A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Dinah Mulock Craik’s John Halifax, Gentleman! I have been working on this book for… over two years… Okay, but I restarted it afresh a few months ago, because I’d neglected it so long that the details were getting foggy. Through the eyes of John’s adoring friend Phineas, we follow steadfast, upright, devout John Halifax through his life from the 1790s to the 1830s, lightly touching on some dramatic events in English history (most notably, John Halifax introduces steam-powered machinery into his cloth factory), but mostly considering the events of his life from a quieter, more domestic angle.

Baffled that it took me so long to finish. (Also baffled by the 1890s advice book in which the author sighs that girls of today seem to prefer John Halifax to Ivanhoe. Did they really?) I didn’t dislike the book or I would have quit entirely, but I never built up any momentum on it either.

I also finished a couple of 1930s Newbery books. In Anne Parrish’s Floating Island, a family of dolls are packed in a crate and sent off on a ship… only to get shipwrecked!!! On a normal, non-floating tropical island island. But because all their information about the outside world comes from picture books at the toyshop, they are a bit confused about how some things work, and believe that islands float like boats. Full of fun details about moving through life as a doll about the height of a human hand. The modern reader may wince over Dinah, the Doll family’s Black doll cook, who ends up staying on the island because she feels mysteriously at home there and also has become queen of the monkeys.

Also Eunice Tietjens’ Boy of the South Seas. Tietjens had lived on Tahiti (she was also a war correspondent in World War I) and her depictions of island life are lively, affectionate, and full of interesting details about daily life.

Teiki, a young Polynesian boy, accidentally stows away on an English ship (he fell asleep in one of the lifeboats while watching the sailors unload), which takes him to Moorea, an island close to Tahiti. There a local family adopts Teiki, and he’s mostly very happy, going to school, surfing and cock-fighting with the other boys, and watching Tom Mix movies in the local cinema. But under the surface he feels a gnawing sadness, which grows as he realizes how much French colonialism has eaten away at the island’s traditional culture.

In the end, Teiki falls in with a museum curator, an association which will give him the opportunity to maintain the old skills, even though those skills are fast changing from a living tradition to an artifact of older times. This is perhaps not fully satisfying, but I’m not sure a more satisfying solution is actually possible, given that there is no way for Teiki to reverse the basic trend.

What I’m Reading Now

At long last, I’ve taken the plunge on Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White! So far, our narrator has met The Woman in White on a moonlit lane out past the outskirts of London. The Woman in White mentions, in passing, a connection to Limmeridge Hall… whither our narrator is engaged to go the very next morning, to take up a post as a drawing master! God I love these Victorian coincidences.

What I Plan to Read Next

Caroline B. Cooney’s Goddess of Yesterday.

I’ve been gallivanting through the Newbery Honor books of the 1920s, mostly relying on what is available online, although (bafflingly) my library has exactly one in book form: Padraic Colum’s The Voyagers: Being Legends and Romances of Atlantic Discovery, which details the Atlantic voyages of Maelduin, St. Brendan, Leif Ericsson, and Columbus. The first two are legendary and the last two are historical, a distinction which Colum never makes in the book itself, although the astute reader might guess it from the lack of talking birds in the latter two tales.

I also read Annie Parrish & Dillwyn Parrish’s The Dream Coach, which you will be delighted to hear shares the same surrealist bent as William Bowen’s 1922 The Old Tobacco Shop: A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure, a literary mode that has mostly fallen out of Newbery favor (although it pops up as late as Ellen Raskin’s 1975 Figgs & Phantoms).

I must admit that I tend to enjoy surrealism more in theory than in practice, and The Dream Coach is no exception. I’m delighted that it exists and was a runner-up for an award, and I love the conceit of the book, the coach that carries dreams to children - but at the end of the day this means that the book is a series of four dream sequences, and that is a LOT of dream sequences by weight.

Also, one of the four dreams is sent to a youthful Chinese emperor, and the portrayal of China is about as enlightened as you would expect for 1925. China was a popular setting in 1920s American children’s literature (Shen of the Sea won the Newbery Medal in 1925), and on the basis of those books, I’m not convinced the American public fully grasped that China is a real place and not a fairy tale kingdom.

(Side note: Annie & Dillwyn were brother and sister, and Dillwyn later married M. F. K. Fischer, who later still became a famous food writer. Truly the world of American letters was small in the mid-twentieth century!)

However, the most racist book in this particular batch is Charles Boardman Hawes’ The Great Quest, set in the year 1826, in which our hero’s uncle is persuaded by the nefarious friend of his youth to sail to Africa in search of a great treasure.

“Is it slaves?” I asked.

First they sail to Cuba, where they acquire some dastardly crew members (one of whom has a sinisterly feminine voice) and also a boat with ample cargo space!

“Is that because it’s a slave ship?” I asked.

The dastardly crew members conspire to get Our Hero and his doughty French friend (who clearly used to be a musketeer or whatever the early 1800s equivalent is, because he has MANY hitherto unsuspected martial skills) impressed by the Spanish navy! But because of the not-musketeer’s presence of mind, they escape, and thus join the dastardly crew in sailing to Africa, where it turns out there actually IS a literal gold treasure… which is in a hut, built atop a king’s grave… where the whole adventuring crew are besieged for days by a lot of African warriors who are VERY ANGRY about the whole “built atop a king’s grave” thing.

(The crew eventually escapes, and our hero muses, “I wonder if the whole performance to which we owed our lives was not characteristic of the natives of the African coast? If therein did not lie just the difference between a people so easily led into slavery and a people that never, whatever their weaknesses have been, have yielded to their oppressors? It all happened long ago, and it was my only acquaintance with black warfare; but surely we could never thus have thrown American Indians off the scent.”)

In their escape, they had to leave the gold behind, but NEVER FEAR, they have a backup plan: illegal slave-trading! I have been expecting this since the words “voyage to Africa” crossed the page, but our hero is shocked that there is gambling going on in this establishment. Blah blah blah, some more stuff happens, our hero meets a missionary’s daughter, the VERY ANGRY African warriors run them all out to sea before any slave-trading happens, there is a shipwreck etc. Our hero marries the missionary’s daughter! Happy end! Perhaps Love was the true treasure all along.

After this I need a bit of a breather, which is just as well. There are two more Newbery books from the 1920s still available (Nicholas: A Manhattan Christmas Story, which I’m saving for Christmas, and The Story on Mankind, which I’m saving for… well, someday it will just seem like time, I guess) and then I’ll need to wait for the rest to hit the public domain. The 1928 books will become available in 2024. Ample time for a rest!