Charles and Mary lived their childish days over again in these stories. They forgot that as children they had not seen things in the same light. They forgot (those days had been short for them) that children, however precocious, are not concerned with their own thought-process, but with life and movement and adventure. And so their stories are really essays about children: essays that let the grown-up reader into some of the little people’s secrets. If it were possible for children to see themselves with the eyes of men and women, then Mrs. Leicester’s School might be to them what the Essays of Elia are to their parents. As it is, no child could appreciate the irony of innocence which runs through the book like a refrain.
A suggestion of Wordsworth, in the story of “Elizabeth Villiers”, can hardly be accidental. The little girl has learnt to read from her mother’s epitaph, and her sailor uncle, just home from sea, finds her in the churchyard rehearsing her lesson.
“‘Who has taught you to spell so prettily, my little maid?’ ... ‘Mamma,’ I replied; for I had an idea that the words on the tombstone were somehow a part of mamma, and that she had taught me.” The uncle, who knows nothing of his sister’s death, asks for her and turns in the direction of the house. “You do not know the way, I will show you,” says the child, and she leads him to the grave.
There is a similar pathos, not less beyond the insight of most children, in Elinor Forester’s account of her father’s wedding-day:
“When I was dressed in my new frock, I wished poor Mamma was alive to see how fine I was on Papa’s wedding-day, and I ran to my favourite station at her bedroom-door.”
But there is another motif in the book which, although its chief appeal is to grown-up sympathies, might satisfy a child’s love of contrast and surprise: the strangeness of familiar things; the romance of the unromantic.
Emily Barton is a little Cinderella, carried off by her father (whom she has forgotten) from the house of relations who have neglected her. A postchaise takes the place of the pumpkin-coach, a new coat and bonnet do humble duty for a ball-dress.
Thus equipped, she jumps into the chaise “as warm and lively as a little bird”. Mary Lamb has a store of such tender phrases.
The home that most children take as a matter of course, is a palace of delight to this little girl. Tea is a feast.