Christmas Stories: Christmas, A Happy Time; A Tale, Calculated for the Amusement and Instruction of Young Persons

Christmas, A Happy Time, by Alicia Catherine Mant (or, as the title page says, Miss Mant) is a typical children’s story of the 1830s, which means that nothing happens. Well, a dog dies, principally so that Miss Mant can make it clear just how important it is for children to obey their parents. Not that the children in this story do disobey their parents. It’s just — I really can’t see any point to this story. It’s not amusing, it’s not instructive, and it’s not Christmassy.

My Father’s Dragon…

…is now available on Project Gutenberg.

Actually, it may have already been there–the “Recently Posted or Updated EBooks” feed doesn’t actually specify which is which. I think it’s new, although UPenn’s Celebration of Women Writers has had a version up for a while.

Any excuse to reread it, though, and a Gutenberg eBook is a pretty good excuse. It’s fully illustrated, and, well, completely wonderful in every way. Read it. Find a kid to read it to. Pull out your paperback copy — I have two — and smile at it, because you just can’t help it. Read the sequels. Be happy.

The Poor Little Rich Girl

I didn’t really like The Poor Little Rich Girl, by Eleanor Gates. I thought the first part was sort of good: Gwendolyn, the title character barely sees her wealthy parents, and her governess, her nurse, and the footman are sort of in league against her–they threaten her, take advantage of their position, and conspire to keep her from telling her mother and father how unhappy she is. It’s kind of intense, and a little bit difficult to read, because you really get a sense of Gwendolyn’s frustration and unhappiness.

Books I have neglected to post about since finishing The Girl From Hollywood

I keep wanting to do a post about Edgar Rice Burroughs’ book The Girl from Hollywood, and how an absolutely appalling series of coincidences gets three different women involved with an evil movie director named, if I recall correctly, Wilson Crumb. One gets addicted to cocaine and becomes a drug dealer (although he cannot get her to sleep with him);another gets addicted to cocaine, becomes his mistress, and dies of pnuemonia after he hits her; and one, after semi-successfully fending off his advances, shoots herself. The two drug-addicted ones are in love with the same young man, who lives on a ranch modeled after Burroughs’ own, and the attempted suicide is his sister. His name is Custer, and he spends a while in jail for murder. It’s all pretty miserable. If I had no interest in reading the Tarzan books before, I really don’t now.

Anyway: things I have read since The Girl From Hollywood, and liked better:

The Galloping Ghost

The Galloping Ghost is the second book I’ve read by Roy Judson Snell. The first was The Blue Envelope, which was an adventure for girls set in Alaska. I thought it was okay, but I questioned Snell’s choice of title: the blue envelope is largely irrelevant.

Can I say he’s got a problem with irrelevant titles after only two books? Because the ghost of the title is just a deus ex machina that occasionally drops by to give the detectives a clue to the mystery, and he’s not even as helpful as the detectives’ boy assistant Johnny, who basically provides the solution to the mystery by accidentally stumbling on clues near the local florist at every opportunity. His luck is so good that the book would only be half as long as it is now if he didn’t keep withholding information for no apparent reason.

The Motor Car Dumpy Book

“These are the kind of clothes you wear when you go moting if you are a man.”

“These are the kind of clothes you wear when you go moting if you are a woman. “

“This is the magistrate who fines you £20 if you have been driving too fast. It is best not to drive too fast.”

The Motor Car Dumpy Book, by T.W.H. Crosland

Just David

Last week I was on an Eleanor Porter kick. I’d never realized how many books she wrote that weren’t, you know, Pollyanna. Her Wikipedia entry says she wrote mostly children’s lit, but I’m not sure how much I trust her Wikipedia entry, seeing as it calls the three Miss Billy books children’s lit (questionable) and Just David a novel for adults (untrue). I have no idea whether it’s right about the rest of her books, since those are the four I’ve just read.

Just David came first, and I think I’d have been able to tell that it was by the author of Pollyanna even if I hadn’t already known. Either that or I would have thought an unknown author was just copying Eleanor Porter.

Marjorie in Command

A few weeks ago I found Marjorie in Command at a tiny used book store where all hardcovers were a dollar each and paperbacks were fifty cents. (I also got a paperback of Paul Murray Kendall’s Richard III, and that’s part of why I haven’t been updating lately — it figures that I would use the time not taken up by my history classes to read a history book.) It’s by Carolyn Wells, and although I would have been happier to find a Patty Fairfield book, this is pretty good, too.

The Blue Envelope

I haven’t updated much lately because I’m taking a couple of classes up at Columbia and they provide me with lots of reading. I haven’t had much time to read things for fun, let alone write about them. But there’s always more time for reading than writing, and I’ve built up a backlog of books (which sounds nicely alliterative, don’t you think?).

One of them is The Blue Envelope, by Roy J. Snell. I have a hard time describing this book. It wasn’t at all what I expected from the title, or even what I expected after reading the introduction. Actually, it wasn’t what I expected after having read half the book, which was, you know, somewhat disconcerting.

Adrift in New York, or Tom and Florence Braving the World

Ah, Horatio Alger, Jr. If I have an area of expertise, he’s it. A few of his books were the beginning of what is now a pretty large collection of old children’s novels, and I bought my tenth Alger yesterday. It’s called Adrift in New York, and it’s exactly as ridiculous as I’ve come to expect Alger’s books to be.

You’ve probably heard of Alger in connection with the “Alger Myth”: the idea that anyone can make money and move up the social scale as long as they’re willing to work hard. I don’t like the Alger Myth. Or, at least, I know that it doesn’t really hold true in his books. My friend Sam expresses it much better in his description of Mark the Matchboy: through hard work and good luck, you can become the grandson of a rich man.

Adrift in New York is something like that.