My other favorite storybooks were about English children. “A Sea Change,” “A York and a Lancaster Rose,” “The Story of a Short Life,” “Merrie England” were among those I read again and again. As for “The Prince and the Pauper,” it would take a volume larger than this one if I were to try to tell you how I felt about that beautiful story.
One of the queer things about grown-ups which boys and girls do not often suspect is that, while we seem so different from you, with our grey heads and bald heads and glasses, our shortness of breath when we run for the train, our strange preference for an easy-chair and a book by the fire rather than the chance to dance all night or to skate all day, inside of us there is something that never grows up. And because a part of us always stays “boy” or “girl,” what we particularly loved when we were children we keep on particularly loving as long as we live.
So, when I am hunting for books for the children’s room shelves of our public libraries, although I try to find those on every kind of interesting subject—because reading in ruts is bad for any one, young or old—I confess to keen delight when I come upon first-rate stories of the sort that were my favorites when I was a girl.
A few years ago an old Brooklyn library was preparing to move from its ancient quarters into a spick-and-span new building. Going over the dusty shelves one day, I found a shabby little book in faded red covers with funny, old-fashioned pictures among the yellowed pages. The title of the book at once caught my fancy, “Memoirs of a London Doll.”
In two seconds I was miles and miles away from the dusty shelves of the prosaic library on the clattering, commonplace Brooklyn street. I was up in the Sprats’ garret room, under the eaves of the dingy tenement on the dusky London street where the Sprat family, father, mother, and three children, ate and slept and worked at their trade of making jointed, wooden dolls. I followed with absorbed interest the fortunes of what must have been the most remarkable doll ever turned out by the Sprats, the one whose first little mother named her “Maria Poppet.”
Maria Poppet was a doll of character who kept her eyes open and who never neglected an opportunity to learn from every event of her varied life; who was not puffed up by association with rank and wealth nor cast down by harrowing experiences; who valued loving hearts above jewels and titles and the glitter and show of fashion.
Maria Poppet had fine gifts as a story-teller too. If she had been required by one of her little mothers’ governesses to write a composition, the task would have offered no difficulties to her. What she saw in the London of nearly a hundred years ago she makes us see—the Twelfth-night customs, the Lord Mayor’s Show, Punch and Judy, the Christmas Pantomime, the Zoo, the life of little Lady Flora, waited upon by governess and maids and powdered footmen, and the lives of the little milliner girls, driven by cruel Aunt Sharpshins from six o’clock in the morning until eight o’clock at night.
How delightfully puzzling are some of the quaint old words Maria Poppet uses. She speaks of the “turbans” worn by the ladies of her day. Did you think turbans belonged to “Arabian Nights” characters only? Maria wore “a frock and trousers” and “stays”—or no, she wore “a small under-bodice of white jean instead of stays”; her frock was made of “lemon-colored merino”; her little mother pattered about the room in “list” shoes. And Maria’s mothers did not go to the dry-goods store nor the grocer’s, nor did they buy pies at the baker’s. They visited the “draper’s” and the “green-grocer’s” and bought “raspberry tarts” at the “pastry-cook’s.” And what do you suppose a “teetotum” is? And a “tinkerum”? If you have a great-grandmother perhaps she can tell you; and she may sing, as did my grandmother, the quaint old tunes, “They’re all nodding” and “Cherry ripe” and others which Maria heard the London street organ play.
Sometimes boys and girls look rather scornfully upon old-fashioned things. They think that nothing which is not “up to date” can possibly be as fine as modern shows. Well, I, for one, never saw a Fifth Avenue window display—and I love to gaze into Fifth Avenue shops—more dazzling than the pastry-cook’s window on Twelfth-night; nor a more gorgeous parade than the Lord Mayor’s; nor a play more enchanting than the New Grand Christmas Pantomime which the London Doll saw at Drury-Lane Theatre in the “old-fashioned” days of the story. And I do not believe that any American child, visiting one of our enormous, bewildering toy departments at Christmas time, sees treasures more truly satisfying than Lady Flora found in the London toyshops years and years ago.
You will not wonder that when I finished reading Maria Poppet’s most entertaining “Memoirs” I was eager to find copies of her story to place in all our Brooklyn children’s libraries. I searched the shops in vain. The little book had been “out of print” for many years, the book-trade people reported.