“Whenever I happen to like my tea very much, I always think of the delicious cup of tea Mamma gave us after our journey.”
The father and mother, loved by other children without thought, are a King and Queen of romance:
“Mamma, to my fancy, looked very handsome. She was very nicely dressed, quite like a fine lady. I held up my head and felt very proud that I had such a papa and mamma.”
A ride through the London streets becomes a royal progress. In her exile, the child has had no toys: “the playthings were all the property of one or other of my cousins”. Now she appreciates the joy of ownership. Not toys alone, but little books are purchased, and by a mischievous turn, Mr. Newbery’s old device is turned against his successors: “Shall we order the coachman to the corner of St. Paul’s Churchyard, or shall we go to the Juvenile Library in Skinner Street?”
This is far removed from the dramatic realism of the Edgeworth School. It is the difference between the facts and the poetry of everyday life.
There is more poetry (but less that a child would take) in Charles Lamb’s story of the little four-years-old girl in Lincolnshire and her “first going to church”.
The house is too far from a village for the family to attend church, until they are able to set up “a sort of carriage”. But the child is attracted by “the fine music” from the bells of St. Mary’s, which they sometimes hear in the air. “I had somehow conceived that the noise which I heard was occasioned by birds up in the air, or that it was made by the angels, whom (so ignorant I was till that time) I had always considered to be a sort of bird.”
The bells calling Susan to church give the story a spiritualised Whittington touch. The ride to church and the child’s first impressions are wonderfully described.
“I was wound up to the highest pitch of delight at having visibly presented to me the spot from which had proceeded that unknown friendly music: and when it began to peal, just as we approached the village, it seemed to speak Susan is come, as plainly as it used to invite me to come, when I heard it over the moor.”
Here again, things that most children disregard, from thoughtless familiarity, appear strange and delightful to the lonely child. “All was new and surprising to me on that day; the long windows with little panes, the pillars, the pews made of oak, the little hassocks for the people to kneel on, the form of the pulpit with the sounding board over it, gracefully carved in flower work.”