Abstract
During the interwar years, John Masefield wrote three novels featuring a male protagonist with the surname “Harker” struggling against an adversary called Abner Brown. The first of these novels was written for an adult audience, the remaining two for children. The chronological sequence of these three novels and the relationship between their characters is far from clear, although the recurrence of names and places gives the impression that they should be read in connection with one another. In the present study, I will argue that the trilogy, whose settings correspond to specific periods of the author’s own life, can be read as a tripartite reflection on childhood, loss and the redeeming power of art
Highlights
During the interwar years, Masefield wrote three novels whose male protagonists shared the surname “Harker”: Sard Harker (1924), The Midnight Folk (1927) and The Box of Delights (1935)
In The Midnight Folk, Kay is seeking to retrieve lost treasure from Santa Barbara, the fictional central American state which is the setting of Sard Harker
The temporal and geographical information provided in the novels themselves makes it very difficult to understand how they might be read as forming any kind of chronological sequence
Summary
Masefield wrote three novels whose male protagonists shared the surname “Harker”: Sard Harker (1924), The Midnight Folk (1927) and The Box of Delights (or When the Wolves were Running) (1935). The first of these novels is an adventure novel written for an adult audience and its eponymous hero was an adult. We are told that the events of Sard Harker begin in 1897, and the setting of The Midnight Folk would appear to be chronologically earlier, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, since there is no electricity, travel is by horse and cart and the housemaid Ellen refers to “my grandfather’s time, in the French wars” (Luhrie 2004, 75; Masefield 1967, 140). I would argue that these three novels reflect not so much a logical narrative sequence as an ongoing reflection on the themes of childhood, loss and the redemptive power of art, issues which were of central importance to Masefield throughout his career, in part because of his own abruptly interrupted childhood and the devastating experience of war
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