The builders have departed and Richard has the house to himself for the first time. This house was bought in fiction as in real life (£480 pounds in real life – slightly more in the novel) with money that came to him from his grandfather’s Trust on the death of his father. The book opens with Richard Maddison making a visit to the house he has just bought, 11 Hillside Road, Wakenham, which faces his beloved ‘Hill’: in real life this was 11 Eastern Road, Brockley (later re-numbered 21) opposite Hilly Fields, and which still exists today, looking more or less as it did then. We are shown how his father’s increasing irritation and his mother’s ineffectual placatory interference combine to have an adverse effect on the child: which is of course HW’s purpose, part of his ‘cause and effect’ theme, which we have already seen in the earlier Flax of Dream series. The book is an honest and vivid account of young childhood with all its trials and tribulations, and we truly live the lives of this fictional family with the wealth of detail of their lives and of the period.īut young Phillip is already rather a problem child in the eyes of various members of the family: he is sensitive and nervously imaginative, tending to lie his way out of trouble, whose naughty escapades – those of a normal child – are not understood by his parents.

As the book opens we are in 1897 and at the beginning of the story of Phillip, Richard Maddison’s first born (and the central character of A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight), now two years old and nicknamed ‘Donkey Boy’ because, due to his early problems, his life was saved when he was fed on the milk of an ass, brought to his despairing parents by ancient Mr Pooley. Date not known, but probably 1970, as that is when ISBNs were introduced in the UK.ĭonkey Boy is an evocation of time and place: of an ordinary family living in south-east London at the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth century. Re-issued Macdonald, using first edition sheets, re-cased and with a new dust wrapper bearing an ISBN. The book sparked some controversy, for its portrayal of the police as pigs, and as a result was not stocked by public schools and libraries in parts of the United States.(Volume 2, A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight )įirst published Macdonald, October 1952 (12s 6d) In 1993, Weston Woods Studios adapted this book to an animated movie, narrated by John Lithgow and directed by Gene Deitch. The book was also featured on an episode of Between the Lions. In 1978, Sylvester and the Magic Pebble was given the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award. The book was nominated for the 1970 National Book Award for Young People's Literature (losing out to Isaac Bashevis Singer's A Day of Pleasure).

Sylvester and the Magic Pebble earned Steig the 1970 Caldecott Medal, his first of many Caldecott and Newbery Medal honors. The rest of the story deals with the resulting aftermath: Sylvester's personal attempt to change back into his true self and Mr. Unfortunately, the magic pebble falls off the rock, and Sylvester is unable to revert to his donkey form as the pebble must be in contact with the wish-maker to work. Immediately afterward, a lion scares Sylvester, and as a defense he wishes himself into a rock-the only thing he could think of at the moment. Sylvester Duncan, a young donkey from the fictional community of Oatsdale, collects pebbles 'of unusual shape and color.' One day he finds a spherical red pebble that grants wishes.

The boy that time donkey