“Wild Surmise”: The Pleasures and Pains of Coming Second in Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons

This article explores Arthur Ransome’s engagement with ideas about children, adventure and exploration from the long eighteenth century in his celebrated Swallows and Amazons series. I argue that Ransome positions his child protagonists between the practical enlightenment of Daniel Defoe’s marooned hero and John Keats’s Romantic belatedness: the Walkers and Blacketts find themselves exploring a world that is already inhabited by those they dismissively call “natives”—their adult parents. The eponymous first volume, in particular, uses Crusoe and Keats to work out ways for children to cope with coming second—with their subordination within existing discourses.