Maggie Browne, the pen-name of Margaret Andrewes née Hamer (1864-1937), was an English author of fiction and non-fiction children's books, who is best known today for Wanted, a King, an Alice in Wonderland-type story.
Early life and education
Browne was born Margaret Hamer in 1864 in Leeds, Yorkshire, the daughter of John Hamer (1837–1906), a Yorkshireman from Halifax who owned a bookselling business in Leeds, and Sarah Sharp Hamer, née Heaton, a writer of children's books. John Heaton, Hamer's maternal grandfather, was also a bookseller in Leeds. John Hamer joined the staff of Cassell's, the publishers, in the 1860s, where he was publishing manager from 1867 till 1900. By 1871, the family had moved to Islington, in London. Hamer's younger brother, Sam Hield Hamer, also became an editor at Cassell; he is credited with "discovering" Arthur Rackham as an illustrator. He wrote under the name of Sam Browne.
Career
Browne's first five books were published in 1884, when she was twenty, by Cassell, the publisher where both her father and brother worked. Chats About Germany was mentioned among forthcoming publications in September 1884. It was one of a series from Cassell of books for young readers about other countries, at a time when "everybody nowadays is expected to know a little about German and much about Germany." It was well received, and was described by reviewers as "a pleasantly chatty volume, not too learned", in which "all manner of odds and ends of information are brought together, and the simplicity and ease of the author's narrative should make her work popular with children." Chats About Germany was re-issued in 1889, when one reviewer considered it "perhaps the best of the series", and described Maggie Browne as "so able a writer".
Little Mothers And Their Children and Our School Day Hours (both 1884) were two of the four volumes, printed separately, that comprised Cassell's Album for Home, School and Play. In Little Mothers, "all the amusing "make-believes" of little girls as to their dollies are quaintly set forth." It was "narrated in the simplest of language", and "deserves to be very popular in the nursery". Browne's two other 1884 titles, Our Pretty Pets and Creatures Tame, were also part of an album by Cassell, My Own Album of Animals. They were "written in an easy simple style, and in a way likely to attract and amuse children."
Wanted, a King, Or, How Merle Set the Nursery Rhymes to Right (1890) is the best-known of Browne's works in the 21st century, with its own entry in the second edition of The Oxford Companion of Children's Literature. As the subtitle indicates, the book features nursery rhymes and their characters, which the heroine, Merle, encounters in a place called Endom as she dreams while in bed recovering from a fall. Contemporary reviews praised her "lively and imaginative work. The author is to be most heartily congratulated on having made the very most of a novel idea. She has written a real fairy book, such as ought to make her popular in all the nurseries of the country ..... they will ask Miss Maggie Browne for more." The Gloucester Journal described the author as "a young lady who is known and loved in the world of juvenile literature", who "succeeds where others may fail because she is in thorough sympathy both with her task and with her young readers", and wrote, "everybody is made happy, by means which the madcap ingenuity of the author renders equally probable and satisfactory." Some reviewers recognised it as "a clever story of the "Alice in Wonderland" type in which Miss Maggie Browne has shown a keen appreciation of the likings of children... There is much genuine humour in this brightly-woven tale..." Lewis Carroll reportedly owned a copy "as part of his collection of 'books of the Alice type'." A modern scholar notes differences between Merle and Alice, describing Merle as "an original and engaging character, courageous and defiant in her determination to vanquish the autocratic Grunter Grim." Instead of "adapting and acquiescing" as Alice had done, "Merle is encouraged to 'Defy, Deride, Desist, Deny' ... [her] successes reveal the ways that nonsense and imagination can oppose socially imposed expectations and constraints."
A dramatised version of Wanted, a King by Maude Scott was produced at the St. Pancras People's Theatre, London, in 1928.
