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
'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