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 hard winter, heroes and knaves

The Long Winter

by Laura Ingalls Wilder

***

In last Friday’s post, Charles Ingalls, the beloved “Pa” of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter, hints to his near-starving family that there may be a hidden source of grain near the little Dakota Territory town of De Smet.

The Ingalls family, along with the rest of the town’s settlers, is enduring the long winter of 1880-1881, among the worst ever recorded in the United States. Following an early October blizzard, the Ingalls move from the flimsy shanty on their land claim into a house in town, certain that they will not lack for supplies because a railroad runs through De Smet.

Laura Ingalls Wilder, c. 1885

But as blizzard and blizzard strikes the region, trains are unable to run. Coal for heating and cooking – the only fuel on the near-treeless prairies – runs out, and the Ingalls twist their supply of hay into knots to burn for fuel. The stores run out of meat and flour, and the settlers, too new to the country to have harvested their own grain, grind wheat in coffee mills to make bread. Until the wheat runs out.

Still, there are rumors that a settler several miles south of town was able to raise a wheat crop and may be persuaded to sell – if the rumors are true, and if anyone from town can find him on the trackless, snow-swept prairie. With no more than a single clear day between each round of blizzards, there’s little time to search, and to be lost during a blizzard meant death.

And although the bachelor Wilder brothers still have food, they know only too well that others in the town, including the Ingalls family, are nearing starvation. At the risk of their lives, Almanzo and a young friend, Edmund “Cap” Garland, set out in search of the grain.

Almanzo Wilder, c. 1885

“I think no one really expected them to get back,” Laura wrote in her autobiography, Pioneer Girl , “for twelve miles, a good part of it through sloughs where the horses would break through and have to be dug out, looked almost hopeless of being done in one day and it must be done between storms.”

Wilder and Garland, however, make the trip, returning after dark with enough wheat to last the townspeople until spring. The next day, another blizzard hit.

In view of the insistence on integrity of Almanzo Wilder, Laura’s future husband, it is interesting that in The Long Winter she insists he was several years younger than indicated by his conventional biography, having lied about his age in order to file a homestead claim.

Still more interesting is her omission about another family who were actually living with the Ingalls through the desperate winter. Despite her claim to historic accuracy, Laura refused the urging of her writer-daughter Rose Wilder Lane to include the George Masters family in her account.

George, the son of an acquaintance, and his pregnant wife, Maggie, had moved in with the Ingalls at the start of the winter. Pamela Smith Hill, editor of Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, quotes a letter between Laura and her daughter: “When Maggie came, Ma saw she would soon have a baby, much too soon after the time she was married. Maggie didn’t want the baby to be born at her folks’ and disgrace them. George’s folks . . . wouldn’t have her there. . . Then winter set in and caught them. There was no where else they could stay.”

In Pioneer Girl, Laura continues, “George was always first at the table at any meal. . . (and) he would gobble, not denying himself even for Maggie as we did because of her nursing the baby.” George would become a byword in the family for selfishness.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a September of young adventurers with Johanna Spyri’s Heidi.)

Adventure classics -- The grim tale behind 'Little House'

The Long Winter

by Laura Ingalls Wilder

***

If there was anything Charles Ingalls disliked, it was feeling closed in. But after multiple warnings of an unusually hard winter approaching in late 1880, he moved his family, including young daughter Laura, from their hastily-built shanty on the plains of the Dakota Territory into a house in the nearby town of De Smet.

“It’s a satisfaction to me to be where we’re sure of getting coal and supplies,” says Ingalls (the “Pa” of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House on the Prairie” series) to his family. “We’ll keep enough coal in the lean-to to outlast any blizzard, and I can always get more from the lumberyard. Living in town, we’re in no danger of running short of any kind of supplies.”

Little does the family realize the winter of 1880-1881 will go down in history as the most severe winter in United States history. Laura Ingalls Wilder would record an account of it in 1940’s The Long Winter, the volume of the “Little House” series her editors feared would be too harsh for her young readers.

Following a three-day blizzard that closes the town’s school, the settlers wait expectantly for the arrival of the regular train. 

After days of raging wind, it’s good “to hear the stillness,” Laura’s older sister Mary says. “They could hear again the small sounds of the town. . . The only usual sound that they did not hear was the train’s whistle.”

At supper that night, Pa brings words that the train has been stopped by the heavy snow. “But they’ll shovel through it in a couple of days.” But hardly has the snow of one blizzard been shoveled away than another comes, and another, and more after that. Days pass, then weeks. Food and fuel become scarcer until at last – there are none.

In place of now non-existent coal, the Ingalls twist hay to burn for heat. In place of depleted flour, they grind the seed wheat settlers were saving for the next year’s sowing in a coffee grinder to bake into bread.

It’s possible to see in Wilder’s story the symptoms of protein and vitamin deprivation as the in the family’s diet dwindles to brown wheat bread and potatoes. There is rejoicing when in early January a farmer butchers his oxen and Pa returns triumphantly with four pounds of beef and bones.

“‘We can make this last a week, for flavoring at least,’” says Caroline Ingalls (the “Ma” of the story), “‘and by that time the train will surely come, won’t it?’

“She looked smiling at Pa. Then she stopped smiling and quietly asked, ‘What is it, Charles?’”

The trains, he tells her, won’t come. Unable to clear the tracks, the railroad will not run trains again until spring. And it’s has stopped running trains till spring. Till spring. And it’s only January.

They had four pounds of beef, a few potatoes, and partly-filled sack of wheat left for food.

“Is there any more wheat, Pa?” Laura asks.

His answer, with a strangeness in it she doesn’t understand: “I don’t know.”

He does, however, have a suspicion, and it isn’t a pleasant one. He has seen something out of place in the nearby store of two brothers, Royal and Almanzo Wilder. Is it a hiding place for a food supply? If so, can he coerce the Wilders to sell it? And does he dare even mention this hope to his family?

As Laura Ingalls Wilder (who eventually married one of the Wilder brothers – but that’s a story for another day) was working on the manuscripts of her “Little House” series in the 1930’s and 1940’s, her then more-famous daughter Rose Wilder Lane reminded her to identify a central theme for each volume.

Hard at work on a book tentatively titled The Hard Winter, Wilder pondered the advice, John E. Miller writes in Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman Behind the Legend. The theme of this book, she decided, would be her family’s survival of that long, hard winter of 1880-1881. It was an ordeal the Ingalls family and the other settlers of De Smet would have to endure without help from the outside world.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a September of young adventurers with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter.)