THE VILLAGE WATCH-TOWER
by Kate Douglas Wiggin
INTRODUCTION TO THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EDITION
These days the name of Kate Douglas Wiggin is virtually unknown. But if one mentions the title “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm,” recognition (at least in America) is instant. Everyone has heard of Rebecca; her story has been in print continuously since it was first published in 1903. It is certainly Mrs. Wiggin's most famous book, and the only one of her many books that is still in print. Everything else she wrote has slipped into complete obscurity. Occasionally in an antique shop, one may still find a copy of her immensely popular seasonal book, “The Birds' Christmas Carol”, but that is about the extent of what is readily available, even second-hand.
The Birds' Christas Carol is available as our Etext #721, Nov. 1996.
In 1904, Jack London wrote (from Manchuria!) to say that Rebecca had won his heart. (“She is real,” he wrote, “she lives; she has given me many regrets, but I love her.”) Some eighty years later I happened to pick up and read “Rebecca” for the first time. The book was so thoroughly enjoyable that when I had finished it, I began at once a search for other works by the same author—especially for a sequel to “Rebecca”, which seemed practically to demand one. There was never a sequel written, but “The New Chronicles of Rebecca” was published in 1907, and contained some further chapters in the life of its heroine. I had to be satisfied with that, for the time being. Then, well over a year after jotting down Mrs. Wiggin's name on my list of authors to “purchase on sight”, I finally ran across a copy of “The Village Watch-Tower”; and it was not even a book of which I had heard. It was first published in 1895 by Houghton, who published much of her other work at the time, and apparently was never published again. Shortly thereafter I found a copy of her autobiography.
Kate Douglas Wiggin (nee Smith) was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on September 28, 1856. She was raised for the most-part in Maine, which forms a backdrop to much of her fiction. She moved to California in the 1870s, and became involved in the “free kindergarten” movement. She opened the Silver Street Free Kindergarten in San Francisco, the first free kindergarten in California, and there she worked until the late 1880s (meantime opening her own training school for teachers). Her first husband, Samuel Wiggin, died in 1889. By then famous, she returned to New York and Maine. She moved in international social circles, lecturing and giving readings from her work. In 1895 she married for the second time (to George Riggs).