A century of children's books

by Florence V. Barry

Some, not yet ripe for this encounter, would turn for comfort to the bright and imaginative “Life of a Looking Glass,” and revive their more childish interest in the “adventures of things”.

The Glass, “being naturally of a reflecting cast,” would catch, but not hold the restless attention of very little persons. It was for those past the stage of actual belief in talking things, who came back to it with a new perception of imaginative correspondences.

The tranquil passage of the story (so perfectly adapted to the “speaker”) is broken now and then by a flash of wit. There is nothing extraordinary about the incidents: that the writer admits; but she never fails “to give the charm of novelty to things of everyday”, and chooses her pictures not so much for moral ends as because they would be likely to persist among the “reflections” of a looking-glass.

First, the large spider in the carver and gilder’s workshop “which, after a vast deal of scampering about, began very deliberately to weave a curious web” all over the face of the glass, affording it “great amusement.” There is something in the responsive brightness of the thing that gives immediate sanction to the idea of its being amused. Then, the lively apprentice who gave it “a very significant look”, which it took at the time for a compliment to itself. And then a succession of images in quick movement reflected from a London Street. “The good-looking people always seemed the best pleased with me”, it remarks, with a sly gleam, “which I attributed to their superior discernment.”

After this, the scene changes to one of almost lifeless calm; the “best parlour of a country house, whose Master and Mistress see no company except at Fair time and Christmas Day.”

“Perhaps I should have experienced some dismay”, remarks the glass, “if I could have known that I was destined to spent fifty years in that spot.”

The younger the reader, the more endless such an interval would seem; yet if any had patience to follow the tale at its own pace, they might enjoy the fashion of that parlour: the old chairs and tables, the Dutch tiles with stories in them, that surrounded the grate, and the pattern of the paper hangings “which consisted alternately of a parrot, a poppy and a shepherdess—a parrot, a poppy and a shepherdess”. The repeated phrase suggests the length of days. “The room being so little used, the window-shutters were rarely opened; but there were three holes cut in each, in the shape of a heart, through which, day after day and year after year, I used to watch the long dim dusty sunbeams streaming across the dark parlour.”

Youth cannot wait for description, but these words translate themselves into light and shade.

Here is the mistress of that parlour, ready dressed for church on a Sunday morning, trotting in upon her high-heeled shoes, unfolding a leaf of the shutters and standing straight before the looking-glass. She turns half round to the right and left to see if the corner of her well-starched kerchief is pinned exactly in the middle. The glass has turned portrait painter. “I think I can see her now”, it says, “in her favourite dove-coloured lustring (which she wore every Sunday in every Summer for seven years at the least) and her long full ruffles and worked apron”. Then follows the master, who, though his visit was somewhat shorter, never failed to come and settle his Sunday wig before the glass.

Thus half a century goes by, with the imperceptible movement from youth to age. The glass is reset in a gilt frame to suit the fashion of new times; once more it reflects young faces and vibrates with the laughter of youth.