Winnie-the-Pooh
Winnie-the-Pooh is a fictional anthropomorphic teddy bear created by the English author A. A. Milne and the English illustrator E. H. Shepard. Winnie-the-Pooh first appeared by name in a children's story commissioned by London's Evening News for Christmas Eve 1925. The character is inspired by a stuffed toy that Milne had bought for his son Christopher Robin in Harrods department store, and a bear named Winnie they had viewed at London Zoo.
The first collection of stories about the character is the book Winnie-the-Pooh, and this was followed by The House at Pooh Corner. Milne also included a poem about the bear in the children's verse book When We Were Very Young and many more in Now We Are Six. All four volumes were illustrated by E. H. Shepard. The stories are set in the Hundred Acre Wood, which was inspired by Five Hundred Acre Wood in Ashdown Forest in East Sussex—situated 30 miles south of London—where the Londoner Milne's country home was located.
The Pooh stories have been translated into many languages, including Alexander Lenard's Latin translation, Winnie ille Pu, which was first published in 1958 and in 1960 became the only Latin book ever to be featured on The New York Times Best Seller list. The original English manuscripts are held at the Wren Library in Trinity College, Cambridge, to which he had bequeathed the works. The first Pooh book was ranked number 7 on the BBC's The Big Read poll.
In 1961, The Walt Disney Company licensed certain films and other rights of the Winnie-the-Pooh stories from the estate of A. A. Milne and the licensing agent Stephen Slesinger, Inc., and adapted the Pooh stories, using the unhyphenated name "Winnie the Pooh", into a series of features that would eventually become one of its most successful franchises. In popular film adaptations, Pooh has been voiced by the actors Sterling Holloway, Hal Smith, and Jim Cummings in English, and Yevgeny Leonov in Russian.
History
Origin
named the character Winnie-the-Pooh after a teddy bear owned by his son, Christopher Robin Milne, on whom the character Christopher Robin was based. Shepard in turn based his illustrations of Pooh on his own son's teddy bear named Growler, instead of Christopher Robin's bear. The rest of Christopher Milne's toys – Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga, Roo, and Tigger – were incorporated into Milne's stories. Two more characters, Owl and Rabbit, were created by Milne's imagination, while Gopher was added to the Disney version.In 1947, the toys came to the United States in the custody of Milne's US publisher, with whom they remained until 1987. The publisher then donated the toys to the New York Public Library. They have been on display at the Main Branch of the New York Public Library in New York City ever since.
In 1921, Milne bought his son Christopher Robin the toy bear from Harrods department store. Christopher Robin had named his toy bear Edward, then Winnie, after a Canadian black bear Winnie that he often saw at London Zoo, and Pooh, a friend's pet swan they had encountered while on holiday. The bear cub was purchased from a hunter for C$20 by Canadian Lieutenant Harry Colebourn in White River, Ontario, while en route to England during the First World War. Colebourn, a veterinary officer with the Fort Garry Horse cavalry regiment, named the bear Winnie after his adopted hometown in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Winnie was surreptitiously brought to England with her owner, and gained unofficial recognition as The Fort Garry Horse regimental mascot. Colebourn left Winnie at the London Zoo while he and his unit were in France; after the war she was officially donated to the zoo, as she had become a much-loved attraction there. Pooh the swan appears as a character in its own right in When We Were Very Young.
In the first chapter of Winnie-the-Pooh, Milne offers this explanation of why Winnie-the-Pooh is often simply known as "Pooh":
American writer William Safire surmised that the Milnes' invention of the name "Winnie the Pooh" may have also been influenced by the haughty character Pooh-Bah in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado.
A bronze sculpture of Winnie as a young cub, created by Lorne McKean, was unveiled at London Zoo in September 1981 by Christopher Robin. The skull of Winnie is displayed at the Hunterian Museum in London, the location of anatomical exhibits of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, with a 2015 examination of the skull showing that she suffered from chronic periodontitis, an inflammation and loss of connective tissues supporting or surrounding the teeth, which can be caused by poor diet, such as the honey Christopher Robin spoon fed her.
Ashdown Forest: the setting for the stories
The Winnie-the-Pooh stories are set in Ashdown Forest, East Sussex, England. The forest is an area of tranquil open heathland on the highest sandy ridges of the High Weald Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty situated 30 miles south-east of London. In 1925 Milne, a Londoner, bought a country home a mile to the north of the forest at Cotchford Farm, near Hartfield. According to Christopher Robin Milne, while his father continued to live in London "...the four of us – he, his wife, his son and his son's nanny – would pile into a large blue, chauffeur-driven Fiat and travel down every Saturday morning and back again every Monday afternoon. And we would spend a whole glorious month there in the spring and two months in the summer." From the front lawn the family had a view across a meadow to a line of alders that fringed the River Medway, beyond which the ground rose through more trees until finally "above them, in the faraway distance, crowning the view, was a bare hilltop. In the centre of this hilltop was a clump of pines." Most of his father's visits to the forest at that time were, he noted, family expeditions on foot "to make yet another attempt to count the pine trees on Gill's Lap or to search for the marsh gentian". Christopher added that, inspired by Ashdown Forest, his father had made it "the setting for two of his books, finishing the second little over three years after his arrival".Many locations in the stories can be associated with real places in and around the forest. As Christopher Milne wrote in his autobiography: "Pooh's forest and Ashdown Forest are identical." For example, the fictional "Hundred Acre Wood" was in reality Five Hundred Acre Wood; Galleon's Leap was inspired by the prominent hilltop of Gill's Lap, while a clump of trees just north of Gill's Lap became Christopher Robin's The Enchanted Place, because no-one had ever been able to count whether there were 63 or 64 trees in the circle.
The landscapes depicted in E. H. Shepard's illustrations for the Winnie-the-Pooh books were directly inspired by the distinctive landscape of Ashdown Forest, with its high, open heathlands of heather, gorse, bracken and silver birch, which are punctuated by hilltop clumps of pine trees. Many of Shepard's illustrations can be matched to actual views, allowing for a degree of artistic licence. Shepard's sketches of pine trees and other forest scenes are held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
The game of Poohsticks was originally played by Christopher Robin Milne and his father on the wooden footbridge, across the Millbrook, Posingford Wood, close to Cotchford Farm. In the stories Pooh plays the game with the other characters, Christopher Robin, Tigger, and Eeyore. The location is now a tourist attraction, and it has become traditional to play the game there using sticks gathered in the nearby woodland. When the footbridge had to be replaced in 1999, the architect used as a main source drawings by Shepard in the books, and retained its precursor's original style.
First publication
Christopher Robin's teddy bear made his character début, under the name Edward, in A. A. Milne's poem, "Teddy Bear", in the edition of 13 February 1924 of Punch, and the same poem was published in Milne's book of children's verse When We Were Very Young. Winnie-the-Pooh first appeared by name on 24 December 1925, in a Christmas story commissioned and published by the London newspaper Evening News. It was illustrated by J. H. Dowd.The first collection of Pooh stories appeared in the book Winnie-the-Pooh. The Evening News Christmas story reappeared as the first chapter of the book. At the beginning, it explained that Pooh was in fact Christopher Robin's Edward Bear, who had been renamed by the boy. He was renamed after an American black bear at London Zoo called Winnie who got her name from the fact that her owner had come from Winnipeg, Canada. The book was published in October 1926 by the publisher of Milne's earlier children's work, Methuen, in England, E. P. Dutton in the United States, and McClelland & Stewart in Canada. The book was an immediate critical and commercial success. The children's author and literary critic John Rowe Townsend described Winnie-the-Pooh and its sequel The House at Pooh Corner as "the spectacular British success of the 1920s" and praised its light, readable prose.