Book Review: Uncle Arthur's Bedtime Stories Series 41

Title: Uncle Arthur’s Bedtime Stories Series 41

Author: Arthur S. Maxwell

Date: not shown

Publisher: Stanborough Press Ltd

ISBN: none

Length: 87 pages

Illustrations: photographs, mostly in color

Quote: “I thought of all the boys and girls who  are just like Suzanne’s little doggie. Lively, mischievous, and naughty as can be—but their mothers love them anyway.”

In the preface to this book, Maxwell explains, “When I finished writing Bedtime Stories 40 about a year ago the thought passed through my mind that it might be a good place to stop. Since then, however, the story ideas have come flooding in so fast that what could I do but go on?”

For more than forty years, “Uncle Arthur” had been collecting true stories from churches all over the English-speaking world and published them in his moral, easy-reading, illustrated Bedtime Stories books. Publishers bought the right to rearrange these stories in new editions as the original editions were used up, during and after Maxwell’s lifetime, so over 60 volumes of Bedtime Stories exist.

Bad news for some online readers: these stories contain none of the self-mocking winks and nudges a series of “uncle’s bedtime stories” might suggest to you. Maxwell was absolutely serious about his life mission of supplying true and edifying stories for children.

How did actual children relate to these occasionally preachy books? When Maxwell went to Australia, he reported in the preface to all-new volume 41, he met “fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, who read the books when they were children. What a welcome they gave me!”

I was a child of the appropriate age for these books, that year (it would have been around 1970). I had three volumes of Bedtime Stories, one original and two of the first rearranged edition (Maxwell lived to see at least two rearranged collections). It’s a painful duty to tell you that the Bedtime Stories weren’t the favorites I practically memorized. I enjoyed them, though.

I have met a few people, mostly lifelong Seventh-Day Adventists, who don’t remember liking the Bedtime Stories. “All those morals are enough to give any child a guilt complex.”

Funnily enough they didn’t give me a guilt complex. I think more depends on the family than on the stories. It won’t do first-graders any harm to read about the doggie who chewed up the new shoes and ran over the freshly washed car with his muddy feet, or the stray lamb who had to be chased back to the flock, or the boy who thought prayer might have saved a misplaced toy from being burned at the dump...if they’re allowed to enjoy the stories as stories, if parents don’t preach or nag or use the stories as punishments.

Volume 41 is hard to find in the U.S., and so far as I know none of these stories was included in the reprint collections. My copy was printed in England. I don’t know whether any copies were printed here. The period-perfect photos give the book a special nostalgic appeal. It’s aimed at children who are learning to read and/or still being read to, but I think it’s worth reading once, at any age, just as a piece of popular culture.