Children's literature R. M. Ballantyne and G. A. Henty specializing in the production of adventure fiction for boys. This inspired writers who normally catered to adult audiences to write for children, and an example is Robert Louis Stevenson's (1850–94) classic pirate story "Treasure Island" (1883). In the years after the First World War, writers such as Arthur Ransome (1884–1967) developed the adventure genre by setting the adventure in Britain rather than distant countries. Ransome began publishing in 1930 his Swallows and Amazons series of children's books about the school-holiday adventures of children, mostly in the English Lake District and the Norfolk Broads.
Swallows and Amazons series discussion and theorising about precise relationships. This contributes strongly to the series' air of authenticity. The first book, "Swallows and Amazons", and four sequels — "Swallowdale", "Winter Holiday," "Pigeon Post" and "The Picts and the Martyrs" — are set in and around an unnamed lake in the English Lake District. Most of the unfinished "Coots in the North" would also have been set on the lake had Ransome completed it before his death. The lake and the surrounding fells are based on an amalgam of Windermere and Coniston Water, places where Ransome spent much of his childhood and later life.