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Anne Carroll Moore’s Nicholas: A Manhattan Christmas Story achieved a Newbery Honor in 1925, and like many of the Honor books from the 1920s, it is interestingly bizarre. It’s really a book in two parts, and the second half, which takes place after Christmas, is mostly straight-forward sightseeing in New York, visiting the Hippodrome and the aquarium and the circus and riding the subway and taxis and a hansom cab.
The first half, however, is a surrealist everything-and-the-kitchen-sink extravaganza, of the kind that appears to be a 1920s children’s book speciality. Our story begins when Nicholas arrives in New York City just before Christmas. He comes from Holland and he is eight inches tall. (The book takes little advantage of this fact, to my sorrow.) He wears a World War I helmet from the Chemin des Dames, to remind him of the children whose homes were destroyed in the war, he says. I firmly expected this to result in a benefit concert or something of that sort, but in fact it remains a loose end, flapping in the breeze.
Nicholas at once befriends everyone in New York, starting with the library lions Leo Astor and Leo Lenox (they weren’t renamed Patience and Fortitude until the Great Depression), who see to it that he’s invited to the library’s Christmas party. Other guests include Alice in Wonderland, Sindbad the Sailor, the Boy Wizard (no idea who this one alludes to, but Moore must have thought her readers would know) Palmer Cox’s brownies, various fairies and trolls and nixies, all the comical gentlemen from Washington Irving’s Knickerbocker History of New York, Washington Irving himself, not to mention Charles Dickens and Kate Douglas Wiggin, and not the mention the library statues come to life and also characters from every other book that Moore likes.
I’m 90% sure that Moore appears in this book as Nicholas’s human friend Ann Carraway. Further, I suspect that all the other human characters (Lucky; John Moon; Joe Star; Miss Flora McFlimsey; Molly Gardiner; and on and on and on…) are based on Moore’s real-life friends. I have no evidence to back this up. I just feel it’s so in my heart.
Anne Carroll Moore was the head of the children’s department in the New York Public Library, in which position she shaped children’s library programming as we know it today. I strongly suspect that this book achieved its Newbery runner-up status as a result of some intense politicking at the American Library Association that year, because while I enjoyed it (and made note of many of Moore’s book recommendations), I’m not convinced that Nicholas is actually any good. The prose is clunky. Whole threads get dropped, as witness Nicholas’s war helmet, or indeed the never-utilized fact that he is eight inches tall. To call the characters cardboard cutouts insults the more memorable cardboard cutouts of the world. The structure is bizarre, consisting of one long Christmas set piece replete with magic followed by disconnected episodes with no magic at all.
And yet, and yet. I did enjoy it, in all its ungainly lumbering glory. It’s awkward and messy, and yet there’s this irrepressible joie de vivre.
The first half, however, is a surrealist everything-and-the-kitchen-sink extravaganza, of the kind that appears to be a 1920s children’s book speciality. Our story begins when Nicholas arrives in New York City just before Christmas. He comes from Holland and he is eight inches tall. (The book takes little advantage of this fact, to my sorrow.) He wears a World War I helmet from the Chemin des Dames, to remind him of the children whose homes were destroyed in the war, he says. I firmly expected this to result in a benefit concert or something of that sort, but in fact it remains a loose end, flapping in the breeze.
Nicholas at once befriends everyone in New York, starting with the library lions Leo Astor and Leo Lenox (they weren’t renamed Patience and Fortitude until the Great Depression), who see to it that he’s invited to the library’s Christmas party. Other guests include Alice in Wonderland, Sindbad the Sailor, the Boy Wizard (no idea who this one alludes to, but Moore must have thought her readers would know) Palmer Cox’s brownies, various fairies and trolls and nixies, all the comical gentlemen from Washington Irving’s Knickerbocker History of New York, Washington Irving himself, not to mention Charles Dickens and Kate Douglas Wiggin, and not the mention the library statues come to life and also characters from every other book that Moore likes.
I’m 90% sure that Moore appears in this book as Nicholas’s human friend Ann Carraway. Further, I suspect that all the other human characters (Lucky; John Moon; Joe Star; Miss Flora McFlimsey; Molly Gardiner; and on and on and on…) are based on Moore’s real-life friends. I have no evidence to back this up. I just feel it’s so in my heart.
Anne Carroll Moore was the head of the children’s department in the New York Public Library, in which position she shaped children’s library programming as we know it today. I strongly suspect that this book achieved its Newbery runner-up status as a result of some intense politicking at the American Library Association that year, because while I enjoyed it (and made note of many of Moore’s book recommendations), I’m not convinced that Nicholas is actually any good. The prose is clunky. Whole threads get dropped, as witness Nicholas’s war helmet, or indeed the never-utilized fact that he is eight inches tall. To call the characters cardboard cutouts insults the more memorable cardboard cutouts of the world. The structure is bizarre, consisting of one long Christmas set piece replete with magic followed by disconnected episodes with no magic at all.
And yet, and yet. I did enjoy it, in all its ungainly lumbering glory. It’s awkward and messy, and yet there’s this irrepressible joie de vivre.
