A great impetus to the whole conception may possibly have been given by a tour which the child was fortunate enough to make with her parents and sister to Warwickshire and thence to Scotland in June, 1850, a tour of which further particulars will be found in the next chapter. In the course of her very conscientiously kept diary, she says, “We read the Lady of the Lake aloud,” and she herself is reading “Ivanhoe, one of the Waverley novels.”
There is no proof, however, that any part of her Utopia was sketched after this tour, and a great part of it was certainly written before.
On the whole, perhaps, the most remarkable thing in connection with “Sackermena and her Isles” is the staying power shown by the writer in developing her idea, and her determination to get everything down on paper. In this more than in anything else the child was father of the man.
S. J.-B. was a born chronicler.
As regards Sackermena, the idea certainly afforded no lack of scope and variety. What with drawing maps, writing poetry, framing laws, adding up the totals of her army and reserves, devising for the soldiery “A dark red long coat with silver falcons, and thick leather buskins studden with iron,” and many another guise equally picturesque,—she certainly did not suffer from monotony in her self-chosen occupation. And the above examples by no means exhaust its possibilities. On a stray slip of paper we come upon a formal complaint from a “justice,” who, “passing in disguise through Pe,” was supplied with a loaf deficient in weight; and a tiny booklet (laboriously stitched together by the writer’s hot little hands) has the following title page:
THE SACKERMENEE’S
POCKET BOOK
Containing many Little Accounts
of their Customs