Story-telling in playgrounds, settlements and libraries as it is
carried on in various communities, is described in the following
comprehensive report which was made by the Committee on
story-telling, Miss Annie Carroll Moore, Chairman, at the Fourth
Annual Congress of the Playground Association of America. It was
printed in the Playground, August, 1910, and an abridgement
appeared in the Library Journal (September, 1910). A sketch of
Miss Moore appears on page 113.
"Is she a Fairy, or just a Lady?"
A little Scotch girl asked the question after a story hour in a
children's library. "She made me see fairies awful plain."
"She made me see fairies, too," answered the children's librarian
with whom the child had shared her doubt. "Let's go and find her
and make sure."
On the way they spoke of the story they had both liked best. It
was about an old woman who lived long ago in Devonshire, who
loved tulips and planted her garden full of them, and tended them
with great care because they seemed to her so beautiful. After
the old woman died some extremely practical persons came to live
in her house and they considered it very foolish to grow tulips
for their beauty when the garden might be turned to practical
account. So they dug up the garden and analyzed the soil, and
planted carrots and turnips and parsnips and just such vegetables
as promised to yield speedy and profitable returns.
By and by a wonderful thing happened. Tulips no longer grew in
the garden; there was no room for them and nobody had time to
look after such useless things. But on the spot where the old
woman was buried the most beautiful tulips sprang up of
themselves, and every night in the Springtime the faries may be
seen bringing their babies to rock them to sleep in the tulip
bells.
The little Scotch girl wondered whether there was "a book in the
library with the tulip story in." She wanted to read it to her
grandmother, she said, because her grandmother was "always
speaking about her garden in Scotland," and she wondered if the
tulips in Scotland had fairies asleep in them.
The storyteller, who was Miss Marie L. Shedlock, looked
wonderfully happy when asked whether she was a "Fairy" or "just a
Lady." She said she supposed she was really "just a Lady," but
she had become so intimate with fairies through listening to
stories about them, and thinking about them, and telling fairy
tales to children and grown people in England and America, that
she felt almost like a fairy at times, and she had come to
believe with Hans Christian Andersen, whose stories she loved
best of all, that life itself is a beautiful fairy tale.
Then she told the little girl that the tulip story was not in a
book, and that she must tell it to her grandmother just as she
remembered hearing it, and that having seen the fairies while she
listened would help her to remember the story better. She could
see pictures all the time she was telling stories, she said. The
little girl had never thought of making pictures for herself
before. She had only seen them in books and hanging on walls.
This unconscious tribute to the art of the storyteller made a
lasting impression on the children's librarian. If a child of
less than eight years, and of no exceptional parts, could so
clearly discriminate between the fairy tale she had heard at
school and the tale that made her "see the fairies," there was
little truth in the statement that children do not appreciate
artistic storytelling. She went back to her children's room
feeling that something worth while had happened. The children who
had listened to the stories now crowded about the book shelves,
eager for "any book about fairies," "a funny book," or "a book
about animals."
The little girl who had seen the fairies was not the only one who
had fallen under the spell of the storyteller. "I always knew
Pandora was a nice story, but she never seemed like a live girl
before," said one of the older girls. "I liked the Brahmin, the
Jackal and the Tiger best," exclaimed a boy. "Gee! but couldn't
you just see that tiger pace when she was saying the words?" "I
just love The Little Tin Soldier," said a small boy who hated to
read, but was always begging the children's librarian to tell him
stories about the pictures he found in books. "Didn't she make
him march fine!"
Before the end of the day the children's librarian had decided
that even if there could be but one such story hour in the
lifetime of an individual or an institution it would pay in
immediate and far-off results. But why stop with one; why not
have more story hours in children's libraries? Other children's
librarians were asking themselves the same question, and then
they asked their librarians, and those who recognized in the
story hour a powerful ally in stimulating a love of good
literature and a civilizing influence wherever the gang spirit
prevailed, gave ready assent.
Ten years have passed and the story hour is now an established
feature in the work of children's libraries. Miss Shedlock came
to America to tell stories to children and to their fathers and
mothers. She returned year after year to remind the schools and
colleges, the training schools and the kindergartens, as well as
the public libraries, of the great possibilities in what she so
aptly called "the oldest and the newest of the arts."
In her lectures upon "The Art of Storytelling;" "The Fun and the
Philosophy; The Poetry and the Pathos of Hans Christian
Andersen," and in the stories she told to illustrate them, Miss
Shedlock exemplified that teaching of Socrates, which represents
him as saying: "All my good is magnetic, and I educate not by
lessons but by going about my daily business." The story as a
mere beast of burden for conveying information or so-called moral
or ethical instruction was relieved of its load. The play spirit
in literature which is the birthright of every child of every
nation was set free. Her interpretation of the delicate satire
and the wealth of imagery revealed in the tales of that great
child in literature, Hans Christian Andersen, has been at once an
inspiration and a restraining influence to many who are now
telling stories to children, and to others who have aided in the
establishing of storytelling. It is now three years since Miss
Shedlock was recalled to England by the London County Council to
bring back to the teachers of London the inspirational value of
literature she had taken over to America.
Interest in storytelling has become widespread, reaching a civic
development beyond the dreams of its most ardent advocates when a
professional storyteller and teacher of literature was engaged to
tell stories to children in the field houses of the public
recreation centers of Chicago. Mrs. Gudrun Thorne- Thomsen has
been known for some years in this country as a storyteller of
great power in the field of her inheritance, Scandinavian
literature. It is very largely due to her work that the city of
Chicago has been roused to claim the public library privileges so
long denied to her children, and to make the claim from a point
that plants the love of literature in the midst of the
recreational life of a great city.
No one who was present at those meetings of the New York
Playground Congress, conducted by Miss Maud Summers, will ever
forget her eloquent appeal for a full recognition of the value of
storytelling as a definite activity of the playground. She saw
its kinship to the folk dance and the folk song in the effort to
preserve the traditions of his country to the foreign-born child.
And she saw the relation of the story to the games, the
athletics, and the dramatics. More clearly than anything else,
perhaps, she saw the value of the story in its direct appeal to
the spiritual nature of the child. Miss Summers' interest and
enthusiasm made the work of the present committee possible. As
one of her associates, its chairman pays grateful tribute to her
memory and links her name with a work to which she gave herself
so freely in life, that her death seems but the opening of
another door through which we look with full hope and confidence
upon childhood as "a real and indestructible part of human life."
There is a line of Juvenal that bids the old remember the respect
due to the young. It is in that attitude, and with some
appreciation of what it means to be a growing boy or girl of the
present time, that the subject of this report has been approached
and is now presented for the consideration of the Playground
Association of America. We know only too well that we cannot give
to childhood in great cities the simple and lovely ways we
associate with childhood. We CAN give to it a wonderful
fortification against the materialism and the sensationalism of
daily life on the streets, against the deadly monotony of the
struggle for existence, by a revival of the folk spirit in story,
as well as in song and in dance, that will not spend its strength
in mere pageantry, but will sink deep into our national
consciousness.
It should be clearly stated that the field of storytelling,
investigated, relates to children above the kindergarten age and
to boys and girls in their teens. The investigation lays no claim
to completeness and has not included storytelling in public nor
in private schools.
An outline covering the main points of this report was sent to
representative workers in thirteen different cities, to several
persons professionally engaged in storytelling, and to other
persons whose critical judgment was valued in such connection.
The outline called--First, for a statement of the extent to which
storytelling is being carried on in playgrounds, public
libraries, settlements, and such other institutions, exclusive of
schools, as might come to the notice of the members of the
committee. Second, for information concerning the persons who are
telling stories, whether their entire time is given to
storytelling and preparation for it; whether it forms a part of
the regular duties of a director or an assistant; and, finally,
whether volunteer workers are engaged in storytelling.
Replies to these inquiries with a brief statement of results have
been grouped by cities,[3] as follows:
[3] Owing to space limitations, in general the formal reports
from cities represented in the discussion are omitted in the body
of the report.