Bobbsey Twins
Sdhigginbo
favorite. Actually, a popular historian (that is, someone who studies
popular history, not a historian everyone likes) would have great fun with
this books, I think. Consider the Bobbseys' black servants, Sam and
Dinah. When the series began they talked in dialect and generally
conformed to all the racial stereotypes of the period. By the late
sixties (about the time I finally grew out of the books) they spoke
standard English but made only occasional appearances--probably because
the series creators were rather embarrassed about the family's having
servants at all by that point. And then you have the changing role of the
bully, Danny Rugg--at some point he almost turned into a nice guy, but
apparently this got too boring, so he was demonized all over again in
subsequent installments. But I'd better see if anyone else is the
slightest bit interested in this before I write too much.
JaneYolen
absolutely no memory of anything other than the names of the characters.
And absolutely ABSOLUTELY no memory of black servants speaking dialect.
Hmmmmmmm.--Jane Yolen
kuz...@acfcluster.nyu.edu
The servants' dialect is a crystal-clear recollection for me - I was
hopelessly confused, I had NO IDEA what they were saying. ("dat" for "that",
"chiles" for "children," "sho nuff" for "sure enough" etc.)
When I was first reading the Bobbsy twins I must have been about six or seven,
and at that time in school, we had a unit called "reading for context." Our
worksheets were paragraphs, for example, where two children were talking about
sand, shells, and water. The conclusion: they were at the beach. I was
convinced that "reading for context" had been designed to help kids with the
Bobbsy twins; you had to figure out what Sam and Dinah were saying based on
the responses of Bert, Nan, and co.
I believe the reason that some may remember this and others not is that the
different versions published over the years were drastically rewritten. My
collection was mostly hand-me-downs; the volumes from the '30's were heavy on
the dialect, those from the '40's were significantly better. I've seen
editions from the '60's and '70's belonging to kids I baby-sit, and Sam and
Dinah have all but dissappeared into the woodwork, although I really haven't
read one cover to cover. I'm sure an expert on series books would be able to
explain the differences from edition to edition much more clearly.
Elizabeth K.
Patricia Reynolds
jane...@aol.com "JaneYolen" writes:
"Snap! Snap! Git away from dar! Stop it! Oh, mah good land ob massy!
Now look whut yo' has gon an' done! Mr. Bobbsey, come in heah,
quick!" (_Bobbsey Twins at Spruce Lake_, p. 31)
Is typical. I can't remember what I thought about it at the time -
it was as strange as a party-favor.
--
Patricia Reynolds
p...@caerlas.demon.co.uk
JaneYolen
Bobbsey Twins.) But then when I re-read a Nesbit book prior to writing an
Afterward for it (Dell edition), I discovered it had some fairly obvious
anti-semiticism in it. And I--a nice Jewish girl--read it right after
World War II and adored it, and never noticed. Kids read straight through
a lot of stuff that raises the hair on the back of adult necks, I guess..
(Or at least I did.)
--Jane Y
Kathy Statham
[snip]
> There's a very good chapter on the Bobbsey Twins books ("Bobbsey
>Bourgeois") in Bobbie Ann Mason's _The Girl Sleuth: A Feminist Guide_.
>According to Mason, when the books were revised in the 1950s a lot of
the
>more blatant racism was excised.
The same thing was supposedly done to the Nancy Drew books. In most of
the older editions, the villains are always described as having "swarthy"
features. I don't remember any dialect or *blatant* racism in the Nancy
Drew books, but there certainly was a lot of xenophobia.
--Kathy
sta...@bga.com
Susan C. Mitchell
: Actually, I did an article on the Bobbsey Twins revisions as
: reflective of the culture (rise of gov't and consumerism,
: growth of suburbs over farms, changing attitudes towards
: religion and people of color, changes in technology). It's
: a fascinating series to study.
: Jane Y--unless you read the revisions (which would've been
: after your childhood), there was atrocious dialect &
: stereotyping, but it was always secondary to the twins'
: adventures.
: What do other people remember about the series?
I remember being always slightly annoyed that Nan never got to *do* much
of anything; she seemed almost to be absent from some of the books. I
also recall a couple of specific scenes that gave me a sense of
dislocation, a feeling that I was reading a book that took place in
another world: one in the very first book, a 1930s edition, when Nan,
age eight, says that for Christmas "All I want is a set of furs.... A
beautiful brown set, just like Mamma's" (she gets them, too) and one in
_The Bobbsey Twins Out West_ (you have to understand, I grew up in the
Southwest), when Bert asks a ranch hand if there were any "wild Indians"
near the ranch and is told that "all the Indians around here are tame."
Think globally, act locally.
Susan
--
===========================================================================
"We, the people, are not free. Our democracy is but a name. We vote?
What does that mean? We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee."
-- Helen Keller
Bill Forg
While we're on the subject, I noticed that a year or two ago the Bobbsey
Twins were re-published in abridged editions. As I rather intensely
dislike abridged books, I didn't bother to leaf through one. Now I'm
wondering what they cut out. If the characters of Sam and Dinah changed
so radically from the 30's to the 60's (I read books from both eras;
garage sales are wonderful!), perhaps they've been written out
altogether now. How about it? Does anyone know?
Gretchen Forg
Anima
>The same thing was supposedly done to the Nancy Drew books. In most of
>the older editions, the villains are always described as having "swarthy"
>features. I don't remember any dialect or *blatant* racism in the Nancy
>Drew books, but there certainly was a lot of xenophobia.
Yes, there's a reason for the revisions being similar in both series of
books. They're by the same author. Edward Stratemeyer began a syndicate
that was carried on by his daughters until the last one died a few years
back, but the tradition continues. Franklin W. Dixon's Hardy Boys books
and Carolyn Keene's Nancy Drew continue with new authors being edited by
someone at the home factory same as always, far as I know. Stratemeyer,
or people he hired and supervised/edited produced both series, as well as
the Dixon WWII pilot stories, Victor W. Appleton's Tom Swift, and,
doubtless, others. Over the years, there have been a number of newspaper
stories etc. on the updating of all these, dropping the racist elements,
updating the prices and slang.
To my mind, the most outrageous change, however, was intorduced a few
years aback in the Hardy Boys Files paperback series, in which Chet
Morton (Iola's chortling brother) was killed by a terrorist bomb....
What my foggy memory cannot reel off along with the pen names above is
the one that was used on the Bobbsey Twins books. Nor can I say whether
the Honeybunch series was also from the Stratemeyer Syndicate. And what
about Rick Brant, another boy inventor? Ah, welladay.
--
an...@io.com When making public policy decisions about new technologies
for the Government, I think one should ask oneself which technologies would
best strengthen the hand of a police state. Then, do not allow the Government
to deploy those technologies. --Philip Zimmermann
Bonita Kale
In a previous article, an...@pentagon.io.com (Anima) says:
>sta...@bga.com (Kathy Statham) writes:
>
>>The same thing was supposedly done to the Nancy Drew books. In most of
>>the older editions, the villains are always described as having "swarthy"
>>features. I don't remember any dialect or *blatant* racism in the Nancy
>>Drew books, but there certainly was a lot of xenophobia.
>
>Yes, there's a reason for the revisions being similar in both series of
>books. They're by the same author. Edward Stratemeyer began a syndicate
>that was carried on by his daughters until the last one died a few years
>back, but the tradition continues. Franklin W. Dixon's Hardy Boys books
>and Carolyn Keene's Nancy Drew continue with new authors being edited by
>someone at the home factory same as always, far as I know.
...
>
>To my mind, the most outrageous change, however, was intorduced a few
>years aback in the Hardy Boys Files paperback series, in which Chet
>Morton (Iola's chortling brother) was killed by a terrorist bomb....
True? Good old Chet? My God!
>What my foggy memory cannot reel off along with the pen names above is
>the one that was used on the Bobbsey Twins books. Nor can I say whether
>the Honeybunch series was also from the Stratemeyer Syndicate. And what
>about Rick Brant, another boy inventor? Ah, welladay.
Well, the Bobbsey Twins were by Laura Lee Hope.
I remember a Nancy Drew book in which an anonymous suspect was referred to
as 'the freckle-faced colored man', which sounds pretty racist to me.
I have a soft spot for the Bobbseys. One of them was given to me for my
8th birthday, and it seemed so -big- and -long-. Took me a while to get up
the nerve to read it; it was my first fat book. When I found out it was
easy to read, I was pretty smug, I can tell you.
--
Bonita Kale
bf...@cleveland.freenet.edu
kuz...@acfcluster.nyu.edu
The publishers probably killed him off because they didn't think kids of
the '90's could relate to someone named "Chet." <sniff>
I also heard somewhere that in the Nancy Drew Files, Nancy dumps Ned and gets a
new boyfriend. I realized early on in my Nancy Drew reading (about age 8 or
so) that Ned is the world's biggest drip, I wished she had cut him loose a long
time ago.
Ann, I think I had successfully repressed the "fat fairy" and "fat fireman"
stuff for years! I hated that too.
My favorite event in the Bobbsey Twins books was when the children came across
a little castle, very detialed but just the right size for children. A tiny
woman lived in it, and at first, Flossie thinks she is a real fairy. This was
in one of my early edition books, so I am not certain if it made the editorial
cuts into the later ones.
I also named my cat "Snoops" after the Bobbseys' cat, and was furious
that everyone kept calling the cat Snoopy, thinking she was named after the
comic strip dog.
Elizabeth Kuzina
Zirconn
Previously an...@io.com writes:
:What my foggy memory cannot reel off along with the pen names above is
:the one that was used on the Bobbsey Twins books. Nor can I say whether
:the Honeybunch series was also from the Stratemeyer Syndicate. And what
:about Rick Brant, another boy inventor? Ah, welladay.
The Rick Brant Science Adventure Stories were were not part of the
Stratemeyer Syndicate. They were all written by Harold Goodwin using the
pseudonym of John Blaine, 24 books in all.
John
Zir...@aol.com
Deidre A. Johnson
To correct a few errors from previous posts:
Chet Morton wasn't killed in the CaseFIles; his sister, Iola
was.
The same author didn't write the various series, nor do
Stratemeyer descendants currently oversee the series. Harriet
Adams, Stratemeyer's daughter, ran the SYndicate until her
death in 1983, but for much of the 1960s & 1970s, she supervised
(and sometimes wrote) the girls' series, while Andrew Svenson
apparently managed (but didn't usually write) the Hardy Boys
Several years after Adams's death, SImon & Schuster
purchased the SYndicate; MegaBooks currently handles the
various series (packaging, getting mss., etc.)
Honey BUnch was a Syndicate property (under the pseudonym
Helen Louise Thorndyke). Rick Brandt wasn't; it was
ghostwritten by Hal Goodwin under the John Blaine
pseudonym.
SharynN
band. I believe Nan is the drummer. Don't hold me to this. (Ah, Nan
Bobbsey, predating Courtney Love by years and years....)
There was another one involving (by now antiquated) computers -- THE
BOBBSEY TWINS AND THE COMPUTER BUG MYSTERY, I think.
Reading the older versions of these books is like watching Nick at Nite.
My choices for 1990s books would be....
THE BOBBSEY TWINS ON THE INTERNET
THE BOBBSEY TWINS AND THE STARBUCKS MYSTERY (highly caffeinated)
THE BOBBSEY TWINS ON MTV
THE BOBBSEY TWINS VISIT BOSNIA
I can't go on.
Sharyn November
Deb Holland
>[snip]
>the one that was used on the Bobbsey Twins books. Nor can I say whether
>the Honeybunch series was also from the Stratemeyer Syndicate. And what
>about Rick Brant, another boy inventor? Ah, welladay.
>
Laura Lee Hope is the pen name used on the Bobbsey Twins and on the
Honeybunch books.
Sdhigginbo
Does anyone remember "Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue"? I think it was
published in the 1920s--don't know whether it was by a syndicate author or
not.
I'd forgotten the "fat fireman" nickname and the cat's name. What did
always puzzle me when I was a child was how the twins could go off on
their adventures constantly and no one seemed to care how much school they
were missing.
Buffy Hyler
devouring every book I can find. I must have been around 7 - 8 years
old. I loved them, obviously. But I don't remember much about them
other than the 3 sets of twins.
However, I've been reading *lots* of childrens books for the 8 and
under crowd as my 8 year old son has been growing up. I found a
Bobbsey Twin book in a used book store (I don't know which version) and
thought that this might be a great book to get for him since I remember
being so fond of them.
Yuck!!! I read the first chapter in the store and the writing style
was *so* bad. It was *very* hard for me to read it at all, let alone
get lost in the story. It reminded me of those really bad stories that
I had 30+ years ago in school reading books. The conversation was very
stilted and the story line was incredibly simple.
I guess the real problem I have is that perhaps my son has already
outgrown these books. We have been reading books that perhaps more
properly are 10-12 year old type books and have lots more detail,
character development and plot.
But even the 4 to 6 year old age Little Critter/Berenstein Bears books
read better than this Bobbsey Twin book.
Has anyone read one of these books as an adult and still felt that they
were really good books? Maybe I just picked a bad chapter/book.
--
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Buffy Hyler (hy...@ast.saic.com)
SAIC, Campus Point
San Diego, California
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Deidre A. Johnson
To respond to a previous post: Stratemeyer used more than
64 pseudonyms. Most of them are listed in my STRATEMEYER
PSEUDONYMS AND SERIES BOOKS (Greenwood, 1983), a
bibliography of Stratemeyer and Stratemeyer SYndicate
publications.
Deidre A. Johnson
Style in the Bobbsey Twins--the first book has had 5 different
texts; the next two, four each; most of the others, two or
three revisions. The early editions (pre1960s) usually
had readable prose--not literature, but engaging. Many
of the rewrites and the titles published during and after
the 1950s and 1960s lost much of that; the quality is bery
uneven. To give one example of how casually the series was treated:
the first 3 Wanderer editions (1980s) are actually reworked
versions of a failed SYndicate series, the Tollivers. That
means the dialogue & actions were written for another set of
characters entirely (and for a family of 5-6 children) and
basically reassigned to the twins. Many of the early Bobbsey
books, in contast, were written by Howard Garis, who had a
good instinct for reaching -- and charming -- his audience.
R A Burroughs
: jane...@aol.com (JaneYolen) writes:
: >This is fascinating to me. (All the stuff about racist material in the
Which Nesbit book? I've never noticed any anti-Semitism. Or am I just
thick? :-)
: Children don't relate books to real life for a long time (i.e. not until they
: are old enough to make full sense of it all). What happens in a book had,
: for me, no resemblance to the real world. Its not even as though I thought
: "That girl in the book has to stay home and do the cooking, but thats because
: it was written at a different time when things were like that, this doesn't
: mean I have to behave the same way", there was just no correlation between
: that kind of character and my own life, in the same way that there is none
: between me and Moon Face or Silky.
This is true. I mean, what's wrong with Noddy in the original, for
heaven's sake? Kids aren't that stupid - they know Toyland or whatever
isn't real life!
The only problems I ever had with "unreal" stories is that I read so much
historical fiction and old-fashioned school stories that I began to talk
in a very dated way and got horribly teased at school. :-) Did anyone
else have this problem? (I still do it sometimes, but now people just
think I'm being random.)
: Claire
Rosie
===========================================================================
You're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without
holding on (Dean Martin).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
It is good to get drunk once in a while. What else is there
to do? ("A Greeting to Lu Hung-Chien").
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
I tried. (R.A.Bu...@durham.ac.uk)
===========================================================================
Caleb Spring
: Chet Morton was killed by a terrorist bomb?!?!?!?! Say it ain't so!
: The publishers probably killed him off because they didn't think kids of
: the '90's could relate to someone named "Chet." <sniff>
Yes, but then why did they keep "Iola?" :)
Caleb Spring
Deidre A. Johnson
Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue was another Syndicate property
--also published under the Hope pseudonym.
As for Dinah and Sam Johnson, the Bobbseys' employees--
they disappeared from the New Bobbsey Twins series (the
one where the older twins were in a rock group--with
Nan on keyboard, I think), but were restored in very
peripheral roles in the red editions. For what it's
worth, the red editions were abridged by former Strate-
meyer Syndicate partner Nancy Axelrad, who also ghost-
wrote Bobbsey Twins titles in the 1970s and 1980s, so
the abridgements are in keeping with the tone of
the earlier books (and the idea of continually updating
fits the series perfectly). The oldest titles are
still probably the most enjoyable--but maybe that
depends on which versions are most familiar.
Deidre A. Johnson
To reiterate--Chet *wasn't* killed; Iola was.
And Stratemeyer did use more than 64 pseudonyms; we're still
discovering them. If Billman said he only used 64 in SECRET
OF THE STRATEMEYER SYNDICATE, then she was in error. (And, if
you check the endnotes, you'll see she cites STRATEMEYER
PSEUDONYMS as the source for much of her info about the
Syndicate.) SECRETS wasn't meant to be an expose of the
Syndicate, but an analysis of why the books are so
successful (which she does masterfully).
The first 3 Nancy Drew books were written by Mildred Wirt
Benson. That's been proved by court testimony. In fact,
Stratemeyer didn't even like the character the way
Wirt Benson wrote it, but fortunately he let her work
stand after a reader at G&D liked it. That, too, is
documented in court testimony.
Sorry to seem so emphatic about this, but -- as others
have noted -- material about the Syndicate abounds in
rumors and snarled information and I had to see it
--oops, that should be Hate to see it
perpetuated.
Tracey Mealing
killed by a terrorist bomb in the early books of the Hardy Boys Files -
definitely a departure from the earlier series -welcome to the '90s kids!
Tracey
==========kuz...@acfcluster.nyu.edu, 2/21/95==========
Putrdad
heaven's sake? Kids aren't that stupid - they know Toyland or whatever
isn't real life!
The only problems I ever had with "unreal" stories is that I read so much
historical fiction and old-fashioned school stories that I began to talk
in a very dated way and got horribly teased at school. :-) Did anyone
else have this problem? (I still do it sometimes, but now people just
think I'm being random.)
RA: Unfortunately, I read the Bobbsey Twins when I was but a lad and it
left me horribly stuck in that vernacular. The one line that always
killed me was when somebody would say something and the kids (B Twins or H
Boys) would "chorus".
Example: "Children, I have a small railroad filled with candy located in
an exotic land where your Father happens to have a business trip scheduled
next week," Mrs. Powers said. "Would you like to see it?"
"We sure would," Flossie and Freddie chorused.
Whenever I'm in a situation where two people say the exact thing at the
same time I always say out loud," they chorused." One day, somebody is
going to know what I mean.
More power to the Bobbsey Twins.
Dad