Adventure classics – The flowering of children’s literature

Heidi

by Johanna Spyri

***

It’s no coincidence that the 19^th century’s invention of the concept of childhood as we know it also saw a flowering of literature written for children. Before that magical century, reading material considered suitable for children was limited to Aesop’s fables and a few collections of fairy tales, many of them aimed, fable-like, at adults. Then, with a suddenness that rivaled the explosion of novels for adults in the previous century, children’s literature – stories written for children, dealing with their concerns seriously and with as much artistry as literature for adults --  burst on the scene.

Stories like Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. And like Johanna Spyri’s Heidi.

Was this literary outburst the result of educational reforms that kept children in school well into their teen years? Of increasingly mechanized agriculture and industry that made unskilled child labor less exploitable? Or even of philosophical movements such as Romanticism and Transcendentalism that saw children less as beings steeped in original sin than as souls fresh from God? 

One other thing happened to stories written about children – they didn’t die as much. In reality, children died quite often, subject to waves of epidemics and the century’s special scourge of tuberculosis. In literature, not so much. Stories for children aimed to show them how to deal with life in the now, not the hereafter.

So the tale of Heidi, abandoned last week to the mercy of her quite terrifying grandfather, becomes an idyll instead of a gruesome fable. In the company of the cleanest and gentlest flock of goats ever imagined, she romps through the green and flowery pastures of the Swiss Alps, mercifully free of an formal schooling.

Heidi and Klara

Although orphaned, Heidi was not without beneficent adults – her almost inexplicably tender grandfather and a blind old woman, the grandmother of the local goatherd. Only one thing had been lacking – a best friend worthy of a young girl. Then the wicked aunt who had abandoned her returns and takes her to – gasp! – the big city of Frankfurt (and schoolteachers).

But as Heidi learns, even city life with all its limitations of has a compensation in the form of the invalid daughter of her new household – Klara. Unable to walk, Klara is possibly a victim of poliomyelitis, whose epidemics swept through Europe and America in the late 19^th century.

Twelve-year-old to Heidi’s eight, Klara is both an older, more sophisticated sister, and a friend in desperate need of something – and someone – to live for. Heidi’s tales of her life in the mountains stir a yearning in Klara to experience that free life.

Klara’s education, helps Heidi embrace the joy of reading. Not a bad lesson to learn from Spyri’s book. With Klara’s aid, Heidi is separated from her aunt’s grasp. She returns to the mountains, her grandfather and her beloved goats. Now if only Klara could join her.

But how can a girl who can only move in a wheelchair reach the little house perched on its high peak? Can Klara ever recover enough strength to view the frolicking goats and their flowery pastures for herself?

A few decades after the 1880 publication of Spyri’s Heidi, Frances Hodgson Burnett would conjure a similar Eden for a disabled child in The Secret Garden. In that book, aided by an almost inaccessible flowery paradise, orphaned Mary Lennox will help another child learn to walk again. Did Burnett learn the trope from Heidi? Will Klara also be healed to return to her family in triumph? And will Heidi learn that helping others is better even than being helped?

I’ll leave readers to discover the answer themselves, in a story available free at Project Gutenberg.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics begins an October of Halloween horror with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter.”)

Adventure classics – The 19th century’s childhood romance

Heidi

by Johanna Spyri

***

How could a woman so unhappy write about as much joy as Johanna Spyri put into her 1880 story of Heidi, the orphan who made everyone – well, almost everyone – around her so happy?

Unhappily married to a workaholic husband, suffering from long-term depression after the birth of her only son, and seeing that son edging ever closer to death from the 19^th century’s curse of tuberculosis, Spyri poured memories of her golden childhood in the Swiss mountains into one of the world’s most beloved children’s stories, the epitome of the late 19^th century’s neo-Romantic vision of the child as “no commonplace soul”, to quote a slightly later writer of the genre, L.M. Montgomery.

A bringer of emotional and physical health to those around her, Heidi would become the forerunner of such other child heroines as Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908) and Mary Lennox of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911).

The Canadian Montgomery may well have been aware of and influenced by the work of Anglo-American Burnett -- already famous for her 1886 novel, Little Lord Fauntleroy -- and Burnett surely must have known about Montgomery’s book.

It's possible that both of them also owe an unacknowledged debt to Spyri’s work, which appeared in English at least as early as an 1885 American translation by Louise Brooks. (Although I’ll refer in this a subsequent post to the 1925 translation by Helen B. Dole from the Dallas Public Library.)

Like her spiritual sisters Anne Shirley and Mary Lennox, Heidi has been orphaned soon after her birth. Her dying widowed mother, Adeleide, entrusted the namesake baby to an aunt, but by the time Heidi is 5-years-old, her flighty Aunt Dete is eager to palm the child off on her only other living relative, her reclusive paternal grandfather.

Heidi & her grandfather

Even before the death of his only son, Heidi’s father, the old man had become bitter and estranged from the society of the tiny fictional village of Dörfli.

“He used to have the finest farm (around),” Dete gossips to an inquisitive neighbor. “But (he) would do nothing but . . . travel about the country, mixing with bad people that nobody knew about. He drank and gambled away the whole property. . . and disappeared. . . it was said that he had got into trouble, that he had killed someone.”

When the old man at last returns with his son, Tobias, he finds all doors closed to him. And although his son is well thought of and marries a local girl, bad luck dogs the family. When Tobias dies in an accident and his wife of a fever brought on by grief, neighbors call it a judgment on the old man, who abandons the village to live a hermit’s life on the mountain called Alm, high above the village.

“And now are you going to give the child to the old man up there?” the neighbor asks Dete. “I’m surprised that you should think of such a thing.”

But despite their shock and indignation, no one in the village is willing to take care of little Heidi. Turning the child over to the old man, Dete says insinuatingly, “You will have to answer for her, if she comes to any harm. You don’t want to have anything more laid to your charge.”

At those words, the old man angrily runs Dete away from his mountain hut. Heidi, meanwhile, has been exploring the area and is apparently unaware of the argument between her aunt and grandfather. Childlike, she finds the perfect place for a bed – the hayloft in the upper story of her grandfather’s hut. And after making a delighted acquaintance with her grandfather’s milch goats, and a meal of bread and cheese and goat’s milk, she climbs into her new bed, sleeping “as soundly and well as if she had been in the loveliest bed of some royal princess.”

And the old man, watching her innocent sleep, feels the first thawing of his heart begin.

Now if only other people would stop pestering him about how to bring up a little girl. . .

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a September of young adventurers with Johanna Spyri’s Heidi. Want to read ahead? Get this copyright-expired work free at Project Gutenberg.

Adventure classics -- A garden of healing for a lost boy

The Secret Garden

by Frances Hodgson Burnett

#

How much did Frances Hodgson Burnett want a daughter? So much she only made a slight spelling change in the name she had chosen (from Vivien to Vivian) when her second child turned out to be a boy. Poor Vivian Burnett got dolled up with long golden curls and lace and velvet suits to become the inspiration for the sentimental book that made his mom famous. At least he lived through it.

image: wikimedia commons

This post isn’t about that boy -- or that book.

It was for her older son, Lionel, that Burnett wrote what many people consider her best book, 1911’s The Secret Garden. It’s the book in which Lionel’s stand-in, Colin Craven, is transformed from invalidism to exuberant, boyish life. And by the way, don’t be fooled into thinking The Secret Garden is just a girl’s book (although girls like it, too). Burnett’s putative heroine, Colin’s tomboyish cousin Mary Lennox, who practically bullies him back to health, is the rowdy, bossy brat Lionel’s little brother Vivian probably longed to be.

Unfortunately, Lionel didn’t live to see the book that should have made him famous. Born in 1874, he died of tuberculosis in 1892. His death plunged Burnett, already struggling with a failing marriage, into depression. She would see the breakup of marriage to her sons’ father and a second (and short-lived) marriage before finding a real life secret garden at Great Maytham Hall in Kent and coming to terms with her personal losses.

In The Secret Garden, ten-year-old Mary Lennox is sent from India, where her parents have died in a cholera epidemic, to Misselthwaite Manor, Yorkshire estate of her reclusive uncle, Archibald Craven. Bored nearly out of her mind at being the only child in the huge old house with its hundred rooms, she begins to explore the estate’s gardens. Hearing stories about a mysterious, walled, locked garden, Mary sets out to find it. With the help of a friendly robin, a crusty old garden, and the eerily charming neighbor boy Dickon, the garden returns to life.

But Mary is not, in fact, the only child living in Misselthwaite. Convinced that she hears someone crying late at night, Mary goes exploring and finds a secret even more hidden than the garden -- Craven’s son, Colin. When Colin’s mother died at his birth after a fall in the walled garden, his father shunned him, leaving the child to be brought up by servants who catered to his every wish for fear of bringing on his ever more terrifying temper tantrums. This unhealthy regimen has reduced Colin to life as a chronic invalid, fearing even to leave his room.

Aided by Mary, whose temper is as formidable as his own, the flock of animals Dickon tames, and plenty of fresh air and exercise, Colin gains strength and life, and even reconciliation with his estranged father -- everything Burnett could have wished for her lost Lionel. Burnett knew a saleable story when she wrote it. So the tale that began bleakly ends in the garden’s “flurry of autumn gold and purple and violet blue and flaming scarlet,” as Colin emerges from its gate, the winner of a race, straight into his father’s arms.

Burnett hadn’t been able to save Lionel, but she gave him a second, literary life through her writing.

Of course, The Secret Garden is widely available at Amazon and other sources. And give yourself a smile by trolling clips of the 1993 movie on YouTube.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics plunges into an October of Halloween horror with Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.”)