Reading aloud to my grandsons gives me great pleasure despite the fact that their preferences and mine do not always coincide! Ping. The Children of the Northlights, Rabbit Hill, Little Toot, Katy and the Big Snow, and many others, we read them all by turns.

Sometimes I wonder which of these books will be memories to them, half a century hence, as certain stories and pictures of my youth are still fresh and clear in my mind.

What a delight these illustrations would have been to us in the 1880’s when we were growing up in Manchester, England. We had no Kurt Wiese, Dorothy Lathrop, James Daugherty, Hardie Gramatky, or the others whose work the modern child enjoys. I suppose it was just because picture books for small children were so rare, that until I learned to read for myself at the age of seven, I can recall a single book — one with pictures for the letters of the alphabet. I have a vivid recollection of “I stands for Infant,” a child with large, staring eyes, which for some reason frightened me. I used to flip the page over quickly so as not to see it, and I disliked the word “Infant” for a long time.

In those early years my mother used to read us Bible Stories and Nursery Rhymes, and later my sister and I, the eldest of a family of eight, would play at being the characters. “Nine, ten, A good, fat hen.” I was the good, fat hen, and used to trot round the garden with my sister prodding me in the small of the back with a clothes-peg clamped on to the end of a stick. And I remember wrapping a pillow in a shawl, and walking up and down my bed, pretending that I was the mother Hannah, taking the baby Esther to be blessed by Jesus in Jerusalem.

After I could read for myself, the first books that I remember were all of a moral nature that qualified for Sunday Reading, which continued in my life until I was about nine. The choice was great and included Peep of Day, Line Upon Line, and a claret-colored book called Rills from the Fountain of Life. The title conveyed nothing to me, but I liked the cadence. The stories were all about bad children, and our favorite was of a jealous little girl who killed her baby brother by throwing a hot iron on him as he lay in his cradle. Like Cain, she was branded forever, the story said. This seemed most appropriate and very thrilling. On Sundays, too, we were allowed to have the second-hand, calf-bound volume copy of Pilgrim’s Progress, which always opened automatically at the picture of Christian’s fight with Apollyon. The page was thumbed a dirty, as if the former owner had gazed at it long and often, and little wonder for the picture was truly terrifying to an imaginative child.

Not all our reading, however, was of this type. While we were still very young we were given a book which we thought had the most beautiful pictures in the world. It was The Story Without an End, translated from the German. I would sit by the hour and look at those pictures in ecstasy, both the vivid, glowing ones, and the soft shadow tints, and I can see every detail of them to this day.

Then there was Undine, written in German. My mother used to read it aloud to us, translating smoothly as she went along. Undine was a beautiful maiden, half mortal, half watersprite, who won the love of a Prince, but was betrayed by a jealous woman, and imprisoned beneath a sealed fountain. I do not know if this lovely story has ever been translated into English, but it deserves to be. [Undine by De la Mottee Fouque, adapted from the German by W.L. Courtney, and illustrated by Arthur Rackham, was published in 1909 by William Heineman (London) — EDITOR’S NOTE.]

Like other children on both sides of the Atlantic, we had our Grimm and Andersen and Arabian Nights, our Lear and Lewis Carroll. We devoured the books by Mrs. Molesworth, Mrs. Ewing, and Mrs. Gatty. We had our own copies of Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, and the Swiss Family Robinson. From our young aunts we borrowed Queechy, Rosamond, and The Wide, Wide World, but to us, the children in these seemed old-fashioned, not moderns like ourselves.

Little Arthur’s History of England was a milestone in my development for it was my first introduction to English history, and with its stories a new world began to unfold, though the dividing line between fact and fiction was still very nebulous.

Gradually historical stories took a tremendous hold on my sister and me. We read all we could lay our hands on, but our best beloved were Men of Iron, The Little Duke, The Children of the New Forest, and The Dove in the Eagle’s Nest. For months we lived in these books, and for us their characters were far more real and important than the people in our daily life. The Dove in the Eagle’s Nest impressed me especially, for there was a quality in the writing that printed indelibly on my mind the descriptions of the slow melting of the snow among the mountains, the gradual coming of spring, and the broad meadows near Ulm with its beautiful cathedral spire. I saw them, in reality, forty years later and felt as if I were returning to a place where I had been before.

When I was eleven, my grandfather, who was a famous Baptist preacher, gave us a complete set of Sir Walter Scott’s novels. We read them all, not as a duty, but for pleasure, and though we “skipped” here and there, many of them became an integral part of our lives.

About this time I read The Heir of Redclyffe (with my mother’s permission) and although the decorous lovemaking was very harmless, I felt most emancipated. A little later I chanced to hear my grandfather, in his sermon, mention The Story of an African Farm and “its dreary creed.” The moment we arrived home I went to the dining-room bookcase in which were kept the grown-up books that we were not allowed to read, and, curled up on the floor between the bookcase and a large armchair, all ready to slip the book back if anyone should come, I started posthaste on Olive Schreiner’s story. The philosophy was beyond my comprehension, of course, but I was gripped by the power of the book, and there was a completely new atmosphere in it that I absorbed with the hunger of youth.

Then there were all the books about America. What a strange far-off place it seemed in those days, and how it fascinated us! Just as Little Arthur’s History of England had unlocked for us the doors of the past, so did our first book depicting the American scene let us glimpse a world that was like, yet strangely different from, our own.

It was one called Hollyberries, and we loved the colored illustrations. The children didn’t look the same as English children. Nor did the houses and the churches. A few years ago, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I was walking along on a December evening, when suddenly the shape of a slender church spire against a wintry sky, with a crescent moon and bright, sharp stars, brought to my mind a long-forgotten picture. “Why, that was in Hollyberries,” I thought, with genuine delight. I had always felt the atmosphere of that picture was un-English, and here, half a century later, I found it.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin came to us when I was around ten. Well do I remember it, a bright, green book, in which the first picture was of Eliza’s little son dancing before Mr. Selby and the slavetrader, while Eliza hovered anxiously in the background. I cannot say we wept over little Eva’s death. She was altogether too good to appeal to our family.

But it was my mother’s gift of a subscription to St. Nicholas that really brought America to us. No other little girls of our acquaintance had it. Their English magazines like Little Folks and Chatterbox were very different from St. Nicholas with its lovely paper and print, its fine illustrations and general appearance. And we delighted in the American atmosphere. The food (just as interesting to the young then as it is now) sounded so delicious, and we longed to taste syllabub, popcorn, and griddlecakes with maple syrup. We discovered that “shingles” were a kind of wooden roofslate and not a disease, that the “sidewalk” was the pavement, that a “yard” was a garden, “crackers” a plain kind of biscuit, and “biscuits” were scones. We read about Helen Keller, who was just my age, we read stories of New Orleans, and a short story, which seemed very foreign, entitled “Ham Esterbrook’s Canopener.” To me a can was a “tin” and our cook scorned food from tins. I doubt whether our household boasted such an implement as a canopener.

The there were the Gypsy Breynton books and others of the same kind. And Louisa M. Alcott’s stories of the March family, and from which we could quote whole passages by heart. “What Katy Did” and its sequel were both prime favorites with us, and often at night, long after we were meant to be asleep, my sister and I would lie in the darkness discussing this America, where the schools sounded so different from our own, and where the children seemed so much more independent, with no nurses and not many servants. We were intrigued by the way they wore “rubbers” on their feet, and the girls had their hair cut in “bangs.” And they were always “fixing ” things, and drove in “buggies” and “sulkies.” Altogether it was thrilling, and we yearned to meet some American boys and girls and get to know them for ourselves.

It is many years since I first crossed the Atlantic, and England ceased to be “home” to me. My children and my grandchildren were born on this continent, and many of the things that struck me as strange, when I read American books as a child, are accepted as natural by them. My children have had first-hand experience of life in England and on the Continent, but to my grandchildren that atmosphere comes only through books.

I hope that as they grow older it will appeal to them, and to all the others of their generation, in the same way that the American atmosphere appealed to me. For I know of no single factor more important to the promotion of international goodwill than that the children of different countries should have a knowledge and an understanding of each other, and to my mind, the best and simplest way to acquire this knowledge and understanding is through the medium of children’s books.

[The HORN BOOKMagazine, July, 1945, pp 243 – 247]