by Lucy Mangan
Stay-at-home types can take comfort in Meg’s story. She is the eldest sister and therefore Terribly Sensible, except for one never-to-be-forgotten chapter when she throws caution and New England Puritanism to the wind and gets her shoulders out for the lads at a ball. An evening of wild champagne-sipping and fan-waving are enough fun for one lifetime, however, and she is then able to settle down happily with John Brooke and a linen cupboard.
I had and still have a lot of time for Meg. I too would discover once adolescence hit in a few years’ time that one evening’s excitement was enough and retire from the fray thereafter. In my case, it was not at a ball but a grimy nightclub in New Cross, south-east London, called the Venue. It was too loud to talk and there was nowhere to sit except for the filthy floor – you were supposed to be up and dancing, of course, but I mimed a resounding ‘No’ to that – and a single drink cost twice what I was earning an hour at the local supermarket and everything was awful. I sat – gingerly – in a corner and thought fondly of linen cupboards until it was time to go home.
For readers of a less hermitic stripe there’s Amy – an admirably proto-modern girl who has to be beaten over the head with the family copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress before she can remember to pretend that people are more important than money and that her Aunt March’s rosary is not, in fact, simply a statement necklace. Attagirl.
Romantics can have Beth, and even from my very first reading were welcome to her. I was profoundly perplexed when a family friend saw what I was reading and asked if I had cried at her deathbed scene. It had not even occurred to me to mourn the passing of such a relentlessly angelic, bloodless nothing – a lack of feeling the years have done nothing since to remedy.
Tomboys of course have – once you’ve made allowances for various nineteenth-century handicaps – a glorious heroine in Jo. From her they learn that they can make money in unfeminine ways such as writing (as long as they a) spend their hard-earned cash on sending careworn Marmee to the seaside and b) eventually stop it to marry ancient German men with beards and open orphanages for boys in none-too-subtle exercises in wish-fulfilment).
Writers-to-be love Jo perhaps even more passionately. She was the character Louisa May based most directly on herself (the others were idealised portraits of her own sisters and parents) and her longing to write and the fulfilment she finds in doing so provide the most vivid moments in an already vivid book. Her description of Jo ‘falling into a vortex’ and giving herself up to ‘scribbling’ in the attic for as long as a story held her thrilled me to the marrow. It was with great sadness I learned years later that the writing of Little Women itself rarely gave the author that vertiginous feeling of exhilaration. She enjoyed writing the gothic romances that had made her name (her first was published in 1854) and the more lurid tales she published pseudonymously in the 1860s because they offered her an escape from what was, by and large, quite a hardscrabble and miserable life. But Little Women was based on her real life and written at the behest of others; her father thought there should be more good, plain, morally uplifting stories for boys and girls, and her publishers wanted ‘a girls’ book’ from her – so she found it more of a slog. As she put it in her diary, ‘I plod away, though I don’t enjoy this sort of thing. Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters; but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it.’
Her publisher doubted it too when she sent him the first dozen chapters – he found them ‘dull’. But by the time the first proof of the whole book was done, both he and the author were more impressed. ‘It reads better than I expected,’ Louisa’s diary records. ‘Not a bit sensational, but simple and true, for we really lived most of it; and if it succeeds that will be the reason of it … Some girls who have read the manuscript saying it is “splendid”! As it is for them, they are the best critics, so I should be satisfied.’
Those early readers were an accurate bellwether. Little Women was an instant bestseller and has been loved by generations of (mostly) girls ever since.fn1 The March sisters’ adventures remain as fresh and moreish as the muffins that greet them when they wake on Christmas Day, and as satisfying. Their little universe is a well-ordered one. Sins are always expiated. Sacrifice is always rewarded (with spiritual growth, not money or extra limes or anything – that would kinda negate the whole concept) and so is kindness. Let someone use your neglected piano and a pair of bespoke embroidered slippers will soon be yours. Justice is always done – at least according to the 1868 lights of a woman working through some fairly major Daddy-’n’-Transcendental-theology issues. I was fine with Beth going to her reward but I thought Jo letting Amy plunge through the ice and nearly drown was entirely fair compensation for Amy throwing her manuscript on the fire. No need for Jo to sob for forgiveness afterwards. She would have been well within her rights to let her drown, I thought, and I stand – as the anxious guardian of my own manuscript ’ere – even more firmly by this today.
I also remain undecided about the whole Jo/Laurie/Amy/Professor Bhaer imbroglio. Between the publication of the first part of Little Women and the publication a year later in 1869 of the second – known as Good Wives – readers begged Alcott to have Jo marry rich boy-next-door Laurie, who befriends the whole family but Jo in particular.
They were out of luck. This was, after all, a woman who once lauded spinsterhood in an article entitled ‘Happy Women’ on the grounds that ‘liberty is a better husband than love to many of us’, which is nineteenth-century feminist speak for ‘Have you SEEN the state of most of them? JESUS.’
Her diary entry for 1 November reads: ‘Began the second part of “Little Women” … Girls write to ask who the little women marry, as if that was the only end and aim of a woman’s life. I won’t marry Jo to Laurie to please anyone.’
Perhaps if the pressure from her public and her publisher hadn’t been quite so great she would have let Jo go unmarried entirely. As it was, she at least resisted the easy option and invented the professor instead. He has no real ancestor in (juvenile) fiction – he was created especially for Jo. She meets the Berliner – ‘neither rich nor great, young nor handsome, in no respect what is called fascinating, imposing, or brilliant, and yet he was as attractive as a genial fire, and people seemed to gather about him as naturally as about a warm hearth’ – after she has turned down Laurie’s proposal of marriage and gone to New York City to write and teach. They form a friendship that deepens gradually and diffidently into love. They marry and once Aunt March dies, turn her huge home and grounds into a boys’ orphanage. Yes, there are shades of Louisa’s father in idealised form in there – a teacher who sticks at it, an older bearded man who puts his orphanage-wide family and his wife before everything and can be relied on at all times – but he is right for her. And more of a man than Laurie will ever be, I’m telling you.
Look, I liked Laurie, okay. He was fine. He just … well, he wasn’t much, was he? He was too light and bright – when he wasn’t being spoiled and sulky – for Jo. He was a much better fit for Amy. They could waft around Europe insubstantially together. Jo needed something more stolid altogether. So yes, I’m a Bhaerite. I rate the prof.
I have had many arguments about this over the years. Not as numerous as those I’ve had about Anne of Green Gables (sickening? Or charming beyond measure? We will get to this), but still – many.
Those not on Team Bhaer find him smug, patronising and – as a friend once shrieked at me in a moment of particularly high emotion – ‘He kills her dreams!’ because she ends up running a school at which he can teach, instead of carrying on writing for a living. I still do not see it. I think he’s wonderful. And she wants to run that school. She’s just lucky she fell in love with a man who can also teach. It’s all good.
Whatever your view of particular events or characters in the book, taken all together what Little Women does give the reader is a picture of four different girls (and a Marmee) working to cultivate, subdue and repress various aspects of themselves to fit a
preordained model of femininity. Which leads you to the very dimmest beginnings of a shred of a scintilla of awareness that there is a model. And that that’s … that’s a bit mental.
Elizabeth Janeway wrote in a New York Times book review in 1968 that ‘Little Women was written by a secret rebel against the order of the world and woman’s place in it, and all the girls who ever read it know it.’ It gave me another link in a chain of thought I was not quite consciously developing. I tucked the Marches in beside Ramona and felt able to set my face a little more firmly against ‘twirly’ girls at school, who – at eight-going-on-nine were growing twirlier by the bloody day.
Classics
Little Women had another welcome effect too – it introduced me to the hitherto unknown world of The Classic.
I wanted to know why this book had had so much effort put into it. The red leather! The gilding! The very, very thin, very, very white paper! The introduction and biography! It seemed to fall under the heading of material rather than philosophical conundrums, so instead of running to my usual fount of book-wisdom, I presented it to my own Marmee for consideration.
It was an old book, she explained. But Grandma had only just given it to me, I pointed out. No, not in that sense, she said. In the sense that it had been written a long time ago and been printed and reprinted ever since because people kept wanting to read it. It was considered A Classic. There were lots of them – books that had endured and which everyone had either read or at least heard so much about that they had absorbed the essence of them almost by osmosis.
What was osmosis? I asked. But she had run out of time for explanations – I think the house needed repointing before our swimming lesson or something – so I spoke to empty air.
No matter. The next time Dad took me to Dillons in Bromley, I scanned the shelves until I found the title Little Women. It was part of a series which all had similar covers – the Puffin Classics livery. Over the next few months Dad would add many volumes to my shelf at home. I weeded out first anything too adventurous (Treasure Island, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Coral Island and so on) and second, all the animal stories.
I had an early, strict and enduring rule against books in which animals – especially talking animals – were the predominant feature. Thus to the oblivion to which I had already consigned Beatrix Potter, Winnie the Pooh, the inhabitants of Brambly Hedge, Rabbits Peter and Brer and Tales of Farthing Wood I now added, with an equal lack of compunction, the likes of the Just So Stories and The Wind in the Willows. What an idiot. I do not know where or when this mindless prejudice was formed, but in the coming years it would also set me against classics like Tarka the Otter and Ring of Bright Water, and the Whitbread Award-winning The Song of Pentecost and countless less famous others. What. An. Idiot.
Never mind. What’s done is done, and even after a purge of fur and feathers, there was still a fair portion of the canon to devour. I set to work with a will.
The canon, for children, generally means books written between (roughly) the late Victorian era and the end of the Edwardian age; products of what’s traditionally been considered the golden age of children’s literature, bookended by Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Winnie the Pooh (1920). Any later and you’re into upstart, Modern Classics territory. Any earlier and you’re back in moral-tale territory and a world too different for its stories to have endured.
But by the middle of the century, as we have noted, entertainment had largely supplanted education as the driving force in children’s books. Most of the categories and genres – including adventure, school and family stories – into which children’s books still fall today had been established, and the machinery for producing, bountifully illustrating and distributing writers’ wares was becoming ever more smooth and sophisticated. Authors could make decent livings writing for children, which attracted more and more contributors – good and bad – to the field. Still, they hadn’t quite managed to shuck off the last vestige of the moral tale – the tendency to talk as an adult, slightly down to children. A faintly pedagogic tone and a teacherly distance remained between the author and his or her reader.
And then came Alice.
7
Wonderlands
Many a day we rowed together on that quiet stream – the three little maidens and I – and many a fairy tale had been extemporised for their benefit … yet none of these tales got written down: they lived and died, like summer midges, each in its own golden afternoon until there came a day when, as it chanced, one of my little listeners petitioned that the tale might be written out for her … In a desperate attempt to strike out some new line in fairy lore, I had sent my heroine straight down a rabbit hole, to begin with, without the least idea what was going to happen afterwards.
THE QUIET STREAM is the Thames in 1860-something, the tale teller is the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and the petitioning maiden is Alice Liddell. The tale itself became known as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which Dodgson – not wishing to damage his scholarly reputation as a mathematician at Oxford – published under the nom de plume Lewis Carroll.
I did not read it when I was a child, though it has been so thoroughly embedded in the national psyche since it first sold out on publication that for years I believed I had (that of course being Alan Bennett’s famous definition of a classic – a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have). It wasn’t until I started reading it to Alexander last yearfn1 that although I knew about the white rabbit, the bottle labelled ‘DRINK ME’, the cake labelled ‘EAT ME’, the growing and the shrinking, the encounters with the hookah-smoking caterpillar, Cheshire cat and its grin, the Mad Hatter, tea parties and croquet with the Queen of Hearts with flamingos for mallets and hedgehogs for balls and the frankly rigged trial of the Knave of Hearts who stole some tarts, I hadn’t actually experienced them first-hand. I had just absorbed the basics through the ether.
And what I hadn’t appreciated from a distance was the very thing that makes Alice such a landmark in children’s literary history – the directness of Carroll’s voice; the alternating stoicism and stroppiness of his protagonist (who completely steps outside the hitherto unbroken tradition of polite, delicate, submissive heroines) as she navigates her way through this world of irrational creatures, mad royals and untrustworthy labels on attractive foodstuffs; the all-pervading sense of a writer at one with his child-self instead of writing down to a half-remembered state; the sheer modernity of it all.
Also – it’s an absolute rush. A delicious, borderline hallucinatory, confection. Alice is a riot of nonsense, parodies, wordplay, twisted and dreamlike (il)logic, invention and imagination tumbling over each other in the excitement. There is something in there for everyone. I like the semantic shenanigans (the Mouse giving a very dry lecture on William the Conqueror to restore those who have been soaked by Alice’s gigantic tears pleases me most), while Alexander is as yet more entranced by the cat that leaves its grin behind. I do wonder what the mother of a more mathematically inclined friend of mine thought when her son’s interest snagged on the EAT ME and DRINK ME scenes because, he recalls delightedly now, ‘they introduced me to the concept of absolute scale!’ She was probably used to operating at a certain level of bewilderment by then.
It reads completely differently from everything that came before it. There is no question that it is meant purely to entertain and to entertain unstoppably – a stream of nonsense (in the best possible sense) designed to carry every reader away. Way to inaugurate a golden age, Mr C! Thanks!
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Although I missed out on Alice, my actual introduction to the Edwardian classics was an absolute belter. The writer and critic Marghanita Laski once said that she had loved it because it was ‘a book for introspective town children’. As one of that happy, if pallid, breed I can confirm that she was absolutely right. It was The Secret Garden, and it had absolutely everything you could possibly want in a story. An admirably sour-faced orphan – Mary Lennox, w
hose parents die when cholera sweeps through their home in India. A country house – Misselthwaite Manor, to which Mary is sent to live with her even more sour-faced uncle who is still mourning the death of his wife. An invalid boy – her cousin Colin, who has a non-specific spinal problem and is the source of the mournful cries that have been keeping Mary up at night and improving her temper not at all. A SECRET GARDEN – the key to which Mary discovers as she begins to warm to and explore Misselthwaite Manor. And finally a proto-sexgod called Dickon, brother of the manor’s friendly maid Martha Sowerby, who knows all about gardening and how to roast eggs in a tree hollow. Together in the peaceful privacy of the garden they bring hope, Mary’s tender side and Colin’s legs back to life. Who could ask for anything more?
Judging by its relative lack of success on publication, the answer seemed to be – quite a lot of people. Little Lord Fauntleroy, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s first children’s story (about Cedric Errol, a poor little boy in New York who turns out to be an English earl – a rags-to-riches story that echoed Frances’ own and was a plot she used many times in her adult and children’s fiction), had been a critical and commercial triumph. Adults, in particular, loved it and a generation of young boys were forced into velvet suits, lace collars and curl papers until their fond mamas emerged from their collective passion to ape the sartorial fashions of the eponymous hero. The mobcapped shades of Kate Greenaway’s generation must have hovered round and laughed. The little lord himself, to be fair, is far less nauseating in the book than in the various screen adaptations that have come to dominate our memories of him – but the clothes … the clothes were always terrible. They – and the accompanying long, curled hairstyles – were based on those Hodgson Burnett herself created for her own two sons. All great women have their blind spots.