Reading good bad books
My mom gave me a small stack of old children’s books from my grandmother’s collection. I am fairly sure they were my grandmother’s to begin with. I grew up reading this stuff. The top of the pile was Helen’s Babies, which I vaguely remembered as somehow not one of my favorites – not a book that I read over and over again. After I ripped through it this morning I got some insight as to why. It has a sort of condescending “little kids lisping and saying adorable things while being idiotically naughty” flavor to it (like the much later “Penrod”) that I didn’t like then and that still rubs me the wrong way. I enjoyed it more now than I did when I was a kid and found it funnier. What I didn’t realize is that it was written in 1876! (Contemporary with Five Little Peppers btw.) That is quite early for this kind of book and makes it more interesting to me.
I had a look at the front of the book and realized that this isn’t my grandma’s copy of Helen’s Babies, which was in terrible condition, falling apart. My mom must have bought this one or maybe I bought it years ago to give to her, knowing she loved it. The book is inscribed, “Presented to Dan Halstand, April 5th, 1925 on his 7th Birthday from Grand Mother Halstand”. I wonder if 7 year old Dan liked it for the naughtiness of the little boys, ages 5 and 3? In a sort of Joel Pepper Gee-whockety way that an older kid (like I was when I read it) would find nauseating? And did Grand Mother Halstand present it to him because she read it to her children? It could even have been a book from her own childhood!
The book’s point of view character, Uncle Harry, arrives in the country somewhere just north of New York City, as his married sister sent him a letter telling him he should go take care of her two boys for his vacation. “Just the thing!” he muses, considering his brother in law’s fine horses, cigars, books, and cellar of claret. There is a maid or children’s nurse (aka a nanny), a cook, and an Irish handyman/driver/horse caretaker running the household. Anyway, Uncle Harry quickly realized that the children he thought of as perfect angels from earlier visits, were filthy, ruin everything, cry and howl, wake him up at all hours, love to climb up on the roof and hang over cliffs, and so on. Hijinks ensue.
The “plot” is that he has a certain Regard for a lady in that town, Alice Mayton, whose mother lives there – it seems like Alice is visiting from NYC too but staying in a boarding house full of other single ladies. So there is a romantic plot that is also comical as the children ruin every social occasion or embarrassing Uncle Harry in some cringey way by revealing way too much of his Certain Regard for Alice in mixed company. He falls into the mud and is seen by a carriage of tittering boarding house ladies; the littler boy falls and get hurt and demand that he sing a particular embarrassing song while rocking him and kissing him (also in front of the boarding house ladies.)
This is pretty cool in a way because it’s about this slightly pompous young man who does much of the normal work of caring for young children. He doesn’t realize how attractive and steady and loving it makes him look to not only all the ladies but his particular crush, Alice.
I went to have a look to see what reviews or discussion I could find of the book. Unexpectedly, right at the top of the results — George Orwell mentioned it a couple of times in his essays on literature; briefly mentioned in Good Bad Books (a term he says that GK Chesterton came up with), and then explored a bit more in Riding down to Bangor. He is thinking about how as children we gather some vague idea, the most stereotypical, about other places in the world – for him, from things like boys’ adventure tales.
The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one’s mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can even survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.
You can think of how they map out gender and class in a similar way.
Orwell’s description of his boyhood concept of “America” is very funny!
He also mention so many good favorites of the genre! Rebecca of Sunnnybrook Farm and the What Katy Did books! I wish I could go back in time and get him to read Understood Betsy as well. Anyway, when he analyzes Helen’s Babies it’s really him trying to understand how social class works in the U.S. of the 1870s, in New York, post Civil War. And the morality of the book which manages to work in a pious Christian air in a less dull way than the usual books of that time – the tracts where a small child is either naughty and dies, or is super religious and pure and dies – accompanied by the most boring sermonizing ever. Instead our naughty toddlers are seen as cute and healthy and normal – their naughtiness is innocent and pure – They like the more adventurous Bible stories and insist on praying adorably before bed, not forgetting their dead baby brother.
Orwell analyzes it as compelling, readable schlock. I ended up reading through a fair number of his essays of criticism – some I had read before, like the one on PG Wodehouse, but most were new to me.
I had a look a the author of Helen’s Babies, John Habberton. He wrote the book on the advice of his wife (maybe with her input?) to tell stories of their own children and how cute they were. I saw he published more books that look like sentimental tales of parenting – for example, “The Annals of a Baby, by one of its slaves”. I’m curious to read that one!
That title makes me think of The Biography of a Baby, a more serious work of developmental psychology from 1881 by Milicent Washburn Shinn, in which she analyzes the behavior and development of her niece, Ruth, for the baby’s first two years. Very refreshing and non religious, not sentimental in the way you might expect from 1881 – contemporaneous with books like Helen’s Babies or Elsie Dinsmore. Milicent was the first woman to get a PhD from UC Berkeley. It’s a great book that I often buy for people when they are having their first baby!
Next up, I will re-read Plain Jane and Pretty Betty which I remember as one of my favorites. There is a very decrepit copy of Judith and Jane – to read it I will have to treat it like an archival copy and more or less turn the pages with tweezers and white gloves since I don’t see it online as an ebook anywhere and also don’t see any other copies for sale!
