Mary Poppins in the Park by P. L. Travers, 1952.

This Mary Poppins book is supposed to take place during the first three books in the series. It’s a collection of incidents that take place in the park. Each chapter is a short story, and each of the stories can stand alone.

I thought that the stories were fun, but there are a few instances of racial language that I didn’t like in the original version of the book. At various points throughout the original version of book, Mary Poppins chides the children for things they’re doing by calling them “Blackamoors”, cannibals on an island, or “Hottentots. ” In other words, she’s implying that they’re being “savages.” I know that notions of “savage natives” appear in other old children’s books, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to give modern children these ideas, and I don’t like it that Mary Poppins uses racial words as insults for the children in the story. Fortunately, later printings of this book rewrote these scenes to remove inappropriate racial language.

When I was writing this review, I told my brother the plot of one of the stories in the book,Lucky Thursday, and we had a good laugh over it. It was a pretty funny story to read. My brother asked whether the story was supposed to have a moral or teach children anything. I thought about it, and I suppose that part of the moral could be “Be careful what you wish for”, but in the end, I don’t think any real lessons were learned.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

Stories in the Book:

Every Goose a Swan – When everyone seems to be daydreaming and pretending that they’re someone they’re not, Mary Poppins tells the children a story about a vain goose girl and the others around her who have grand ideas about who they think they really are. When someone points out the realities of being the people they like to think they are, they all decide that maybe it’s better to just be themselves.

Faithful Friends – Miss Andrews, a neighbor of the Banks families, has been advised to go traveling for the sake of her health by her doctor. Before going away, she asks the Banks family to look after her “treasures” during her absence. Mrs. Banks puts them in the nursery because she knows that Mary Poppins will look after them, although Mary Poppins is a little put out by this extra duty. The “treasures” turn out to be a collection of random knickknacks, battered and incomplete. The children are particularly interested in a pair of hunters with lion friends, but one of them is mostly missing, and they think that the lion missing his hunter looks rather sad. By coincidence (apparently), they meet a couple of policemen who are reminiscent of the hunters. One of them used to live near a jungle but had to return home because he lost a foot, like the knickknack hunter. He’s been sad since he got back because he says he’s missing a friend. However, he gets his friend back when a loose lion suddenly appears in the park. When children get home, the missing hunter is back in the knickknack, and the lion looks happy.

Lucky Thursday – Michael is unhappy because the other children got to go to the park while he had to stay home with a cold. The only interesting thing that happens is that he sees a strange cat out the window. Michael goes to bed in a bad mood, but the next day, all sorts of lucky things begin happening. However, it turns out that it’s not quite as lucky as he thinks. First, he doesn’t take care of some of the nice things he receives and loses them. Then, the mysterious cat leads him on what seems like a magical journey from the park to a castle of cats, and he is told that everything he’s received has been because he wished on the Cat Star the night before. Part of what he wished was just disgruntled grumblings, though, and part of the cats’ idea of fun and games is to make Michael answer riddles. If Michael answers the riddles correctly, he’ll get to marry one of the cat princesses, and if he doesn’t, he’ll have to work in the kitchen of the castle with other children who made foolish wishes. Michael does answer the riddles correctly, but he doesn’t want to marry a cat, and he has a desperate struggle to escape from the castle of the cats. He only manages to escape when he blows Mary Poppins’s whistle.

The Children in the Story – The park keeper isn’t very happy about the fair set up near the park because it always leaves such a mess. Mary Poppins and the children are also in the park, and Jane is reading aloud from The Silver Fairy Book. She and Michael start talking about the princes in one of their favorite stories. Then, the three princes come out of the story to see Jane and Michael. The princes say that Jane and Michael are the children in the stories they read, and they’ve entered their own book to visit them. They say that they’ve visited generations of other children before.

The princes have brought their unicorn with them, and when adults around them start noticing that there’s suddenly a real unicorn in the park, they start panicking and arguing among themselves about whether the unicorn belongs in the zoo, in a museum, or as a sideshow at the fair. The adults seem to feel like the princes and unicorn are vaguely familiar, but they can’t seem to remember why. Most adults forget about the princes when they get older, but not all. Bert the matchman remembers, and it turns out that Mary Poppins has also been nanny to the princes.

The Park in the Park – The children are playing in the park on a hot day. Jane is making little figures out of plasticine and a little park for them all. Michael is hungry, and the baker figure comes to life and gives him pie. The children get to know the other figures, and Jane is amazed that the characters have lives that she didn’t create for them. The figures don’t seem to remember that Jane made their little world, and Jane and Michael are astonished to realize that they have now become child-size in the little park she created.

Hallowe’en – On Halloween, as the children are heading home with Mary Poppins with nuts and toffee apples, they meet the strange Mrs. Corey and her tall daughters. The children are told to be careful of stepping on shadows and that they should take care of their own shadows so they don’t run away. Mary Poppins hurries the children home and to bed, but the children find leaves that seem to be invitations to some kind of party. The children look outside and see shadows without people in the garden. The children follow the shadows, including their own, to the park. There, they see the shadows of everyone they know and even nursery rhyme characters. Mrs. Corey, her daughters, and Mary Poppins are there, and they explain that it’s the night before Mary Poppins’s birthday, and that’s what the celebration is about. They all dance with the shadows until Mrs. Boom arrives, upset, because her husband is distressed that his shadow is missing. Soon, other people also arrive to reclaim their shadows.