Re the learning to read bit above from John on SC ~~ the original Frankenstein's creation, in the Mary Shelley novel, is sensitive & highly intelligent, & learns to speak, & read, by overhearing & then goes on to read Paradise Lost. Is there perhaps an echo here?

On the racial question, re more innocent, or alternatively more horrible, times: anyone remember the old Wizard comic, which was mainly prose stories for older boys, like Hotspur, Rover, &c, but did have a running cover strip: about a man and a boy shipwrecked on a desert island who have somehow pacified the natives, whom they always referred to as 'the nigs' [can such have indeed been the case during my brief existence!], whom they enlist to aid in various projects. A sort of Tarzan spinoff? Tho overtones of the Ballantyne of A Coral Island [1857] too, perhaps: how far did ERB learn from that tradition, does anyone think?

Rapparee, have you really the privilege of living in Pocatello, Idaho; where Judy Garland's persona in A Star Is Born, was born in a trunk in the Princess Theater. Wowie! BTW Pindah-likoyee is given as Apache in the Flashman books, about which I used to correspond with Geo MacDonald Fraser, but alas he is now dead so I can't ask him about it.

~Michael~