Fans of The Famous Five books know that the children enjoyed a drink of ginger beer. But that often-quoted line, “lashings of ginger beer” wasn’t written by Enid Blyton – it only appeared in the movie Five Go Mad in Dorset. [1]
The first of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books, Five on a Treasure Island, was published on 11 September 1942. 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. The novels feature the adventures of a group of young children – Julian, Dick, Anne, Georgina (George) and her dog Timmy.
In some books, the children go camping, on a hike, or on a holiday together elsewhere. The settings are almost always rural and enable the children to discover the simple joys of cottages, islands, the countryside, and the sea, as well as an outdoor life of picnics, bicycle trips, and swimming. Parents love these books for their old-fashioned charm but for children the key is the thrilling stories, the secrets that are uncovered, and the sense of adventure.
The seemingly perpetual youth of the Famous Five children, who experience a world of apparently endless holidays while not ageing significantly, is known as a floating timeline. Floating timelines allow for an episodic series with no defined endpoint but at the expense of losing a sense of the characters growing. The books are written in a nostalgic style even for the time they were written and have attracted criticism for presenting children exploring the countryside without parental supervision as natural and normal.
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 totalling over a hundred million. All the novels have been adapted for television, and several have been adapted as films in various countries.
The twenty-one original books have never been out of print and remain popular with readers worldwide.