Title: Hobberdy Dick
Author: K.M. Briggs
Date: 1955 (U.K.), 1977 (U.S.)
Publisher: Greenwillow (U.S.)
ISBN: 0-688-84079-5
Length: 239 pages
Quote: "But he...had only known the Culvers for a
little over two centuries. He would stay with the old place a little
longer."
Fair disclosure: This is a book that libraries across the United States added to
their "children's" collections, and then discarded due to complaints
from parents and teachers. And those parents and teachers were right: it's not
really a children's story at all.
Not that it's a book that needs to be hidden from
children, particularly. In fact it's almost free from sex and violence,
certainly tastefully written, and a delightful read for anyone who likes
English Literature--a suitable companion for other books Greenwillow was
bringing to the U.S. at the time, notably Briggs' own Kate Crackernuts 
and
Robert Westall's splendid Devil on the Road.
But few modern children are
likely to like it. They don't "get" it. Although Hobberdy Dick is
a novel set in the world of the old English fairy tales that used to be told to
children, it's outside the frame of reference of children who absorb more
modern fairy tales from TV broadcasts. It may attract some middle and high
school students to English Literature courses (probably the author's intention)
but it won't make much sense to the students until they've taken the courses.
Even for adults C.S. Lewis's Discarded Image 
may be
the best introduction to this book. Susan Cooper's Dark Is Rising 
quintet
is a set of young adult novels that may help introduce young readers to
the medieval lore from which the speculative world of this story is made.
Briefly: this is not a story about the real world we
know, past or present, U.S. or U.K. It's about the world as English people in
the seventeenth century seem to have imagined it to be. And although that
speculative world is bounded by Christian beliefs, in between the boundaries
set for it by Christian beliefs it's full of traditional pre-Christian beliefs;
things handed down to English Christians from their preliterate British Pagan
ancestors, things that are neither supported nor specifically contradicted by
the Bible or by modern science. English Christians took those things very
seriously. Some believed very seriously that whatever wasn't Christian was of
the Devil and must be untrue; others believed, equally seriously, that whatever
wasn't specifically anti-Christian was likely to be true, and worth preserving.
For the folk whose lore Briggs made a career of
documenting in scholarly books and recycling into novels, however, there was a
third "spiritual" realm in addition to Heaven and Hell. There were longaevi,
long-livers. The idea of these humanlike creatures was probably based on the
idea of departed ancestors living on in some way, but the longaevi were
thought to be a separate race, not humans, and certainly not the ghosts of dead
humans (although many seventeenth century English Christians believed devoutly
in ghosts, too). They were mortal but their lifespans were counted in
centuries not decades. Probably the most thorough and sympathetic treatment
they have ever received in literature was Tolkien's Rings 
books; there were
lofty, poetic, glamorous longaevi like the Elves and small, homely,
amusing, relatively short-lived ones like the Hobbits.
Although stories about them had been told before
Britain became Christian, and several sources (like Cooper) maintain that they
had their own alien purpose that was neither good-for-humans nor
evil-for-humans, the longaevi were fitted into the Christian worldview
by a tradition Briggs mentions in this story: They were that "host of
Heaven" of whom one third were faithful to God and became angels, one
third rebelled with Satan and became devils, and one third never made up their
minds and became the various kinds of "wights" (faeries, elves,
pixies, nixies, leprechauns, gnomes, sylphs, the Old Gods, the goblins...)
found in British and European folklore. Depending on their individual qualities
and characters some of them were glamorous and aristocratic, and some were
humble and homely, perhaps even subject to confusion with ordinary mortals who
might have been unable to find steady jobs and tried to attach themselves to
households where they were allowed to work for food and shelter. In some
stories some of the smaller, humbler ones, like brownies, were quite geriatric
and had been condemned to live until they'd done something good enough to merit
another offer of spiritual salvation.
So here is Dick, an ordinary decent hobgoblin, not
exactly miserable but able to empathize with another bogle (from an older tale)
who lamented, "Woe's me" that he thought he was many generations away
from the reward from a human "that'll lay me" to rest with the hope
of restoration to Heaven. He looks like a little old man, but he's not a
man--closer to a Hobbit, or to a brownie. He's not hoping to be released from
his life as a "hob," exactly. He's just determined to be the best
little hob he can be. In this story we see him doing all of a hob's traditional
jobs, as well as he can, considering his great age, small size, limited powers,
and lack of sympathy from the dominant humans in the family that move into his
home.
Though Hobberdy Dick was marketed as a story
about the family being "unloving Puritans," that's not exactly
accurate. All Puritans practiced a strict form of Protestant Christianity, some
much stricter than others; like devout people today, they were supposed to be
quiet, sober, modest, and frugal, but kindness, generosity, and even
cheerfulness were encouraged. Briggs' Puritan family are portrayed as real
Puritan families undoubtedly were: some easier to like than others. The young
man Dick does most to help has a bossy but not unreasonable father, an
unlovable stepmother, some witless but not unlovable stepsiblings, a wonderful
grandmother whose closeness to Heaven intimidates Dick but also helps him, and
a girlfriend who seems almost as perfect to Dick as she does to her admirer.
Medieval Europe was Catholic, of course. Medieval
studies can easily become Catholic Studies (or, if determined not to be
Catholic, Islamic Studies); that's what medieval literature was about, mostly.
The English Civil War embodied the conflict between Catholic or at least High
Church of England "Cavaliers" (the "conservative party" of
their day, endorsing some traditional "revels" and rights for the
lower class but mostly endorsing the traditional rights of the aristocracy) and
Puritan or Low Church "Roundheads" (the "rebellious/progressive
party," led by Oliver Cromwell, a man without an hereditary title, and
often thought to represent a step toward egalitarian thinking). As usual when
political polarization occurs, each side appealed to some people's ideals of
truth, beauty, and honor, and to some people's selfish greed. In Hobberdy
Dick Briggs does not actually assert that Cromwell's victory was a sad, bad
thing; she lets some characters say that, and lets others find it a good thing.
In the end, for young Joel and Anne as well as for
Dick, that "Puritan"/progressive/"Low Church" idea of a
bourgeois family moving into a stately home and intermarrying with a
"gentle" family seems quite satisfactory. The main difficulty Anne
and Joel worry about is that, in the old Catholic system, that sort of thing
was frowned upon; there was a strict hierarchy, in the physical as well as the
spiritual realm, and a boy like Joel was supposed to be as far
"below" a girl like Anne as Dick would have been below Titania, Queen
of the Faeries. (That name...yes, Faeries were originally human-sized or
bigger, and "Titania" was identified with the Greek Titans, who were
giants.) In the new system, where people come from matters less than where
they're going, and since Anne and Joel are presumably going to Heaven by the via
positiva of good lives in this world, they have every right to marry each
other.
Joel's stepmother doesn't seem to love her own children
very much, and if she's too "Puritan" to want Joel dead, she
certainly makes no secret of wanting him out of her way. She is a classic example of an unloving
person who happens to be a Puritan. Some of Dick's fellow longaevi,
including the splendid old Grim "who had been a god" (in
Norse lore Grim was a nickname for Odin), feel unloved by Puritans who don't
want to notice or believe in them--or offer the traditional ration of bread
that probably sustained some real homeless laborers in Merrie Olde Englande.
Nevertheless Joel and Anne have to be considered "loving" people,
over and above their chaste romance with each other. What Dick actually does,
in this story, is help some "loving Puritans" overcome the baleful
influence of some "unloving" Puritans.
So whose side is Briggs on? It's hard to say. She
wouldn't have thought it was polite to dispute her publisher's decision about
how to advertise her book, if she had disagreed with it. I suspect that she
wrote as a detached historian. Dick, who exists in the old Catholic worldview
but not in the Puritan one, would probably never have much to say in favor of
the Puritans...but Anne and Joel might be considered a pro-Puritan statement,
too.
And I suspect that seeing "unloving Puritans"
in reviews and summaries of the book did much to prejudice people against it,
to prompt librarians to discard it rather than reclassifying it--as they should
have done--as a work of speculative fiction for adults.
(Briggs could hardly have been expected to foresee how
much merely calling her protagonist "Dick" would do to prejudice
people against this book. I've seen people who obviously had no idea what
"Hobberdy" meant pick up a copy of the book and say "Hobberdy Dick?
What kind of book is that for children?!" Relax, people. Even after
the Nixon Administration, for many English-speaking people it's just a man's
name. Briggs was English, and old, and probably didn't realize it was anything but a man's name.)
Dick has to be the most lovable of all his kind. The
working-class longaevi, according to stories Briggs cited in her
nonfiction books, preferred "wights" as a general term for themselves;
one who was otherwise hard to classify considered, in snappy rhymes, words like
"faery" and so on, and concluded "But if you call me 'seelie
wight' I'll be your friend by day and night." Some of them were
consistently friendly to humams, although the stories about them tend to be
shorter than the ones about the nasty ones. Many stories about the friendly
wights who attached themselves to prosperous farms sound like stories about
homeless men, often small, elderly, and disabled or deformed in some way.
Goblins, however, despite their gnomelike habits, tendency to live in caves and
be able to find underground watercourses, mineral seams, or buried treasure,
were often considered ugly, hostile wights. The Princess and the Goblins
and
"Goblin Market
" are late stories, but some older goblin stories are
nastier. Dick is, however, a real sweetheart, not only nicer than most goblins
but nicer than some brownies and piskies. He prefer that humans not call him,
but he is a friend to Anne, Joel, and their grandmother by day and night.
Ghosts, we learn, are part of Dick's world--boring
little parvenus that come and go; Dick is pleased to help one of them fade out.
Wicked witches, humans who have sold their souls to the Evil Principle, are
real for Dick; they have little power over humans but considerable power over
hobs, and since they are deeply nasty people it takes real courage for Dick and
a few goblin buddies to rescue a child from one of them. (Wiccans, or
"white witches" who had not sold their souls and had mutually
respectful or human-dominant relationships with longaevi, were still
part of nineteenth century folklore but are not represented in this story.)
If you agree with the Puritans that all beliefs not specifically supported by the Bible are antichristian, then you won't like Hobberdy Dick or much of anything that K.M. Briggs wrote. If you're either a folklorist or a Neo-Pagan, you'll love all of Briggs' thoroughly researched nonfiction and imaginative folklore-based fiction. I'm a folklorist and I enjoy Briggs' books...but I recommend them to adults who are, or are becoming, reasonably well educated, not to kids. I think this writer expected all kids to be as familiar with her material as the children she knew were, and they're not.
Because bad marketing made this wholesome little tale of Merrie Englande so controversial, it's a collector's item. This web site blushes to ask for $20 per book + $5 per package + $1 per online payment. Briggs' other books aren't much cheaper; Kate Crackernuts, the most successful seller in the U.S., is currently available at prices that force us to demand $10. And Briggs isn't even here to enjoy her 10% of those payments. However, you can add books by living authors, which are likely to be cheaper, to the package (three other books of the same size will ship together with Hobberdy Dick in one $5 package), and 10% of the cost of those books will be sent to those authors or their charities.
and the bleakness in Anne Frank's 
are necessarily mature enough to
appreciate. Though sex-free, with minimal violence and no foul language, a
novel whose basic plot is about the necessity of death is a novel for adults.
Some teenagers may like Earthsea; for children I think 
and 
did
enough to expose children to mortality.
, some
who liked 
...only some, not
all, people who like 
and/or 
and/or Suzette Haden
and/or 
and/or Frank
like the Earthsea books. Even some people who liked LeGuin’s science
fiction or her occasional mainstream fiction don’t like her fantasy-parable
books. Time may help. I remember reading the Earthsea trilogy in college and
not appreciating it at all. I was probably patient enough and educated enough
to appreciate this book before age 50, but between ages 17 and 50 I left it
alone. Then again, time may not help; a lot of middle-aged people will say that
they already knew death is inevitable, and didn’t need to read 223 pages of
fiction that makes that point.
),
more provocative science fiction
about what humans would do with new technology if we got it to work (like 
), and, if
she’d wanted to write fantasies, cute, simple ones like 
. 
