Either at school or at home I read all the classics considered necessary for children: 'Treasure Island', 'Kidnapped', 'Little Women', 'David Copperfield', 'Ivanhoe', 'Robinson Crusoe'. I suppose I enjoyed them; I certainly did not resent or avoid them. Very occasionally some incident would seem to connect with my own life: the doings of the Spanish Inquisition in 'Westward Ho!' for example, fitted in exactly with what I had heard about Roman Catholics. But on the whole the themes appeared completely abstract and impersonal, even when the author intended a message to strike home. 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' did not cause me a moment's concern for the plight of Negro slaves in America, and neither did 'The Water Babies' for the sufferings of the child chimney-sweeps, not because these situations had been done away with, but because no book stirred me in that way...
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Patricia Beer Print: Book
[analysis of a female respondent in Arnold Freeman's 1918 Sheffield Survey] 'Munitions worker, age eighteen... Has read Seebohm Rowntree's "Poverty" and a basic economics textbook, as well as "Little Women".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: questionaire respondent Print: Book
[analysis of a female respondent in Arnold Freeman's 1918 Sheffield Survey] 'Housewife, age twenty-eight... Has read "David Copperfield", "The Old Curiosity Shop", "Lorna Doone", Louisa May Alcott and the travels of Livingstone and Darwin'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: questionaire respondent Print: Book
'Constance Smedley's favourite childhood reading was ... Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868-9)'
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Constance Smedley Print: Book
'Mary Lakeman, a Cornish fisherman's daughter, confirmed what George Orwell had written in "Riding Down from Bangor": "Little Women", "Good Wives", "What Katy Did", "Avonlea", "Tom Sawyer", "Huckleberry Finn", and "The Last of the Mohicans" all created a romantic childhood vision of unlimited freedom and open space. "For me Jo, Beth and Laurie are right at the heart of a permanent unalterable American scene", she wrote, "and I can turn on Louisa M. Alcott and others so powerfully that Nixon and Watergate are completely blacked out"'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Lakeman Print: Book
'Mary Lakeman, a Cornish fisherman's daughter, confirmed what George Orwell had written in "Riding Down from Bangor": "Little Women", "Good Wives", "What Katy Did", "Avonlea", "Tom Sawyer", "Huckleberry Finn", and "The Last of the Mohicans" all created a romantic childhood vision of unlimited freedom and open space. "For me Jo, Beth and Laurie are right at the heart of a permanent unalterable American scene", she wrote, "and I can turn on Louisa M. Alcott and others so powerfully that Nixon and Watergate are completely blacked out"'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Lakeman Print: Book
Elizabeth Segel, in "'As the Twig is Bent ...': Gender and Childhood Reading": "
[Melvyn Bragg] became 'hooked' on Alcott after having picked up at a seaside
bookshop Jo's Boys ... 'I read it countless times,' he remembered, 'and the pleasure
I found in it ... enabled me to hurdle the terrible barrier presented by Little Women,
which I sought out at the library on the hunt for anything else by Louisa May Alcott
... For Little Women, Miss Alcott announced, firmly, on the title page, was A Story
for Girls. Yet I read it.'"
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Melvyn Bragg Print: Book
Elizabeth Segel, in "'As the Twig is Bent ...': Gender and Childhood Reading": "
[Melvyn Bragg] became 'hooked' on Alcott after having picked up at a seaside
bookshop Jo's Boys ... 'I read it countless times,' he remembered, 'and the pleasure
I found in it ... enabled me to hurdle the terrible barrier presented by Little Women,
which I sought out at the library on the hunt for anything else by Louisa May Alcott
... For Little Women, Miss Alcott announced, firmly, on the title page, was A Story
for Girls. Yet I read it.'"
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Melvyn Bragg Print: Book
From chapter entitled 'Conversations' in Maria Weston Chapman's 'Memorials' of Harriet Martineau: 'Reading an article of Miss Alcott's, she [Martineau] says, "Transcendental Wild Oats"! -- what a capital title! It has genius in it."'
Century: 1800-1849 / 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Harriet Martineau Print: Unknown
'Meeting held at 22 Cintra Avenue 10.3.41
F. E. Pollard in the Chair.
1. The minutes of the last meeting were read and signed.
[...]
3. Violet Clough read an exceedingly interesting paper on “Children’s Literature”
showing the was it has developed from the “Moral Tales” of Maria Edgeworth
published at the beginning of the 19th. Century, to the delightful tales by Beatrix
Potter & A. A. Milne which are read today. The one retrogressive step she thought
was in the binding of the books, which today seem to come to pieces almost at
once. All the mothers present agreed with this, so it is no reflection on the Clough
children in particular although it may be on the modern child in general.
4. Readings from children’s literature were then given as follows:
Labour Lost from the Rollo Books. Selected by S. A. Reynolds & read by A. B.
Dilks.
“The Fairchild Family” by Mrs. Sherwood read by Mrs. Pollard – this was
particularly gruesome.
“Little Women” by Louisa Alcott read by Mary Stansfield.
Divers examples of children[’]s poetry read by Rosamund Wallis, which included
an impromptu recitation by Howard Smith of one of Hillair[e] Belloc’s Cautionary
Tales.
“Alice in Wonderland” by Lewis Carrol[l] read by F. E. Pollard.
“Samuel Whiskers” by Beatrix Potter read by Muriel Stevens.
“The Sing Song of Old Man Kangaroo” a Just So Story by Rudyard Kipling, read by
Howard Smith.
“The Wind in the Willows” by Kenneth Grahame read by Margaret Dilks.
“The House at Pooh Corner” by A. A. Milne, read by A. B. Dilks.
5. Bruce Dilks sang two of Fraser-Simsons settings of A. A. Milne’s Poems.
“Christopher Robin Alone in the Dark” and “Happiness”.
[Signed as a true record of the meeting by] S. A. Reynolds
April 7th / 41'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary S. Stansfield Print: Book
'I could begin to read one of the books that had been given to me ... and lose myself
in another world. [Followed by a list of the books enjoyed].'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Eileen Lawrence
