Twelve Years after the March sisters, Jack and Jill and the Allegorical Hill

It's New England, it's winter, and there's snow on the ground. 

Sound familiar? I'm sure it does, but we're not about to visit the March sisters. The Civil War is over, and in the small town of Harmony Village, a group of friends on the cusp between childhood and youth are about to experience a year of life, love, loss, and moral lessons. Lots and lots of moral lessons.

Louisa May Alcott's Jack and Jill was first published as a serial in the youth magazine St. Nicholas beginning in 1879, before being published as a book in 1880. 

The story opens at the bottom of the hill, literally. It is the first good snow of the season, and the boys and girls in the story are introduced as they take their turns sledding down one of three runs (coasts). 

The easiest was the smooth run that led into the meadow, that was for the little folk. The second swept across the frozen pond, and the sledders had to navigate around the skaters. The third ran from the very top a steep hill, and ended at a rail fence on the high bank on the opposite side of the road.

First to appear is sixteen year old Frank Minot, older brother of the title character Jack, then Molly Loo, a friend and contemporary of title character, Jill, and her baby brother Boo, followed by Gus Burton, Frank's friend, then Ed Devlin, the slightly older pal of all, Joe Flint, another contemporary of Frank's, and Merry Grant. friend of Jill.

Finally, we meet Jack (John Minot) and Jill (Janey Pecq), best friends, poised at the top of the third run.

Let's pause for a moment and examine the attributes of the gang before going further on. Alcott took pains to include a wide variety of personalities/social standings/economic class into this little group. Here's the breakdown:

Frank and Jack Minot come from a wealthy family, led by Mrs. Minot (there is no mention of any Mr. Minot). Frank is bookish, a member of a boy's temperance club, and looks forward to starting college. Jack is athletic, not a great fan of academics, and very sweet natured. The boys are close, but brotherly teasing is evident. Both strive to be good in their mother's eyes.

Molly Loo and Boo are comfortably economically, but their widowed father is obsessed with work and only occasionally seems to remember that he has children. The housekeeper, Mrs. Bat, does the bare minimum, and Molly lacks a reliable female mentor. She basically acts as a mother to Boo, but knows that her efforts are not enough.

Gus Burton is a good friend to Frank and relatively well-off. He is also going to college in a year. His younger sisters are Laura and Lotty.

Ed Devlin is a model to all. Making his way alone in the world, he works at a business in town and has the respect of everyone who knows him.

Joe Flint prefers to take the easy way out and looks down on others who lack money and social standing, but has occasional stabs at good behavior. The other boys call him out when he strays.

Merry Grant is the only daughter of a hard working farmer and his wife, who longs for beauty in everyday life. She has three older brothers, is well-loved, but misses the "little touches" that would make her clean but Spartan house more homey.

Not immediately present at the sledding hill was nineteen year old Ralph Evans,  a budding sculptor who dreams of traveling to Europe, and is also held in high regard for his hard work and honest living.

Finally, there is Jill. 

Jill, like so many of Alcott's heroines, is a tomboy, always the top of her class, and in contrast to her best friend Jack's large frame and blond good looks, is small, with black eyes and hair, and a merry disposition, but possesses a strong will that in Mrs. Minot's opinion, needs a bit of tempering. Jill and her mother are poor, Mrs. Pecq being a widow who struggles to get enough work to support them, and they live in a small cottage next to the Minot's large home.

As far as her friendship with Jill, "... Jill goes wherever Jack does, and he lets her. He is such a good-natured chap, he can't say 'No.'"

Back to the story ...

On Jack and Jill's final run down the hill, disaster strikes. The sled crashes. Jack has a massive lump and a cut on his forehead, and a broken leg. Jill is stunned, and lies immobile in the snow.

Both Jack and Jill try to take the blame for the accident while they're still lying in the snow. Merry says blame can wait for later, right now the two need help. 

Transported back home, Dr. Whiting sets Jack's broken leg, and delivers the bad news to the active boy that he won't be up and about for at least three weeks. 

Over at the Pecq's, Dr. Whiting fears that Jill's injuries are much more severe, a broken back, and advises Mrs. Pecq to keep her as quiet as possible. Jill is overcome with remorse and says that she'll be the best girl in the world once she gets out of bed. Her mother tells her that will be a long while, then sings her to sleep. She worries for her daughter's future, but reminds herself that her good friend yonder - Mrs. Minot - will never let Jill want for care.

Jack will not tell his mother that it was by Jill's urging that they took the last run, but Mrs. Minot knows, because Jill, herself, told her. Mrs. Minot tells Jack that in the future, he must help Jill control her headstrong will, that ,"..when you learn to yield less and she more, there will be no scrapes like this to try us all."

All the boys and girls come round to check on the two invalids. Frank devises a sort of telegraph devise between the two houses so the two friends can communicate while their friends are in school. That alleviates the boredom of recuperation for a while, but the novelty eventually wears off.

Jill has the worst time of it, for she too, loves beauty, and the small, poor house where she lies captive has ugly wall paper and poor furnishings. When Mrs. Pecq informs Mrs. Minot of Jill's unhappiness, Mrs. Minot takes to decorating the walls with pictures and bric-a-brac. When Jill asks where they came from, Mrs. Pecq says the good fairly that never comes empty-handed, meaning Mrs. Minot.

Mrs. Minot continues to give Mrs. Pecq sewing jobs so the widow can earn money.  

One day, while all the girls are over and Mrs. Minot is there, the girls discuss how much they'd like to become missionaries. Mrs. Minot says that it is not necessary to travel to faraway lands to do missionary work, that work can be done right here, in their own homes. She tells Merry that she can help out more at home, Molly Loo can step up with little brother Boo, and, although she does not say this aloud, that Jill can have a positive effect on Frank and Jack, just by her presence, making the two boys more thoughtful and considerate.

The girls sally forth with high aspirations, and it's a rocky road at first, but success follows hard work and effort. By the end of the story, all have achieved their goals.

The boys, meanwhile, have their own set of goals and ambitions, and struggle, as the girls do, to achieve them, some more successfully than others. 

At one point in the story, Jill and her mother come to live at the Minot's. Mrs. Pecq will serve as housekeeper, leaving Mrs. Minot to her other projects. When summer arrives, Jill, Jack, Frank and Mrs. Minot all take a summer holiday. Mrs. Pecq stays back at the house. (I'm sure that I'm not the only person uncomfortable with the fact that Mrs. Minot basically usurps Mrs. Pecq's role as Jill's mother.) There is drama, when Jill, left alone in a boat, is pulled out to sea, but she is rescued by the very remorseful Frank and Jack.

Because this is a story for young folk written during Victorian America, there is a death. It is poor Ed Devlin who shakes his mortal coil, after a short, undefined illness. His funeral is attended by all, and there is much discussion on why the young die before their time.

When the new school year rolls around, Mrs. Minot announces that neither Frank - who was to start college - or Jack will be returning. After much consideration, she has decided that both would be better off with a more balanced education involving lessons and outdoor activities, along with, of course, healthy eating and no alcohol. Jill is included in this effort, and at the conclusion it bears fruit, Frank is healthier, Jack more comfortable with his academics, and Jill, having learned patience through her ordeal, has acquired a few more of the traditional womanly skills, while still retaining her lively spirit.

If you have students who loved Little Women or Eight Cousins, this book is an easy recommend. Otherwise, it's a tough sell for the following reasons. 

First is its age. Jack and Jill is nearly 150 years old, and the vocabulary is going to be unfamiliar to students today. 

Second is the sheer profusion of moral lessons crammed into each and every chapter. As I wrote above, Jack and Jill was originally a serial in St. Nicholas magazine, so Alcott had the requirement of inserting a moral lesson into each one, no exceptions.

Third is the delivery of said lessons, which have all the delicacy of a sledgehammer wielded by a circus strongman with anger issues. Poor Mrs. Minot bears the burden of being the deliverer of the bulk of them, and halfway through the book I cringed whenever she made an appearance. This was pretty shabby treatment for the well-meaning matron.

Fourth is the discussion around Ed Devlin's death. The young man's demise is viewed as part of God's plan that is beyond the understanding of man. Many people hold this to be true, however, others do not. If you have a student who suffered a loss of a loved one, this might or might not be upsetting for them to read.

Despite all of the above, I enjoyed the book. Reading it as an adult with a strong background knowledge of the times and the author, it was easy enough for me to skip over the preaching and appreciate the portrayal of a time and place where people interacted with each other instead of screens, kept themselves busy with lots of group activities, and take in how artfully Alcott wove in her educational and life views into the plot.

Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania in 1932, the second daughter of four born to  Amos Bronson Alcott, transcendentalist philosopher and educator, and Abagail May Alcott, feminist and abolitionist.  

Growing up, Alcott knew periods of extreme poverty, due to her father's inability/refusal to earn money to support his family in a manner that did not go against his ideals. It was left to Louisa's mother to earn money anyway she could, but earning opportunities were limited for women, so as soon as Louisa could, she took on whatever work to could to support the family, at times working as a domestic, a companion, and as a nurse in the Civil War.

The Alcott's were part of the Underground Railroad, harboring runaway enslaved people on their journeys to Canada. The family believed in equality of the sexes and races, women's suffrage, and were part of the Transcendentalist movement. As a child, Louisa took lessons in botany from Henry David Thoreau, and had access to the Emerson's library. Nathanial Hawthorne and his family were neighbors, although Hawthorne himself preferred to limit his exposure to Louisa's father. I don't blame him.

Louisa was determined to get rich and support her family, and she succeeded through her writing. Hospital  Sketches, an account of her experience as a nurse in the Civil War, (she contacted typhoid after six weeks and nearly died, her health never recovered) was her first major success, followed later by the semi-autobiographical Little Women in 1868, and a number of other books for young people. She also made money writing adult novels and "scandalous" stories, sometime under a pseudonym of A.M. Barnard. 

Louisa May Alcott never married, and died at the age of 55 in 1888 in Boston, Massachusetts.

Louisa May Alcott is a fascinating individual who lived, and lived fully, at a fascinating time in history. there are a wealth of books about her, and the times she lived in that merit reading. I will recommend the last one I read, written by Samantha Seiple titled Louisa on the Front Lines: Louisa May Alcott in the Civil War. 

An article on Little Women from Humanities magazine.

Louisa May Alcott's obituary from the New York Times, dated March 7, 1888.

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I've had to hold off on the audiobooks the past two weeks, but I am hoping to get back into The Phantom of the Opera before the week is out.

I've recently embarked on the journey of self-publication. It's been an education. If you're interested in the process, check out my other blog On the Trail of Rogue Lits ...

I've also just created a bare bones website (the topic of my next blogpost at OTTORL) at www.carolmaticbooks.com

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Two for the Price of One: A Tale of Silver Skates and a Travel Guide with a Brief History

 Why or and not and?

The title of Mary Mapes Dodge's 1858 novel, Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates  has always been a bit problematic to me. The story of Hans Brinker is inextricably intertwined with the race for the silver skates, so why the or? 

If you wanted to reflect the very real division of the book, I would opt for something along the lines of Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates, and, A Brief History and Travelogue of Holland. A little cumbersome, true, but an accurate reflection of what you get when you open the cover. Also, an accurate description of Dodge's intended achievement in writing the book.

So, first the story, then a bit about the remarkable woman who wrote it.

Hans Brinker tells the tale of Hans Brinker, a fifteen-year-old boy who lives in Broek, Holland, in a poor cottage facing a canal with his younger sister, Gretel, his mother, Meitje, and his father, Raff. Ten years earlier, Raff Brinker suffered a horrible accident on the dikes, that left him badly brain damaged. As a result, the family has struggled to survive, getting by on Meitje's knitting and piecework and whatever work Hans can procure. Their hardship is worsened by Raff's erratic behavior, which can at times pose physical danger, and the disdain of many of the townspeople who refer to their home as "the Idiot's cottage".

Social class plays a major role for the characters in the story.

Despite all this, the Brinkers are a close-knit family, who continue to nurse the hope that Raff will someday be well. The Brinkers also live with a mystery, two actually. Before Raff left on that fateful night to  work on the dikes, he gave his wife a silver watch with the engraved initials of LJB to hold and told her to take care of it. He also told her that, due to some suspicious behavior on the part of one of his co-workers, that he had hid their savings of 1000 guilders. He intended to explain both when he returned, but that was not to be. 

Though they searched, Hans and his mother could not find the money, and had come to the conclusion that the father's suspicious co-worker must have stolen it. As far as the watch, Dame Brinker held fast to her promise to her husband and never sold it, despite at times of extreme hardship being sorely tempted.

The background now set, Dodge introduces the rest of the characters. A group of boys and girls, their ages about the same as Hans and Gretel, are skating on the canal in view of the Brinker's cottage. Economically, they fall into middle-class to wealthy. The boys are Peter van Holp and his brother, Ludwig, Lambert van Mounen, Carl Schummel, Jacob Poot and his English cousin Benjamin Dobbs, and a little fellow with the big name of Voostenwalbert Schimmelpenninck. The girls are Hilda van Gleck, Annie Bouman (Gretel's friend), Richie Korbes, and Katrinka Flack. They run the gamut from kind-hearted and honorable (Peter and Hilda), to smug and spoiled (Carl and Katrinka), and come to in what is essentially a the moral tale of Hans Brinker all the expected fates. 

*You might notice that some of the names above (as well as others in the book) are not purely Dutch and leaving towards the German. The names appear differently in different editions of the book, but I am using the names as they appear in the 1985 paperback edition from Dell Publishing Co.

All of the children are excited at the prospect of the upcoming skating race on the canal, where the winners - one boy, one girl - will be awarded a pair of silver skates. Both Hans and Gretel are excellent skaters, but any dreams of winning the race are just that. Neither own a pair of real skates, just wooden versions that Hans - very skilled at woodcarving - has fashioned for them. 

This changes when the kind-hearted Hilda notices the pair on the canal and asks them if they, too, will be joining the race. When she discovers the reason  - no skates - she has Hans crave her a wooden necklace like the one Gretel is wearing, and with that money, he will be able to buy at least one pair of skates.Hans uses the money to buy skates for his sister. When Hilda's friend and admirer Peter hears of it, he commissions Hans for a second necklace, the money then paying for a pair of skates for himself.

It is while Hans is on his way to Amsterdam, using his wooden skates on the canal,  to buy his skates that he comes upon the Dr. Boekman, the famous physician and surgeon. Mustering up all his courage, he approaches the doctor -  a dour sort with a reputation to match - about his father's case. The doctor, though gruff, agrees to visit the Brinker household in a weeks time.

Hans and his mother are elated, but their joy is cut short when Raff experiences a violent episode and falls into a deep fever. Hans once again goes for the doctor, but on his way he encounters Peter van Kolp and his group of friends on the canal. The boys are on a skating holiday of several days duration, to see the sights and visit Peter's married sister during the Feast of St. Nicholas celebration. Seeing how concerned Hans is over being away from his family, Peter tells Hans that he will find Dr. Boekman and give him the message to please come at once. Hans gratefully accepts, then heads back home.

This is where the second book, the one I dub A Brief History and Travelogue of Holland, appears. Over the next several chapters, we will see nothing of Hans or the Brinker household, but a great deal of the boys, the English cousin, and an enormous amount of detail on Dutch history, prominent Dutchmen in politics, the military, and the arts, and detailed descriptions of Dutch architecture, engineering, and cityscapes. Dodge does flesh out the characters of the individual boys, but it can be some dense reading.

We do learn, during this time, that Dr. Boekman has received the message Peter left for him regarding Raff Brinker, and has departed for Broek.

Once the boys return home, the story refocuses on the Brinkers. 

Dr. Boekman is there with his assistant. The doctor believes that he can operate successfully on Raff, and is given permission to do so by Dame Brinker. The doctor needs Hans to assist, so no one notices when a terrified Gretel rushes from the house. Outside, over a period of some hours, Gretel feels herself falling asleep to beautiful visions and it roughly awoke by Hilda, shaking her and forcing her to move. Hilda had noticed was appeared to be a pile of rags along the canal, but upon closer inspection had discovered that it was Gretel.

The two then return to the Brinker cottage, and learn that the operation has been successful. Word spreads that Raff Brinker is now back from the dead - some of those words were quite fanciful indeed - and the town is amazed. Dr.Boekman warns Hans and Dame Brinker that Raff is not be be overexcited, needs plenty of rest, and fine foods that the Brinkers cannot afford. Hans is resolved to sell his skates to raise money, and he does, but it is Annie Bouman, who convinces the boy that she will sell them for him. While Annie goes off to that purpose, Hans searches for work, but is unable to find any. When Annie returns, she delivers money from the sale to Hans, an amount well above what the skates are worth, and insists that Hans take every cent, despite his protest.

Also upon his return, he sees that a fairy godmother has delivered just the type and quantity of food that Raff needs for his recovery. 

Raff's memory returns slowly, and piecemeal. The realization that he has lost ten years of his and his family's lives is difficult, but he insists that he will be back to work in a short while. Initially, Raff believes that his family had access to the hidden money and knew the story of the silver watch. There is a false alarm when Hans coaxes the location of the hidden money from him, that it is buried by the south side of the willow tree. Hans and Dame Brinker dig for hours, but the money isn't there. Turns out, it was the wrong tree. The tree Raff remembered had been cut down earlier, and when Hans dug there, the money was found.

There was still the mystery of the watch. As it turns out, the watch belonged to Dr. Boekman's son, who left in a hurry after believing that he had killed one of his father's patients. He gave it to Raff, who he encountered on his way leaving the country, and left with him a message that if his father ever wanted to contact him, he should look for a Thomas Higgs in Birmingham, England. When Dr. Boekman sees the watch, and hears the message, he rushes to find his son. Dr. Boekman had labored under the mistaken belief that his son had abandoned him to live a dissolute life. The doctor had caught his son's mistake - the wrong medicine prescribed that could have killed his patient - but never realized at the time that his son believed himself a murderer.

As Thomas Hicks, the son owned a successful leather goods company in England, which, upon reconciliation with his father, he moved to Amsterdam. Raff Brinker became the manager. Hans is taken under the wing of Dr. Boekman, educated, and goes on to study medicine.

And the race? It took place on a fine, sunny day. Gretel won the girl's skates, and Peter van Holp won the boy's race, with an assist from Hans. Peter's leather strap had broken, and Hans, who had a good chance of winning himself, gave his strap to Peter. 

The last chapter takes place years later, and Dodge recounts the fate of the various characters. Hans is the famous surgeon, Dr. Brinker, and married to Annie. There are children, and grandchildren, and a good life, well-deserved, is had by all the Brinkers.

This is not a suitable read-aloud, but it is an excellent book for the advanced reader in intermediate grades and middle school readers who enjoy the classics. Dodge's style is very much 19th century, and will take some getting used to, but the story hooks you in from the beginning and (with some judicious section jumping), keeps you hooked until the end. 

I remember reading Hans Brinker as a grade-schooler, and I'm pretty sure that I did a fair amount of skipping over the history and travelogue chapters. When I reread it as an adult, I did read the whole thing, and found it interesting, if just a little bit too fawnish at times. 

The only disturbing element I found as a modern reader was Dodge's description of the Jewish Quarter in Amsterdam. After the English cousin Ben visited the Marine school, he, "... he peeped into the Jew's Quarter of the city, where the rich diamond cutters and squalid old-clothes men dwell, and wisely resolved to keep away from it;..."

For all of Dodge's expansiveness is describing  Dutch history and famous Dutch men (they are all men, no individual woman is mentioned amongst the notables), the negative connotation attached to the sentence and the lack of the history behind the existence and evolution of a Jewish Quarter is disappointing. 

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And now about the author.

Mary Mapes Dodge was one of the most important figures in 19th century children's literature as both an author, editor, and proponent for other writers.

Born in 1831 to a prominent NYC family, she was educated at home along with her sisters, studying literature, French, Latin, music and drawing. In 1851, she married a business associate of her father, the NYC lawyer William Dodge. They had two sons, but in 1858 William abandoned his family, and was later found drowned. He had been dealing with financial difficulties and his son's illness. In the norm for the times, the newspaper obituary stated that he died suddenly.

Widowed with two boys to support, Mary moved back in with her family, where they had relocated to New Jersey. It was there that she began to write. In 1861 she was asked by her father to edit a section of his periodical, The Working Farmer. Dodge then branched out into writing short stories, and in 1864 her collection of Civil War themed stories, The Irvington Stories, was published. The book was a moderate success, and her publisher asked for a follow-up. Dodge had recently become fascinated with Holland, and after copious research and multiple interviews with Dutch friends, published Hans Brinker, or, the Silver Skates in 1865.

Before writing the book, Dodge had never visited the Netherlands, but the book was a huge success, translated into many languages, and won a prize from the French Academy. 

Dodge went on to become an editor and founder of the magazines Hearth and Home, and later in 1873, of St. Nicholas Magazine (a name she chose), for close to thirty years, where through her efforts nearly all the the notable and upcoming authors, including Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling, contributed. She also continued to write, and contributed adult articles to the likes of Harper's Magazine and The Atlantic Monthly.

Mary Mapes Dodge died in 1905.

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Mary Mapes Dodge obituary in the New York Times here.

A tribute to Mary Mapes Dodge written by William Fayal Clarke appeared in Volume 32 of St. Nicholas magazine in 1905. You can read it here.

Thomas Nast contributed to the original illustrations of Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates. See an example here.

                                                   

Update on audiobooks: I finally finished The Woman in White. It was quite a journey but worth the time. I just started Gaston LeRoux's The Phantom of the Opera, narrated by B.J. Harrison, so I'll let you know how it goes. After TWIW nearly 25 hours, its nine hours should feel like a walk in the park.

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I've recently embarked on the journey of self-publication. It's been an education. If you're interested in the process, check out my other blog On the Trail of Rogue Lits ...

Everybody's Favorite Redhead, and, no, I don't mean Lucy (but God bless her, she gave us Star Trek )

 Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking and Pippi Goes on Board, books one and two of The Adventures of Pippi Longstocking

A little girl with a big heart and a horse on her porch...

Near the end of Pippi Goes on Board, a group of children and townspeople gather together to bid Pippi farewell as she is about to sail off with her father, Captain Ephraim, to become a South Sea Islands princess.

"Three cheers for Pippi Longstocking!" they cried.

I agree. Three cheers for Pippi Longstocking, one of the most wonderful of children's literary characters you will ever come across. I read her as a child and loved her, and now, I'm reading her as an adult and love her still.

Pippi is nine years old and lives all by herself in an old house called Villa Villekulla, surrounded by a gloriously untended garden at the edge of a very small Swedish town. Well, not all alone. Mr. Nilsson, a monkey who was a present from her father, and her pet horse, who stays on the porch, live with her. Her father was a sea captain who had been blown overboard and disappeared, (Pippi believes that he is now a South Sea Islands king) and her mother had died when Pippi was just a baby, and was even now, Pippi knew, watching her little girl through a peephole in the sky.

"Don't you worry about me." Pippi tells her mother, looking up at the sky. "I'll always come out on top."

And Pippi always does.

Pippi's hair is the color of carrots, woven into two tight braids that stick straight out, and she is dotted all over with freckles. She wears a dress that she made herself, blue with red patches, and a pair of stocking with one leg green and the other brown. On her feet, but twice as long, were a pair of black shoes that her father had bought her, with plenty of room to grow into.

Something else about Pippi, she is very, very strong. She can, and does, lift her horse onto the porch when the horse is tired. She also had a suitcase full of gold coins, and is happy to share.

Pippi's two best friends live next door. Tommy and Annika are very well-behaved children, and both enjoy their adventures with their new neighbor. Things happen when Pippi is around, wonderful things, and adventures are an everyday occurrence. 

There is the time when Pippi takes on a group of bullies picking on a younger boy, and when Pippi intercedes, they make fun of her hair and freckles. Well, Pippi is quite fond of both, their taunts don't hurt her, but she teaches them a lesson - tossing them in the air, hanging them across a big tree branch - that they never forget. And don't even think about whipping a horse, Pippi will make sure that you know exactly what that feels like.

Then there is the time that Pippi goes to school. Pippi doesn't have a lot of use for school, but she goes at her friends urging and, while she and the teacher do like each other (it was a process), both decide that perhaps school is not for Pippi, at least just then. 

The adventures just keep on coming with each new chapter, and Pippi always, as she puts it, comes out on top. That Pippi Longstocking appeals to children is no great mystery, she is the embodiment of many a child's fantasy. She lives all by herself, is entirely self-sufficient, and does exactly what she wants. True, she does regret some of her actions, but she learns from her mistakes, and her intentions are always good. She's a happy-go-lucky little girls who is generous, kind, a loyal friend, fearless, and willing to share her joy with all. 

Pippi isn't perfect, and she is always willing to self-improve, if, this is a big if, if the so-called improvement makes sense to her. She has a huge imagination - although a lot of it is based on things that really happened - but her stories are often preposterous. She says she needs to stop lying, but she has, as kids often do, an imagination that makes the borders between fact and fiction more than a little fuzzy at times.

Pippi is never boring.

Pippi Longstocking books are perfect for read-aloud in the elementary classroom. Every chapter is a separate adventure, and the chapters are only around five to seven pages each. 

Astrid Lindgren was Swedish, and there are references sprinkled about in both books that highlight this fact. I now know there is actually something called fruit soup (Fruktsoppa). If you're interested, recipes abound on the internet.

One caveat using Pippi as a read-aloud. Make sure that you use a recent edition, such as translator Susan Beard's 2020 edition, from Penguin Young Readers Group. Lindgren penned her first Pippi Longstocking in the 1940s, and used terms that are not acceptable today.  I have Viking's 1997 edition of the books, where Pippi refers to her father as a "cannibal king" and uses the word Hottentots, a pejorative used in the past to describe peoples of Africa. Beard's translation substitutes South Sea Islands for cannibals and removes any reference to Hottentots.

Astrid Ericsson Lindgren was born in 1907 on a farm outside of Vimmerby, Sweden and died in 2002 in Stockholm. Her first children's book was published in 1944, followed by the first Pippi Longstocking book. Pippi's story began in 1941 when Lindgren's seven-year-old daughter Karin was ill and bed-bound with pneumonia. She demanded a story, and when Lindgren asked her what she should tell, Karin replied Pippi Longstocking, a name the seven-year-old conjured all by herself. Lindgren began telling, and in 1944 wrote down all the stories as a book to give to Karin on her tenth birthday. Afterwards, she sent the manuscript to a publisher, got no results, then entered another publisher's contest, and won first prize, along with a book contract. 

Pippi was popular in Sweden, and in 1950 Viking published an American version. Lindgren went on to a distinguished career as a children's author, and won numerous awards, including the Hans Christian Andersen award in 1958.

Lindgren created a series of diaries - seventeen in all - chronicling the war years from 1939 to 1945. She also worked for the Swedish government during that time in a classified position in the secret services.

Lindgren was an animal rights activist her entire life, and in 1980 the government enacted a new Swedish Animal Protection Act that came to be known as Lex Lindgren, or Lindgren's Law.

Astrid Lindgren's official website can be accessed here.  It is definitely worth checking out.

Coming up next: Still deciding. So many choices!

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An aside that has nothing to do with children's books...

One of my other projects, in addition to this blog, is to go back and reread (and in all honesty, read for the first time) adult literary classics. Due to a combination of circumstances, I can no long read the printed page for the same length of time that I used to, so, I turned to audiobooks.

I know many people listen to audiobooks while occupied by another activity - knitting, cooking, etc. - but multitasking is not my forte. When I listen, that is all I do. So far, it's working out rather well.

These are several of the audiobooks I've completed so far, if you're interested.

Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne, read by Tim Curry.  Tim Curry's narration saved this book. Tim Curry's narration would save any book. I recommend any audiobook in which he is involved. While Journey was groundbreaking for its time, and Verne is often referred to as the father of science fiction, the book is very wordy as are most books of that time (1864), and a great portion of the story is centered on rocks. Lots and lots of rocks.

Dracula by Bram Stoker, read by Alan Cumming, Tim Curry, Katherine Kellgren, and five others. Dracula is one of my favorite books, and I really enjoyed this audiobook version. Even Van Helsing's long-winded discourses and horrendous Dutch (at least, Stoker's version of Dutch) accent was tolerable.

Currently listening to: The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, narrated by Roger Rees, Rosalyn Landor, John Lee, and Judy Gleeson. I've never read this one. The book is totally engrossing and the performances excellent. Fifteen more hours to go!

Some say that it all began with her ...

 Five Children and It by E. Nesbit

Three brothers, two sisters, and a ... Hairy Bat?

    If you knew nothing about E. Nesbit or her writings, and I mean nothing at all, and you pulled this book off the shelf for a blind read, you would (fairly quickly, I think) form some of the following impressions about both.

    E. Nesbit has a real handle on the thoughts and motivations of children, and really understands the siblings dynamic.

    E. Nesbit has a wonderfully dry and wicked sense of humor, as well as imagination.

    E. Nesbit was British, and her writing reflected some of her own life experiences, from a  comfortably middle-class perspective, somewhere in the late 19th/early 20th century.

    E. Nesbit's writing reflects on the social issues of her time, and she had opinions.

    Also, if you are an American, as I am, you would be well-served to have a dictionary handy, because Five Children and It is a thoroughly British book, and contains words and expressions unfamiliar to those of us on this side of the pond.

    Full disclosure. While I have never read any of E. Nesbit's books before, I was familiar with her name through a long ago university class on British history. I remembered that hers was a name associated with the Fabian Society, but that was about it. Anyway, I'll delve into Nesbit later on in this review. For now, let's focus on the Five Children and It.

    Five Children and It is the story of the five brothers and sisters: Cyril, Anthea, Robert, Jane, and the Lamb, who at about two years of age was the youngest of the bunch. 

    The family had just relocated to the country after living the past two years in London, to an isolated house they called the White House. No other houses were close by, but they were close to a gravel pit and a chalk quarry. 

    One day, while Father was away on business for a time, Mother also had to leave the family home to care for Granny. The five children were left in the care of the maid, Martha, and the family cook. 

    This leaves the children free to basically roam at will the day long, as long as they get home in time for supper. One day, they go to the gravel pit, and begin to dig a hole in the sand all the way to the other side of the Earth, in their minds, Australia. It is through this endeavor that they uncover the Psammead, a sand fairy, a hairy little creature thousands of years old with a bat's ears, a snail's eyes, and a spider's body.

    Since the book is written in the style of a third person, constructed as a mother telling a story to her child (Nesbit dedicates Five Children and It to Robert Bland, the youngest of her own five children), there are many interesting side observations exhibiting a dry wit. 

   The Psammead, or the Sammyadd, as the children call him, explains to the children that he is a sand fairy, and obligated to grant them one wish a day. This is not information offered graciously, the Psammead is a grumpy fellow, and I suppose you would be too if you find yourself constantly woken up and asked for ridiculous wishes, as the children are wont to do. It's a tiring business overall, and, as the Psammead repeats throughout the story, made all the worse by the fact that none of the wishers ever takes the Psammead's advice.

    That advice? Be careful what you wish for.

    Predictably, the children's wishes almost always lead to catastrophe, but there is a saving grace. The wishes only last until the sun goes down. After that, everything reverts back to normal.

    This is a very good thing. The first thing the children wish for is to be as beautiful as the day. Voilá, they are, but then nobody recognizes them, and they can't get into their own house at suppertime. After that, it is a parade of perhaps we should have thought this through a bit better misadventures. Fabulous wealth? You got it, but then no one will accept their golden coins for payment, and the police make an appearance. A desire to fly? Here's a set of wings, but be careful after you raid the vicar's larder and then fall asleep atop the church tower. There's no way down but a locked staircase, and you didn't wake up until after sundown. (A good unintended consequence this time is that Martha meets a man she later marries.) 

    The children, who do think, but are still human, try to come up with work-arounds to keep the Psammead from granting unintentional (you try to erase the phrase I wish from your vocabulary; it's not so easy as it sounds) or far from unanimous wishes, which happen with unhappy frequency despite their best efforts. 

    There is the incident of a castle under siege, the transformation of Robert into a giant, and a  suddenly grown-up Lamb whose adult personality is less than beguiling, where again, the children are saved from bad consequences by a setting sun.

    The tale of two wishes rule out - to me - the use of this book as a read aloud because they reflect the views of the time completely out of step with the current day. The completely out of hand wish is of Cyril, under the influence of the book The Last of the Mohicans - wishing that there were 'Red Indians in England ... the right size for us to fight.'  Put yourself in the mindset of when this was published, 1902, and I'll leave the reasons to your imagination.

    The second wish involves one of the siblings - saddled with babysitting their youngest brother -  wishing that the Lamb would be wanted by everyone who sees him. Everyone does, including a company of gipsies the siblings encounter on their way back home. The children are afraid, everyone knows that gipsies are dangerous, want nothing to do with their nasty food when offered dinner, even though, after they ate, acknowledged that it wasn't so bad. Saved from having to surrender the Lamb to them by sunset, they take the baby and make to leave.

    That's when one of the women, Amelia, tell the children that she would like to kiss the baby goodbye, and they're not to be afraid, that "..us gipsies don't steal babies, whatever they may tell you when you're naughty." She thens confides that she's lost all of hers. Lamb then reaches up and strokes her face. Amelia then touches the baby's head, chest, hands and feet and says, 'May he be brave, and have a strong head to think with, and always come safe home to his own.' After that, she said something in a language the children did not understand, and left. The children, in this instance, realized that assumptions about others are not necessarily true. 

    The day the wishes end comes about by the actions of Anthea. At breakfast, the children learn not only of their mother's imminent return that afternoon, but of the theft of a wealthy woman's jewels the previous night. Jane, without thinking, wishes that her mother could find all those lovely things in her room when she returns that day. 

    Catastrophe!

    Anthea's quick thinking and determination saves the day. Initially, the children want to tell their mother the whole truth about the Sammyadd, but Cyril says she won't believe it and will think they're pretending. When Jane protests that it's true, Anthea answers, "...of course it is, but it's not true enough for grown-up people to believe it...' 

    All is well in the end. Anthea, exhibiting empathy of the Psammead plight, negotiates multiple wishes that day to fix the situation, with the promise that they will never ask for another after that day. Also, the Psammead make her promise that she will never tell anyone about them. When Anthea asks why, the answer is that if the grown-ups knew, they would wish for real earnest things, like a graduated income tax, or old-age pensions, or free secondary education, things that would make the world topsy-turvy. In this, Anthea grants the Psammead their wish, and all's well that end's well.

    As I said before, this is not a book that I would consider a viable read aloud, but I will never support removing a book because it does what the written word always does: reflect the worldview of the writer at the time it was written, which Five Children and It most definitely does, both the good and the bad. Nesbit is a delightful writer, with a fantastic imagination, but this is the only book of hers that I've read. Does the book reflect the prejudices of the times? Most definitely, which can be a real point of discussion, and one I wish (there's that phrase again) was more in evidence where vintage books are concerned. If you have a student who enjoys magical realism and fantasy, this book is an option, with a lending caveat that it is a product of a different time and a different world. That's not an excuse. It's an explanation.

Five Children and It is the first book of The Psammead Trilogy, and after reading this one, I will be reading the the rest: The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904) and The Story of the Amulet (1906). Why? Because I think her writing is wonderful, for all the reasons mentioned above.

Normally, when I do a blind review, I read the book first, then I research the author and any of their other works. Because my public library subscribes to the Gale databases, I generally start with Something About the Author, and then look up articles in Gale Literature to get a wider picture. In this instance, I went a bit further.

But first, some basic facts.

Edith Nesbit was born in London in 1858, and died at Jesson St. Mary's, New Romney, Kent, England in 1924, after several years of poor health. She and her first husband, Hubert Bland, were founding members of the Fabian Society, and between them they raised five children. Nesbit was the main breadwinner, supporting her family through her writing. She wrote poems, articles, books, and plays for both adults and children. She viewed herself primarily as a poet, and was well regarded in her lifetime as such, but her enduring legacy is as a children's author.

Nesbit was dedicated to the work of the Fabian society, and her beliefs are evident in her writings. (See above for the reasons the Psammead doesn't want to grant adult wishes. The explanation is an excellent summary of some of the major goals of the Fabians, and Nesbit not only advanced those goals in her writing, she lived them. She was generous with time and money, even when she had, at different periods in her life, little of either to give.

Nesbit's household was unconventional. Her two youngest children were adopted. Their father was Hubert, and their mother was Alice Houston, Nesbit's friend who lived with the family and functioned at times as both housekeeper and secretary. Their home was a literary and artistic center, figures like George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells were frequent visitors, and Nesbit served as a patron of sorts to many up and coming literary figures.

Nesbit influenced generations of writers who came after her, including J.K. Rowling, Edward Eager, Neil Gaiman, C.S. Lewis, Noël Coward, Antonia Fraser, and Joan Aiken. The list goes on and on.

After I wrote the first part of this review, I checked out a biography of Edith Nesbit: The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit: Victorian Iconoclast, Children's Author, and Creator of The Railway Children by Eleanor Fitzsimons. It is a well-researched, heavily annotated account of her life and times. I highly recommend it, and thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

Some interesting links:

    The website of The Fabian Society. 

    The Edith Nesbit Archive at the University of Tulsa Special Collections and University Archives.

    Edith Nesbit writes on writing for children in her book Wings and the Child; Or, The Building of Magic Cities

Coming up next: The Adventures of Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren.