The success of the Pooh stories also undermined the reception of the non-juvenile work Milne wrote later. “It seems to me now that if I write anything less realistic, less straightforward than ‘The cat sat on the mat’, I am ‘indulging in a whimsy’,” Milne wrote in the introduction to his play The Ivory Door in 1928. “Indeed if I did say that the cat sat on the mat (as well it might), I should be accused of being whimsical about cats; not a real cat, but just a little make-believe pussy, such as the author of Winnie-the-Pooh invents so charmingly for our delectation.”

His collaborator, the Punch political cartoonist turned Pooh illustrator EH Shepard, felt the same. Before his death, he called Pooh “that silly old bear” and expressed regret that he’d ever taken part.

After the Winnie the Pooh books, Milne tried to write for Punch again. But not even his former readers would take him back. “His skill had not deserted him, but his public had; and eventually the editor, EV Knox, wrote to tell him so,” his son Christopher wrote in his 1974 memoir The Enchanted Places. “We each had our sorrows.”

The real boy

After all, Milne wasn’t the only one who struggled with Winnie the Pooh’s fame. As the inspiration for Christopher Robin, in some ways Milne’s son was even more famous than his father. As one Town and Country article put it in a photograph caption, Milne was an “English playwright. Children’s poet laureate by divine right of whimsy. His plays have been successfully produced in New York. And he is the father of Christopher Robin.”