Playing with the past

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Children's books, Edwardian era

I won’t lie and say that every book that we come across in the Tower is really exciting. Many of them are school textbooks or religious pamphlets that are less than exciting to look at. Once in a while though, we get something really pretty that we want to share (hence this blog!)

This week we found two books that fit this description. “The Children’s Store“ and “The Doll’s Play-House” are books and toys rolled into one. When I was little I remember having similar books were you had to cut clothes for the doll out of paper and then dress her up. These books follow the same theme but take it to another level. As well as folding out into either a model home or a shop, they also come with paper accessories for the setting. As well as being a fun and nostalgic trip down memory lane, the books also give us some important information about the time period they come from.

 The clothes the characters are wearing in the picture on the left tells us a lot about fashions in the Edwardian period. It’s easy to recognise the sophisticated lady customer and her daughter, the grocer or the butcher just from their costumes. They don’t seem to have changed much in the last hundred years but the pictures still provide us with a nice visual resource of what people were wearing in their everyday lives back in 1911.

The next few inserts show us the kinds of goods that would have been available in a general store in 1911.  These include general household goods, basic food provisions, clothes and dressmaking supplies. I always pictured people having to visit multiple shops in order to get everything they needed, unlike the convenience of the supermarkets which we have today. Based on “The Children’s Store” this isn’t true. These shops sold a wide range of goods and were likely to have been the hub of the community.

The second book is a more traditional doll’s house. Whereas the Store could be played with by all children, the doll’s house is very much geared towards little girls. This was a time when, although things were beginning to change, little girls were still expected to be able to run a household as their primary duty when they grew up. Toys like a doll’s house would have been a good way for them to practice basic skills. This books includes a sitting-room, bathroom and bedroom as well as the more traditional cut-out-and-dress doll.

This kind of focus on the day-to-day lives of people in the Edwardian period is one of the things which makes books like these so interesting to read, and to catalogue. Books like this were made to be used and cut up, which would have destroyed them for future generations. Although these books weren’t designed as anything more than a child’s plaything, they provide valuable insights into social history. This is the type of history not often recorded in books of the time and this makes the work of that the Tower Project does so important. The books also provide information to those interested in children’s books and the history of childhood which makes it even more fortunate that the library has preserved them for all these years!

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A Boy’s Book of Battleships

A Boy’s Book of Battleships by Gordon Stables, pictures by Charles Robinson.

William Gordon Stables was a Scottish-born medical doctor in the Royal Navy and a prolific author of adventure fiction, primarily for boys.

He wrote over 130 books. The bulk of his extensive works belong to the genre of boys’ adventure fiction, often with a nautical or historical setting.

One book of notable interest is A Boy’s Book of Battleships, which is a beautifully illustrated history of battleships. The illustrator, Charles Robinson, presents the vessels using both simple line, and strikingly coloured, drawings that immediately attract the eye to this book. The text is written in an easily digestible format that concisely documents the evolution of the design of battleships throughout history. The author starts by describing a humble ‘War Canoe’, used by Head Hunters in the days of Homer, and then works through to the vessels of the Roman Empire, the Viking Age and up to the modern day, including battleships used in the First World War.

The book only lightly concerns itself with technical matters such as ship construction methods and materials, and focuses largely on the cultural history, usage, means of propellant and weaponry of the battleships. Early designs of battleships were powered by oarsmen, in contrast with modern ships powered by steam and mechanical power.

[Click on images to enlarge]

Warship of Ancient Greece

 

“The Greeks of the Homeric age were one of the first of maritime nations….”

Roman Trireme 

 “Even when at her Zenith, no one would ever have thought of accusing Rome of being a great naval power, nor her sons of being sailors in the true sense of the word; but nevertheless more than once she made an attempt to rule the waves.”

Phoenician Battleship

 “The Phoenicians were great traders and they visited every port of the Mediterranean. They even crossed the Bay of Biscay and bartered with the ancient Britons on the coast of Cornwall”

Viking Ship

 

“There is hardly a boy in Britain to whom the brave doings of the ancient Vikings do not appeal.”

H.M.S. Dreadnought 

 “The Dreadnoughts are the most powerful battleships in the world. Not only are their guns terrible engines of war, but they are so well protected as to be invincible and unsinkable”

Classmark : 1910.11.10

A school at war

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School stories, World war 1

 May Wynne’s “The honour of the school” published in 1918, has one of the most curious dustjackets I’ve ever seen. Who wouldn’t want to take this book off the shelf to find out what happens? The story begins traditionally with a new girl arriving at Polgrath school, which is housed in an old manor house on the Cornish coast, providing an exciting setting of wild sea, rugged cliffs,  and smugglers’ caves. The war intrudes mainly during meals: weak tea, no sugar and “war bread” which is unpopular. But the war is only the background to the real adventures: before a fortnight has passed the girls have been trapped in a smugglers’ cave and blown up a woodshed when practising chemical experiments. After a single morning recovering with her Latin grammar the heroine manages to fall down a cliff, and is rescued by a young man in khaki, who has come from Canada “to fight the Germans”, his ship has been torpedoed and he has swum ashore. Beat that.

Still wondering why the hero has been hiding behind the panelling in the picture gallery? I wouldn’t dream of spoiling the surprise ending. Read it and find out!

Kathleen Ainslie, Shakespeare and Catherine Susan

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Children's books, Colour Illustrations, Kathleen Ainslie, Shakespeare

We get many books of Shakespeare quotations here in the Tower Project but few are as entertaining as this recent find. 

Ay! There’s the rub – Hamlet

The book “Tut-tut” by Kathleen Ainslie features famous quotes from many of Shakespeare’s plays accompanied by humorous illustrations. I’m not sure that I’ll ever look at some of these plays the same way again!

Poor, poor dumb mouths – Julius Caesar

Take, oh! Take those lips away – Measure for Measure

 

Catherine Susan and Me

After a bit of investigation I found out that the author, Katherine Ainslie, was quite a well-known illustrator in the early Twentieth century. She was most famous for producing a series of books about a little Dutch peg doll called Catherine Susan. Over the years she wrote and illustrated many adventures for the plucky little doll which became a firm favourite.

 

Getting arrested in “Votes for Catherine Susan and Me”

Some stories were surprisingly topical, such as “Votes for Catherine Susan and Me” which saw the main character and her friend joining a Suffragette march and ending up in jail! There were also some traditional stories featuring more everyday adventures and numerous calendars produced.

 

These books make me think of the story books that I used to have as a little girl where toys came magically to life, so it was really nice to find this small reminder of my childhood in the tower. I’m sure if I had been around one hundred years ago I would have been an avid reader of the ‘Catherine and Me’ books!

 

Catherine Susan’s Calendar 1911: 1911.6.63

Catherine Susan and Me in Hot Water: 1911.6.64

Votes for Catherine Susan and Me: 1911.6.65

Tut-tut: 1911.7.436

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two fauns and an ogre

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Arthur Ransome

Everybody knows Arthur Ransome wrote Swallows and Amazons; that wonderful adventure tale of children messing around with boats, which awakened a love of sailing in so many of its readers.  Most people also know he wrote another eleven books in the series, set not only in the Lakes, but also in East Anglia and around the world.

 These are books that I have read time and again, but (probably like many others) I must confess I’ve never read any of the rest of his writings.  I vaguely know he wrote books on fishing, edited a collection of Russian fairy tales and was a political correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, but I’d never heard of a small volume entitled “The hoofmarks of the faun” [1911.6.1209].

 This is a collection of some very early works and, to be honest, they are not terribly good on the whole.  Written over twenty years before Swallows and Amazons, he seems to be struggling to find his style.  The publisher lost £25 on it (a fair amount of money in 1911) and needless to say, it didn’t make Ransome’s name or fortune either.

 The title piece features a faun from the south, who falls in love with an elf-girl from the north but, although his feelings are reciprocated, they cannot do more than sense each other’s presence.  One day they see each other’s footsteps, but she thinks his are made by some “horrible thing.”  Learning of this from a gossipy starling, the faun sadly leaves to return to his own kind.  Not a feel-good story, then.

 Neither is the closing story, “The ageing faun,” which is another tale of lost love.  In between these two are a rather odd, slightly philosophical, piece on love and dreams and a rather better story, called “The little silver snakes,” which touches on the occult, but suffers from a slightly anti-climatic ending.  Then there is a rather puzzling literary criticism on a chap called Peter Swainson, who allegedly had one book published a few days after his death.  I can find no trace of this book and no trace of this Peter Swainson in birth records of the time.  Did he really exist, or is this some kind of fantasy criticism?

 “Rolf Sigurdson” is perhaps the best work in this collection, with echoes of Norse mythology, a reasonably strong storyline and a happy ending.  This one I read and enjoyed, without needing to wince at flowery prose or wonder quite what Ransome was on about.

 So much for that.  My interest awakened, I dug out another early book of his, entitled “The imp and the elf and the ogre” [1911.6.590].  I expected this to be more twee fairy tales, but no, it is in fact a rather charming and informative children’s book about nature.  Ransome could write for children – that is so very apparent from this book.  In fact, if you’ll just excuse me, I think I’m going to slip away and curl up in a corner with it…

Come live with me …

Visitors to the UL tower most often admire the immaculate condition of the books there, particularly the children’s books. Sent straight from publisher to library, they are crisp and brightly coloured still. I find they trigger sharp memories of the books I read and loved as a child. There were a lot of them: some books were read to us in school, I borrowed others from the junior library, scavenged for them at jumble sales, got some as presents.  And seeing the books in the tower brought it all back …

Learning to read in the late 1960s inevitably involved the Ladybird reading books featuring Peter and Jane, and their impossibly bright and cleanly-coloured lives. The pictures of Peter putting on his party outfit (shorts, ironed shirt and tie) were far removed from our world of casual jeans. But other books felt close to home: Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet shoes, with its London setting, and above all the contrast between everyday home life and the thrill of going to the theatre and ballet. My mum used to read it to us when we were little, we used to act out bits and made my brother play the ballet dancing prodigy Posy because he had red hair. (I’m very sorry, honestly.)  And Eve Garnett’s The family from One End Street, was the one book I read as a child that seemed to be set in a familiar place (though it was in fact based on Lewes rather than London). One of the favourite places to play when I was little was the builder’s yard in our road, with its mountains of sand to climb up and slither down, and huge pipes that you could crawl inside. Joe of One End Street did so too and was carried away in the pipe:

 

In contrast, Arthur Ransome‘s Swallows and Amazons books were set in a landscape I could only imagine, with lakes big enough to sail across and islands you could  live on and be away from streets and people. I had the complete set, very pale blue Puffin paperbacks with a sharp beaked Puffin on the spine, but the library had the older hard backed editions with those distinctive dustjackets.

 

You couldn’t get Enid Blyton in the library or at school because she was banned in Hounslow Borough, so oddly enough getting hold of her books provided the sort of thrill that other people got from reading Nabokov’s Lolita. I was very attached to the Malory Towers series, set in a school packed with girls, horses, a swimming pool, cliffs overlooking the sea, plus a criminal element among the girls that livened things up. I had all six books in a bewildering mixture of editions with illustrations ranging from girls in gymslips and plaits to mini-skirted 1960s teens. Needless to say this didn’t bother me any more than any other children.

So stop coveting the perfection of the books in the tower: they haven’t been taken to bed by children who can’t wait to know the ending or covered in chocolate spread. They haven’t lived!

Letters to Peter Pan

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Children's books, letters. Pauline Chase, Peter Pan

Peter Pan's Post Bag

‘Peter Pan’ is one of those stories with an enduring appeal. Everyone loves to hear stories about the ‘boy who never grew up’ and his battles with Captain Hook. There is something special about the story that has captured the imagination of children throughout the ages.

Pauline Chase (photo credit: Vintage Lulu)

Today I came across the book “Peter Pan’s Postbag : Letters to Pauline Chase”. Born Ellen Pauline Matthew Bliss, Chase was an American actress who was best known for playing Peter Pan on stage from 1906-1913. The book contains a sample of the letters that were written to her as Peter throughout her run.

A worrying number ask for tips on how to fly like Peter, whilst others comment that “Tinkerbell was very rude sometimes!”. There are also many letters asking for an “ortograf”. Finally the book includes a map of Never Never Land so that any lucky children who make it there could find their way to tell Peter in person how much they love him.

Map of Never Never Neverland

Below is a selection of the best (possibly cutest!) letters in the book (spellings reproduced):

Dear Peter

I am frightfully anxious. I am still quite young & don’t ever want to grow up. I always want to be a little boy (I mean girl) and have fun. Please don’t show this letter to Tinkerbell or she might call me a silly ass! Love and thimbles from Lesley.

A letter from Mary

 

Darling Peter

I should love to be you. I like you better than Wendy but don’t tell her because it might make her jealous & I like her nearlly as much as you. Madge

A letter from Ronie

Dear Peter Pan

You said that every time somebody said “I dont believe in fairys”, a fairy dies, so would you please tell me if every time somebody says “I believe in fairys”, a fairy comes. Love from Mabel

"Please teach me to fly!"

Midnight feasts, dramatic rescues and playing the game

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Angela Brazil, Dorita Fairlie Bruce, Elinor M. Brent-Dyer, Elsie J. Oxenham, Girls' education, School stories

Pillowfights at bedtime

School stories, especially those set in boarding schools, have always held a strange fascination for me. The friendships, adventures and practical jokes (rags, usually leading to scrapes – you have to love the slang!) depicted in those tales were so far away from my experience of a very ordinary large day-school that they seemed to be set in a different world. Malory Towers and St. Clares were, in their own way, just as exotic to me as the Faraway Tree.  Of course, all school stories take some liberties with the realities of school life and so I suspect that many, if not most, of the happenings I enjoyed reading about were quite far away from actual events in real-life boarding schools.

Enid Blyton’s (in retrospect somewhat limited) depictions of school life are, naturally, only one branch of a long-established “family tree” of girls’ school stories. Early school stories by the exceeedingly prolific L.T. Meade mainly deal with small private educational establishments and the girls’ moral dilemmas. In contrast to later school stories, games are kept to a minimum (hardly suprising in the long skirts of the day), although dramatic rescues and near-death experiences abound. Later writers such as Angela Brazil tell somewhat more amusing tales (except for the interminable, and, to someone who never played either game, extremely mystifying, descriptions of hockey and lacrosse matches!); the schools grow larger, the schoolgirls become more natural in their behaviour and characters, and although near-death experiences still crop up, they are usually (slightly) less melodramatic in character.

Apprehending a burglar

Large series of books set in one school become more common as the genre develops; the most well-known authors being those known to fans of the genre as “the big three”: Elsie J. Oxenham (the Abbey series), Dorita Fairlie Bruce (Dimsie) and Elinor M. Brent-Dyer (the Chalet School). The focus in these series is naturally still on adventures and scrapes, but also on friendships made for life, on “playing the game,” on community spirit and of course on having fun while at the same time gaining an education and being prepared for life beyond school. Naturally, the books teem with extraordinarily talented, beautiful or rich  girls, most of whom marry baronets, doctors or lawyers. Just occasionally however, an ordinary mortal appears who just gets on with things and makes the best of life!

These fictional representations of schools mirror the development of educational theory and girls’ schools in 19th and 20th century Great Britain: the genre of girls’ school fiction began, as is only logical, with real-life schools for girls.  Most of the earliest girls’ schools were small private establishments in which a handful of teachers, often ex-governesses,  taught maybe 20-30 girls. A good fictional example of such a school is Miss Minchin’s school in Frances Hodgeson Burnett’s A little Princess (first published in 1888 as Sara Crewe, or, What happened at Miss Minchin’s). These genteel establishments were precursors of the large boarding schools which appeared in the 20th centry, with their very different emphases on plenty of team sports, extracurricular activities and exams that were designed to take pupils on to university or vocational training. Unsurprisingly, many of the best authors of school stories had at some time during their lives been school teachers themselves.

The secret panel

Just as the boarding school is often seen as a particularly British institution, the boarding school story appears to be a peculiarly British (and by extension, Commonwealth) genre, for although there are tales of boarding schools in other languages (Emmy von Rhoden’s 1885 story Der Trotzkopf being a good German example) they are certainly not as plentiful as those published in English. Although, or perhaps because, only very few parents could afford to send their children to boarding school, school stories were among the most popular genres of children’s fiction in the 20th century. In fact, these stories continue to enjoy great popularity, with many books by Angela Brazil et al. being reissued by publishers such as Girls Gone By Publishers, and fan clubs and fan-fiction websites dedicated to the most famous series, such as the Chalet School, attracting a large number of members of all ages.

While I have moved on from Enid Blyton, I still enjoy school stories. The sense of fun, the friendships, and the way the horrible girls always get their just deserts (or are reformed) at the end are very appealing, though I never seriously wanted to go to a boarding school myself, the thought of being away from home and family for prolonged periods of time simply being too awful to contemplate.

Besides, nobody would get me out of bed at midnight just to drink ginger beer…

Mabel Dearmer greetings cards

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Greetings cards, Mabel Dearmer

One of our very first blog posts was Helen’s tribute to Mabel Dearmer, “Mabel Dearmer: an unexpected gem“. Dearmer’s illustrations, with their bright, clear colours, were one of the most memorable things I found when I first started to explore the tower and its collections.

Now the library has produced some stunning greeting cards with Dearmer’s illustrations, taken from “The book of penny toys”. London: Macmillan, 1899. (UL classmark 1899.10.141) and from “The wonderful toymaker” In Evelyn Sharp “All the way to fairyland. London: John Lane, 1898 (UL classmark 1898.7.167) The cards have no text, so are suitable for a range of occasions, and are available from the University Library entrance hall during library opening hours

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Library Christmas cards on sale

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Christmas cards

One of our favourite things in the Tower Project is finding pictures to share on this blog. The tower collections have great illustrations, some beautiful, some funny, some just weird!  And this year two of our favourite pictures are available as part of a new selection of Christmas cards available from the University Library entrance hall, during library opening hours.

As well as the wonderful ‘Judy magazine’ Christmas pudding illustration (UL classmark 1895.9.91) and the picture of a Canadian train stuck in snow, taken from the Train scrap book (UL classmark 1906.12.1)  there are two beautiful illustrations taken from UL manuscripts and finally ‘Waiting for crumbs’ (UL classmark Waddleton.b.1.438)

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