Happy Birthday Mr Milne!
“Oh, Bear!” said Christopher Robin. “How I do love you!” “So do I,” said Pooh.”
Today is A.A. Milne’s birthday. The creator of the iconic and loveable bear “of Very Little Brain”, Winnie-the-Pooh, was born on 18 Jan 1882 and died in 1956. What is perhaps less well known about Alan Alexander Milne is that he was a prolific playwright and screen play writer, he published novels, including two works of crime fiction, wrote poetry and edited the satirical magazine, Punch.
The Winnie-the-Pooh stories that made Milne so well known were inspired by Milne’s son, Christopher Robin, who was born in 1920, and named his teddy named after a bear in London zoo called Winnipeg.
Eyore, Piglet, Tigger, Kanga and Roo were also Christopher’s toys, and the setting for the books, The Hundred Acre Wood, is based on a real wood, The Five Hundred Acre Wood in Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, near where Milne, his wife, Daphne, and Christopher Robin lived.
Milne initially wrote a short story called The Wrong Sort of Bees featuring Pooh. The first full length children’s book, When We Were Very Young, was published shortly afterwards, in 1924 and illustrated by E.H. Shephard. It was an instant hit, selling 50,000 copies in the first two months.
Milne went on to write Winnie the Pooh, Now We Are Six and The House at Pooh Corner. His books have never been out of print since they were published.
Sadly Milne was not as fond of Pooh as many of us are, as he felt that the success of his children’s books overshadowed his more serious work and that he was pilloried by “literary snobs"“. In his memoir, It’s Too Late Now, he wrote:
“We all write books, we all want money: we who write want money from our books. If we fail to get money, we are not so humble, nor so foolish, as to admit that we have failed in our object. Our object, we maintain, was artistic success.”
We, at the RLF, are indebted to Milne, who left the rights to his estate to four beneficiaries, including us. As a result of this kindness, we have been able to help hundreds of writers through our hardship grants, and thousands of writers, students, and the general public through our educational work.
“Some people care too much. I think it's called love.”
Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne
One of our RLF Fellows, children’s author, Michaela Morgan, has written a lovely article for Collected called, A.A. Milne and Me: A Pathway to Literature.
“I am an author for children, supported in part, via an RLF Fellowship, by Milne’s estate. He funds me now in a very practical way. He buys my groceries and pays for the heating. I have no idea of his motivation for this but I’m grateful. Thank you A. A. — you make a difference to me and thousands of others and long may you continue to do so.” Michaela Morgan