Nobody who reads the book can suspect Miss Fielding of more than a distant admiration for Mrs. Teachum. Her own sympathies are clearly with the old dairywoman who, when the children were rebuked for a want of tact in their remarks to her, replied: “O, let the dear Rogues alone, I like their Prattle,” and taking Miss Polly (the youngest) by the hand, added: “Come, my Dear, we will go into the Dairy and skim the Milk pans.”
There is a kind of story-telling, touched with the same wise playfulness, which is not beyond the talents of average aunts. Two such there were, sisters-in-law, Dorothy and Mary Jane Kilner, whose stories, published in Dutch flowered covers, were as popular after 1780 as the earlier Newberys. There is some doubt about their respective pseudonyms, but the family records ascribe the signature “M. P.” to Dorothy and “S. S.” to her sister, which establishes Dorothy as the author of The Village School.[103]
Her stories grew naturally out of a happy and uneventful life spent in the little Essex Village of Maryland Point, and her best critics were the nephews and nieces for whom she wrote. But she was in the habit of sending her books to “the Good Mrs. Trimmer” for criticism, and it seems likely that she wrote The Village School to help that lady in her work of teaching poor children to read.
“M. P.” (she borrowed the initials of her village) is in some sort a nursery Crabbe. There is not an incident in her story outside a country child’s experience: no Babes-in-the Wood opening, no clever animals, no romance of improbable good fortune. This is the “clean pleasant village” of every-day life. The schoolmistress, Mrs. Bell, believes in simple virtues, but has no theories. Boys and girls learn to read, and girls to spin, knit stockings and sew. They are grouped quite simply, as in some old-fashioned print, and M. P., having borrowed Miss Fielding’s device of labelling them with symbolic names, uses it to avoid the complexities of character. Jacob Steadfast and Kitty Spruce are predestined to carry off the prizes which Betsy Giddy, Master Crafty and Jack Sneak inevitably lose; and a child is content with the main distinctions of Good and Bad.
The story, slight as it is, reveals M. P. as an aunt who is not indifferent to “Flowers picked out of the Hedges, Daisies and Butter Flowers”; who can make garlands and enjoy a singing-game,—the right sort of game for village schools:
“What we have to do is this
All bow, all courtesy and all kiss;
And first we are our Heads to bow
As we, my Dear, must all do now;