Category Archives: Children Then

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Angel mothers of fiction

  Sunday 10th May 2015 ,
Cedric says goodbye to his poor mother, who nobly gives him up so that he can have the advantage of being brought up as a Lord by his grandfather

Cedric says goodbye to his mother, who nobly gives him up so that he can have the advantage of being brought up as a Lord by his grandfather, the Earl. 

As a child, I didn’t get along well with my mother, who was overwhelmed with caring for lots of children, including one with special needs, mostly alone. I used to take refuge with book mothers, who always seemed angelic. Little Lord Fauntleroy (who by the way is an American! Did you know that?) calls his mother Dearest, which is enough to make most modern children gag; however, it appealed to Victorian mothers so much that quite a few actually dressed their boys like this:

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A child in the 1888 theatrical version of Little Lord Fauntleroy

Most of those Victorian angel mothers, I now know, had servants. They never had to wash dishes, go to the grocery store, change diapers or stand over a hot stove. Much easier for your child to adore you when it sees you in the drawing room for an hour or two a day!

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The real Alice

  Wednesday 8th April 2015 ,
The real Alice Liddell at age 7

The real Alice Liddell, age 7

This year is the 150th anniversary of the publication of Alice in Wonderland. I read it as a child and enjoyed it, but it is way more fun to read as an adult. It’s full of puns and in-jokes and references that go over the head of a child. We miss a lot of the jokes ourselves because we’re so removed from a time when children had to memorize poems like this:

How doth the little busy bee
Improve each shining hour,
And gather honey all the day
From every opening flower…

In works of labor or of skill,
I would be busy too;
For Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do.

For me, the only illustrations are the original, Tenniel ones. Did you know the artist put himself in the book as the White Knight? And there are many other visual jokes. Tenniel worked with Lewis Carroll on the illustrations– Carroll had done some himself, which are interesting to compare with the ones we are used to.

Mary Hilton Badcock, possibly the model for Tenniel's idea of Alice.

Mary Hilton Badcock, probably the model for Tenniel’s idea of Alice.

Lewis Carroll, in real life, was a mathematics lecturer at Oxford, and the real Alice’s father was dean of Christ Church College, far above him on the university ladder. But the dean’s children loved him and one day he took three of them out for a row and little Alice, then seven, demanded a story “with nonsense in it.” This was the origin of Alice in Wonderland.

Although it is clear that Charles Dodgson liked little girls too much– yet we are in Victorian times here, no actual evidence shows bad behavior on his part toward Alice, and although Alice’s parents put a stop to his visiting their children for reasons Alice never found out (a BBC documentary seems to show that any parent would have), she herself had the friendliest memory of him till the end of her life, and later wrote that she was sad for years that he had stopped coming. As an adult, they corresponded once or twice and I recall his saying that Alice was the politest child he ever met. You can see an echo of this all throughout Alice in Wonderland, when Alice is polite to caterpillars, dormice, mad hatters, pigs, and even the Queen of Hearts, who wants to cut off her head.

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Freedom for children

  Saturday 14th March 2015 , ,
When I was 12, my family lived at the bottom of this this mountain.

When I was 12, my family lived at the bottom of this mountain.

As a girl, I was a bookworm, but we lived in a beautiful part of upstate New York and from time to time I would venture outside to explore, going deep into woods, up mountain streams, across frozen ponds. Once I even fell into a drift of powder snow over my head and literally had to swim out. I don’t remember my parents ever particularly worrying about my siblings and me. Of course, there were seven of us.

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My father grew up in Malden, a then all-Irish town just north of Boston. When he was about ten, he and his best friend were allowed to bicycle to Thoreau’s Walden Pond (red arrow, above), ten miles away as the crow flies, but 23 miles by road, and spend the night there camping out. They were city kids and had no idea how to camp. They built a fire under a can of beans and it exploded!

Children nowadays, though, don’t seem to get as much freedom to roam. A British study chronicled the extent of the crippling of children’s freedom and reported that four out of five children had basically no contact with nature.

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In contrast, read this account of a river adventure. It’s a letter to Harper’s Young People, a children’s magazine, published on August 31, 1880.

The Mississippi River at Moline

The Mississippi River at Moline

Moline, Illinois
I live on the Mississippi River, which is over a mile wide here. I am thirteen years old, and a reader of Young People. I think “The Moral Pirates” is the best story of all.
Two of my companions, Frank and Rob, had read the story; so we made up our minds that instead of cruising we would camp out for a week. Frank’s father owned a large row-boat, which he said we might take, and I took my tent and dog. We laid in enough provisions to last a month.
So after a good deal of trouble we got started. We landed about three miles from here, on the other side of the river. It was a splendid place to camp. The ground was sandy, and was hemmed in by trees. The first night passed well enough. The next morning Frank and I rowed across the river for milk. As we were nearing camp on our way back, a large steamboat nearly ran us down. The swell nearly capsized us, and as it was, we got pretty wet.
We concluded that we could not stand that sort of thing, and made up our minds to start for home the next day, where we arrived to be well laughed at.

I’m sure life is safer for children now, but I think we’ve lost something, don’t you?