A few facts feel impossible until you sit with them. One is that Winnie-the-Pooh is a hundred years old. A.A. Milne and E.H. Shepard’s nursery classic first appeared in 1926, and somehow that small bear of very little brain has shuffled through a full century without ageing a day. This summer, scholars and admirers are gathering to mark the occasion, and I could not be more delighted by the form the celebration is taking.
On Saturday, July 11, Homerton College, Cambridge, hosts a one-day event titled “100 Years of 100 Acres,” convened by the Centre for Research in Children’s Literature at Cambridge. It is billed as a chance for scholars of Pooh to return to the Hundred Acre Wood and reflect on the past, present, and future of our ursine friend. The day runs from half past nine in the morning until quarter past five — a proper, unhurried immersion in a single small wood and everything it has come to mean.
I am their keynote afternoon speaker after the delightful ‘In which we have a smackeral of afternoon tea’ and before ‘The Hums of Homerton.’
A Hundred Years of a Hundred Acres – academic programme
- 9-9.30am, In which we come to the conference
- 9.30-9.40am, In which we are introduced to Winnie-the-Pooh and some trees, and the conference begins
- 9.40-10.40am, In which we go Hunt-ing (a.k.a. Professor P gives a Plenary)
- 10.40-11am, In which we are entirely surrounded by coffee
- 11am-12.30pm, In which we think about influence, adaptation, and translation
- 12.30pm-1.30pm, In which we eat lunch and look at an exhibition and/or an illustration workshop
- 1.30pm-3pm, In which we think about the Pooh-niverse at home and abroad
- 3pm-4pm, In which we go on an expotition to the College gardens
In which Homerton College gives a Pooh Party – public programme
- From 3pm, In which we welcome guests, and explore the College gardens
- 4pm-5pm, In which we have a smackerel of afternoon tea
- 5pm-6pm, In which Kathryn Aalto celebrates a Literary Treasure: Winnie-the-Pooh at 100
- 6pm-onwards, The Hums of Homerton (optional)
Why a Bear Still Matters
What strikes me, having spent years walking the real forest behind the fictional one, is how seriously the academy is now prepared to take a children’s book. The questions on the table are not soft ones. A century later, what is the special nature of Pooh, and how does it speak to our current moment? How do recent approaches to children’s literature, from posthumanism to ecocriticism, shed new light on the text? These are the frames through which a new generation reads Milne — the bear as a way of thinking about how we live alongside the non-human world, about memory, about what we mean when we say innocence.
And there is the matter of the book’s strange, sprawling afterlife. Since 1926, Winnie-the-Pooh has carried myriad reworkings — iconic animations, Latin translations, bestselling philosophy, and big business besides. Part of the day’s work is to make sense of that longevity: the adaptability of these tales and the entangled global history of this one small book.
The Forest Behind the Stories
Readers of my own work will know where my heart lies in all this. The Hundred Acre Wood was never wholly invented. It grew from Ashdown Forest in Sussex, the heaths and pine clumps Milne and Shepard knew intimately, and that real landscape is, to my mind, the quiet third author of the stories. To return to the Wood, as this event invites us to do, is also to return to a particular English place — its birds, its weather, its light.
My New York Times bestselling book, The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh: A Walk Through the Forest that Inspired the Hundred Acre Wood, was the most fun book to write on the subject,
A Fitting Celebration
Alongside the talks, the day will feature an exhibition drawn from Homerton Library’s outstanding collection of children’s literature, with opportunities to engage directly with the material. That blend of rigorous thought and tactile delight feels exactly right for Pooh, a book that has always held wisdom and play in the same paw.
A hundred years on, we are still walking those paths. I hope to see some of you there.