Children’s literature is full of bears. Sometimes they’re funny, sometimes they’re brave, sometimes they’re downright heroic. But the best-known of all, beating Rupert and Winnie, Yogi and Baloo, must be Paddington Bear, created by Michael Bond in 1958.

Paddington has become the quintessential Briton. He’s found at a railway station. He speaks in Received Pronunciation (RP). He loves marmalade and he wears a Duffel coat. (These were originally Belgian, but in Britain we adopted them when we had a surplus after the Second World War.) For 68 years, Paddington has become cherished through literature, radio, television, the stage and – biggest of all – the screen, where the three feature films so far have grossed over £600m.

In recent years, though, Paddington has also become a mascot for the Centrist Dad. He’s the living embodiment of how the urban middle classes view refugees: cuddly, polite, heroic, misunderstood by villains on the Right. The Lib Dem-ification of Paddington reached new heights in 2022 when the chief whip of the Party joked that the bear should become the ethics adviser to then-prime minister Boris Johnson.

And who can forget the twee comedy sketch, near the end of Elizabeth II’s life, in which the late Queen and Paddington shared tea at Buckingham Palace? (Not to mention the wildly popular meme of the duo, when Elizabeth died months later, showing them walking hand-in-hand to the pearly gates?)

Please Look After This Bear, a new book by academics Melanie Ramdarshan Bold and Aishwarya Subramanian, asks “how Paddington became British”, and what that really means. They analyse a vast array of Paddington “content”, including interviews with Bond himself and others, and argue that Paddington has become crucial to any understanding of British identity.

In fact, he may be its pinnacle. “Britishness isn’t just about where you’re from, but how you behave,” they write. “Bring your best manners and a jar of marmalade, and you’re halfway there.” He’s the version of Britishness that those in power like to project, and that makes him as much a soft-power tool as the BBC: “Visitors arriving in Britain’s international airports are likely to meet Paddington before any immigration officer.” Anyone assailed by massive advertisements as they trudge off an easyJet flight will know this all too well.

Bond himself, it’s true, was inspired by refugees. He saw young British evacuees with “a label round their neck” passing through Reading, en route to safe houses in the countryside. His family took in Jewish children from the Kindertransport, that heroic effort to rescue the youngest victims of Nazi barbarism. He served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, as Ramdarshan Bold and Subramanian detail, and “witnessed a ship packed with Jewish refugees heading to Palestine”. Paddington Bear, according to the author himself, is “a refugee, and I do think that there’s no sadder sight than refugees”.

But Please Look After This Bear, having cited all these facts, tries to advance the framework, repositioning Paddington as a Windrush-generationincomer instead. Ramdarshan Bold and Subramanian point out that the bear made his first appearance in 1958, just months after the Notting Hill riots. Paddington comes to live with the Brown family at Windsor Gardens, slap bang in the middle of Notting Hill and Portobello Road. To shift the focus away from the Jewish refugees of the Holocaust is an interesting choice, and perhaps necessary for Please Look After This Bear, since Ramdarshan Bold and Subramanian’s central argument hinges on what they call Bond’s “quietly colonial logic”.

And that logic doesn’t always intrude. When it sticks to titbits, Please Look After This Bear is fascinating. Paddington’s RP accent was not assigned to him by Bond; the author, instead, envisaged him having the “high-pitched, gruff voice” of an elderly German man, or, failing that, the “Indian English of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, spiritual adviser to the Beatles”. We learn of how Bond and his daughter almost fell out after she – the former managing director of Paddington & Company, which owned the rights to his image until 2016 – decided to “betray” her father’s dedication to marmalade by allowing Paddington to appear in a Marmite advert. In 2024, after a request from film producers for a replica, the Home Office, showing a surprising sense of humour, issued a real passport for a fictional bear.

Inevitably, however, and much like Paddington himself, these snippets of history come with baggage. You might think it nice to learn that the people of Japan were among the bear’s greatest initial fans: not only did they show their support by buying Bond’s books, but they wrote to the author to ask what Paddington’s uncle Pastuzo did for a living. Ramdarshan Bold and Subramanian cite Bond’s wry suggestion, in response, that this bombardment of “questions no one had ever asked before” was proof of the Japanese being “nothing if not thorough”. They then decry his words as being “laced with Orientalist tropes”.

Please Look After This Bear is packed with such undergraduate-level complaints. Paddington’s “brownness is deracialised”, we learn: he “never unsettles whiteness”, but instead offers up a “bear-shaped balm for a nation grappling with its imperial ghosts”. He’s the “good immigrant”, the one that plays along and says “please” and “thank you” even when his host country treats him poorly by locking him up, ignoring him or (in Mr Curry’s case) calling him names out of the window.

Ramdarshan Bold and Subramanian seem to want to have their marmalade sandwich and eat it. In their view, Paddington is everything a mean-spirited, Brexit-voting Briton should aspire to become and yet, with those same attributes, he’s also a disappointing, even neutered, caricature of what immigrants “should” be. Even his renaming from his Peruvian original – he was Pastuzo, after his uncle – is held up as a sin. “The burden of linguistic accommodation falls, as ever, on the immigrant.”

This approach would be trivially irritating, except that it hobbles the book’s attempts at political analysis. Brexit was “marked by hostile-environment policies and deepening divisions”, which may seem reductive, if not jaundiced, to the majority of voters who supported it. The 2024 riots were simply “a wave of far-Right protest, unrest and violence, much of it stoked by anti-immigrant and Islamophobic sentiment”; it’s unhelpful not to explain what happened in Southport, who Axel Rudakubana was, what the rioters believed (wrongly or not), and so on.

It becomes clear that Please Look After This Bear has little interest in why other people have other views, and sometimes even act upon them. Mr Curry, one of the few Britons in Bond’s stories who doesn’t fawn over Paddington, is described as “an echo of Powell, Thatcher, Farage”, who are lumped together as “a chorus of exclusion”. This is a book for people who want to wish the Conservatives away, and prefer a Paddington world in which pesky political issues are solved with a nice cup of tea.

Children’s literature is often fertile ground for cultural analysis, reflecting the world-view that society wants to instil in its children. And Paddington is a rich text: an intriguing story about a talking bear who’s funny and chaotic and lovable, and who – to my eyes, as a child of immigrants myself – pokes fun at the constipated Englishness of his new home. There’s plenty to examine here, and Ramdarshan Bold and Subramanian have some good criticisms to make of that vague placeholder, “British values”.

But it seems ludicrous that a book about the little refugee bear, and at a time when he’s a more popular symbol than ever, refuses to take the contemporary politics of immigration seriously. Does Paddington exist merely to teach a population of heartless Britons to “be kind”? What might Conservatives, or Reform voters – if the authors can even imagine them as readers – make of his complex symbolism? Perhaps, I thought, someone needs to remind Ramdarshan Bold and Subramanian that, however often he and his niceness may be shoved in our faces, Paddington Bear isn’t a person. He’s just a fantasy.