Is Paddington Better than Pooh?

Ranking bears is normally a sentimental exercise. We want to hold a trial instead, in which the defence must prove character rather than cuddliness.

Died famous

Consider the field. Cocaine Bear (also known as Pablo Escobear) - the black bear that in 1985 found a smuggler’s dropped bag in the Georgia woods and whose film-version went on a woodland rampage - died famous, which is not the same thing as being interesting. Pure appetite, no interior life: the internet’s ideal citizen, and no more a moral agent than weather.

A jurisdictional problem

Winnie-the-Pooh has an interior life, though it is largely honey-shaped. His problem is jurisdictional. The Hundred Acre Wood is a nursery with the exits painted over. Nobody arrives there and nobody is turned away, and you cannot test a bear’s hospitality in a world that has never had a knock at the door. Pooh is prelapsarian, unemployed, morally untried, and self-described as “a bear of very little brain”.

We've all worked with a Fozzie

Baloo is a tutor spoiled by adaptation: Kipling’s version drills a boy in the Law of the Jungle, Disney’s version sings him out of it. Either way Baloo is completely at home in the jungle. He doesn’t need papers, or shiny blue passport, because he is the jungle, and there is no credit in belonging to a place that is already you. The same objection knocks out Rupert, who was born in check trousers and jaunty scarf in an English village and has therefore never had to become anything. Yogi is a libertarian with a picnic basket, wholly defined by his opposition to one park ranger. Iorek Byrnison is armoured, sovereign, a friend to Lyra, and magnificent, but he is a king, and kings are not guests. Fozzie is a bear doing a job badly on purpose. And we’ve all worked with a Fozzie, haven’t we?

Paddington is doing the most difficult job out of all the bears and is doing it tremendously well.

An act of unearned trust

The thing to notice about him is that he arrives. He comes off a boat and sits on a suitcase at a London railway station in 1958 - the year of the Notting Hill riots - with a label round his neck addressed to nobody in particular, asking that somebody, anybody, take responsibility for him. It is an act of unearned trust in a country that had not yet agreed to be trustworthy. Michael Bond had seen Jewish children with labels at Reading station during the war, evacuees waiting to be claimed, and the image stayed with him. He also had to move his bear from “darkest Africa” to “darkest Peru” once it was pointed out that Africa is conspicuously short of bears: a rare instance of an immigration decision taken on purely zoological grounds.

A one animal inspection regime

Paddington’s instruments are marmalade, a hat with contingency rations inside it, and his famous hard stare: a technology of pure embarrassment, and the only deterrent this country has ever entirely trusted. His politeness works as a moral audit of everyone it lands on, which is why Mr Curry finds him insufferable and why the Browns, who make their decision on a station platform, come out of the story so well. He does not assimilate so much as hold Britain to the standards Britain advertises. The marmalade sandwiches are the least of it. Paddington is running a one-animal inspection regime on the national self-image, and has been for nearly seventy years now.

Paddington outranks the entire ursine field

That, at rather greater length, is some thoughts from our book, Please Look After This Bear: How Paddington Became British, and the reason Paddington outranks the entire ursine field. The others are only what bears are: hungry, sovereign, or intoxicated. Paddington is what Britain claims to be, and occasionally, when caught in the hard stare, actually manages to be.

Melanie Ramdarshan Bold will be at Wigtown to make the case in full. Rebuttals from Pooh partisans are welcome.

You can buy tickets for Melanie Ramdarshan Bold' event on 4 October on our website.