The 19th century child-lit world...

[lady_schrapnell]

Not a lengthy discourse on same, never fear! Just a few amusing (to me) and/or relevant (perhaps) bits and pieces.



The first is a quote from Susan Coolidge (actually from a book she wrote called Nine Little Goslings, which I've definitely not read):

'Perhaps we may live to see the day when wise mammas, going through the list of nursery diseases which their children have had, will wind up with, "Mumps, measles, chicken-pox - and they are all over with 'Amy Herbert', 'The Heir of Redclyffe', and the notion that they are going to be miserable for the rest of their lives!'

The Heir of Redclyffe, as regular readers of this LJ might remember, is the book over which Little Women's Jo was sobbing, which helped spark my 'What were they reading in those classic kids' books' curiosity. According to What Katy Read, 'officers in the Crimea' wept over it as much as Jo or any other 'sentimental teenagers'! Amy Herbert is by Elizabeth (not Anna) Sewell and - oh my, this is so circular - in What Katy Did, before Cousin Helen arrives, Katy thinks she will be like a character from Amy Herbert! I love this extreme intertextuality, especially when an author who (even her fans - and I am one) can produce books which are pretty sappy at times, pokes rather good-humoured fun at another author for being sentimental and maudlin. Books (and TV shows & films too) just date a bit too quickly these days, for quite this kind of allusion, maybe. I've been trying to think of the requisite tear-jerker book(s) that kids today have to read but failing.

I'd managed to forget all the many jibes at books (and journals of various kinds) in Nesbit's The Story of the Treasure-Seekers and even more (apparently) The Wouldbegoods - and am now very eager for a reread of those. Daisy in the latter apparently has been 'reading the wrong sort of books' and those include Ministering Children (that one is legit), Ready Work for Willing Hands, and Elsie, or Like a Little Candle. Cheery stuff indeed!

I knew that there was heavy parody of the earlier, particularly moralistic children's literature going on in The Water-Babies, as with his 'Cousin Cramchild', who tells little folks there are no fairies, among other stupid things. But I managed to miss some of the specifics of one of the jabs, through not knowing about Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World. Which may be virtually unread now, but was a huge success in its time - with Warner's publisher telling her there was a Wide Wide World fever (and sales to justify the claim. Even Henry James praised it!) But Kingsley poked a finger of ridicule even at Warner with a bizarre scene on Tom's trip to the Other-End-of-Nowhere, where he sees, among other things, 'Waste-Paper-Land, where all the stupid books lie in heaps' and people dig and grub among them 'to make worse books out of bad ones' and then 'all the little books in the world' ... 'and if the names of the books were not Squeeky' (Queechy, another Warner AKA Wetherall hit) ... nor the Narrow Narrow World... then they were something else.' I'm sure it says something bad about my maturity that I found this amusing even without knowing much -> anything about The Wide Wide World. But - let me say in his defence, lest anyone think Kingsley could only sneer at others' success, that it's believed that The Water-Babies helped to bring about the end to the use of child chimney-sweeps. (AND, another snippet I learned just today, is that a chimney-sweep whom Kingsley knew and who claimed to have been the model for Tom, eventually became Mayor of Wokingham! Real life soot to (at least relative) riches story.)





I haven't bothered to add my superfluous currency-of-your-choice to the reviewers vs bloggers kerfuffle, as enough people have said enough sensible things that there seemed to be no reason. (Why, though, some are arrogant enough to think that only bad will happen when regular readers of 'proper' publications which have been giving them a steady diet of entirely unbiased, insightful reviews, desert them for blogs, which they'll be entirely unable to form any kind of sensible opinion of for themselves?) Anyway, I wasn't going to say anything superfluous, that's right. But, if anyone cares to hear the story of the 19th century high-brow reviewer ... It's a nice story, and you might not know it, even if you enjoy the literature (adult or children's!) of the time.

Background not to be condescending, but because Henry James may be famous as one of the more important realist novelists of the period, but it's probably going to be only real fans and those studying literature who come across him as a critic as well. When we studied him in the 19th Century Novel course, people were split fairly evenly between those who loved Portrait of a Lady and those who thought it was one of the most boring on the course, but he was almost universally considered pretty damned arrogant and disdainful as a critic. Part of that was his reviews - he even dissed Middlemarch, starting his review by calling it 'at once one of the strongest and one of the weakest of English novels.' He ended the one of Far from the Madding Crowd with this: ' But, as we say, Mr Hardy has gone astray very cleverly, and his superficial novel is a really curious imitation of something better.' His 'The Art of Fiction' is a famous reply to a lecture given by Walter Besant, and well-respected for its serious examination of literature.

So, with that as a background, the next part of the story is that R.L. Stevenson wrote his own article called 'A Humble Remonstrance' and took James on about almost everything in 'The Art of Fiction' - including his criticisms of Treasure Island, though James did have nice things to say about that too. I fully expected to read next that James either ignored the much lower-status Stevenson entirely or reacted defensively - or just in disbelief at Stevenson's presumption. In fact, he wrote a very warm letter back, expressing appreciation of Stevenson's essay and his contribution to the debate about literature, and rejoicing in having found someone with whom he had so much in common. The two became good friends, though they never met in person because of Stevenson's travels, and remained so until Stevenson's death, news of which 'devastated' James. There's even some indication that James modified his opinions somewhat in response to Stevenson's 'A Humble Remonstrance', apparent in later critical writings.

Two people who loved books, cared about writing, and respected each others' right to have and share their own opinions.... I do trust my readers' intelligence, but the relevance just isn't very subtle, is it?



Firmly in the last-but-one century still, as I finished a reread of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, discovered I can't find my old copy of The Princess and the Goblin (and it's not easy to get in shops either - will have to Do Something) and can't put my hand on Peter Pan (next two up for module reading), need to reread Five Children and It and The Secret Garden. Then it's Alcott's Work & Little Women - about which I've already discovered that one of the changes from the original was to make Marmee tall and elegant instead of 'stout'. Bloody hell! That started early... And hopefully also rereading What Katy Did (and possibly the other two), Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and Anne of Green Gables. Plus as much as I can stand to read online of The Wide Wide World, The Heir of Redclyffe and maybe even a bit of The Daisy Chain's 800+ pages. List of the more-recently published books burning holes in my self-restraint another time ...

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I love uncovering evidence of dialogues between writers, whether in letters, or dueling essays in long-ago magz, or in the pages of fiction.

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's it exactly! One of my favourite things about the 19th Century Novel module was that. I'm really hoping I can manage to find the review of Eight Cousins by Henry James somewhere. I'm still slightly boggling at his having reviewed it.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

He reviewed her twice that I know of, and both are Olympian James smackdowns.

When he reviewed Alcott's (now forgotten, and probably justifiably so) Moods

From the middle of the Moods review:

Mr. Warwick is plaintly a great favorite with the author. She has for him that affection which writers entertain, not for those figures whom they have well known, but for such as they have much pondered.. . .There is a most discouraging goodwill in the manner in which lady novelists elaborate their impossible heroes. There are, thank Heaven, no such men at large in society.

He whacks into Eight Cousins with this at the start:

"It is sometimes affirmed, by the observant foreignher, on visiting these shores, and indeed by the venturesome native, when experience has given him the power of invidious comparison, that American children are without a certain charm usually possessed by the youngsters of the Old World. The little girls are apt to be pert and shrill, the little boys to be aggressive and knowing; both the girls and boys are accused of lacking, or of having lost, the sweet, shy bloom of ideal infancy. . . .

Miss Alcott is the novelist of children--the Thackeray, the Trollope, of the nursery and the school-room. She deals with the social questions of the child-world, and, like Thackeray and Trollope, she is a satirist. She is extremely clever, and, we believe, vastly popular with infant readers. In this, her latest volume, she gives us an account of a little girl named Rose, who has seven boisterous boy-cousins, several grotesque aunts, and a big burly uncle, an honest seaman, addicting to riding a tilt at the shams of life.
....

He goes on to scold her for using satiric tone against describing the 'elders and betters' of children: Miss Alcott seems to have a private understanding with the youngsters she depicts, at the expense of their pastors and masters; and her idea of friendliness to the infant generation seems to be, at the same time, to initiate them into the humorous view of them taken by their elders when the children are out of the room.


He goes on to poke his quill at the lack of moral instructiveness of the novel, finishing with monumental disapproval:

Her uncle Alec, with his crusade against the conventialities, is like a young lady's hero of the "Rochester" school astray in the nursery. When he comes to see his niece he descends from her room by the water-spout; why not a rope-ladder at once? When he aunts give her medicine, he surreptitiously replaces the pills with pellets of brown-bread, and Miss Alcott winks at the juvenile reader at the thought of houw the aunts are being humbugged. Very likely many children are overdosed, but this is a poor matter to tell children stories about. When the little girl makes a long, pert, snubbing speech to one of her aunts, who has been enquiring into her studies . . . he is so tickled by what would be vulgarly called her "cheek" that he cances a polka with her in jubilation. . . . What have become of the "Rollo" books of our infancy and the delightful "Franconia" tales? If they are out of print, we strongly urge that they be republished, as an antitode to this unhappy amalgam of the novel and the storybook. These charming tales had, relatively speaking, an almost Homeric simplicity and "objectivity." The aunts in "Rollo" were all wise and comfortable, an dthe nephews and nieces were never put under the necessity of teaching them their place.

He finishes up with: "The child-world was not a world of questions but of things, and though the things were common and accessible to all children, they seemed to have the glow of fairy-land upon them. But in 'Eight Cousins' there is no glow and no fairies, it is all prose, and to our sense rather vulgar prose.

I can only think of those loads of pills the aunts gave indiscriminately being calomel--which was poison--and it's a double dose of shudder.

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Olympian smackdown is right! Thank you for posting these! The idea of Alcott (well, in the kids' books at least) being lacking in moral instructiveness....

I can't find now the reference to Moods which mentions the name of the character modeled on Emerson, but wouldn't be surprised if it were Mr Warwick.

About the calomel, to veer off at a tangent, I wonder if she knew it was poison at the time of writing Eight Cousins - she did say she'd never been well after that stint of nursing...

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I don't thnk anyone knew that giving mercury to anyone, especially children, especially children with fevers, was a very bad idea until early in the 20th century. From anything I can tell the general wisdom was, inducing diarrhea was the way to cure all sicknesses: my grandmother certainly used to ask first, before anything else, if she fould out we'd been sick, "Have you been to the bathroom today?" Once when I was four she made me sit there pretty much all afternoon. I learned to lie after that one.

So Alcott is unlikely to have known that "more is better" was particularly horrible in regard to just about every so-called medicine given to kids at that time. But isn't that amusing that someone would take Alcott to task for being insufficiently morally instructive! I can just imagine how horrific these "Rollo" tales must have been!

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

It did seem pretty early for it to have been recognized as a poison, it's true. I was just thinking how incredibly self-denying and stoic it would have been for Alcott to have discovered that she'd been poisoned and her health destroyed some 20 years before, and 'rescue' her child characters with a nod and a wink at getting one over the aunts!

Yes, my grandmother was a great believer in proper bowel training as well! I don't remember being allowed leave the house in the morning without having 'been to the bathroom' while I lived with my grandparents. Same phrasing even.

[emmaco.livejournal.com]

What a lovely list you have to look forward to! I think I have a copy of The princess and the goblin somewhere. If you want me to check, please let me know - it'll only sit in a box otherwise.

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

It is a lovely list. Unfortunately, so's the one with the non-module-related books, and both my resistance and my reading speed are low! Charlie's got a copy of TP&TG for me, but thank you very much for the offer.