A century of children's books

by Florence V. Barry

Akin to this is the theme of changed fortune: privileges only recognised when lost. It is the moral (never pointed in these tales) of “Charlotte Wilmot” and “The Changeling”. The child of the ruined merchant describes her first night in the house of his poor clerk. The moon, often watched in happier days, is now a symbol of misfortune:

“There was only one window in the room, a small casement, through which the bright moon shone, and it seemed to me the most melancholy sight I ever beheld.”

Poetry, not fact, is again the chief element in the story of the “little Indian girl in a ship”. Her gentle, imaginative sailor-nurse gives her no Natural History or Geography. He turns her thoughts to “the dolphins and porpoises that came before a storm, and all the colours which the sea changed to”; she is never troubled about the genus of the one or the causes of the other. If Lamb had set down this sailor’s tales, as no doubt he would have told them to a child, he could have made a real children’s book, of “the sea monsters that lay hid at the bottom, and were seldom seen by man; and what a glorious sight it would be, if our eyes could be sharpened to behold all the inhabitants of the sea at once swimming in the great deeps, as plain as we see the gold and silver fish in a bowl of glass”.

In the same way a visit to the country is not made the subject of lessons on rural occupations or botany. As a matter of fact, Grandmamma’s orchard is a fairy place where pear-trees and cherry-trees blossom together, and bluebells come out with daffodils. The profusion of these flowers and the sound of their names might attract a child that yet would miss the best touches:

“Sarah was much wiser than me, and she taught me which to prefer.... I was very careful to love best the flowers which Sarah praised most, yet sometimes, I confess, I have even picked a daisy, though I knew it was the very worst flower, because it reminded me of London and the Drapers’ Garden!”

Here Mary might have aimed a gentle shaft at the hated instructive writers, who taught children “which to prefer”; but there is no double intention in Sarah.

Only one story, “The Changeling”, has really dramatic moments. There is a miniature Hamlet scene in this, a “little interlude” played by children, which causes the wicked nurse to betray herself. A child would enjoy it better than the Tales from Shakespear. But the little girl who frightens herself into believing that her aunt is a witch is best understood by readers of “Witches and Other Night-Fears”; little Margaret, reading herself into Mahometism and a fever would be less interesting to small folk than the book, Mahometism Explained, which she found in the old library, “as entertaining as a fairy-tale”. The humour is too subtle for children, they would enjoy the picture of Harlow Fair better than that quaint account of the grave physician puzzled over an extraordinary case, “he never having attended a little Mahometan before”.

And so it is with the pictures of child-life. The grown-up reader has the best memory for Emily Barton (very young indeed) at her first play. Emily herself remembered that it was The Mourning Bride; but she was so far confused between this “very moving Tragedy” and “the most diverting Pantomime” which followed it, that she made a strange blunder the next day.

“I told Papa that Almeria was married to Harlequin at last, but I assure you I meant to say Columbine, for I knew very well that Almeria was married to Alphonso; for she said she was in the first scene.”

At the back of the grown-up mind, besides, there are pictures to help in the reading. Charles and Mary, instead of Emily Barton, reading the tomb-stones, looking up at the great iron figures of St. Dunstan’s Church,[132] or talking over their first visit to Mackery End (too long ago for Charles to remember); Mary at Blakesmoor with the old lady who had “no other chronology to reckon by than in the recollection of what carpet, what sofa cover, what set of chairs were in the frame at that time”. Or John Lamb, the father, taking a walk to the Lincolnshire village, “just to see how goodness thrived.”[133]