From the time she was six until she was thirteen she wore every day an iron collar around her neck, and a backboard strapped tightly over her shoulders. This was to make her perfectly straight. Perhaps you may have seen here and there a very stately old lady who never was known to lean back in her chair, but who always held herself as erect as a soldier on duty. If so, she was taught, you may be sure, to carry herself in that way when she was a little girl.
Poor Mary's iron collar was put on in the morning, and was not taken off until dark, and, worse than that, she says: "I generally did all my lessons standing in stocks, with the collar around my neck. I never sat on a chair in my mother's presence."
Her brother and herself were great readers, but you can count on the fingers of one hand all the books they had to read. Robinson Crusoe, two sets of Fairy Tales, The Little Female Academy, and Æsop's Fables formed the entire juvenile library. They used to take Robinson Crusoe, and seat themselves at the bottom of the wide staircase, the two heads bent over the page together. Whenever they turned a leaf, they ascended a step, until they reached the top, and then they began to go down again.
Little Marten was not very persevering with his Latin, so, although it was not then the fashion for girls, Mary's mother decided that she should begin the study in order to encourage him. The sister soon distanced the brother, and before she was twelve her regular task of a morning was fifty lines of Virgil, translated as she stood in the stocks.
You will ask what sort of dress this little girl was allowed to wear one hundred years ago. In summer she had cambric, and in winter, linsey-woolsey or stuff gowns, with a simple white muslin for best. Her mother always insisted on a pinafore, which was a great loose apron worn over everything else, and enveloping her from head to feet.
It is quite refreshing to find that neither the backboard nor the Latin took from the child a love of play and of dolls. Her special pet was a huge wooden doll, which she carried to the woods with her, tied by a string to her waist, after the grown people had decided that she was too big to care for dolls. A friend one day presented her with a fine gauze cap, and this was the only ornament she ever possessed as a child.
I think the little girls who compare 1882 with 1782 must be thankful they were not born in the last century. I know that I am. Yet little Mary Butt was a very happy child, spending, when permitted, hours of great delight in the woods and groves, and listening eagerly to the talk of the learned and travelled visitors who came to Stanford Rectory.
