My poor sad readers. My sympathies to all of you and the loss that
you must have felt, because I read Abbie Farwell Brown's The
Christmas Angel and forgot to
review it in my last blog. How did none of you clamor to ask me my
thoughts and opinions on this middling tale of holiday orphans?
Maybe you knew already. Maybe you already read The
Christmas Angel and you sadly
shake your head and wonder what kind of a derisive, vulgar old maid I
will turn out to be every time I utter a "fiddlesticks."
That's Miss Terry's swear word.
Miss Terry is spending Christmas
evening sorting through a box of the quaint old toys that she and her
brother used to play with when they were children, and when I say
sorting, I mean burning them in the fireplace. Burning her childhood
memories becomes tedious and Miss Terry devises an experiment: She
will put each toy on the sidewalk and watch what happens to it. She
appears to be in New York circa 1910 so there's ample foot traffic:
"... a good many people passing, but they seemed too preoccupied
to glance down at the sidewalk. They were nearly all hurrying in one
direction. Some were running in the middle of the street. 'They
are in a great hurry,' sniffed Miss Terry disdainfully. 'One would
think they had something really important on hand. I suppose they are
going to hear the singing. Fiddlestick!'"
Miss Terry is, of course, hiding behind
the curtains waiting for someone to notice her Jack-in-the-box.
Finally, two Jewish boys pick it up and beginning brawling for the
owning of it. Miss Terry, thoroughly disgusted with humanity, sets
out a manky Noah's ark. It's soon spotted by a poor mother with two
ragged children they make to grab it, but a rich woman in a fur coat
swoops it up and won't let the poor family have it. A Canton flannel
dog, the Flanton dog, is seized by a child who is so excited he runs
into the road and gets hit by a car, and Miss Terry's old doll is
picked up by a little girl who perceives it's accidentally been left
on the doorstep by its owner and that she, the little girl is
stealing it. She steals it anyway. Miss Terry, her suspicions
confirmed, makes to burn the Christmas angel that used to sit atop
the Christmas tree when she and Tom were little. She and Tom don't
talk anymore because he was a Christmas jerk once upon a time but he
wrote her a letter last week... She sets the angel on the
mantelpiece and everything goes wuzzy. In a Dickensian way, the
Christmas angel speaks to her and shows her what has happened to all
her toys. The Jewish boys fought over Jack because they both wanted
the honor of presenting it to a little invalid child; the rich
woman's child died recently and she had a temporary fit of hating all
surviving children but repented and gave the poor family a Christmas
dinner; the car accident had the double effect of humanizing the
driver and helping the poor child and his mother financially; and the
little girl wrestled with her conscience and decided to bring her
found doll back to its own little girl, Miss Angelina Terry, as the
tag on its neck said, the very next day. Her parents were dead, you
see, so she had nothing nice of her own and wanted a doll so badly,
although this wasn't hers to keep.
"'Will she bring it back?' asked
Miss Terry eagerly, when once more she found herself under the gaze
of the Christmas Angel. He nodded brightly.
'To-morrow morning you will see,"
he said. "It will prove that all I have shown you is really
true.'"
In anticipation, Miss Terry orders a
fine Christmas dinner, reconciles with Tom, adopts the girl, and
never says "fiddlestick" again. There's nothing like a
sweet Christmas story with orphans as presents. Reading stories like
this, you can see where the modern "orphan crisis" myth has
its origins. Pity, by 1910 advances in public health, a consistent
policy of keeping bastard babies with their mothers, and rising wages
already had cut the number of darling orphans wandering the streets,
although Charles Loring Brace's orphan train continued running 'til
1929 in the last decades he was mostly shipping babies. Aside from
fantastical elements, A Christmas Angel
is sweet and could be read at Christmas next year.
On
another topic entirely, 1916 and All That
isn't entirely all that. "A history from back then until right
now," by C.M. Boylan, it fits right on the bookshelf between
other tomes of historical parody like 1066 and All That and
America: The Book, but
1916 isn't all that
funny, not even the parts about the potato famine.
Two
books that also aren't worth mentioning at great length are The
Story of My Childhood by Clara
Barton and Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days by
Annie L. Burton. I listened to these both on Librivox while I was
doing Christmas iStore. Ms. Barton wrote her memoirs of childhood as
an elderly woman after schoolchildren wrote to her persistently
asking her about her younger days. Mrs. Burton wrote her memoirs
while attending a night school in Boston. Ms. Barton's stories are
all about growing up as the oops child of a prosperous New England
farm family and being taught everything by four siblings who were
already teenage schoolteachers. Mrs. Burton had worse origins,
obviously. She still had time to roughhouse in the woods and poke at
interesting things with sticks, but she didn't have any food. All
the slaves left the plantation during the Civil War, including Mrs.
Burton's mother, who went to set up a better life for her children,
and Mrs. Burton and her siblings remained in the big house for a year
until her mother came back for them. Ms. Barton attended the Civil
War and says she would rather face the cannons at Antietam again than
speak at public meeting. Mrs. Burton tells about the first night in
her mother's cabin with a small hoe cake to divide between mother, a
brother and a sister, and some other children, when a white woman and
her children knocked cautiously at the door and asked if they could
stay the night, because they are displaced by the war. Mother shares
the hoe cake and young Annie is happy when they go so she won't have
to share her food again. Meanwhile, Clara Barton's friend's horse
runs away. Mrs. Burton grows up and moves north, works a series of
jobs, and opens a couple restaurants. There's not a lot of childhood
or slavery here and the books falls to a litany of employers. Ms.
Barton's keeps the anecdotes coming. Being forbidden to ice skate,
fever, crippling shyness. In the end, one of the leading lights of
American phrenology stays at her parents' house while he's on the New
England lecture circuit and he tells Mrs. Baron, "Clara will
never stick up for herself, but she'll stick up for other people.
Get her a school." So Ms. Barton is quickly trained up as a
school teacher and rousingly successful at it. Founding the Red
Cross isn't mentioned at all. Both books are worth the two hours it
takes to listen to each of them.
I'm
still floundering about in the beginning of Discworld and I finally
got to Interesting Times
which is fabbity fab fab fab. It's one of the ones with the wizards
and I haven't gotten into those so much. It's the sequel to
Sourcery, which I
haven't read. In this one, Rincewind is requested on the
Counterweight Continent (which bears a striking resemblance to Asia)
and becomes unwillingly embroiled in a Red revolution. The title
comes from a local curse, "May you live in interesting times."
Next
up: matriculating men and multiple meanings of masculinity.
