The Tell-Tale Heart (UPA, 1953).

A while back I did this brief little retrospective on an old animation studio.  It was called United Pictures of America, or UPA for short.  To try and summarize a whole lot of history in just a short span of words, the studio was created out by a cadre of Disney animators as a result of their collective decision to revolt against the House of Mouse over the question of wage pay.  For the purposes of this review, that group included all of the artists who worked on the short film under discussion today: Producer Stephen Bosustow; Ink and Paint Designer Paul Julian; Animator Pat Matthews; Production Manager Herb Klynn; Cameraman Jack Eckes; Scriptwriters Bill Scott and Fred Gable; and Director Ted Parmelee.  With Bosustow in the lead, these and a host of other animators, in-betweeners, and illustrators first went on strike against Disney, then left the company all together to set out their own course in the field motion picture animation.  UPA was the eventual result of these efforts, and for a time, it was possible to claim that they were the closest rivals Walt ever had outside of Warner Bros. when it came to making successful theatrical cartoons.  One of the reasons UPA was so good at this was because of their deliberate choice not just to animate outside the boundaries that Disney and Chuck Jones had established with their previous successes.  They were also able to successfully wed their chosen avant-garde minimalist technique to the type of sophisticated subject matter that was perfectly suited to it.

Its a mistake to claim that UPA was the first ever animation studio to base its films off of pre-existing literary source material.  That honor doesn't even belong to Walt Disney himself, but rather to former newspaper comics illustrator Winsor McCay, who has to count as the first published author to ever use the then new medium of animated pictures to bring his own Little Nemo comic strip to life.  From there, of course, Walt would go on to draw from the sources of European folklore and the Brother's Grimm to create some of his most iconic works.  In this sense, UPA wasn't even trying to play catch-up, so much as just continuing the game of Follow the Leader.  What continues to make their efforts stand out from the pack was in the type of literary models they used for inspirations.  UPA was the first studio to take the works of of modern writers such as James Thurber, popular contemporary music, or as in the case of today's offering, popular works of Gothic Fiction.  They did all of this in an effort whose goals were twofold.  First, they wanted to prove that they had what it took to get out of Walt's shadow.  Second of all, Bosustow and Company knew that the way to do that was to prove to the audience that animation could be used to tell stories whose subject matter was more mature than the regular cartoon fair.

It was with this goal in mind that one day Scott and Gable appear to have been the ones to hit on the idea of taking the work of one of the great pioneers of Horror fiction, turning it into a theatrical animated short, and getting none other than Oscar winning actor James Mason to star and narrate in it.  The result was a 1953 adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart", and it went like this. 

The Power of the Sentence (1971).

One of the cardinal goals of The Scriblerus Club is the ability to shine a light on the efforts and creative achievements of forgotten names.  These are the artists (writers, for the most part, though there have been a handful of filmmakers in this particular group) who have fallen through the cracks of history, and are often in danger of disappearing altogether if someone doesn't draw attention to their efforts.  That's very much the case with David M. Locke.  He's someone who I know more or less nothing about.  All I've been able to discover about him is what is revealed in his author bio, and that goes as follows.  "David M. Locke is primarily a science - not a science fiction - writer.  He earned a Ph.D. and spent a year as a Fulbright fellow and five years as a research chemist before taking up writing.  So far as I can determine, this is his first story.  Surprisingly, despite his background, this is not filled with heavy science.  The only evidence of a highly trained mind comes from the meticulous care with which this tale is developed (56)".  Those words were written all the way back in 1972 by Sci Fi author and editor Lester Del Rey, as part of his editorial notes.  They were part of an anthology that he was editing way back when.  It was called Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year.  Those words also count as just about all I've been able to discover about David M. Locke.

Del Rey doesn't seem to have kept any close contact with this particular artist.  He was one of the most prolific storytellers and anthologists back during the Silver and New Wave eras in the history of Science Fiction.  His role as an editor made it essential that he keep in close contact with a long list of who's who in the field of Speculative Writing.  For whatever reason, David Locke is the one name that no one ever seems to have bothered to keep track of.  It's possible to know more about guys like Del Rey than it is this one obscure byline on a title page.  Even the scant piece of information that Locke was once (still is?) a Fulbright scholar doesn't tell us much, as its an international program attached to numerous academic institutions.  So any information about where Locke came from, what schools he went to, where he graduated from, or whether he maintained or continues in these academic settings would be so much guess work I might as well be creating a fictional character.  The only true statement I can make about him is that he is a name that has all but vanished off the literary map.  All that's left is his story about a very peculiar classroom lecture, and so I thought it might be interesting to look into it.

Vanishing Point: Doctor of the Soul (1986).

Being a fan of old radio dramas can sometimes be filled with a lot of interesting perks.  At least that's the case if you're the kind of story enthusiast who whose devotion to the world of fiction can sometimes lead you into all sorts of interesting avenues that have remained unexplored by the vast majority of the audience.  It's in wandering down all these forgotten pathways that you begin to discover all fascinating broadcast history that has fallen through the cracks.  For instance, the history of the radio drama is filled with a lot of forgotten names.  This can sometimes be a shame, because every so often you run across a writer, actor, or showrunner who for one brief moment was able to make a genuine contribution to the medium, and yet history has an often-cruel way of not remembering their achievements.  I think something like this is what happened to those now out of the way programs such as Vanishing Point.  If the name sounds at all familiar, that's because I've given the show a few moments of column space here on the Club once before.  

The whole show was very much a textbook example of the successful follow-up from a parent program.  Much the same way as the character of Frasier Crane was able to take on a life of his own after Cheers.  In the case of the show under discussion today, Vanishing Point grew out of the success of a previous Canadian Broadcasting radio entry known as Nightfall.  That earlier series was a classic example of the late-night Horror anthology.  A version of Tales from the Crypt for the theater of the mind.  It became enough of a ratings hit that eventually the CBC was ready to try and build a sister project.  This one would share the same late night anthology format as Nightfall.  Even some of its episodes would echo the previous entry in terms of genre and situation.  However, it was made clear right away that this new project wouldn't just be imitating the same ideas.  Instead, the new series was to be free to explore as much of the terrain of the fantastic as its writers wanted or felt they could get away with under a radio budget.  In other words, it didn't always have to be straight-up Horror.  Sometimes it could be Sci-Fi, Urban Fantasy, and even the occasional narratives delving into nothing more than slices of life.  It was going to be less Tales from the Crypt and more Twilight Zone for radio, in other words.

The result is a series that really seemed determined to explore as much of the range of the theater of the mind as possible.  It's an entry from this forgotten bit of Canadian broadcasting that I'd like to take a look at today.  Tonight's play is written especially for radio by David Helwig and concerns one of the greatest conundrums that mankind continues to grapple with.  So if you'll join us for tonight's journey into the unknown, I believe we're do for a most unusual appointment in a psychiatrist's office.

Suspense: One Hundred in the Dark (1947).

I think I've reached the point where I no longer quite understand pop culture.  A lot of it has to do with the fact that pop culture no longer seems to be quite know itself anymore.  Like, I can recall for the longest time there being this sort of homogenization thing going on, where it was this great repository of entertainment past, present, and future.  Everybody had their reference points and this was able to create what I can only describe as a shared language that everybody could join and be a part.  These days, however, I keep getting this sense of fragmentation, like it's all breaking down into niches and sub-cultures.  In some ways, I suppose there might be a possible sense of inevitability to this.  Perhaps its just the nature of the Internet in and of itself to create a kind of niche-ification of public knowledge, even where the books, films, and TV shows we all like are concerned.  My problem with such information siloing is that I'm never quite sure that's a healthy outcome.  Part of what made the analog form of pop culture so awesome was that it lead to this building of a greater sense of community.  In other words, it was something that brought us together, and could have even made us greater than we are now.  The problem of reducing pop culture to a series of mental cubbyholes is that this sense of shared vocabularies and and languages gets lost when you cram it all into this piece of digital shelf space which others can then shove out of sight, and hence out of mind.  It just seems to me like that's the kind of result where it becomes to easy to devalue a story or concept that brought others together.

For instance, I can remember a time when it seemed like J.R.R. Tolkien was everywhere.  Not just confined to an out-of-the-way weblog as the typical thing you expect to find nowadays, either.  I'm talking this guy was everywhere.  This was true not just in terms of the breakout impact of the original Peter Jackson trilogy, either.  Even before all that, right at the very turn of the 20th century into that of the 21st, it seemed as if Middle Earth was busy enjoying its own fan led pop culture renaissance.  You had an endless treasure hoard of popular fan studies, and various scholarly critical texts about Professor T and his writings being placed on retail shelves not just all over the American continent, but also in places like Great Britain, France, India, you name it.  In that sense it was a true international phenomena.  A case of fans worldwide coming together to create a grassroots phenomenon that worked as a shared pop cultural treasure that was able to unite myriads of people the world over in the celebration of nothing more than just a very good piece of literary art.  Are you kind of maybe starting to see what I mean when I talk about the difference between pop culture then from now?  The major difference seems to rest on the fact that the former version of it truly was inclusive.  This updated 2.0 model, however, just seems to exist for the sole purpose of creating a siloing effect on its users.

Forgive me for saying this, yet I don't think Tolkien's works would have stood a chance if this mainframe setup was in place way back when.  He might have still had his fandoms.  However, they would have been reduced to what they are now.  Just a few scattered pieces of get togethers in chatrooms and the odd occasional blog post here and there, and none of it would have reached the fever pitch that would have allowed Jackson and the rest of his cast and crew to mount not just a successful but impactful showing as they wound up with.  Of course, I'm sure others will argue that at least this setup would have meant that none of us would have to sit through the ongoing botch job that is The Rings of Power or whatever the Game of Thrones franchise has become.  I can't help thinking that all of this later stuff is the result of pop culture becoming corporatized a bit too much for its own good, however.  We seem to have stumbled upon a cautionary lesson in allowing our enthusiasms to get perhaps just a bit too popular.  Maybe the real education here is to know when to guard the stories that matter from getting too out of hand.  Whatever the case may be with all that, there are still some aspects of pop culture from the past that have a way of astounding you with their seeming resiliency.

For instance, I am still amazed to learn that there are a great many fans out there of the broadcast medium or format known as Old Time Radio.  I'm talking now about a very specific and identifiable period in the history of American entertainment.  For those who may not have a clue what I'm talking about OTR (for short) is best described as pretty much the first major breakout media format in an era before television or the net.  It belonged to an age when all of the world's news and entertainment was limited to to the contours of a small squat box with speakers in it wired to a transmitter powered often enough by what I can only describe as a variation of the electric light bulb.  It often lit the box up right well enough whenever it was turned on and working to full capacity.  However, the providing of light in a room wasn't the real purpose for this kind of fixture.  It was there to make the box talk.  That's how radio used to work in an pre-wireless era.  Rather, let's say that most of our grandparents did have a form of wireless.  There just wasn't a single scrap of anything digital about it.  It was all analog.

The particular drama I'd like to share with you now comes from the days when the radio was king.  That time was known as the format's Golden Age, when the Theater of the Mind served as America's idiot box of choice.  What's stunning to learn is just how much from that period still survives in archive form, and how much of it has made its way in and onto the digital realm.  It's seems that this easy availability is what accounts for the widespread awareness of a style of entertainment that doesn't even manage to get so much as a passing mention in the news anymore.  It seems to be a testament to the power of online fandom that it can help resurrect the reputation of a long forgotten form of storytelling.  With this in mind, I thought it would be fun to look into a sample offering from the Golden Age of Radio.  It's an episode of an anthology series known only as Suspense.  From what I can tell of this program, there might have been a time when it was the highest rated show on the airwaves.  Whatever the case, tonight, we offer, for our listening audience the story of Owen Johnson's "One-Hundred in the Dark".

Rudyard Kipling's Finest Story in the World (1891).

There are a lot of reasons this blog exists.  One of them is because there are a lot of good stories worth remembering out there.  So, it's like, I kind of want to make sure they at least stand a chance of not getting lost to time.  No matter how obscure the artist or the work may be, if the story is even halfway decent, then it deserves a shot at preservation in my book.  The best I know of how to do that is to give the artist and their work as good an article here as I can manage.  It's not much, yet perhaps it makes difference enough to one person out there.  Out of such things, dynasties can sometimes be built, after all.  A second reason for starting up this operation is a lot more simple and common among fandoms.  I just like sharing and (if possible) getting a chance to discuss my favorite books and films.  The desire to share an enthusiasm with others has got to be one of the oldest instincts in human nature.  It might not get as big a press coverage as the ability to hunt, gather, and form communal bonds, yet I'll swear such a drive has to be a natural part of what makes us human.  One final reason for posting articles up here on this site centers around one enthusiasm in particular.  For whatever reason, I'm fascinated with the way that stories are created.  I'm one of those behind-the-scenes junkies who can sometimes get just as great a deal of enjoyment in figuring out how The Hobbit was put together just as much as I do reading it as a story.

This fascination with how and why stories are made might be described as perhaps one of the guiding purposes of this blog.  It's all tied up with this unshakable curiosity I have.  The best way to describe it might be to form it in the shape of a series of questions.  Why do stories exist?  What makes them work so well when the writing is good?  Also, what makes it all fail in various ways?  In other words, I seem to be fascinated just as much with the craft and imaginative inspiration that fuels the art of writing every bit  as I am with reading a good example of the finished literary product.  To cut it all short, I seem to be a by now incurable bookworm.  The kind of guy who takes the full ramifications of that title seriously and without a trace of irony.  I suppose that in itself is ironic, yet it's just the way everything has turned out for me.  And so here is this blog, and the fascination still remains.  How do good stories get told?  It's one of the considerations that powers the engine of this meager little site, and I'll probably still be asking it long after this article is no longer in my rearview mirror.  Sometimes a reader like me gets lucky, and runs across an actual literary artist whose mind is caught up in the with the same fascination of where do the stories come from?  One famous name who shares this enthusiasm was an author by the name of Rudyard Kipling, of The Jungle Book fame.

I've written about him once or twice on this blog.  What's interesting about guys like Kipling is that there's a sense in which he can be said to conform to type.  He's a problematic mind with an undeniable well of imaginative talent and creativity sharing the same mental office space with the kind of small-mindedness of, say, an H.P. Lovecraft.  The key difference (however much or little this counts) is that Kipling never seems to have been as virulent in his opinions as Lovecraft, even going so far as to count the actual native inhabitants of both India and Arabia as among his closest friends.  The result is one of those studies in contrast, a natural sense of humanism and empathy coexisting somehow within the politics of the British Raj.  The result is this strange picture of the artist as a kind of borderline figure, someone with a foot in two opposed worlds, and always struggling with how to hold each in the proper balance.  There's plenty worth talking about on that score, and maybe we'll have a chance to discuss it here as we go along.  Right now, it is enough to repeat what I've said above.  Kipling is unique in being one of the handful of artists who are just as much fascinated by why and how stories are told, just as much as he is interested in getting as much of the finished product on the page as far as possible.

This topic of why and how stories are made held such a fascination for him, that it eventually resulted in one of those stories about the making of stories.  The difference is the interesting twist that Kipling brings to the table when it comes to describing the writing process.  I call it different, yet maybe that's not quite so much the right word.  Perhaps when you put the writer's thoughts on the art of writing into the plainest life-size terms as possible, what you get is no more than the same thoughts of theorists like Coleridge and Jung.  However, even if this is the case, it's the way in which Kipling describes the creative process, and most of all, the way he talks about where do the stories come from that makes for such an interesting idea to unpack.  This, then, is Kipling's tale of "The Finest Story in the World".

Edith Nesbit's Accidental Magic (1912).

If there's any hidden thread of logic to history, then one of its unspoken rules seems to go as follows.  Most of the great pioneers will never get the credit they deserve.  Neither shall their names be written on anyone's hearts, nor must their memories be allowed to endure.  If that sounds harsh, then, it's like, I don't know what to say.  We've got all the opportunity in the world left for someone to rediscover the life and fiction and someone like Edith Nesbit.  I mean if anyone else would bother with such an effort, I'd be more than happy with that outcome.  And so the net result is no one offers themselves any other choice except to ask who or even what the fuck am I talking about?  And the literary accomplishment of one of the first major groundbreakers in the creation of the modern fantasy story goes by without notice.  All that happens then is that the story of a great talent goes untold.  I'm not sure you can describe that kind of outcome as fair.  It's just what happens, in spite of a lot of best efforts at keeping worthwhile memories alive.  So that's why blogs like this exist, to make sure that a lot of good names, stories, and narratives aren't entirely forgotten.  Edith Nesbit is just one such talent out there that deserves to be remembered.

In many ways, her own life reads like something of out of one of her own fairy tales.  I've written a previous article on this author that goes into much greater depth on her life.  Here, however, I'll have to settle for the truncated version of historic events.  Edith's story is told simply enough, though.  Once upon a time, there was a little girl who found herself turned into the protagonist of one of her own fairy tales.  It all started one day in 1858, when this young child found herself born to parents in the Kennington district of Surrey, England.  Together, they decided to call her Edith.  Her father, John, was a prosperous agricultural chemist who had even managed to build a successful school dedicated to that same farming practice.  The place was devoted to an Industrial Education, in other words.  It meant that John Nesbit spent a great deal of his life teaching farmers from both the local and distant countrysides how to survive and thrive in the often merciless, cutthroat world of mid-Victorian era London.  As a result, Edith's earliest experiences found the child surrounded by people from a majority working class backgrounds.  Since her father was a diligent advocate for the rights of England's lower class citizens, the greatest legacy he seems to have left his daughter was a willingness to see herself as no more than an equal with the poorest citizen of the metropolis.  Edith's education was lucky in that sense, anyway.

Her father may not have been able to help when it really counted, yet at least he was able to instill in her the idea that even the lowest classes of the UK had an inalienable dignity that meant they ought to be given a just and fair chance to better themselves and their situations.  In that sense, much in the way of stories like this, her father was able to give his favorite daughter a gift.  Also much in the vein of such folktales, this gift was never showy or extravagant, yet it wound up being among those talents that counted the most later on.  Edith was able to remember the lessons she learned from her father's encounters with England's working classes, and she used the knowledge gained from these early memories to become something of a tireless champion for the poor and the worker's rights.  Another gift given to Edith by her parents was that of the Victorian Childhood Nursery.  This was the second great teacher in the child's life, and it was the one that gave Edith her future fame and glory.

There is one big, long book to be written about the place of the Victorian Nursery in the development of the modern Fantasy genre and the stories that have gone on to become the guideposts and markers of its identity.  Many chapters of this story have already been written in the form of various studies and master's theses.  The best volumes out there to explore this topic still remain the same.  They are Morton Cohen's landmark biography of Lewis Carroll, Roger Lancelyn Green's Tellers of Tales: Children's Books and Their Authors from 1800 to 1968, and Stephen Prickett's simply titled, yet comprehensive book-length study, Victorian Fantasy.  The best way to sum up a long yet fun story is to claim that Edith was the recipient of a collective gift.  The birth of the middle class type household into which she was born saw the invention and rise of the Nursery as a childhood social institution.  I'm not real sure its correct to describe these rooms that soon began to dot the landscape of both British and later American homes as a clear-cut example of the safe space.  That's especially not true when writers like Edith, Mark Twain, and Edgar Allan Poe would go on to look back at their semi-shared time in those places as one of learning how to confront their fears of the dark.  Instead, I subscribe idea that the parents thought they were giving their kids a safe space, however it just didn't turn out that way.

Instead, what wound up happening is that it's like we sort of ended up carving out a kind of ballpark in which for the first time the Imagination was allowed to roam free and play in.  It has to be remembered that nothing quite like this had ever existed before.  Until the Nursery came along, while the novel and the reading public had begun to cement themselves as permanent aspects of modern life, it was all still a relatively new social construct.  The first major publishing houses had just been set up in the 1730s and 40s during the last century by the likes of Robert Dodsley, and most of the fiction published tended to be in the Manners and Morals vein of Jane Austen, or else it was the first, halting attempts at building the first examples of the modern Gothic Ghost Story, with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, or the germ of the fantastic adventure yarn contained in the likes of Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe.  These were all very much baby's first steps, rather than the full-fledged fantastic genres as we know them now.  If authors like Scott and Dodsley were the ones to throw the ball into the playing pen, then it was kids like Edith, who grew up with this stuff in the Nursery to take the pitch and run with it.  That's because the Nursery was where all the folklore of the old world came to have its new Victorian home.

Since the Nursery was designed as a place for children like Edith to entertain themselves, that meant it had to be stockpiled with all the sorts of diversions that were thought to be fit for young adults.  The good news for the likes of Nesbit, Kipling, and a young West Midlands lad with the peculiar yet lyrical name of Tolkien was that the adults in charge of the Nursery all seemed to agree that there was no harm in passing along to their young charges reprintings and chap books containing the content from storytellers like Aesop, Charles Perrault, and the Brother's Grimm.  That's how a girl like Edith first made the acquaintance of Mother Goose and the denizens of fairyland as charted and cartographed by the likes of Spenser and Shakespeare.  This growing trend of the Nursery as the place for childhood idylls was helped along in no small part by the first major translations of The Thousand and One Nights made for children's mass consumption.  It made it possible for the YA of Queen Victoria's time to conceive of a visit to the Nursery as yet another chance to take journeys on magic carpets, or open enchanted casements onto a host of other worlds and adventures.  This, then, was the second and most telling influence on Edith's childhood.  It was enough to turn her into a lifelong fan of the Fantastic.

This initial fan girl crush soon turned into a lifetime professional occupation.  As she came of age, Edith soon found herself transforming from just a dedicated enthusiast in the crowd to one of the artists performing for the audience.  As she began to train her mind in the art of storytelling, she also began to discover how to take all of the folklore she'd devoured as a starstruck child and find an ideal modern form of creative expression for all of the old myths she used to love as a child.  In doing this, she sort of wound up creating the parameters of the modern Fantasy genre as we now have it.  A good way to gain a perspective on this achievement is with a simple formula.  No Nesbit, no Tolkien and Middle Earth.  Also no Neil Gaiman and practically everything he's ever done.  None of their later efforts would have been possible if Edith didn't turn out to be the one creative voice that wound up plowing the original field in the first place.  The main reason either of the two later names were able to succeed as well as they did was because Nesbit was the one who built the original ballpark for them to play in.  In honor of her unrecognized achievement, I thought it might help to remind everyone of what she did by taking a look at one of her short stories for children.  This one was a previous publication that was later added to a collection known as The Magic World, and Edith called it by the title of "Accidental Magic".

Mrs. Chamberlain's Reunion by Philippa Pearce (2001).

I've already given readers of this blog their first introductions to a writer named Philippa Pearce once before.  For those who still haven't read that older Club entry, or those who have and just forgot, here's a bit of an abridged refresher course.  Just as everybody has to come from somewhere, it also makes sense to claim that every writer is the product of the influences that molded them into the specific type of artist that they have all become.  Shakespeare and Mark Twain, for instance, wouldn't have been capable of writing the works that made them famous without the imprints that time, place, and culture had left on their minds.  This is something that appears in all of their works, and its so much a part of who each writer is that it's like there's no way they could stop it from seeping into their words.  To read Shakespeare with due diligence is to slowly immerse yourself into the early modern mindset that was the Elizabethan World Picture.  Likewise, becoming a devoted fan of Twain's work is a good way to gain a working knowledge of both the pre and post-Civil War ethos of the American landscape during the middle and near end of the 19th century.  Twain, in particular, is a useful resource these days for the way in which even his most imaginative flights of fancy highlight all of the social issues that this Country is still dealing with.

In the same way, though in a much lighter vein, it is possible to get a sense of the influences that helped mold Philippa Pearce into the writer she became.  In her case, most of the shaping influences in her art can be traced back to her childhood, growing up in Great Shelford, near the River Cam, in Cambridgeshire, England.  Her parent's were merchant millers, yet their occupation never got in the way of their daughter's education.  A lot of that was conditioned by the location that Ernest and Gertrude Pearce decided to settle down and raise a family in, and which subsequently became the place of the artist's birth.  If you follow the course of the River Cam long enough in a certain direction, it will take you both through and right past the iconic town and College which have taken their respective namesakes from the water source.  It's one of those cases where, if you pay attention to the geography long enough, you can maybe begin to understand why sometimes even the children of the working class residents of the town dotted about the River could sometimes grow up with higher rates of literacy than elsewhere, and this includes Pearce herself, as well.  All of which is to say that the first and biggest influence on Philippa as a child was the fact that she grew up within the shadows, environs, and confines of Cambridge University.  As a result, she was something of a college town girl.

It makes sense, therefore, that spending most of her childhood within reach of one of the most iconic and greatest centers of learning in the world meant her formative years were spent in an atmosphere that was always being molded at some fundamental level by the demands and enticements of academia.  It's no surprise, therefore, that growing up in such a collegiate setting would mean both an easy access to books, and eventual result of both an academic, as well as literary frame of mind on the part of the author.  All available indications point to Philippa taking a somewhat natural interest in the world of Arts and Letters at an early age, no doubt shaped in large degree to the influence that Cambridge University and its administration was able to exert on the daily workings of life in her hometown.  She was further assisted in this growing interest in the Realm of Letters by the fact that her parent's business as millers left them well off enough to send their daughter to Cambridge's Girton College.  She was thus able to graduate with a successful degree in both English and History (web).  It was this nurtured interest in Art and is relations to historical events which seems to have colored Philippa's work for the remainder of her days.  Her fictions tend to coalesce around a number of themes and settings.

In one sense, she's very much a writer concerned with the potential dramas of the domestic scene.  The vast majority of her work takes place in the lower and middle class houses containing the types of families that she knew growing up.  In this she shares a lot in common with Mark Twain.  Both artists can be described as regional authors, or Writers of Place.  Like Twain, in other words, Phillipa always seems to have been at her best when bringing the Cambridgeshire town and country settings she knew as a child to life on the printed page.  Twain did the same thing with his boyhood hometown of Hannibal, Missouri.  Or, for that matter, in much the same way Tolkien did for the West Midlands country of his own Victorian/Edwardian youth.  Philippa's stories tend to be a lot quieter in their focus on the domestic than either the rambunctious mischief of Twain, or the soaring epic qualities of Tolkien.  However, that's not the same as saying that she was unfamiliar with the tropes of the Fantastic.  While the domesticity of Cambridge country life might have been the author's main primary setting, much like the work of Stephen King, Pearce's backdrops were often the stage for various happenings and occurrences of the otherworldly variety.  What's remarkable and somewhat gratifying to learn is just how much of these Fantasy elements took the form of the traditional Gothic framework.

Also much like King, Philippa's stories concern the ways in which the hidden and sometimes troubled aspects of life can erupt into an otherwise normal setting in the form of the supernatural.  The major difference between the two is that Pearce's approach to this same material tends to take a much more gentler guiding hand, for lack of a better word.  A lot of this seems down to the fact that when it came time to find her niche in the world of letters, Phillipa somehow wound up settling on the venue of children's author as the mode that allowed the best possible expression of her own creative voice.  Nor is there anything to complain about, really.  Much like the work of R.L. Stine, or Bruce Coville (or closer to home, E. Nesbit and M.R. James), at her best Pearce's efforts can act as a very useful gateway entry to the wider world of Gothic fiction.  She does this by manufacturing narratives of the ghostly and the whimsical that in some ways can almost be said to signal the future work of authors like Neil Gaiman.  One such story is what we'll be looking at today.  It's called "Mrs. Chamberlain's Reunion".