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    Just William
    Just William
    Just William
    Ebook181 pages4 hours

    Just William

    By Richmal Crompton

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    About this ebook

    Richmal Crompton Lamburn was born in Bury, Lancashire, on November 15th, 1890. She attended St Elphin's Boarding School, originally based in Warrington, Lancashire and later moved with the school to a new location in Darley Dale, near Matlock, Derbyshire in 1904. To pursue her chosen career as a schoolteacher, she won a scholarship to Royal Holloway College, part of the University of London in Englefield Green, Surrey. In 1914 Richmal graduated with a BA honours degree in Classics (II class). She was also an active member of the Women's Suffrage movement. That same year she returned to St Elphin’s as a Classics mistress and then three years later to Bromley High School in southeast London where she also began her writing in earnest. Health though was an issue and in 1923 after contracting poliomyelitis, she was left without the use of her right leg. She gave up her teaching career and began to write full-time. Her writing was almost immediately very successful and within three years of leaving the teaching profession she had enough funds to build a house in Bromley for herself and her Mother. The source of most of this success was based on the short stories of William, a rather mischievous 11 year old schoolboy and his band of chums who called themselves "The Outlaws". He first appeared in the short story "Rice Mould Pudding", published in 1919. By 1922, the first collection, entitled Just William, was published and was followed by 37 others. Her health was a continuing issue in her forties. This time breast cancer, which required a mastectomy. Richmal believed her real calling was fiction for adults and in her career wrote 41 novels and 9 collections of short stories. These did well for a time but after the end of World War II their Edwardian Class values were at odds with the change in society. William continued to better than her other works and several times Richmal tried to re-engineer the character; Enter – Patricia in 1927 and Jimmy in 1947. William’s sales still trumped both. She never married or had children. Richmal Crompton died at her home in Chislehurst on January 11th, 1969.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCopyright Group
    Release dateFeb 6, 2015
    ISBN9781785431319
    Author

    Richmal Crompton

    Richmal Crompton was born in Lancashire in 1890. The first story about William Brown appeared in Home magazine in 1919, and the first collection of William stories was published in book form three years later. In all, thirty-eight Just William books were published, the last, William the Lawless, in 1970 after Richmal Crompton’s death.

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    Reviews for Just William

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      A sort of British Dennis the Menace. More like Meh-nace.
    • 5/5
      I've heard about the Just William stories for years now, but for whatever reason, they haven't penetrated American shores. I was pleased and delighted, then, when a close friend sent me this edition of the original Just William collection for my birthday. Now, I'm more surprised than ever these are so unknown in the USA: William, while resolutely a British boy of the 1920s, clearly has the blood of Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and O. Henry's Red Chief in his veins. Because the stories are British, there is no need to see William get more than a trifling comeuppance for his behavior; instead, Richmal Crompton's prose has a wonderfully dry way of both understating and slyly winking at everything William does. As a long-time fan of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster stories, these were right up my alley, and I enjoyed them tremendously.
    • 4/5
      This book about 11-year-old William is good but suffered from the fact that I had recently read Booth Tarkington's "Penrod" (also about an 11-year-old boy). Crompton's stories were just not quite as humorous or as charming. However, perhaps a Brit might feel the reverse to be true. I also found it a bit odd that the final chapter was about finding Jumble when Jumble had played a significant role in the previous chapter and had been present in several of the earlier chapters as well.
    • 3/5
      Re-read - just as good as when I was a kid!
    • 4/5
      "What have I just been saying, William?"William sighed. That was the foolish sort of question that schoolmistresses were always asking. They ought to know themselves what they'd just been saying better than anyone. He never knew. Why were they always asking him? He looked blank. Then:"Was it anythin' about participles?" He remembered something vaguely about participles, but it mightn't have been to-day.Miss Jones groaned."That was ever so long ago, William," she said. "You've not been attending."William cleared his throat with a certain dignity and made no answer.William Brown is the bane of his parents' life, and his sister Ethel's life, and his brother Robert's. His best endeavours go awry and his attempts to talk his way out of trouble involve loud protestations of innocence, or at least of having meant well, but he doesn't seem to learn from his mistakes, managing to break three windows and hit a neighbour's cat in a single morning while practising with his new bow and arrow. He is also a barrack-room lawyer, trying to convince his mother that Tamers and Tigers is an entirely different game from the banned Tamers and Lions, and arguing with convoluted logic that his father had said he could have a party when he hadn't said any such thing.This book was published in 1922, and the contemporary illustrations in the copy I downloaded from Project Gutenberg are great, showing men in suits, women in hats and dresses and scruffy little boys in shorts and caps. As it was written during the silent movie era, when William goes to the pictures he sees a keystone cops-style car chase and some romantic melodramas, which feed his fertile imagination and his romantic heart. My favourite stories in this book are The Show, William Joins the Band of Hope, and William and White Satin. William first meets his dog Jumble in the last story in the book, but Jumble has already appeared in a couple of stories earlier in the book, but I can see why the author put it where she did, as it leaves you with the image of a boy and his dog happily heading off for more adventures.After tea William set off again down the road. The setting sun had turned the sky to gold. There was a soft haze over all the countryside. The clear bird songs filled all the air, and the hedgerows were bursting into summer. And through it all marched William, with a slight swagger, his bow under one arm, his arrows under the other, while at his heels trotted Jumble, eager, playful, adoring - a mongrel unashamed - all sorts of a dog. And at William's heart was a proud, radiant happiness.
    • 4/5
      i read a book about authors and what they read and an incredible number included just william. i had never heard of these books. i got a dvd which used made for tv stories--not great. these stories are period pieces. good reader.
    • 4/5
      I definately must be going back to my childhood. I read these books when I was a child and really enjoyed them then and I enjoyed this just as much now. A way of life that is now fast disappearing.Back Cover Blurb:No matter how hard William Brown tries, his school uniform always looks tatty and disreputable, he mangles the English language in his speech and writing, and he can never remember any of the rules he's supposed to be following. Along with his gang, the Outlaws, he spends his days contriving schemes to make money, trying to get out of doing schoolwork, musing about the fact that girls are a different species and, he reckons, being generally misunderstood by teachers and all other adults.William is one of the most self-righteous characters in English fiction, always ready with a convoluted excuse to explain away his misdemeanours and elastic lies that get stretched to breaking point.
    • 3/5
      My childhood favourite. A young boy of the British middle class suburbs in the 1930s acts out his cowboy and Huckleberry Finn fantasies.
    • 4/5
      A whole other world. One of my introductions to irony, and adult literature in general.
    • 5/5
      Brilliant - I well remember laughing my socks off at these stories when I was about 11. If you can't get a laugh out of these too, there is almost certainly something seriously wrong with you.

      It is remarkable how Richmal Crompton manages to capture the mindset of a young boy.
    • 5/5
      I've read Just William several times, but I've never reviewed it, thinking perhaps it was too familiar (at least to British readers). But Just William is a book that makes me laugh out loud consistently, and not just me: I remember we listened to the audio version (wonderfully narrated by Martin Jarvis) on a journey through France many years ago and Mr SandDune having to stop the car because he was laughing so much that he couldn't safely drive. (Incidentally, the story 'The Show' in this book is the one that prompted that.)William Brown is 11. He is always 11 (despite the first book being written in 1922 and the last in 1970). He lives with his very long-suffering mother, his bewildered father, and his much more grown-up siblings Ethel and Robert (and a cook and a housemaid and a gardener as well) in a small town somewhere in the South of England. William doesn't exactly mean to be bad, at times he has a definite sense of morality, but in practice everything William touches turns to chaos. He just doesn't understand the adult world and the adult world, especially the genteel middle-class world inhabited by the Browns, most definitely does not understand him.In 'A Question of Grammar' William persuades himself that his father has given permission for him to have a party when his family is out:'The party then proceeded. It fulfilled the expectations of the guests that it was to be a party unlike any other party. At other parties they played "Hide and Seek”—with smiling but firm mothers and aunts and sisters stationed at intervals with damping effects upon one’s spirits, with “not in the bedrooms, dear,” and “mind the umbrella stand,” and “certainly not in the drawing-room,” and “don’t shout so loud, darling.” But this was Hide and Seek from the realms of perfection. Up the stairs and down the stairs, in all the bedrooms, sliding down the balusters, in and out of the drawing-room, leaving trails of muddy boots and shattered ornaments as they went! Ginger found a splendid hiding-place in Robert’s bed, where his boots left a perfect impression of their muddy soles in several places. Henry found another in Ethel’s wardrobe, crouching upon her satin evening shoes among her evening dresses. George banged the drawing-room door with such violence that the handle came off in his hand. Douglas became entangled in the dining-room curtain, which yielded to his struggles and descended upon him and an old china bowl upon the sideboard. It was such a party as none of them had dreamed of; it was bliss undiluted. The house was full of shouting and yelling, of running to and fro of small boys mingled with subterranean murmurs of cook’s rage.'Recommended for all ages - as long that is as you don't expect your children's fiction to have an improving quality!
    • 4/5
      I first heard of Just William through Morris Gleitzman’s Once series. I can’t say that I was as enamored with William as Gleitzman’s Felix is. I found William entertaining and terrifying in equal parts. A couple of the stories had me laughing to the point of tears, while William’s behavior in other stories made me so uneasy that I was tempted not to finish them. Eleven-year-old William has such a strong personality that his parents and older brother and sister are often powerless to curb his excesses. I picture William’s most enthusiastic reader as a preteen boy confined to his room as punishment for breaking the household rules, nursing his grievances in the pages of one of William’s adventures.
    • 5/5
      I read the William books as a young child. They were red hardback books that I´d inherited from my older siblings. However, we didn´t have this particular book, so I´ve now read it for the first time.William is the sort of boy who, if he were a real boy, and existed in this day and age, would probably be sent to an institution, or at the very least be heavily sedated with Ritalin, or something even worse.Apart from William, the Brown family consists of Mr. and Mrs. Brown and William´s older siblings, Robert and Ethel.Mrs. Brown is resigned and patient as regards William´s escapades, while Mr. Brown mostly contents himself with exclaiming “He´s mad, mad, I say!”William´s exploits are actually more than minor misdemeanours and, instead of mildly putting up with them, it might have been more fitting had the parents set some firm limits. But then of course the book wouldn´t have been so funny.This book was published in 1922 (I read the books for the first time in the 50s), and it contains quite a few old-fashioned and thus unfamiliar words and expressions. It is eloquently written; the author doesn´t talk down to the reader, and puts to good use her rich, extensive vocabulary.One linguistic feature that puzzles me is that, while the rest of the family talk in an absolutely refined and educated manner, William, though gifted with amazing powers of persuasion and articulation, expresses himself in a distinctly ungrammatical and “common” way, which in fact more resembles the speech of their servants, (William´s family is middle-class, and they were endowed with both a Cook and a housemaid, as far as I recall, and perhaps more servants.)In this book, William wanders into a nearby mansion and finds himself mistaken for a servant boy, “the new Boots” (whatever that is), and tries his hand at this, until it all ends tumultuously. In a later chapter his Great-Aunt Emily comes to visit; her only occupations are eating and sleeping, and when she sleeps she snores in an impressive and entertaining manner. The ever resourceful William avails himself of the opportunity to augment his pocket money by inviting the village children to come to witness/listen to this fascinating performance, and soon they´re all lining up and paying all they´ve got to witness the show. Subsequently, Great-Aunt Emily cuts short her stay, which had been threatening to become exceedingly long-lasting, and Mr. Brown, who was not enamoured of her, rewards William with half-a-crown. (And I recall a time when half-a-crown was quite a large sum!).The book contains innumerable further hilarious episodes, including one in which Mrs. Brown was so irresponsible as to entrust William with looking after a toddler for the afternoon, though Robert was shocked at her naïve trust in her younger son.I´m not a person that generally laughs aloud when watching a funny film or reading a funny book, but found myself doing so several times when reading this book. Since I´ve heard that laughing is extremely good for one, maybe I should read or re-read all the William books! I highly recommend them, including this one, to all.

    Book preview

    Just William - Richmal Crompton

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