“When his father or mother said to him, ‘Frank, shut the door,’ he ran directly and shut the door. When they said to him ‘Frank, do not touch that knife,’ he took his hands away from the knife, and did not touch it. He was an obedient little boy.”
There is something arresting in this.
Frank’s doings and his sayings are a model of simplicity; but nobody could say of him what Charles Lamb said of Mrs. Barbauld’s little boys. As surely as any critic is disposed to laugh at Frank, he finds himself watching with involuntary interest while Frank pulls the leg of the table, and finds out what would have happened to the tea-cups if he had not been such “an obedient little boy”. His adventures, moreover, are not all among the tea-cups. He is interested in a carpenter and in kites, and he has a more than usually good eye for a horse. What really distresses the reader is that he is never allowed out of school; his most casual experience contributes to his mental and moral advancement. Chestnuts, glow-worms, the flame of a candle and other enchanting things are impounded for object lessons. Frank’s father and mother are his tutor and governess; the only poetry they mete out to him comes from Dr. Darwin’s Botanic Garden[160], and is “correlated” to Natural History; and after that it has to be explained. For when Dr. Darwin sings of a moth’s “trunk”, little Frank understands by that “a sort of box”; when his mother repeats:
“Alight, ye beetles, from your airy rings”,
he asks (not without reason) “What does that mean, mamma?” But the explanation would have come without asking. The Governess is giving a lesson, the tutor is at her elbow; and because you should never laugh in lessons, it is all rather serious.
But here, as in every school, are the children; the rest hardly counts. Here, for example, when a child has made friends with Frank, is Rosamond, who will make him forget all these lessons.
Readers of The Parent’s Assistant had met her before, with a filigree basket. Here she is again, “about seven years old”, walking with her mother in the London streets, a very figure of childhood.
The mother disposes one by one of her bright interests: The toys (“all of them”), the roses in the milliner’s window, the “pretty baubles” in the jeweller’s shop. And then:
“‘Oh mother! oh!’ cried she, pulling her mother’s hand; ‘Look, look! blue, green, red, yellow and purple! O mamma, what beautiful things! Won’t you buy some of these?’” (It was a chemist’s shop, but Rosamond did not know that.)