The Famous Five (novel series) -21 Book set

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The stories take place in the children’s school holidays after they have returned from their respective boarding schools. Each time they meet they get caught up in an adventure, often involving criminals or lost treasure. Sometimes the scene is set close to George’s family home at Kirrin Cottage in Dorset, such as the picturesque Kirrin Island, owned by George and her family in Kirrin Bay. George’s own home and various other houses the children visit or stay in are hundreds of years old and often contain secret passages or smugglers’ tunnels.

The Famous five series
Price 130/ Each book
Full series 21 volume =2600/

The Famous Five is a series of children’s adventure novels written by English author Enid Blyton. The first book, Five on a Treasure Island, was published in 1942. The novels feature the adventures of a group of young children – Julian, Dick, Anne and Georgina (George) – and their dog Timmy.

The stories take place in the children’s school holidays after they have returned from their respective boarding schools. Each time they meet they get caught up in an adventure, often involving criminals or lost treasure. Sometimes the scene is set close to George’s family home at Kirrin Cottage in Dorset, such as the picturesque Kirrin Island, owned by George and her family in Kirrin Bay. George’s own home and various other houses the children visit or stay in are hundreds of years old and often contain secret passages or smugglers’ tunnels.

In some books, the children go camping in the countryside, on a hike or holiday together elsewhere. However, the settings are almost always rural and enable the children to discover the simple joys of cottages, islands, the English and Welsh countryside and seashores, as well as an outdoor life of picnics, ginger ale, lemonade, bicycle trips, and swimming.[a]

Blyton intended to write only six or eight books in the series, but owing to their high sales and immense commercial success she went on to write twenty-one full-length Famous Five novels, as well as a number of other series in similar style following groups of children discovering crime on holiday in the countryside.[1] By the end of 1953 more than six million copies had been sold. Today, more than two million copies of the books are sold each year, making them one of the best-selling series for children ever written, with sales totaling over a hundred million.[citation needed] All the novels have been adapted for television, and several have been adapted as films in various countries.

Blyton’s publisher, Hodder & Stoughton, first used the term “The Famous Five” in 1951, after nine books in the series had been published. Before this, the series was referred to as The ‘Fives’ Books.

Characters

The five
Julian is the oldest of the five, cousin to George and elder brother to Dick and Anne. He is tall, strong, and intelligent as well as caring, responsible, and kind. His cleverness and reliability are often noted by Aunt Fanny. He is the leader of the group and is very protective towards Anne and sometimes, to her frustration, towards George. Julian is the most mature of the group but, although well-meaning, his manner can at times come over as overbearing, pompous, or priggish. At the start of the series, Julian is 13-years-old. Over time, he reaches his goal of fully maturing into a young adult.
Dick has a cheeky sense of humor but is also dependable and kind in nature. He is the same age as his cousin George, 2 years younger than his brother Julian and a year older than his sister Anne – eleven at the start of the series. Though inclined to tease his sister at times, Dick is, like Julian, very caring towards Anne and does his best to keep her cheered up when she gets upset. He had a heroic role in Five on a Treasure Island. He uses his wits and saves the five in many adventures but probably has the least clearly-drawn character of the four cousins.

George (or Georgina) is a tomboy, demanding that people call her “George”, and she cuts her hair very short and dresses like a boy. She is headstrong and courageous by nature and, like her father, scientist Quentin Kirrin, has a hot and fiery temper. Introduced to the other characters in the first book, she later attends a boarding school with Anne where the teachers to call her ‘George’. Blyton eventually revealed that the character was based on herself. It is notable that the chief protagonist of the Malory Towers stories also possessed a fiery temper as a defining character trait.[3] George has a loyal dog named Timmy who would do anything for her. She often gets cross when anyone calls her by her real name or makes fun of Timmy, and she loves it when somebody calls her George or mistakes her for a boy. In Five Get into a Fix, old Mrs. Jones mistakes her for a boy: even though Julian had said to her that she was a girl, she later forgets this. George sometimes takes this to the point of asking that her name be prefixed with Master instead of Miss. Various references have been made to what meaning should be read into this – for instance, “I remember reading in my first Famous Five book about a girl called Master George. What a puzzle and thrill. She claims to never tell lies as that is cowardly.”[4] More modern readers have interpreted that George had gender dysphoria, but Hugo Rifkind, writing in The Times, suggested that Blyton’s conservatism meant that was not likely to have been intended.[5]

Anne is the youngest in the group and generally takes care of the domestic duties during the Five’s various camping holidays. As the youngest, she is more likely than the others to be frightened and does not really enjoy the adventures as much as the others. She is ten years old in the first book of the series. She sometimes lets her tongue run away with her, but ultimately she is as brave and resourceful as the others. She likes doing domestic things such as planning, organizing and preparing meals, and keeping where they are staying clean and tidy, be it a cave, house, tent, or caravan. In Smugger’s Top, it is suggested she is claustrophobic, as she is frightened of enclosed spaces, which remind her of bad dreams. But the adventures invariably lead the five into tunnels, down wells, and into dungeons and other enclosed spaces, demonstrating how brave she really is.

Timmy is George’s faithful dog. He is a large, brown mongrel with a long tail. George adopted him after finding him abandoned on the moors as a puppy. He is very friendly; he is clever, affectionate, and loyal to the children and to George in particular; he provides physical protection for them many times. Timmy’s presence is frequently given as the reason the children’s parents allow them to wander unsupervised. George adores Timmy and thinks that he is the best dog in the world, and often becomes furious when people insult or threaten him. In the first book of the series, George’s parents have forbidden her to keep Timmy, and she is forced to hide him with a fisher boy in the village. After the end of the Five’s first adventure, her parents relent and she is allowed to keep him in the house and also take him with her to boarding school. It is a notable feature of the stories that Timmy’s thoughts and feelings are frequently described.

Close friends

Alf, the fisherboy, appears in most of the books set in Kirrin Cottage or at Kirrin Island. In the first book, after George’s parents forbid her to keep the dog, Alf keeps Timmy for her. Timmy adores Alf. Alf also looks after George’s boat. In later books, Alf only looks after George’s boat, as George’s parents let Timmy stay in the house. Alf also appears as James of the same background.
Jo, the ragamuffin girl, clever but wild, joins the Five on several adventures near the end of the series. She is approximately the same age as the children and is a tomboy like George. Her parents were in the circus, but her mother died and her father was imprisoned for theft. She admires Dick and thinks the world of him.
Joanna/Joan is the housekeeper at George’s house. She is an extremely kind woman who is often present at Kirrin Cottage when Uncle Quentin and Aunt Fanny go off somewhere. All the four cousins are extremely attached to her. She is sometimes referred to as Joan.

Family

Aunt Fanny is George’s mother, and aunt to Dick, Julian, and Anne. She is married to Uncle Quentin, and is, through most of Blyton’s Famous Five novels, the principal maternal figure in the lives of the children. She is a very kind and easy-going woman and shows considerable patience with her husband over his short temper and absent-mindedness.
Uncle Quentin is George’s father, and a world-famous scientist, who is kidnapped or held hostage in several of the children’s adventures. He possesses a quick temper and has little tolerance for the children on school holidays, but is nevertheless a loving and caring husband, father, and uncle, and is extremely proud of his daughter. He is also inclined to be very absent-minded, as he finds it hard to switch off from his work and readjust to everyday life. Despite his fame as a scientist, his work does not earn him much money. In the first book of the series, it is established that he is brother to the father of Julian, Dick, and Anne.

Julian, Dick and Anne’s mother is a very nice woman. In Five Go Off In a Caravan, she persuades the children’s father to let them travel in the caravan.

Critical discussion

Floating timeline
The seemingly perpetual youth of the Famous Five, who experience a world of apparently endless holidays while not aging significantly,[6] is known as a floating timeline. Floating timelines allow for an episodic series with no defined end-point but at the expense of losing a sense of the characters growing up. J. K. Rowling commented of her Harry Potter series that she deliberately intended to avoid this in her writing: “in book four the hormones are going to kick in – I don’t want him stuck in a state of permanent pre-pubescence like poor Julian in the Famous Five!”[7]

Bibliography

Enid Blyton’s “Famous Five” novel series

  1. Five on a Treasure Island (1942)
  2. Five Go Adventuring Again (1943)
  3. Five Run Away Together (1944)
  4. Five Go to Smuggler’s Top (1945)
  5. Five Go Off in a Caravan (1946)
  6. Five on Kirrin Island Again (1947)
  7. Five Go Off to Camp (1948)
  8. Five Get into Trouble (1949)
  9. Five Fall into Adventure (1950)
  10. Five on a Hike Together (1951)
  11. Five Have a Wonderful Time (1952)
  12. Five Go Down to the Sea (1953)
  13. Five Go to Mystery Moor (1954)
  14. Five Have Plenty of Fun (1955)
  15. Five on a Secret Trail (1956)
  16. Five Go to Billycock Hill (1957)
  17. Five Get into a Fix (1958)
  18. Five on Finniston Farm (1960)
  19. Five Go to Demon’s Rocks (1961)
  20. Five Have a Mystery to Solve (1962)
  21. Five Are Together Again (1963)

Blyton also wrote a number of short stories featuring the characters, which were collected together in 1995 as Five Have a Puzzling Time and Other Stories.

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The Famous Five (novel series) -21 Book set

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