What have you done with Snoopy?

Whilst researching her new artwork for our exhibition Good Grief, Charlie Brown!, Somerset House Studios resident Eloise Hawser uncovered a hidden history of Peanuts in the British press.

When I was asked to be in the Good Grief, Charlie Brown! show, I thought back to my first encounter with Peanuts: a meandering animated love story called Snoopy Come Home, which I had watched over and over as a child. I remembered how the characters navigate the adult world of hospitals, libraries and bookshops; a world haunted by the refrain, “No Dogs Allowed”. Like the show’s curator Claire Catterall, I was curious to understand the impact of Peanuts on this very ‘adult’ world, through its often profound themes, as well as its long-standing appeal for UK audiences.

At the beginning of my research for the exhibition, I came across a letter that suggested the loyal affection that Schulz inspired in British readers. A letter to the Guardian from 1988 wanted to know why the strip had not appeared as usual, asking for it to be “reinstated at once”. It even asked the editors whether Snoopy had been sent to Battersea Dogs Home.

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Letter to the Guardian, 1988

Who authored this extraordinary instalment of the strip with Snoopy announcing the merging of two UK newspapers? Was Schulz, in his California studio, asked to add the “All set” caption to it? If not, was this an unauthorised appropriation of his creation, Snoopy’s speech bubbles filled in by an imitator? And, if so, was it assumed Schulz would not notice? The exhibition, I think, portrays Schulz as a very disciplined, private man, who worked alone in his studio and never took on assistants. I found it curious, then, to map this portrait of Schulz onto the massive, relentless churn of appropriations of his creation and distribution in the press.

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Charles M. Schulz at work in his studio in Santa Rosa, California, courtesy Charles M. Schulz Museum & Research Centre

I started looking further into the process of building a newspaper. Back in the 70s and 80s, aka the era of ‘hot metal printing’, newspaper articles were literally assembled in metal type by printers (called compositors). A blank space would always be reserved for comics like Peanuts, batches of which would be pre-etched and delivered to Fleet Street every week. Interestingly, the strips delivered were not chronologically dated, as if they fell outside of the temporality of the news cycle. So while in twenty-four hours most of the paper would already be out of date, Charlie Brown and friends seemed to occupy a different space on the page altogether. The ‘all set for tomorrow’ instalment is the only case I found of the outside world, indeed the newspaper industry itself, breaking through the borders of the comic.

No doubt it was Peanuts’ claim to its own neutral, a-temporal space, that meant it could feature in newspapers as different as the Mail and the Observer. Perhaps this distance from daily affairs was precisely what made it so popular. That distance was a distance from the adult world of politics, global events and advertising, and in this way perhaps a relief; a space apart. I found something almost uncanny about one Peanuts strip, which appeared at the bottom of a page full of property adverts. Somehow this juxtaposition made the strip seem particularly estranged from the world around it, and all the more poignant for it.

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The Daily Sketch offices on Shoe Lane

All of this also made me think about the difficulties many people can have with expressing empathy through language, but how they can, by contrast, respond very sensitively to visual art. I like to think that part of Peanuts’ appeal lies in the fact that Schulz’s drawing offers the viewer such an empathetic visual language. Underlying the Snoopy-themed universe to which Peanuts gave rise is a world of ‘angry clouds’ and ‘screaming mouths’  where Charlie Brown and the gang are forever bumping up against – yet still separate from – the adult world of “No Dogs Allowed”.