer, he worked low paying jobs as an office assistant in a publishing company and as editor of a failing magazine “Temple Bar Magazine”, while writing. He began to write books of biography and literary criticism on various authors, Edgar Allan Poe and Oscar Wilde. The Wilde book submerged him into a libel suit with Lord Alfred Douglas. Arthur won the suit but suppressed the text from subsequent editions and refused all interviews regarding it, despite the publicity value around the trial and the book.
He traveled to Russia to study Russian folklore. He published “The Elixir of Life” which was to be his only full-length novel apart from the Swallows and Amazons series. He then published “Old Peter’s Russian Tales” a collection of 21 folktales from Russia.
After the First World War, Arthur became a foreign correspondent and covered the war on the Eastern Front for a radical newspaper. He covered the Russian Revolutions of 1917 and came to sympathise with the Bolshevik cause. He provided information to British officials and the British MI5 who gave him the code name S.76 in their files.
Arthur Ransome settled in the Lake District. He had decided not to accept a position as a full-time foreign correspondent with the Guardian and wrote “Swallows and Amazons” instead. This book made his reputation as one of the best English writers of children’s books.
With the 2016 film Swallows and Amazons was bought to a new generation to the audience and slowly we are seeing the revival of school holiday adventures similar to the ones of the Walker and Blackett children.
Children’s fiction is one of our favourites here at World of Rare Books. Make sure you check out our complete selection of Arthur Ransome vintage finds here.