[HPFGU-OTChatter] Hardy Boys/Bobbsey Twins/etc

[Richelle Votaw]

ER wrote:

> Yes, the Hardy Boys sound a little more, well, hardy, than the Five. 
> A slightly harsher edge to them probably. The Bobsey Twins _sound_ a 
> little younger. Anybody called "the Bobsey Twins" would have suffered 
> badly at my junior school ;)

Yes, the Bobbsey Twins are *significantly* younger than the Hardy Boys.  Well, first of all the characters are younger.  I forget if this has been covered, but the Hardy Boys were 17 and 18, the Bobbsey Twins are 12 and 6.  Except in the first few books, they were 8 and 4.   So they aged for a while, then stopped getting older.   Not to mention nothing bad ever happens to the Bobbsey Twins.  I mean nothing bad that doesn't get undone in the book.  One of the Hardy Boy books someone actually does die.  A supporting character.  

It's kind of confusing, several different series were started by the same person, then sort of delegated out.  
For example, the Bobbsey Twins were created in 1904 by Edward Stratemeyer.  He created and managed several other childrens series, including the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and Tom Swift.  The best anyone knows, he only really wrote the first book to each series, then hired ghost writers and gave them an outline for subsequent books.  Each series published under a different pseudonym. The Hardy Boys didn't come along until the late 1920's.   The same person may actually have written as many as 20 or more books or only one.  There are various inconsistencies because of the different authors, such as the Bobbsey Twins cat.  Sometimes it's a male, sometimes a female.  

So, there you have it.  The life and times of American childrens literature. :)

What's amazing is that I read these books in the early 1980's.  My grandmother read some of the same books in the late 1920's.  Wow.

Richelle


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