Mum had already introduced me to the original stories but one glance at those pages convinced me not to attempt that challenge of strange looking words.

Volumes could, and have, been written on this fascinating subject but the good news is that absolutely none of it need pass through your mind as you read and enjoy Enid Blyton's wonderful Brer Rabbit. Brer Rabbit is a character who seems to make it his business to make the lives of his friends and foes in the animal kingdom a misery, by constantly pulling pranks on them and generally doing them out of something, most usually their food. Brer Rabbit' is from 'Br'er Rabbit' or 'Brother Rabbit' and is a character whose stories have been passed down in the oral tradition of African storytellers, particularly African-American and in the Caribbean. In fact I found this book to be so painful that I actually had to put it down for a day before I went back to finishing it.Ex-library book with stamps on the first page, it is also likely to have a small shelf number sticker on the spine. According to the Index Translationum, Blyton was the fifth most popular author in the world in 2007, coming after Lenin but ahead of Shakespeare.

I'm working through a secondhand collection of Blyton stories and I know there will be more Brer Rabbit stories - not sure how I feel about that right now!

Or is it evidence of early cross-fertilization between cultures which have since evolved, divided, sub-divided and moved about across the globe? The Beatrix Potter and Peter Rabbit brands are highly lucrative, yet I have found no references to the Black American sources of these tales in any of the Beatrix Potter museums and experiences in the UK and US, which attract hundreds of thousands of visitors yearly. Brer Rabbit and Mister Ram' has a number of the Brer animals listening to Mister Ram playing the fiddle in a shed that contains the other animals' carrots, which Mister Ram plans to eat. By the early 19th century, the raw cotton used in these mills was sourced from the Americas, and Manchester’s economic success was deeply connected to the enslavement of African people.