![]() ![]() ![]() Geoffrey Trease is famous for having been the first British novelist to write children’s fiction from the points of view of the servants, the working-classes, and the people who had to make their own living. I only own about six Trease novels, but it wasn’t till I was researching him that I realised that he wrote over 100. ![]() ![]() ‘There must be many readers whose interest in history was originally fired by reading Trease, and some whose knowledge of Garibaldi or King Alfred comes entirely from reading Follow My Black Plume or Mist over Athelney 30 or 40 years ago.’ That’s me: I was that reader with the Children’s Library ticket who learned about history through historical novels, and happily absorbed all the social and political messages they delivered along with the facts. There’s a line in Trease’s obituary (he died in 1998) that reports his popularity for generations of British children. Trease wrote for what we now call Young Adults, Treece wrote for adults, and the differences in their writing put me off reading Treece for decades. Trease should not be confused with Henry Treece, the other English historical novelist of his period filed near him on the shelf. This week’s Really Like This Book’s podcast script catch-up is on Geoffrey Trease’s The Crown of Violet (1952), which is set in Ancient Greece, in about 400 BC. ![]()
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