Writing after office hours
Born in Woolwich in 1873, de la Mare went to the choir school of St Paul’s Cathedral. At seventeen he began work in the statistics department of the Anglo-American Oil Company. He stayed for about eighteen years, reading and writing around the working day. His early collection Songs of Childhood appeared under the name Walter Ramal.
A royal grant in 1908 allowed him to give up the office. A Civil List pension followed in 1915. He wrote for adults as well as children, including the poem The Listeners and numerous ghost stories. Letters and manuscripts preserve a working life that continued long after his books had found their audience.
The three brothers
The Three Mulla-Mulgars sets Thumb, Thimble and Nod on a journey that begins in a hut borrowed from an earlier traveller. Their mother’s instructions about a Wonderstone make the object a family responsibility before it becomes a magical resource. The brothers have familiar English names, but the speech around them is full of invented words. In the 1919 Knopf edition Dorothy P. Lathrop’s illustrations give that unfamiliar world branches to climb and shadows to hide in.
