Poor old
Rainbow, no doubt the delight and even passion of millions of Empire children particularly at its 1920s peak, and today conspicuously unable even to get someone to write a wikipedia page for it (though it is in
this list where we see it existed 1914-1956 and it is discussed
here). Presumably it was called the
Rainbow because, whereas many comics were still utterly black and white, it had a colour cover (I think that's all it had but maybe there was some spot colour inside). How the little ones must have chuckled with joy when they saw a publication with a range of colours on it, like, you know, real life. Except how grey and sombre was their real life really.
Anyway I am interested in the way that the Empire and race (-ism) were reflected in popular publications of this nature in the first half of the 20th century (and even beyond) in part because of my long ambition to write about Colonel Pewter in Ironicus, so when I was looking for something else entirely in my bookshelf this morning my '1925' (would have come out in 1924, dated for the year ahead) Rainbow annual caught my eye - it's in really poor condition, and also, it's fascinatingly on the nose in other ways. Let's get the worst one out of the way first, at least I think it's the worst:
I'm sorry but what I really want to do is get that machine that not only takes you back 96 years in time but also turns you into a fly on the wall with a brain big enough to understand human language and to resist being swatted, so I can hear the discussion about this two-frame comic strip and how it was conceived and the end product received by the editors. I can't even begin to imagine. Like most English comics from, you know, 1900 to whenever Leo Baxendale showed up,* I am pretty sure no-one ever laughed in any way at any of this shit. The casual racism was clearly not even remarkable to anyone, but was there some discussion perhaps about the appropriateness or wisdom of calling a character like this 'Nanny' considering all decent English children were assumed to have a nanny, and wouldn't this lead to a certain amount of disrespect to nannies?
To be honest my main take home reading this now is: what became of the big bird? Was it stuck there forever to die? The other question is, why doesn't Nanny speak in that patois so often attributed to people of colour in these kinds of portrayals? That is really, really interesting to me and I'd love to know what the background to that decision was. Because it suggests on some weird level, to me anyway, that Nanny while obviously being a figure of fun and, I guess, derision, is also a little girl (?) like any other and not to be othered by her speech (I mean she is othered in other ways but her fine English subverts that somewhat, in my opinion). Indeed, the 22 words/four sentences attributed to Nanny here, though simple, at least don't feature that parlous grammar error of the shitty 'it's' for which I guess the buck stops at a bad typesetter/bad proofreader, if these publications were proofed.
Next example: I'm intrigued by this household
I'm guessing these people (eg 'Gretchen') are somehow derived from
The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls, which I had a facsimile copy of at some time in my life and which I have to say is a charming book in many ways. I don't know enough about these characters/their world to be certain who lives in the house, but it does appear it's a kind of share house where girl dolls and boy toys (and a parrot) cohabit. I'm assuming it's a pretty sexy arrangement worthy of a late sixties movie/ late 70s sitcom/ Helen Garner short story but that's
my upbringing.
Marzipan, a magician with prodigious powers residing (I gather) in a candy-cane/walking stick wand which can make things bigger or smaller, is to me the most interesting character. It's the fine line trod here between a caricature of blackness with all its underlying fear and ridicule, with the fear, I guess, of introducing any style of talking, other than the English spoken by George V, into the family living room.
There is another story facing this one across the pp. 34-35 spread in which Marzipan, wandering the streets, encounters a naughty boy playing with a hoop rather than come in to be put to bed by 'Mary' (surely the maid or even the Nanny, obviously not his mother); 'and off he ran, the naughty boy'. 'You must learn to do as you are told, Johnny' says Marzipan, touching the hoop with his wand to make it so big that Mary can pull Johnny, inside the hoop, into the house.
'Marzi' is a second-string character to Tiger Tim and the Bruin Boys, who were the main stars of Rainbow. They are a whole extra problem for anyone interested in colonial representations, being as they are students of Mrs Bruin's jungle school (are there bears in the jungle? Well... obviously yes!). There is a story in this annual where Marzipan and Tim et al interact, and magic, fun, larks and corporal punishment ensue, ending rather boringly with Marzipan promising to come and watch Tim and the Bruins play cricket, then doing so. Once again, Marzipan is himself entirely benign, but also an adult with power (not just magic power, but a kind of banal authority) who speaks in the most white, middle class way imaginable: 'I hope they will beat Mr. Lion's school at cricket, because they are nice boys. I will come and see them play,' he tells Mrs. Bruin on p. 7 (she calls him 'Mr. Marzipan', incidentally). I will put aside the fact that the 'boys' have been anything but 'nice' up to this point in the story, it's not important, take my word for it they have been little jerks for three pages (they audaciously demanded Marzipan hand over his magic wand, which I admit they may not have tried on a white man, but by the same token - they are animals from the jungle, and yes, this is where it gets too hard to make a real pronouncement on what's going on).
Look there is probably even more extraordinary nonsense in this book, the problem is it is a slog, dull but also dense in the weirdness of the assumptions and ideas and the suggestion that nursery rhyme characters are funny or engaging, and all the tropes that no-one surely gave a loose root about even in 1924 let alone any time since. However, one last thing, when we're looking at certain representations, I mean I can well understand that golliwogs were a benign, 'safe' interpretation of blackness in a white colonial system, so I'm not confused, exactly, (although: Marzipan is not a golliwog, clearly, but a powerful free agent - was that in itself meant to be amusingly bizarre???) but it is in any case interesting to me that on the cover we find 29 figures, 13 human(oid) to 26 animal (did someone insist on that 1:3 ratio? It's hard to imagine they didn't, particularly considering the Dolliwogs' parrot friend is absent! Was Foxwell paid per character and 40 went into a higher pay grade?) and of those 13 human(oid) creatures, there are 3 females to 10 males (this is a guess, some I'm not sure about, but when in doubt I'm assuming male). It is clear that the teddy is completely naked, I am going to suggest so too is the pig on the left of the turret and maybe the little dog** on the far left. Everyone else is very clothed, including the parrot right at the front with a pair of trousers Donald Duck would have killed for (and spared us all a lot of embarrassment seeing his big hairy duck dick swinging about but I guess that was the character). But perhaps more interestingly, there is a lot of racial/ethnic characterisation there. I don't know who the figures are looking out of the window at the lower right hand side of the castle, but I do know they are meant to be Asian in some way. At least one of the Dolliwogs along the top row of the castle (I guess it's Gretchen) is supposed to be Dutch. And, of course, we see four stereotypical black caricatures, including Marzipan very prominent on the right in the central turret.
I'm going to leave it to you to figure out (I think it's partly a matter of personal opinion and not really clear) which characters are looking us directly in the eye, and whether that is significant. But as you can see, one of the key Dolliwogs is flying the flag for the future.
I mean, everything's significant about all of this, and also, nothing is.
*1953
** Fluff, seen here with his owners Peter and Pauline 'The Two Pickles'. I'll spend another two hours another day picking them to pieces.
