Book Review: Paddington at Large

Title: Paddington at Large

(That's the cover picture on the book I physically own. The Amazon link may redirect to a newer edition with a different cover.)

Author: Michael Bond

Date: 1962

Publisher: Dell

ISBN: 0-440-46801-9

Length: 128 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Peggy Fortnum

Quote: “Paddington spent most of his spare time out of doors, and when he began supplying the household with vegetables as well as flowers everyone had to agree...that he must have been born with green paws.”

After the animated stuffed animals in Winnie-the-Pooh, there was A Bear Called Paddington, a fantasy so anthropomorphic I’m tempted to describe it as stories about a child who, for no obvious reason, looks just a bit like a very small, harmless bear. Paddington Bear turned up on Paddington Station wearing a little blue coat with a note pinned to it, saying “Please Look After This Bear,” and the very nice Brown family did so through many volumes of stories that are funniest if you try to imagine a real bear acting like Paddington.

Real bears destroy people’s gardens. Paddington cultivates a garden.

Real bears don’t understand human words. Paddington not only speaks, but reads and writes, English on about a second grade level.

Real bears pull trees apart to get at honeycombs. Paddington buys jars of marmalade and politely dips a paw into one from time to time.

Real bears hibernate in winter. Paddington celebrates Christmas and particularly enjoys shopping.

Real bears are big, rough, gruff animals. Paddington never grows bigger than the Brown children, and speaks politely even when other people speak to him as if they believed he was a bear.

So why is Paddington described as a bear rather than a boy? His stories involve messes and misunderstanding, and the pretense that he’s “only a dumb animal” allows children to laugh at his misadventures and learn from them, even though his mistakes are the kind real children might make.

During the “Help our British allies recover from the war” years, our local library acquired all the Paddington books that were then available--nine or ten--and I think the siblings and I read each volume at least once. I don’t think they ever became our favorites. They weren’t disliked; they weren’t loved. Rereading this volume to see whether, as an adult, I can understand why, I think the stories must have seemed too unlikely even to be funny.

The Browns’ neighbor Curry tries to trick Paddington Bear into doing yard work for him. In our world people were positively hypervigilant about allowing anyone to do yard work, always afraid of lawsuits; a lazy man might cover his front yard in gravel but he wouldn’t entrust a gas-powered lawnmower to a kid who might leave it running.

Paddington goes to an open-air concert and tries to complain to Mr. Schubert about his allowing the band to perform an “Unfinished Symphony.” In our world open-air concerts might occasionally have featured a band ambitious enough to try a Sousa march, but not symphonies.

Paddington tries to repair a TV set by crawling inside it. In our world TV sets weren’t big enough to tempt anyone to try that.

On consideration, Paddington’s adventures remind me more than anything else of the TV cartoons being played and replayed at the time...except that the anthropomorphic cartoon animals were usually chasing and fighting each other, and Paddington never fights anybody. He’s a sweetheart, a Perfect Gentlebear, sometimes confused but never angry. If the Warner Bros had done a cartoon series set on the Lost Planet of Nice, they might have featured Paddington.

As a nursery story, toy, and TV/movie tie-in, Paddington gave Winnie-the-Pooh serious competition. There were remakes and remixes, so the counts vary depending on what people consider separate books, but at least 150 separate books about Paddington were printed--not all available in the same countries. (Each chapter in the first nine books could be read as a single short story and was later sold as one...) More than thirty million of these books were sold. At the turn of the century craft books were still featuring patterns inspired by Paddington Bear.

The stories are funny in their bland implausible way. Written to be accessible to elementary school children, they also appeal to adults who read them aloud to children. If you're in the mood for gentle absurdities, and haven't already read this series, Paddington Bear might appeal to you.