A century of children's books

by Florence V. Barry

Her mother answered, as before:

“What use would they be of to me, Rosamond?” It is the purple jar that takes the child’s fancy. Driven to invent a use for it, she thinks she could use it for a flower pot, but that was no part of her desire.

The story of Rosamond and the Purple Jar was meant to celebrate the usual triumph of the Perfect Parent; but every child knows it is Rosamond who triumphs; and this is the point where the Perfect Parent makes her first mistake. She does not warn Rosamond, she only hints:

“Perhaps, if you were to see it nearer, if you were to examine it, you might be disappointed”.

Now, Frank had his chance. They took away the tea-cups before he let down that table-leaf. But nobody helps Rosamond. The little reader follows, in close sympathy, as she goes on unwillingly, keeping her head turned “to look at the purple Vase till she could see it no longer”. And as she goes, it transpires that her shoes “are quite worn out”. That it should come to this, points to some pre-arrangement by the Perfect Parent. The occasion presents a unique opportunity for choice:

“Well, which would you rather have, that jar or a pair of shoes?” The parental Economist cannot buy both; she makes Rosamond understand that she will not have another pair of shoes that month.

Thus the purple jar repeats the theme of the filigree basket and the green and white uniform.

What Rosamond was never told, and what she could not reasonably have been expected to deduce, was that the beautiful purple colour was not in the glass. A child cannot forgive injustice; all Rosamond’s friends (and all children are her friends) cry out that it “wasn’t fair”. They all say, “She wouldn’t have chosen the jar if she had known”; and they are right. But the story goes on relentless. Rosamond, sweet and unquestioning, survives the whole painful experience and hopes at the end of it that she will be “wiser another time”; but the Perfect Parent has lost all the prestige she ever had with children. She lost it before her callous and unintelligent question, “Why should you cry, my dear?” But that sealed her fate.

“I love Rosamond”, said a little twentieth-century girl, not long ago, “but, oh, how I hate that mother!”

Miss Edgeworth drew none of her portraits from a single original; but she often sat to herself for some part of them, and at least one likeness was recognised by the family. Writing in her sixtieth year to her aunt, of the “great progress” she is resolved to make, she adds: “‘Rosamond at sixty,’ says Margaret.”