MISS EDGEWORTH’S TALES FOR CHILDREN
Life at Edgeworthstown—Educational adventures—_Practical
Education_—First stories—_The Parent’s Assistant_—New
elements—“Waste Not, Want Not”: the Geometric
plot—“Little plays”—Settings of the tales—Practical
interests—Characters—“Little touches”—_Early Lessons_—“The
Purple Jar”—_Harry and Lucy_—“Nonsense in season”—_Moral
Tales_—Qualities of Miss Edgeworth’s tales—“_La triste
utilité_”—The Edgeworth fairy—Dr. Johnson as the fairies’
champion—Miss Edgeworth and her predecessors—The magic of
science and life.
Maria Edgeworth was sixteen years old when her father brought her to his
Irish estate of Edgeworthstown.[148] Her childhood had been full of quiet
preoccupations, and it argues much for the impersonal methods of Mr. Day
that, although he had grounded her in Rousseau’s theory, she was in no
way dominated by it.
At Edgeworthstown, her ideas were brought into wholesome touch with
reality. The life was almost adventurous after those quiet years in
Oxfordshire and London. Her father gave her a real share in managing the
estate and she was soon acquainted with many sides of Irish character;
but all her affections and interests were centred in the family, and in
this lay the secret of her power as a writer of children’s books.
Mr. Edgeworth had brought up his eldest boy upon Rousseau’s exact plan,
a more unfortunate experiment than Mr. Day’s; for this child of Nature
would neither teach himself nor learn from others; but his brothers and
sisters gained more than he lost by it: the system was modified for
them, and Emile’s solitary employments found a place among the cheerful
occupations of a big family.
The children were so happy and so busy that Mr. Edgeworth could say in a
letter to Dr. Darwin:
“I do not think one tear per month is shed in this house, nor the voice
of reproof heard, nor the hand of restraint felt”.
He encouraged Maria to record their educational adventures, and her own
translation of _Adèle et Théodore_[149] may have suggested the idea of a
book. The two volumes of _Practical Education_, published in 1798, with
the names of Richard Lovell and Maria Edgeworth on the title page, mark
the beginning of the long partnership which she called “the joy and pride
of my life”.
What her books might have been without her father’s influence may be
conjectured from what they are; this is truer of the children’s books
than of the novels. She had no need of theory. Clear intelligence, warm
and ready sympathies, carried her straight to the centres of childish
thought. A little brother, Henry, had been her especial charge, and from
him she learned what might have escaped her in the general business of
the family.
She scribbled her first stories on a slate, read them to the children
and altered them to suit their taste. Those they liked best were
printed in 1796 at Mr. Edgeworth’s suggestion,[150] and when the little
outside public called for more, fresh stories were produced on the same
co-operative plan and published in the six volumes of 1800.
“The stories are printed and bound the same size as _Evenings at Home_,”
wrote Miss Edgeworth to her cousin (Feb. 27, 1796), “but I am afraid you
will dislike the title; my father had sent _The Parent’s Friend_, but Mr.
Johnson has degraded it into _The Parent’s Assistant_, which I dislike
particularly from association with an old book of Arithmetic called _The
Tutor’s Assistant_.”
There is Geometry, if not Arithmetic, in the book. The pattern is
symmetrical: the tales are constructed to fit the morals; but the
Edgeworths recognised the chief faults of didactic books for children,
and made the first definite attempt to deal with them.
“To prevent the precepts of morality from tiring the ear and the mind”,
says Mr. Edgeworth in the preface, “it was necessary to make the stories
in which they are introduced in some measure dramatic; to keep alive hope
and fear and curiosity by some degree of intricacy.”
This is the best that can be done where the moral is so explicit; and
the device of intricacy serves to divert attention from a too exact
correspondence between cause and effect.
In Miss Edgeworth’s clear and well-ordered world the results of choice
and action are inevitable; but her plots (she was the pioneer of plot in
children’s books) involve a puzzle, and in the solution there is always
an element of surprise.
That Bristol merchant in “Waste Not, Want Not,”[151] who invited his two
nephews to stay with him, in order to decide which of them he should
adopt, bears more than a chance resemblance to Mr. Day. If the two boys
had been girls, the story might have been his own; but in literature, as
in life, Mr. Day was prone to digress; he never could have followed the
relentless order of events from the untying of the two parcels by Hal and
Benjamin (the Merton and Sandford of this drama) to its logical result.
There is a cumulative fatality about this which puts it beyond question.
No sooner has the inconsequent Hal watched the careful untying of Ben’s
parcel, and cut the whipcord of his own “precipitately in sundry places”
than the uncle gives them each a top.
“And now” (a child never could resist the interruption). “And now, _he
won’t have any string for his top_!”
The improvident one, however, finds a way out by spinning it with his
hat-string (the consequence of this is deferred); and then, after
whipping the banisters aimlessly with the cut string, drops it upon
the stairs. Little Patty, his cousin, running downstairs with his
pocket-handkerchief (which he is in too desperate a hurry to fetch
himself), falls down a whole flight of stairs; and the assiduous Ben,
hunting for her lost shoe, finds it _sticking in a loop of whipcord_.
For a time, the string theme is allowed to drop, but it comes up again as
a chief agent of the catastrophe. Hal, on his way to the Archery-meeting
stoops to pick up his ball and loses his hat. (“The string, as we may
recollect, our wasteful hero had used in spinning his top”.). Running
down the hill after it, he falls prostrate in his green and white uniform
into a treacherous bed of red mud, and becomes the laughing-stock of his
companions.
Last and bitterest of all, he sees his prudent cousin replace a cracked
bow-string and win the contest by drawing from his pocket “an excellent
piece of whipcord”. Not a reader but echoes, with additions, the
unfortunate Hal’s exclamation: “_The everlasting whipcord, I declare!_”
This single strand goes in and out with the shuttle-motion of a nursery
rhyme:
_This is the string that Hal cut._
_These are the Stairs_
_That lay under the String_
_That Hal cut._
_This is the Child_
_That fell over the Stairs—etc._
With it are interwoven character-incidents that echo the title-motto and
harp on the note of Rousseau and Henry Brooke: the choice of the two boys
between a warm great-coat and a green and white uniform, which culminates
with perfect logic in Ben’s loan of the despised coat to cover Hal’s
spoilt finery; and the minor choice between queen-cakes and keeping one’s
halfpence to give to a beggar.
It is the strong point of Miss Edgeworth’s contrasts that her bad
children are never attractive, and her good ones hardly ever impossible.
Hal is no villain; but there is no glamour about his naughtiness: he
is greedy and boastful as well as improvident; a child is not moved to
emulate him. The real villains are dishonest or cruel or insolent, never
simply thoughtless or self-willed.
But the good children are a positive triumph. Only Miss Edgeworth could
make a boy live that untied knots to save string, chose an overcoat
instead of a gay uniform and had money to spare for good works. This Ben
is as natural as his pleasure-loving cousin.
The moral, for all its insistence, never hides a picture: the house, the
Bristol streets and shops, the scene in the Cathedral, where they listen
to a robin that has lived there for so many years; and Ben and his uncle
admire the stained-glass windows, but Hal looks bored. These are drawn to
the life.
“_Cannot one see a uniform and a Cathedral both in one morning?_”
Every other boy in the Edgeworth family was a Ben, and would endorse this
catholicity of interest.
It is odd that Miss Edgeworth’s “little plays”[152] should be among the
least dramatic of her works. They were, in fact, stories dramatised to
fit the family “_théâtre d’éducation_,” and the dramatist, intent upon
her lesson, trusted her little company to create their parts. The link
with Madame de Genlis is of the slightest, for although the Edgeworth
children were being educated more or less upon the model of St. Leu,
their plays and stories were not in the least like any that Madame de
Genlis had written.
To Miss Edgeworth, truth was the first law of writing, and she must have
felt the want of sincerity that came between Madame de Genlis and her
books.[153]
Her own stories are essentially dramatic; there is life in every word
of dialogue,—but the characters need no artificial light. A painted
background was a poor substitute for her usual settings, villages that
rang with the sounds of honest labour, fields and orchards full of
children: a realist’s Arcadia.
The little town of Somerville (in “The White Pigeon”), which in a few
years had “assumed the neat and cheerful appearance of an English
village”, is in fact a picture of Edgeworthstown. It is only when the
writer allows her characters to stray outside the bounds of her own
knowledge that the scenery begins to shake. Her school stories would
hardly convince an outsider;[154] the Neapolitan setting of “The Little
Merchants” is ludicrously out of keeping with so moral a community.
But all this is nothing to a child. His interest centres round the
objects that make pictures in the mind, the business he can imitate.
Berquin understood the practical interests of children, but he had not
Miss Edgeworth’s keen eye for things that “draw”. The purple jar in the
chemists’ window, the coloured sugar-plums of the little merchants, the
green and white uniform. Berquin’s children were never so independent
as these. His orphans were adopted; Miss Edgeworth’s keep house by
themselves in a ruined castle, and ply their trades of knitting and
spinning and shoe-making with the rhythm of a singing game. The finding
of a treasure among the ruins is a freak of romance that holds the
imagination even while the coins are being weighed and marked.
Goody Grope, the old treasure-seeker who demands her share of the
orphans’ luck, is the only Irish study, but other characters would
connect these stories, if they were not so frankly acknowledged, with the
author of _Castle Rackrent_ and _The Absentee_: Mrs. Pomfret, that lesser
Malaprop, with her “_Villaintropic Society_” and “_drugs and refugees_”;
Mrs. Theresa Tattle; Mademoiselle Panache, the milliner-governess,
betrayed by her mouthful of pins.
Emma and Helen Temple,[155] drawn without reference to a System, and left
to develop each in her own way, would pass for sedate and early types of
“Sense and Sensibility”; it pleased Miss Edgeworth the better that she
could allow a measure of sense to Sensibility.
She has many variants of these types: the wise sister and playful
brother; the well-informed brother with a thoughtless sister, the wise
or thoughtless one with a foolish or a prudential family. Not one of
them is quite like any other. Nobody could mistake Laura, Rosamond’s
good sister[156] for the equally sensible Sophy, sister to Frederick and
Marianne.[157]
Rosamond, with her filigree basket, would have repeated the lesson of
Charlotte and the watch, but unlike Charlotte, she made the useless
thing as a birthday present for somebody else. The worst that can be
said of Miss Edgeworth’s young people is that they sometimes (from the
very reasonableness of their up-bringing) assume an attitude of “civil
contempt” towards ordinary folk. They understand too soon the dangers
that arise in education from a bad servant or a silly governess, and
are too fond of arguments and encyclopædias. These are annoying traits
in otherwise natural and pleasant persons, for although they are prigs
in matters of knowledge or conscience, they have a very sound sense of
values and can even be merry when it is not unreasonable to laugh.
Sir Walter Scott said that Miss Edgeworth was “best in the little
touches.”[158] Children always find this out. They love the robin that
sings in the Cathedral, the child that shared her bread and milk with the
pig, the “little breathless girl” who ran back to thank Simple Susan for
the double cowslips and violets, crying, “_Kiss me quick, for I shall be
left behind_.”
The smallest parts are played in character, in spite of the didactic
purpose and the clock-work plot. This story of “Simple Susan” is not
unlike a Kilner pastoral; but the colours are fresher, the lines more
definite.
“When the little girl parts with her lamb” said Scott, “and the little
boy brings it back to her, there is nothing for it but just to put down
the book and cry.”
But perhaps his great love of children made him read more pathos into the
story than is actually there. Few readers cry over these tales. They
reflect the temper of the Edgeworth family.
_Early Lessons_[159] records the schooling of these children. Maria had
scarcely discovered “the warmth and pleasure of invention” when her
father recalled her to the Schoolroom. She set about straightening her
bright intricate patterns to make reading books for the little ones, much
as Dr. Primrose’s daughters cut up their trains into Sunday waistcoats
for Dick and Bill.
To turn from the _Parent’s Assistant_ to _Early Lessons_ is to agree with
Byron that there ought to have been a Society for the Suppression of Mr.
Edgeworth.
And yet there is something to be said for these chosen and deliberate
little scenes. Acquaintance prospers where there is no plot-interest
to engross attention. The “little boy whose name was Frank” steps as
naturally into the story as he would into a familiar room. He is so
obviously a real little boy that it is even possible to believe in his
virtues:
“When his father or mother said to him, ‘Frank, shut the door,’ he ran
directly and shut the door. When they said to him ‘Frank, do not touch
that knife,’ he took his hands away from the knife, and did not touch it.
He was an obedient little boy.”
There is something arresting in this.
Frank’s doings and his sayings are a model of simplicity; but nobody
could say of him what Charles Lamb said of Mrs. Barbauld’s little boys.
As surely as any critic is disposed to laugh at Frank, he finds himself
watching with involuntary interest while Frank pulls the leg of the
table, and finds out what would have happened to the tea-cups if he had
not been such “an obedient little boy”. His adventures, moreover, are
not all among the tea-cups. He is interested in a carpenter and in
kites, and he has a more than usually good eye for a horse. What really
distresses the reader is that he is never allowed out of school; his
most casual experience contributes to his mental and moral advancement.
Chestnuts, glow-worms, the flame of a candle and other enchanting things
are impounded for object lessons. Frank’s father and mother are his
tutor and governess; the only poetry they mete out to him comes from Dr.
Darwin’s _Botanic Garden_[160], and is “correlated” to Natural History;
and after that it has to be explained. For when Dr. Darwin sings of a
moth’s “trunk”, little Frank understands by that “a sort of box”; when
his mother repeats:
“Alight, ye beetles, from your airy rings”,
he asks (not without reason) “What does that mean, mamma?” But the
explanation would have come without asking. The Governess is giving a
lesson, the tutor is at her elbow; and because you should never laugh in
lessons, it is all rather serious.
But here, as in every school, are the children; the rest hardly counts.
Here, for example, when a child has made friends with Frank, is Rosamond,
who will make him forget all these lessons.
Readers of _The Parent’s Assistant_ had met her before, with a filigree
basket. Here she is again, “about seven years old”, walking with her
mother in the London streets, a very figure of childhood.
The mother disposes one by one of her bright interests: The toys (“_all_
of them”), the roses in the milliner’s window, the “pretty baubles” in
the jeweller’s shop. And then:
“‘Oh mother! oh!’ cried she, pulling her mother’s hand; ‘Look, look!
blue, green, red, yellow and purple! O mamma, what beautiful things!
Won’t you buy some of these?’” (It was a chemist’s shop, but Rosamond did
not know that.)
Her mother answered, as before:
“What use would they be of to me, Rosamond?” It is the purple jar that
takes the child’s fancy. Driven to invent a _use_ for it, she thinks she
could use it for a flower pot, but that was no part of her desire.
The story of Rosamond and the Purple Jar was meant to celebrate the usual
triumph of the Perfect Parent; but every child knows it is Rosamond who
triumphs; and this is the point where the Perfect Parent makes her first
mistake. She does not warn Rosamond, she only _hints_:
“Perhaps, if you were to see it nearer, if you were to examine it, you
might be disappointed”.
Now, Frank had his chance. They took away the tea-cups before he let down
that table-leaf. But nobody helps Rosamond. The little reader follows,
in close sympathy, as she goes on unwillingly, keeping her head turned
“to look at the purple Vase till she could see it no longer”. And as she
goes, it transpires that her shoes “are quite worn out”. That it should
come to this, points to some pre-arrangement by the Perfect Parent. The
occasion presents a unique opportunity for choice:
“Well, which would you rather have, that jar or a pair of shoes?” The
parental Economist cannot buy both; she makes Rosamond understand that
she will not have another pair of shoes that month.
Thus the purple jar repeats the theme of the filigree basket and the
green and white uniform.
What Rosamond was never told, and what she could not reasonably have
been expected to deduce, was that the beautiful purple colour was not
in the glass. A child cannot forgive injustice; all Rosamond’s friends
(and all children are her friends) cry out that it “wasn’t fair”. They
all say, “She wouldn’t have chosen the jar if she had _known_”; and
they are right. But the story goes on relentless. Rosamond, sweet and
unquestioning, survives the whole painful experience and hopes at the end
of it that she will be “wiser another time”; but the Perfect Parent has
lost all the prestige she ever had with children. She lost it before her
callous and unintelligent question, “Why should you cry, my dear?” But
that sealed her fate.
“I _love_ Rosamond”, said a little twentieth-century girl, not long ago,
“but, oh, how I _hate_ that mother!”
Miss Edgeworth drew none of her portraits from a single original; but she
often sat to herself for some part of them, and at least one likeness was
recognised by the family. Writing in her sixtieth year to her aunt, of
the “great progress” she is resolved to make, she adds: “‘_Rosamond at
sixty_,’ says Margaret.”
* * * * *
_Harry and Lucy_, begun by Mr. Edgeworth and continued at intervals with
Maria’s help, was finished by her in 1825[161]. The four volumes, she
says, complete the series of “Early Lessons”, in which Harry and Lucy had
already figured; but although her drawings of the two children add colour
to the book, it is really an oblation, on Mr. Edgeworth’s behalf, to the
Giant Instruction.
At this stage, it is true, there is a laboratory as well as a museum in
the giant’s castle; he can illustrate the marvels of steam and suggest
experiments with electricity. Yet this is only a more practical Circle
of the Sciences. The children’s voices are trained to the question
and answer of a “Guide to Knowledge”; their lives are marked off in
lesson-periods. Even when a dull journey offers the means of escape,
these little captives hug their chains. They never travel without books,
and when there is nothing to observe from the carriage windows, they
find education in the forests of the Oroonoko, where the plague of flies
affords “an inexhaustible subject of conversation.”
The “Grand Panjandrum” could never come better than into this juvenile
Cyclopædia.[162]
Mr. Foote’s “droll nonsense” pleases Miss Edgeworth chiefly because it
was invented to test a man’s memory; yet she can tolerate nonsense, at
any rate when there is no danger of its being confused with sense.
They are all there: “the Picninnies and the Joblillies and the Garyulies,
and the Grand Panjandrum himself with the little round button at top.”
Lucy laughs and enjoys it, Harry calls it “horrible nonsense”; but their
father’s opinion is final, and Miss Edgeworth agrees with him:
“It is sweet to talk nonsense in season. Always sense would make Jack a
dull boy.”
* * * * *
The didactic purpose, which hampers the story-teller at every turn,
becomes more irksome as an audience passes from childhood into youth.
Fixed patches of light and shade appear unnatural; the critical eyes of
youth are open to devices that passed unnoticed in the nursery.
Miss Edgeworth’s _Moral Tales_, “for young people of a more advanced
age”,[163] followed Marmontel into his own province; but Marmontel drew
his lessons from the world as he found it; Miss Edgeworth fits her world
to her father’s theories.
Here again she has admirable portraits: the Quixotic Forester, a new and
convincing likeness of Thomas Day; Angelina, that mirror of “romantic
eccentricities”; Mademoiselle Panache, little changed since her first
appearance, but here balanced by a “good French Governess”. The
unconscious satire of Lady Catherine is twice barbed:
“I don’t want to trouble you to alter his habits or to teach him
chemistry or _any of those things_.”
Yet here, as in _Early Lessons_, the persons walk gingerly, after the
manner of Berquin’s little boy who kept the skirts of his coat under his
arms, “for fear of doing any damage to the flowers”. The paths of the
Edgeworth garden are purposely narrowed that their doings may “neither
dissipate the attention nor inflame the imagination.”
Miss Edgeworth’s books fitted into her busy life as a natural occupation
for long evenings. She wrote in the common sitting-room with the family
about her, not one of them under any constraint, but talking freely, as
if she had been sewing instead of novel-writing. It was characteristic of
her that she could turn to children’s books in the midst of the Defender
troubles. An Irish rising claimed no more attention than the play and
laughter of the children. She could refer to it in a letter, and pass
on to the next domestic detail without wasting a moment in “useless
reflection”. That is precisely the mood of her stories. The _Moral
Tales_, addressed to an emotional age, do not merely ignore the common
forms of “Sensibility”; they take no account whatever of the stronger
affections and more vigorous manifestations of life: a thing scarcely
tolerable to generous youth. In the nursery books, this equanimity has
its uses. It enables her to deal with one thing at a time, to select from
a mass of details the particular things that a child would waste time in
choosing. Nothing worries or puzzles her; she sees the world in clear
and simple pictures, and reduces the inconsequent thoughts of children to
a relentless order.
Her little figures stand out in firm outline and bright colour, and the
background is interesting chiefly as it gives occupation or the means of
life.
Madame de Staël was thinking of the _Tales of Fashionable Life_, when she
said:
“_Vraiment Miss Edgeworth est digne de l’enthousiasm; mais elle se
perd dans votre triste utilité_”[164]. But it is not less true of the
children’s books.
Flowers in Miss Edgeworth’s garden (she is a true lover of flowers) are
beautiful symbols of human care and industry; but they never encroach
upon vegetables.
Rosamond was a rebel. “Mustard-seed, compared with pinks, carnations,
sweet-peas or sweet-williams, did not quite suit Rosamond’s fancy.”[165]
Miss Edgeworth had chosen those flowers for Rosamond, but the Perfect
Parent knew better. When the sweet thing planned a labyrinth of Crete
“to go zig-zag—zig-zag” through one of her borders, she was reasoned out
of it for the sake of some little green things that were going to be
mignonette, and when she and Godfrey were thinking of digging a pond, a
shocked voice cried:
“What! in the midst of your fine bed of turnips?”
Romance dies hard; but the odds were against Rosamond:
“And now, Mamma, _lay out_ my garden for me, as Godfrey says, exactly to
your own taste; and I will alter it all to-morrow to please you.” This
would be Emily and her mother over again, if it were not so like Maria
and her father.
* * * * *
Dealing with a criticism by her cousin, Colonel Stuart, Miss Edgeworth
wrote: “I _know_ I feel how much _more is to be done, ought to be done_,
by suggestion than by delineation, by creative fancy than by facsimile
copying”; but she wisely stuck to her own method. It is where she touches
the magic circle that she is “spell-stopp’d.” When Laura reads the
fairy-tale to Rosamond (she is only allowed _one_), her passage into an
unreasonable world is marked by a change of diction. The Edgeworth fairy
is “inexpressibly elegant”; her flowing robe is “tinctured with all the
variety of colours that it is possible for nature or art to conceive”.
But there is nothing supernatural about her. She is merely a new specimen
for the Museum, to be “contemplated with attention”, like the others. The
result, recorded in a scientific note, proves her a creature of flesh and
blood:
“Small though she was, I could distinguish every fold in her garment,
nay, even _every azure vein that wandered beneath her snowy skin_.”
Dr. Johnson and Miss Edgeworth took opposite sides on this question of
the supernatural; and since experience proves that both were right, both
must have been wrong.
Mr. Edgeworth attacked the Doctor’s belief that “babies do not want to
hear about babies”, and Maria proved it a fallacy; but neither disposed
of his claim for “somewhat which can stretch and stimulate their little
minds.”
Mr. Edgeworth’s questions are not arguments: “why should the mind be
filled with fantastic visions, instead of useful knowledge? Why should so
much valuable time be lost? Why should we vitiate their taste and spoil
their appetite, by suffering them to feed upon sweetmeats?”[166]
Dr. Johnson could have answered him, and perhaps Mr. Edgeworth knew it,
for he adds:
“_It is to be hoped that the magic of Dr. Johnson’s name will not have
power to restore the reign of fairies._”
There was no great danger, so long as Miss Edgeworth upheld the republic
of common sense; but when at last she laid down her pen, all the spirits
whose existence she had denied rose up and denounced her ineffectual
successors.
Thus she brings the first century of children’s books to a natural close.
She gathers up the loose ends of the old stories and weaves them into a
bright and symmetrical design. The pattern is not wholly original: it was
set by Marmontel, followed by Berquin, attempted by Madame de Genlis and
the English Rousseauists; but Miss Edgeworth brought it to perfection,
expressing traditional themes in terms of reason and benevolence.
The dramatic realism which marks her stories was the keynote of English
ballads and folk-tales; she found a substitute for romance in the
wonders of science. Roger Bacon, that wizard of the chap-books, appears
as a forerunner of the Royal Society. Harry and Lucy know him as the
discoverer of gunpowder, the inventor of the camera obscura, the prophet
of flying-machines.[167]
In Miss Edgeworth’s tales, science has not merely succeeded to poetry; it
has changed the enchanter’s instruments. The Balloon is the new Pegasus,
or the Flying Horse of the Arabian Tales; the Magician still cries “New
lamps for old;” but it is Davy’s lamp that he carries.
Rosamond, when she cannot explore the India Cabinet, is encouraged
to look for wonderful things in her own house; which indeed was Miss
Edgeworth’s own practice. Her “Enchanted Castle” was the home of her
aunt, Mrs. Ruxton,[168] and Aboulcasem’s treasure was not more marvellous
to her than a friend’s “inexhaustible fund of kindness and generosity.”
With the Lilliputians she had more in common than she would have
acknowledged.
“When I was a child,” wrote Mr. Edgeworth in the third volume of
_Early Lessons_, “I had no resource but Mr. Newbery’s little books and
Mrs. Teachum.”[169] He is too conscious of the superiority of the new
children’s books to do justice to Mistress Two-Shoes; yet she, with her
little scholars and her weather-glass, was Miss Edgeworth’s Lilliputian
prototype. Simple Susan could have compared notes with little Two-Shoes
upon good and bad landlords, and in some of Miss Edgeworth’s stories
there are prudential maxims that recall _Giles Gingerbread_ and _Primrose
Prettyface_.
Some of Rosamond’s features may be traced in the portraits by Miss
Fielding, the Kilners and Mary Lamb. The quaint miniature of Goody
Two-Shoes has the same grave intelligent look. If this little person, so
wholly unconscious of her charm, can be regarded as an English type, then
Emilie could not have been altogether French.
Like Madame d’Epinay, Miss Edgeworth let Rousseau’s lifeless image of the
parent or tutor stand between her and her readers. They listened to the
talk of other children, but seldom heard her voice. “Little touches” in
the _Letters_[170] would have made them better acquainted, for here she
spoke freely, showing both tenderness and humour, making adventures of
common incidents,—a journey or a visit to friends.
“I nearly disgraced myself”, she wrote, after a visit to Cambridge,[171]
“as the company were admiring the front of Emmanuel College, by looking
at a tall man stooping to kiss a little child.”
This betrays her attitude to art and life.
If she never understood the “fairy Way of Writing”, it was because
she had built a school upon the fairy circles of her village green.
Her children were so happy in and about the village that they never
discovered an enchanted wood. They planted trees instead of climbing
them; they knew all the roads to Market, but nobody showed them the way
to Fairyland.
When at last the “reign of fairies” was restored, children burst into
an unknown world of adventure and poetry. Ever since that little boy of
Shenstone’s suffered for love of St. George, the fairies have fought shy
of schools. It remains to be seen whether they will hold their own with
modern pedagogues; but they are still in league with the poets, and the
understanding between them is this: that the child, once having tasted
fairy bread, can spend but half his time upon solid earth. The rest he
must have in the Land of Dreams.