Ripples from the dishwater pond

Though why is it dull as dishwater? Granted, it's not what you'd want to be served instead of elephant-supporting strength tea, but then it's really not a beverage option for most people anyway. I think dishwater's either nice and hot and sudsy (ecological washing-up liquid, of course! Mine is Lilly's Eco Clean) or lukewarm and greasy and disgusting. Not particularly dull though.

Me? Dull. Mouldering away quietly, despite the full 24 hours' respite from rain, for the first time in weeks and weeks. And I'm still resisting the great books (still on the floor!) in favour of, atm, Maria Cummins' The Lamplighter. Read about it here - you'll find Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'd-med mob of scribbling women' remark. (What a great sig quote. If one is feeling split-personalitied enough to be a mob unto oneself.) (Dull and a little spacey, clearly.)

Given my state of extreme dullness, I'm not the best judge of what might be marginally interesting to anyone else, but these two snibbets from the 1800s have at least some potential. First is a quote from The Lamplighter, which relates to the question of education I rabbited on about a while ago. (This is Willie - about whom the narrator says 'No one could have been in the boy's company half an hour, without loving and admiring him.' MY heart is a bit resistant to him yet, but I'm ever-obedient, so doubtless will succumb soon.) Anyway, the quote: 'He was fond of study, and until his twelfth year his mother kept him constantly at school. The sons of poor parents have, in our large cities, almost every educational advantage that can be obtained by wealth...' There's been no loving mother to ensure the heroine, Gerty, got equal access to those advantages, but I think she's about to be sent. She's already learned to sweep, dust and make toast, so 99% of the battle is done.

The second really amuses me, but I'm not sure if you'd have to have read An Old-Fashioned Girl to share the amusement. It's really a very unbalanced book, much as I like it, with the first half giving a rather straight-forward contrast between Polly's sensible country ways and the Shaws' silly fashionable city ones. Part of the contrast is Polly's sensible childish nature at 14 vs. Fanny's precocious flirtations and all at 15. The second part has some more unusual themes 'n scenes, as it's 6 years later and Polly has come to Boston to make her living teaching music. The first part was published in a magazine called Merry's Museum, to which Alcott was a regular contributor and of which, at the time, she was editor. In a Preface (a rather oddly careless one IMO), Alcott claims that she had to write the sequel because of the demand of 'beseeching little letters that made refusal impossible'. So what I found today was that, although those beseeching letters weren't published (as had been the custom before Alcott's editorship), Alcott replied to them reprovingly in the Chat section. 'Alcott received several which expressed a hope that Polly and her male cousin would marry or flirt -- letters to which Alcott replies in the Chat that the letter-writer obviously does not understand "why the story was written" and that it would do the reader good to think as she read. Ouch! (Source is a very informative site which has much about Merry's Museum and other children's magazines of the 1800s. The page I found this on is here.)