The thing about Winnie-the-Pooh, 91 years old this year, is that he’s the creature of E.H. Shepard, who drew him, quite as much as he is of A.A. Milne, who created him. The words and the pictures came together for anyone who encountered Pooh Bear in the books rather than the film. Any exhibition about him, then, has to grapple with the difficulty of doing justice to the text as well as to the drawings. And, moreover, to the fact that many of those who love him best heard about him first in a story that was read aloud. And for all that Pooh is a byword for world-class — or rather, middle-class — whimsy, there is something fragile and evanescent about the world he inhabits: he evokes the time When We Were Very Young. Tread softly, then, around this bear.
The V&A’s exhibition — Winnie-the-Pooh: Exploring a Classic — and the double act of Milne, the ‘laureate of the nursery’, and E.H.
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