Just William 04 – William the Fourth

William the Fourth by Richmal Crompton is the fourth Just William book, written for 8 year olds and built on one reliable joke. Grown-ups say things. William believes them.

What happens

William is eleven. His brother Robert is seventeen and has just come home from his first year at college full of world-changing ideas, which he shares in his bedroom with his friends.

The chief idea-haver is Jameson Jameson, aged nineteen and three-quarters. His argument runs like this. We are all human beings. Human beings are equal. So those with too much money must have some taken off them.

William, sitting on the floor with his mouth open, thinks this is the finest thing he has ever heard.

He is thrown out of the meeting (he bites Jameson Jameson's ankle on the way) and made the Junior Branch, of which he is President, Secretary, Committee and Members all at once. He holds meetings under the laurel bushes for an audience of some daffodil roots and next door's cat.

Then he works out the useful bit. If everyone is equal, and the big boys have watches and bicycles and cameras and money and the small boys don't, well. Now is the time for Action. They said so.

You can guess what happens to Robert's watch.

The pleasure of it is watching William reason his way, perfectly logically, from a thing an adult said out loud to a thing no adult wants. He is never naughty on purpose. He's just paying closer attention than anyone would like.

It's a hundred years old, though, and it shows. Some sentences take real effort, with words like rhetorical and apoplectic sitting in the middle of them. The boys pass a stick of rock round for a suck each, one of them smokes a cigarette, and nobody is much punished for anything. So this is a stronger fit as a book you read together than one you hand over, even to a confident eight-year-old, and it suits a child who enjoys the sound of old-fashioned language rather than one who trips on it.

What to read next

If that all sounds like your reader, the very first William book is a better place to begin. It opens with William at the pictures, watching five films in a row, and then coming home and trying out everything he has just seen on his own family.