Royal Mail Stamps: “The Magical World of Children’s Literature”

Royal Mail Stamps: “The Magical World of Children’s Literature”, designed by Peter Malone.

Royal Mail, 1998. First day cover.

This series of stamps illustrating classic children’s literature marked the centenaries both of the death of Lewis Carroll and the birth of C. S. Lewis.

The 20p stamp shows Bilbo Baggins and Smaug from The Hobbit; the 26p one depicts Mr. Tumnus, Lucy, and Aslan from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; 37p is the children from E. Nesbit’s The Phoenix and the Carpet and 43p has Pod and Arrietty from The Borrowers. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland  is naturally the subject of the most expensive 63p stamp, with  Alice and the Red Queen running as fast as they can to stay where they are.

Just at this moment, somehow or other, they began to run.

Alice never could quite make out, in thinking it over afterwards, how it was that they began: all she remembers is, that they were running hand in hand, and the Queen went so fast that it was all she could do to keep up with her: and still the Queen kept crying ‘Faster! Faster!’ but Alice felt she could not go faster, though she had not breath left to say so.

The most curious part of the thing was, that the trees and the other things round them never changed their places at all: however fast they went, they never seemed to pass anything. ‘I wonder if all the things move along with us?’ thought poor puzzled Alice. And the Queen seemed to guess her thoughts, for she cried, ‘Faster! Don’t try to talk!’

Not that Alice had any idea of doing that. She felt as if she would never be able to talk again, she was getting so much out of breath: and still the Queen cried ‘Faster! Faster!’ and dragged her along. ‘Are we nearly there?’ Alice managed to pant out at last.

‘Nearly there!’ the Queen repeated. ‘Why, we passed it ten minutes ago! Faster!’ And they ran on for a time in silence, with the wind whistling in Alice’s ears, and almost blowing her hair off her head, she fancied.

‘Now! Now!’ cried the Queen. ‘Faster! Faster!’ And they went so fast that at last they seemed to skim through the air, hardly touching the ground with their feet, till suddenly, just as Alice was getting quite exhausted, they stopped, and she found herself sitting on the ground, breathless and giddy.

The Queen propped her up against a tree, and said kindly, ‘You may rest a little now.’

Alice looked round her in great surprise. ‘Why, I do believe we’ve been under this tree the whole time! Everything’s just as it was!’

‘Of course it is,’ said the Queen, ‘what would you have it?’

‘Well, in our country,’ said Alice, still panting a little, ‘you’d generally get to somewhere else — if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.’

‘A slow sort of country!’ said the Queen. ‘Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!’

Bought for the magnificent sum of 80p in an antique shop in Snape Maltings.

 

 

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