Just read Mary Poppins for the first time – she’s so terribly English in the book, it’s fantastic. In the movie there’s only the barest hint of her character in the book – she’s standoffish. conceited (she loves window shopping because it allows her to admire her reflection again and again), inflexible, and humourless (no singing here), but somehow, and believably, inspires utter devotion in the children. Perhaps my favorite part is that after amazing and magical adventure after adventure, neither the children nor anyone else in the book has grown or learned a single thing. Wonderful! Haven’t we had enough of moralizing tales for children? The very idea that childish adventures have to come with a side of cauliflower-like lessons has always seemed just a little disingenuous – I recall few enough lessons from my youth, and most of them were imposed upon the events afterward and only vaguely intuited at the time.
I suppose a good parent could do the same with many of the Mary Poppins stories, but I rather like them in their picaresque and amoral state.
A first edition can be had for only $1500 – about the same as an Arthur Rackham illustrated Peter Pan first and about $40k less than a true first of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
