Will It Be Okay? by Crescent Dragonwagon, 1977, 2022.
I like to tie my book reviews into current events when I can, and I first wrote this review around the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. It just seemed like the right time for this one. It’s a picture book, and, when I first wrote the review, my local libraries were closed because of the pandemic, so I couldn’t go find a copy to get pictures. However, the book is available to read online through Internet Archive, which is where I first encountered it.
The version on Internet Archive is the older printing of the book, with its original pictures. Since then, the book has been reprinted with a set of new pictures. The pictures that appear here are from the new version. The older version of the book showed a blonde girl with a blonde mother, and the new version has a mother and daughter with black hair. Between the two, I prefer the newer illustrations, but readers can decide for themselves. I was surprised, but some of the text of the story was also changed between the versions of the book.
A young girl keep asking her mother about various types of problems that she might encounter, everything from storms to bee stings to forgetting her lines in the school play, and asking her what she would do if each of these things happen.
The mother gives her calm, reassuring answers. Some of them are based on common sense, like if their cabbages don’t come up, they’ll go get some tomato plants and plant tomatoes, and then their cabbages will likely come up anyway.
All of the answers have a poetic quality and answer the girl’s emotions, not taking all of the situations exactly literally, but capturing the feeling that the girl would need to have to get through life’s fears and uncertainties. When the girl asks what if no one likes her dancing, her mother describes how she can dance alone until she meets a new friend, who will dance with her and then come to her house to draw pictures and drink cocoa. I take this to mean what if people don’t like the girl instead of just her dancing, and her mother’s response to mean that she just needs to keep living her life, and she will meet people who will like her.
The last question that the girl poses to her mother is “But what if you die?” This is probably the fear that the girl has more than any of the other fears that she’s mentioned, but the mother still has a calm reply.
The mother tells her daughter that if she dies, her love will stay with her and she’ll have so much that she’ll have to give love away to other people. Her daughter will make new friends and dance with them and she’ll even come to love things like bees and thunderstorms and the other things that have frightened her. The girl will love other people in her life, and they’ll love her, too. Everything will be okay.
My Reaction
Life has many uncertainties, and bad things can happen, but there are other things that can make life better so that, in the end, we will be okay, in spite of the bad and scary things that come along. It’s not easy to believe that in the middle of scary situations, when you don’t know how it’s all going to work out, but I appreciate the sentiment. It’s always possible for things to improve. Bad things might happen, but we can handle them. It’s important to believe that we can handle situations and approach them with confidence.
The hardest, scariest thing to accept is when people die. Death is permanent. When someone has died or is facing death, it’s hard to believe that it could ever be okay because you can’t undo death. The mother in the story doesn’t try to deny that she could die at some point, but what she says is that her daughter will go on with her life and that she will always have her love. It’s what she leaves behind and what her daughter will continue to do after she is gone that will make things okay. The mother doesn’t want her daughter to focus on the sad and scary parts but to look forward with hope and confidence. As long as we can continue to move forward and love one another, things will be okay.
The last picture in the original version of the book is of the mother and daughter in the bathtub together, but they’re largely concealed by bubbles in the bath. Personally, I prefer the newer version of the book, which has the mother and daughter dancing in the leaves together under the trees.
Some of the situations in the book were changed between the old version and the new version of the book. In the old version of the book, the girl worries about what to do if she meets a big dog or if snakes come in the middle of the night, and neither of those were included in the new version of the book. Some answers in the old book are as improbable as the problems that the girl poses, like suggesting that the girl play a flute to charm snakes if snakes come. Both versions of the book have the scene where the girl worries that someone might hate her and her mother says that a frog will tell her that she’s lovable.
Grace loves stories, both hearing them and acting them out. She is imaginative, and likes playing games of pretend and acting out adventures.
When Grace’s teacher tells the class that they are going to perform the play Peter Pan and will be holding auditions for parts in the play, Grace wants the title role of Peter Pan. A couple of the other kids think that it’s odd for her to want to be Peter Pan because she is both a girl and black, which is exactly the opposite of how they usually see the character.
However, Grace still wants to play Peter Pan. When she tells her mother and grandmother what the other kids said, they reassure her that she can get the part if she really wants it and puts her mind to it.
To prove to Grace that a young black girl can get starring roles, her grandmother takes her to see a ballet where the granddaughter of a friend of hers from Trinidad is playing the role of Juliet in Romeo and Juliet.
Seeing the performance cheers Grace up and gives her the confidence to audition for the part of Peter Pan. When her classmates see how good she is when she performs, they all agree that Grace should have the role of Peter Pan.
The message that young girls like Grace can do what they set their minds to, even if the roles they want in life aren’t quite traditional, is a good one. As I read the story, I was also thinking that the objection that Grace can’t be Peter Pan actually doesn’t make much sense if you know that Peter Pan, of all roles in plays, is one that is often played by a female. I remember that when I was a kid in elementary school, there was a girl who played the part of Peter Pan, and one of the teachers explained that women sometimes play Peter Pan, especially when the actors are all adults, because women have the higher-pitched voices that the part really needs. I would liked it if the teacher in the story also mentioned that. Also, acting is about capturing the spirit of the character in the story, thinking and feeling like they would think and feel and acting the way they would act. I would have liked it if they had mentioned that. Grace may not look quite the way people might picture Peter Pan, but if she can capture the character in her performance, she’s a good actor.
I liked the pictures in the book for their realism. In a couple of the pictures which show how Grace like to act out fantasies, she is shirtless, but she is very young and it isn’t possible to really see anything, so I don’t consider it inappropriate, but I thought that I would mention it.
Corduroy is a small teddy bear who lives in a department store, waiting for someone to buy him and take him home. However, he is missing one of the buttons on his overalls, and it makes people reluctant to buy him.
One night, after the store is closed, Corduroy sneaks out of the toy department to go looking for his lost button. After a trip up the escalator, he finds himself in the furniture department. To Corduroy, it’s like climbing a mountain and finding himself in a palace.
When he spots a button on a mattress, he thinks it might be his and pulls it off. By accident, he knocks over a lamp, which attracts the attention of a night watchman, who spots him and returns him to the toy department.
The little girl who wanted Corduroy before, Lisa, returns to the store and buys him. Lisa takes Corduroy home and sews a new button on Corduroy’s overalls. Corduroy is happy because he’s always wanted a home and a friend, and now he has both.
At first, this book was a stand-alone story, but later, the author wrote a sequel called A Pocket for Corduroy. Later, other authors continued the series.
The book is available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive.
The Silver Slippers by Elizabeth Koda-Callan, 1989.
A little girl (unnamed, like the other girls in this series) wants to be a ballerina. She takes ballet classes, but she never seems quite good enough, like the ballet posters on the walls of her room. She feels discouraged because she is not perfect.
When her ballet teacher tells the class that there is going to be a dance recital and that one girl in class will be chosen to be the prima and lead the others, the girl doesn’t think that she has a chance to be chosen because her dancing isn’t good enough.
The girl tells her mother about the recital and her doubts about being chosen to be prima, and her mother tells her that it depends on how much she wants to be prima and how much she is willing to practice to improve. If the girl is willing to put in extra practice, she still has a chance to be prima. To remind her of her goals, her mother gives her a silver charm in the shape of a pair of ballet slippers.
In order to improve her dancing, the girl has to focus on her goal and give up participating in other activities to find more time to practice. However, her practicing pays off, and she gets the role of prima. On the night of the recital, she is nervous, but her silver slippers charm reminds her of her dream of being a real ballerina and gives her the courage to go on with her performance.
All of the books in this series originally came with charms like the ones described in the stories. This book originally included a little silver slippers charm for the reader to wear. The hole in the cover of the book was where the charm was displayed when the book was new. The books in the series often focus on the unnamed main character (who could represent any girl reading this story – the books were aimed at young girls) developing new self confidence, and the charms were meant to be either a sign of their new self confidence or inspiration for developing it. In this case, the charm is a reminder of the girl’s goals and how much she really loves dancing, giving her the inspiration she needs to persevere even when learning is difficult.
The book is available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive.
This retelling of the classic fairy tale is a Caldecott Medal winner. The illustrations are beautiful! A note in the beginning of the book explains a little more about the author’s sources for the story as well as his view about it. Instead of focusing on an evil witch who holds a young girl captive, he presents “a mother figure who powerfully resists her child’s inevitable growth.”
A
couple who have wished for children for a long time are excited to realize that
they are finally going to have one!
However, the wife finds herself with an irresistible craving for the
Rapunzel (an herb) that grows in the nearby garden of a sorceress. She is so desperate to have some that she is
able to persuade her husband to steal some for her. But, even having some causes her craving to
grow.
When the husband returns to the garden to get more Rapunzel, the sorceress catches him. He explains the situation, saying that his wife’s craving is so intense that he fears she will die if she doesn’t get some Rapunzel. The sorceress agrees that the wife can have the Rapunzel she needs, but in exchange, she demands the child when it is born. Not knowing what else to do, the husband reluctantly agrees. When the wife gives birth to a baby girl, the sorceress comes, names the baby “Rapunzel”, and takes her away from her parents.
The sorceress cares for the girl and raises her. When the beautiful young girl turns twelve, the sorceress takes her to live in a tower in the forest. The tower is magical, looking narrow on the outside, but containing many beautiful and comfortable rooms. The only way in or out is through the window at the very top. The witch has Rapunzel let down her extremely long, beautiful hair so that she can climb up.
Rapunzel lives alone in the tower for years, until a prince happens to ride by and hears her singing. The prince is enchanted by the singing and asks questions about the tower at the nearest houses, learning about the sorceress and the young woman in the tower.
One
day, he sees the sorceress visiting Rapunzel and sees how she gets into the
tower. So, later, he calls to Rapunzel
himself, asking her to let down her hair.
Rapunzel is surprised and frightened at first, when she sees that her
new visitor isn’t the sorceress, but he speaks nicely to her, and they become
friendly. The prince proposes marriage,
and Rapunzel accepts. After that, he
visits her every night, without the sorceress’s knowledge.
However,
Rapunzel eventually gets pregnant, and when her clothes no longer fit her, the
sorceress realizes it. She calls
Rapunzel a “wicked child” and says that she has betrayed her. She cuts off Rapunzel’s long hair and exiles
her into the wilderness, alone.
The sorceress uses Rapunzel’s long hair to trick the prince into climbing into the tower. When he comes, she tells him that Rapunzel is gone, and he will never see her again. The prince falls from the tower, injuring his eyes. Blinded, the prince wanders alone for a year, lamenting for his lost wife.
Eventually, he finds Rapunzel in the wilderness, recognizing her singing. She has given birth to twins. Rapunzel’s tears heal the prince’s eyes, and he is able to see again. Realizing that they are near to his kingdom, he takes Rapunzel and the twins home.
The book is available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive.
The story of Alice in Wonderland is over 150 years old, and the sequel, Through the Looking Glass, is now 150 years old, as of 2021. These books have been reprinted in many different languages and editions. The edition that I’m using for this review is actually a combined edition of the two from 1960 with added notes by Martin Gardner. (Although I used a cover image from a different edition above.) I like editions with added notes because there is quite a lot to explain about both Lewis Carroll and his stories.
I explained a lot of Lewis Carroll’s background and some of the controversies surrounding his life in my review of Alice in Wonderland. One important point about the Alice stories is that they are full of puzzles, riddles, word games, in-jokes, and parodies of poems that were popular in the author’s time. Lewis Carroll (real name Charles Dodgson) was a mathematician and scholar at Oxford, and he liked to play with logic puzzles and word games. Sometimes he would hide people’s names within poems or parts of the story by rearranging the letters of their names or using them as the beginning of lines in a poem, as an acrostic. There is an acrostic poem which is dedicated to Alice Liddell, the real girl who inspired Alice in Wonderland. This poem is printed as part of some editions of Through the Looking Glass, including the one that I’m using. The acrostic poem also references Row, Row, Row Your Boat, which is apparently older although its origins aren’t completely certain. If you read down the beginning letters of the poem, you find out that Alice’s middle name was Pleasance.
The chess game in Through the Looking Glass is meant to be part of an actual chess game with real moves that can be mapped out on a board. The game and the moves in the story are explained in the preface of my copy of the book. Alice begins as a white pawn in the game, but when she reaches the other side of the board, she becomes a queen, which is part of the rules of chess – pawns that successfully reach the opponent’s side may be exchanged for other pieces. The colors of the chess pieces in Alice’s game are red and white instead of black and white because red and white are old traditional colors. Although black and white are common today, many different color combinations have been used, and the red and white combination dates back to the Middle Ages.
The story begins on the day before Guy Fawkes’ Night. (Alice has been watching the bonfire preparations out the window.) Alice is trying to wind some yarn, and her pet cat Dinah’s little black kitten keeps playing with it. Alice chastises the kitten, and then begins talking to the kitten about the way it was watching her play chess earlier in the day. Alice likes to play games of pretend, and she starts to pretend that the kitten is the red queen from the chess game. The kitten doesn’t cooperate in posing like the chess queen, so Alice holds it up to a looking-glass.
As they look in the mirror, Alice gets the idea of a “Looking-glass House” – a house on the other side of the mirror that can be reached by stepping through it. Alice starts to imagine what it would be like to enter the world on the other side of the mirror. She gets up on the mantle over the fireplace and steps through the mirror into the looking-glass house to see what is there.
Things in the looking-glass house are very strange. The clock and the pictures seem to be alive, and so are the chess pieces. Alice helps the pieces back onto their table after they’ve been knocked off, but they don’t seem to understand what has happened and are alarmed. Alice then picks up a book on the table near the chess board and reads the poem Jabberwocky, which is about the defeat of a horrible monster. The poem is written in backwards writing, and Alice has to hold it up to a mirror to read it. The poem is a nonsense poem that contains many made-up words, which are explained later on in the story.
Alice decides to see what is outside the house. She discovers that the flowers can talk to her, but they are rude and insulting. Then, Alice encounters the Red Queen, who has grown taller than she was in the house. (The flowers say that it’s because of all the fresh air outside.) The Red Queen is both commanding and contradictory, but she gives Alice directions to other “squares”, addressing her as a chess pawn.
Pawns get to move two squares on their first turn, so Alice gets to go by train. In the train carriage, Alice meets many strange characters, including a gentleman dressed in white, a Goat, a Beetle, and a Gnat, who keeps whispering in her ear and suggesting that she make jokes based on puns. Through the Gnat, Alice meets other strange insects, like the snap-dragon-fly, the rocking-horse-fly, and the bread-and-butterfly. The Gnat tells Alice that the creatures in the woods don’t have names, and when Alice goes through the woods, she temporarily forgets her name, getting it back again on the other side.
Soon after, Alice meets Tweedledum and Tweedledee. (Lewis Carroll didn’t invent these characters. They are nursery rhyme characters.) They ask Alice if she likes poetry, and they tell her the tale of The Walrus and the Carpenter. (This is one of the most-quoted poems in the Alice stories – many people remember the part where they “talk of many things” – “Shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings.”) At the end, Alice can’t decide which of the two characters she likes the best because both are sneaky and eat the oysters that trusted them, so she decides that she doesn’t like either of them. (Yeah, I can think of others stories where I’ve felt the same way.) Alice hears a strange sound, and they tell her that it’s the Red King snoring and that the Red King is actually dreaming about her right now. Tweedledum and Tweedledee insist that Alice isn’t a real person, only part of the Red King’s dream, and that she’d disappear if he were to wake up, which upsets Alice. Alice starts to cry, which she thinks is proof that she’s real, but they claim that those aren’t real tears. Finally, Alice decides that they’re just talking nonsense and that there’s no point in crying over it. Tweedledum and Tweedledee want to have a battle (as in their poem), but a large crow interrupts them and frightens them away by producing a great wind.
Alice catches hold of a shawl that was being blown away by the wind and returns it to its owner, the White Queen. The White Queen speaks very strangely, and she says that it’s an effect of living backwards. Because she lives backwards, her memory works both ways, and she can remember things that haven’t happened yet. The White Queen screams with pain before she pricks her finger, so she doesn’t have to do it again after her finger is hurt. Alice cries when she talks about how lonely she is in the woods, and the White Queen distracts her by telling her to consider things because no one can think of two things at once (which is true). The White Queen talks about considering and believing impossible things (sometimes she believes “six impossible things before breakfast” – one of the most famous lines that is often quoted from this story).
As Alice asks the White Queen if her finger is better, she suddenly and inexplicably finds herself in a shop and talking to a sheep, who asks her what she wants to buy. Alice tries to look around, and the Sheep asks her if she’s a child or a teetotum (a kind of spinning top used in old games, sometimes by itself and sometimes as a replacement for dice or a spinner – dreidels are a kind of teetotum) because of the way she’s turning around. The Sheep is knitting and keeps picking up more needles to knit with. For awhile, the shop disappears, and Alice finds herself in a boat with the Sheep, but then the shop returns, and the Sheep asks her again what she wants to buy.
Alice decides to buy an egg, and the egg that she buys turns into Humpty Dumpty when she approaches it. Humpty Dumpty is a bit rude and insults Alice’s name because he doesn’t think it means anything. Alice mistakes Humpty Dumpty’s cravat for a belt because he’s egg-shaped and doesn’t have a true neck for wearing a tie. Humpty Dumpty reveals that the cravat was an un-birthday (a concept that Lewis Carroll invented) present from the White King and Queen. All through the conversation, Humpty Dumpty uses words in unusual yet strangely nit-picky ways, making words mean only what he wants them to mean in the moment. Because he’s so particular about the meanings of words, Alice asks Humpty Dumpty about all the strange words in the Jabberwocky poem, and he explains what the made-up words mean. Humpty Dumpty recites another poem for Alice that doesn’t seem to have a true ending and then abruptly dismisses her.
As Alice leaves, she meets the king with all of his horses and men (from the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme) and is introduced to one of his messengers. Alice is amused by the name and description of the messenger and starts playing a game of “I Love My Love” out loud with the messenger’s name. (The two messengers are called Haigha and Hatta and are shown looking like the March Hare and Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland in the illustrations.) The messenger informs the king that the lion and the unicorn are fighting for the crown again (another nursery rhyme reference). The king says that it’s all a joke because the crown is his and neither one of them is going to get it no matter which of them wins the fight.
The unicorn is amazed to meet Alice because he never knew that children were real before. As at the end of the rhyme, they are given plum cake, and they hand the dish to Alice for her to cut the cake. However, Alice finds that she can’t cut it, so they ask her to hand the cake around first and then cut it afterward, which surprisingly works.
After the others are drummed out of town, also as part of the rhyme, the Red Knight attempts to capture Alice, but the White Knight shows up to save her. The White Knight tells Alice all about his inventions, none of which make any sense, and sings her a song which apparently has several names and is set to the tune of a song Alice recognizes as “I give thee all, I can no more” (which is another name and the first line of the song which is really titled My Heart and Lute, which is part of the on-going joke about the song’s real name).
Then, Alice reaches the final square of the board and becomes a queen, finding a crown suddenly on her head. The Red Queen and the White Queen appear suddenly, and the Red Queen tells her that she must pass an examination before she can truly become a queen. The queens ask her a series of questions that are supposed to be math questions but are actually a combination of riddles and nonsense. Their general knowledge questions are a combination of nonsense and puns. Eventually, the Red Queen and White Queen both fall asleep to a parody of “Rock-a-bye Baby.”
Alice finds herself in front of a door labelled “Queen Alice,” but the old frog who comes to the door doesn’t seem to want to let her in. Alice enters anyway and sits next to the Red Queen and White Queen. They introduce her to the food being served at the feast, but they don’t actually allow her to have any because it isn’t polite to cut and serve something you’ve been introduced to, and the plum cake verbally protests when Alice tries to serve it anyway.
The White Queen tells Alice a riddle in poem form about fish. The riddle is never answered, but everyone drinks to Alice’s health. The Red Queen tells Alice that she should make a speech, and as she gets up, many strange things begin happening in the room. Alice thinks that the Red Queen is responsible and grabs hold of her, threatening to “shake her into a kitten.” Alice suddenly wakes up, holding her little black kitten.
Like in Alice in Wonderland, everything that Alice experienced was a dream. However, the end of the book poses the question of whether the dream was Alice’s or the Red King’s. The question is never answered; it’s just something to make the readers think. That’s actually what I like most about the Alice stories, that they are partly meant to make the reader think. The stories are somewhat disjointed and constantly changing, kind of like dreams do, but I appreciate all the references and parodies in the stories.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, 1865.
The beginning of the story is famous. Alice is sitting with her sister (unnamed in the book, but probably based on Lorina because Lorina was older than Alice) by the river, and she is bored by the book that her sister is reading because there are no pictures or conversations. As Alice is sitting there drowsily, she suddenly spots a white rabbit who seems like he’s running late for something. Curious to see where he is going, Alice follows him and falls down a rabbit hole which is like a deep well.
It takes her a long time to fall (causing Alice to wonder if she’ll pop out on the other side of the world eventually), and when she reaches the bottom, she finds herself in a dark hallway with a small door that is too small for her to go through. She manages to shrink herself by drinking from a mysterious bottle that says “Drink Me,” but she forgets the key to the door on the table above her, so she has to make herself bigger by eating cake from a box labeled “Eat Me.” When Alice is big, she cries so much, worrying that she is no longer herself but someone else she would rather not be because so many strange things are happening, that she makes a sea of tears, and when she is small again, she has to swim.
She meets a mouse, who swims to shore with her, where they meet a bunch of other animals (including the Dodo), who all seem somehow familiar to Alice (probably because they’re all parodies of people Dodgson and the Liddells knew – A Lory (type of parrot) argues with Alice and tells her that it’s older than she is and “must know better” than she does – possibly another reference to Alice’s older sister Lorina).
Alice and all of the animals are wet, so they try to dry themselves. The Mouse begins telling a very dry history of England (ha, ha), but that’s not good enough. The Dodo suggests that they have a Caucus-race (Alice’s childish misunderstanding of certain words and concepts leads to some of the jokes and puns in the story) to dry themselves out, and they all start running in a circle. After awhile, they all stop, and since there is no obvious winner, the Dodo decides that everyone has won and that everyone should receive a prize. Alice gives all the animals pieces of candy from her pocket. Alice’s prize is her own thimble, which is the only other thing she has in her pocket.
The Mouse starts to tell a story about why it hates dogs and cats, but it gives up when Alice doesn’t pay attention and becomes confused. Then, Alice makes the mistake of mentioning her pet cat and how it likes to chase mice and birds, and all of the other animals become offended and leave. However, the White Rabbit appears and, apparently mistaking Alice for his maid, asks her to bring him his gloves and fan. Alice goes into his house to look for them. Finding another bottle like the first one, she drinks it and becomes so big that she gets stuck in the house. The White Rabbit and his friend, Bill the Lizard, become alarmed at her large arm sticking out of the window and talk about burning the house down. They throw pebbles at Alice which turn into cakes, and Alice eats them to become smaller.
Alice makes her escape from the house, distracting a puppy much larger than she is by throwing a stick, and meets a caterpillar, who is sitting on a mushroom and smoking a hookah. The Caterpillar asks her to explain herself, but Alice says that she can’t because she isn’t really herself. Alice tells him that she keeps changes sizes and can’t remember things that she thinks she should remember. The Caterpillar asks her to recite the poem about Father William, and Alice recites Carroll’s parody version instead of the original poem. The Caterpillar agrees that Alice said the poem wrong. He asks Alice what size she would like to be and gets offended when Alice says that being only three inches tall is awful because that is the Caterpillar’s height. However, he does tell Alice that one side of the mushroom will make her taller and the other will make her shorter, not explaining which is which. Alice experiments with bits of mushroom until she finally becomes her normal size again. She keeps the mushroom pieces so that she can change size again, if she needs to. (Has anyone ever made a video game version of Alice in Wonderland where the player, as Alice, has to become bigger or smaller to get through different levels? If no one has, I think someone should.)
Alice soon makes herself small again so that she can go into a little house. Alice speaks to the footman of the house, who has just accepted an invitation for the Duchess to join the Queen for croquet. The footman rambles on about how there’s no use in Alice knocking because they’re both on the same side of the door and everyone inside is making too much noise to hear her. Not getting any straight answers about whether or not she’s allowed to go inside, Alice decides that the footman is an idiot and just lets herself in. The Duchess is sitting inside with a baby while her cook makes pepper soup. The Duchess’s cat, the Cheshire Cat, grins at Alice in a strange way. (The Cheshire cat comes from an expression that was popular in the 19th century – “grinning like a Cheshire cat” – although the origins of the phrase are uncertain. The Cheshire Cat wasn’t actually in the original version of the story.) Alice becomes alarmed when the cook begins throwing things at the Duchess and the baby, but the Duchess tells her to mind her own business. The Duchess is rough with the baby and throws it. Alice catches it and takes it away, worrying that the Duchess might kill it, but the baby turns into a pig, and Alice has to let it go. Alice thinks that it would have been a very ugly child and is better off as pig, which reminds her of other children she knows. (Ouch.)
Alice spots the Cheshire Cat and tries to ask it for directions. It directs her to the Mad Hatter and the March Hare, telling her that they’re both mad. (These also come from old expressions, “mad as a hatter” and “mad as a March hare.”) Alice says that she doesn’t want to “go among mad people”, but the Cheshire Cat says that can’t be helped because everyone is mad here, including Alice, because she wouldn’t be there if she wasn’t. He says that he will see her later when she plays croquet with the Queen. Before the Cat vanishes completely, he asks her what happened to the baby, and when Alice says that it turned into a pig, the Cat says, “I thought it would.”
Alice ends up at the tea party that the March Hare and the Mad Hatter are having with the Dormouse. (This tea party also was not part of Carroll’s original version of the story.) Although they tell her there is no room at the table for her, Alice notes that it’s a big table with a lot of chairs, so she sits down, uninvited. The conversation is confused, and the Mad Hatter tells Alice a riddle without knowing the answer to it himself. Alice says that he’s wasting time, and the Mad Hatter says that Time won’t do anything he wants now because he was accused of “murdering the time” when he sang “Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!” before the Queen of Hearts (he messed up with the timing of the song), and now it’s always six o’clock and always tea time (that’s when people, including the Liddells, used to have tea time when the story was written). This gives them no time to clean up between tea times, so they just keep moving around the table. Alice tries to ask them what they do when they get back to their original positions at the table, but the March Hare changes the subject. The Dormouse begins telling the story of the three sisters who lived at the bottom of the Treacle Well and were learning to draw things that begin with the letter ‘M’. (As the March Hare says, “Why not?”) Alice tries to ask questions, and starts to say, “I don’t think-” The Mad Hatter says, “Then you shouldn’t talk.” Alice gets offended and decides to leave.
She finds a door that takes her back to the hallway where she was in the beginning, and she is able to open the door that she couldn’t before, which leads her into a beautiful garden. There, she finds some playing cards painting the roses. It turns out that they accidentally planted white roses, and the Queen wants red ones, so they’re just painting the roses so she won’t find out. The King and Queen of Hearts enter the garden, and the Queen begins demanding to know who Alice is and who the cards are. Alice gives a flippant remark, and the Queen screams, “Off with her head!” (Which, I think, is about the third time in the story that someone has said that. The Duchess was the first.) The King points out that Alice is only a child. The Queen invites Alice to play croquet. The White Rabbit explains that the Duchess isn’t coming because she’s supposed to be executed for boxing the Queen’s ears.
In this game of croquet, the mallets are flamingos (ostriches in the original version) and the balls are hedgehogs. The card soldiers have to bend themselves to be the arches. Alice can’t control her flamingo or hedgehog, nobody waits for their turn, and the Queen keeps ordering people’s heads to be taken off. Alice is very worried, and when the Cheshire Cat appears, Alice tells him that nobody is playing fairly. She notices that the Queen is listening, so she comments that the Queen is likely to win, which pleases her. The King says that he doesn’t like the Cat and wants him removed. The Queen orders its execution, but the Cheshire Cat makes its body disappear. The executioner doesn’t know what to do because he’s used to removing heads from bodies and can’t deal with a bodiless head. Alice suggests asking the Duchess because it’s her cat.
The Duchess seems glad to see Alice, and as Alice’s mind wanders, the two of them have a discussion about what the moral of the situation is. (Victorian children’s books often had a moral to the story. All of the Duchess’s and Alice’s suggested morals are proverbs that don’t fit the situation at all or are parodies on popular sayings. “Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves” is a parody of “Take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves.”) The croquet game continues until everybody has been arrested except for the King, Queen, and Alice.
The Queen asks Alice if she’s met the Mock Turtle yet (which is supposedly what mock turtle soup is made from). Alice hears the King pardon everyone who was arrested. The Queen orders the Gryphon to take Alice to the Mock Turtle, and the Gryphon tells her that nobody ever really gets executed when the Queen orders an execution – it’s all just the Queen’s fancy.
When the Gryphon introduces Alice to the Mock Turtle, the Mock Turtle explains that he used to be a real turtle. He talks about his youth and the lessons he had when he was young. (The “extras” that he and Alice describe – French, music, and washing – are a parody of British boarding schools at the time and a play of the word “extra.” These things were not provided as free “extras”, and of course, washing isn’t a lesson – they would cost extra at boarding school and the additional costs would be added on to the fees.) The Gryphon and the Mock Turtle describe the Lobster-Quadrille dance to Alice, demonstrating it (while singing a song that is a parody of The Spider and the Fly). They ask Alice about her adventures, and she tells them everything that’s happened to her so far. When she mentions not being able to recite poems correctly, they have her try another, and she recites “‘Tis the voice of the Lobster” instead of “The Sluggard” by Isaac Watts. The Mock Turtle sings “Turtle Soup”, which is a parody of the song “Star of the Evening” by James M. Sayles.
Then, they hear that a trial is beginning. It turns out that it’s a trial for the Knave of Hearts who stole the Queen’s tarts. During the trial, which is basically nonsense, Alice feels herself growing larger. She is called to give evidence, but because she is becoming too tall, she is told to leave the court. The King says that it’s Rule Forty-Two and is the oldest rule in the book, but Alice points out that the oldest rule should be Rule One. The White Rabbit presents a letter, supposedly written by the defendant, which is a nonsense poem. (This one is a shortened version of another nonsense poem by Carroll which loosely parodied the song “Alice Gray” and isn’t recognizably close to the original here.) The King and Queen try to figure out what the poem means, but Alice doesn’t think it means anything. The Queen wants to give the sentence first and the verdict afterward, and Alice says that’s nonsense and she doesn’t care what they think because they’re just a pack of cards. The cards come flying at her, and Alice wakes up.
Apparently, the entire adventure was a dream, and Alice feel asleep on the river bank with her sister. Alice tells her sister about the dream, and her sister is enchanted. Alice’s sister imagines Alice in years to come, telling other children the same story.
The story of Alice in Wonderland is over 150 years old, as of this writing, and it has been reprinted in many different languages and editions. The edition that I’m using for this review is actually a combined edition with the sequel, Through the Looking Glass, from 1960 with added notes by Martin Gardner. I like editions with added notes because there is quite a lot to explain about both Lewis Carroll and his stories. This is going to be a very long review, and there are a number of things I want to explain before I even start summarizing the story.
Lewis Carroll, real name Charles Dodgson, was actually a mathematician at Oxford in England. His modern reputation is somewhat dubious because one of his hobbies was photography, and among the pictures he took were pictures of children, including many in various states of undress, some nude or partially nude and some in nightgowns. Charles Dodgson never married and never had any children of his own, and his sexuality (or relative lack thereof, as some have also speculated) is debatable. He was known for being friendly with the children of many of his friends and colleagues, and he enjoyed spending time with them, talking to them, telling them stories, and teaching them things … and taking pictures of them. The parents of the children knew about the photographs, including the nude ones, and gave permission for them to be taken, even keeping copies themselves.
Scholars debate about Dodgson’s photographs and the intention behind them. Not all of the pictures feature children who are undressed; some are just wearing ordinary clothes and others are dressed in fanciful costumes, like characters from stories. However, the nude or partially nude pictures are troubling because the children in those pictures were not babies, like the ones in modern Anne Geddes photographs. By modern standards, there would be no innocent reason for taking pictures of unclothed children like that. However, some scholars point out that photography was a relatively new hobby at that time, and people were taking pictures of things and other people in ways that people wouldn’t now because they were so eager to try out this new technology. People were realizing that they could use photography to immortalize loved ones in ways that they never could before. (Look up 19th century post-mortem photography only if you’re not easily startled or disgusted.)
There is some evidence that Victorian people were not scandalized by the idea of nude photographs of children, perhaps considering them a preservation of a state of innocence that would gradually disappear as the children grew up, almost like how some people today still photograph nude babies. Dodgson wasn’t the only one taking pictures of nude children at the time, and he apparently did so with the full knowledge and approval of the children’s parents, giving them photographs to keep. On the other hand, without knowing Dodgson’s real intentions, it’s difficult to say whether or not these pictures were really as innocent as they were once supposed, and some people consider that Dodgson may have taken advantage of the innocence of both the children and parents involved for his own purposes. After his death, some of his relatives removed some of the pages in his diaries, censoring them before they could be made public, so it’s difficult to say what they removed and why. This censorship could have had something to do with his photography hobby and how he felt about it, or it could be unrelated, maybe covering up his romantic feelings for someone else or maybe personal or professional quarrels that might have proved embarrassing to people still alive at the time he died. Without the missing diary pages, there isn’t really much to go on, and the speculation is really just speculation.
Not what Alice Liddell really looked like.
One of the favorite child friends of Dodgson’s was Alice Liddell, one of the daughters of the ecclesiastical dean of Christ Church, Oxford. Dodgson often visited the Liddell family and took Alice and her sisters on outings. On one of their outings together, when he and a friend took the Liddell girls on a boating trip on the Thames, Alice begged Dodgson to tell a story, and he began making up the story that became Alice in Wonderland, making Alice herself the heroine. Dodgson was still friends with the Liddell family at that point, although he later had a falling out with the family for reasons that are still unknown. The reasons for the falling out were apparently part of the pages removed from his diary, and some people have speculated that Dodgson may have behaved improperly toward one or more of the girls, although that’s not the only possibility; Dodgson may have had a different type of romantic indiscretion at that time, possibly involving the children’s governess or Alice’s older sister Lorina, and he may have also quarreled with the dean over college politics. Dodgson was a contemporary of another famous author of children’s fantasy books, George MacDonald. (I’ll be talking about him more when I get to The Light Princess and The Princess and the Goblin.) The two of them were friends, and MacDonald was the one who urged Dodgson to publish Alice in Wonderland after his own children read it and liked it. (MacDonald’s children were also among the ones photographed by Dodgson.)
This documentary has more details about the history Lewis Carroll, his photography, and his writing. Overall, I think that probably the most accurate answer in the documentary to the question of what was really going on in Oxford in the mid-1800s is “Who knows?” Some people gave much more definite-sounding responses to the question, but there are equally vehement opinions that take completely opposite views of the situation, and with the obvious gaps in the available information, I don’t think that level of certainty is warranted. The documentary covers various viewpoints and ends with a photograph that is potentially damaging to Lewis Carroll’s reputation, one that would have been scandalous even in the Victorian era if it was really taken by Carroll (it wasn’t proven definitely, but the experts’ conclusions were that seems likely or at least credible, and its time period and quality are in keeping with Carroll’s work) because the subject of the photograph (possibly Lorina Liddell) would have been too old for the photograph to be considered “innocent” even back then. The girl in that photograph would have been above the minimum age of consent for her time but still below the age of consent for ours, making that photograph suspicious by everyone’s standards.
My Reaction
This is not sexy, Martin Grotjahn.
My theory about the issue? I kind of doubt that Carroll was a pedophile. Kind of. Partly, my reasoning is based on listening to and reading the different arguments on each side, and it seems to me that those who express doubt about the accusation have more concrete evidence to support their points (they reference other photographers who took pictures similar to Carroll’s, they discuss the age of consent in the Victorian era, they note inconsistencies in the reported ages of Carroll’s female friends, they provide details about different sources of information, etc.) than the people who insist that he “obviously” and “without doubt” was sexually attracted to little girls, who seem to be largely reactionary and make I statements like “I can’t believe” that there was anything innocent going on and “it makes me angry.” (Some of the people interviewed the Timeline Documentary speak like that.)
Between the two choices, I’d be more inclined to go with reasoned arguments and cited sources more than gut reactions. My reviews here on this site are full of my personal feelings and gut reactions on a number of topics because that is the nature of opinion-based reviews, but I’ve had training in evaluating historical sources and writing research papers. Feelings change over time, and you can’t cite gut reactions as evidence in a thesis paper. The first essay that postulated that Alice in Wonderland may contain sexual symbolism, written by A.M.E. Goldschmidt in the 1930s, may have actually been written as a parody of contemporary psycho-analysis, and some of the “obvious” sexual symbols cited in later essays and analysis make no sense to me. In 1947, a psychoanalyst named Martin Grotjahn said that the scene where Alice’s neck suddenly grows longer is a symbol “almost too obvious for words.” No, it’s really not. I had to sit and think for awhile about why a person with a giraffe-like neck would be considered sexy, and then, it occurred to me that he’s probably really thinking of a piece of male anatomy instead of a girl’s neck, which doesn’t make any sense for the context of the story. Even now, I’m still not completely sure if that’s what he’s really getting at, and if I have to ponder it that much, it’s not that “obvious.” It’s about as bad as all the “that’s what she said” jokes I’ve heard. Quite a lot of unrelated things can be made to sound raunchy if you add “that’s what she said” after them, and the more times you hear that, the more annoying and less funny that kind of joke becomes. When a scholar does something like that in literary criticism, I’ve noticed that people are reluctant to question it because they assume that the scholar knows something they don’t, but I really don’t understand that comment and I don’t mind saying that I don’t think it makes much sense.
Also, I can’t help but notice in the descriptions of Carroll’s interactions with the Liddell girls that he visited them in different locations and took them on outings in different locations and that they were in the company of different people during these visits. The Timeline documentary mentions that the children’s governess would have been with them, even if the parents weren’t, and on the day that he took them on the boat trip where he began composing Alice in Wonderland, they were accompanied by his friend, Robinson Duckworth. I’m not a specialist in Carroll’s life, but it isn’t clear to me, from their descriptions, whether or not he was ever completely alone with the girls or with any child in particular, with no other witnesses. He may have been, but it seems to me from others’ descriptions that they were often chaperoned by different people. If some form of abuse or suspicious behavior were going on, it would be more difficult to evade or fool multiple witnesses. In 1932, when Alice was 80 years old, she went to New York to receive an honorary doctorate from Columbia University for her participation in the creation of a piece of iconic children’s literature and to take part in a centennial celebration of Dodgson’s birthday. I would think that if she had bad memories of Dodgson, she would have been less likely to take such a long journey at her advanced age in order to attend this celebration. On the other hand, that’s still just a guess of mine, and the suspicions about Dodgson, now raised, really can’t be proven either way. It still remains a possibility, and that’s why I only “kind of” think that Dodgson’s intentions might have been innocent.
In the end, I don’t have a firm theory so much as a conclusion: if you need to have definite answers, without debate, qualification, or reservation, in order to acquire knowledge, history probably isn’t your field. My first degree was in history, and I’ve noticed so many times that people discount historians and historical knowledge because the field doesn’t make firm, definite statements on many debatable aspects of history like this, and times when historians and private individuals have tried, they have often been proven wrong in some respect. However, that’s exactly the point: serious, professional historians don’t make definite statements unless and until they have definite proof because they know that there’s always a chance that they could be proven wrong at a later date when new information surfaces. It’s happened before, so true professionals are usually cautious. It’s not that they don’t know anything, it’s just that they’re aware of the limits of their knowledge, and they are careful in how they present what they really know in order to prevent people from drawing the wrong conclusions too quickly. It would be irresponsible to tell people that something is definitely true when the circumstances aren’t definite, so instead, they tell people about the information they know they have and the things are “possible,” “likely,” or “probable,” which irritates people who expect definite answers from experts. We know some things, and we also are aware of what we don’t know and what pieces we’re missing, which is also very important.
It doesn’t matter so much in modern times that we can’t completely prove Dodgson/Carroll’s intentions regarding his photography one way or the other as that we understand that the controversy exists. Without the diary pages, which would have been proof of his thoughts and intentions (and which were probably destroyed long ago), the most we could say is that the photographs suggest a possibility. Because, as scholars have pointed out, Dodgson wasn’t the only person who took photographs of children like that without apparently causing scandal, I wouldn’t say that it’s “definite” that his behavior or intentions were inappropriate. The final photograph in the documentary above is bad, but because they never proved definitely that he made it, I’d hesitate to call it “probable,” even though it seemed to me that the documentary makers were fishing for that so they could have a compelling revelation for their documentary. I don’t know for certain whether Charles Dodgson was or was not a pedophile, but I do know that it’s possible that he may have been one or at least had feelings or urges in that direction. There are enough indications that it remains possible, even though it’s unprovable. If you’re okay accepting as fact that an idea is “possible,” but probably not “probable” and certainly not “certain” … you could do well studying history, and just getting through my explanation (if you managed all that) means that you’re more than ready to tackle the logic puzzles of Alice in Wonderland. They’re kind of like that when you turn them around in your head.
Parodies, In-Jokes, and Literary References
There are a couple of things that are easier to prove about Alice in Wonderland than whether or not Lewis Carroll may have been attracted to the real Alice, and these more easily provable aspects of the story are what make it particularly interesting for me. First, parts of the Alice stories are actually parodies of popular stories and rhymes from the 19th century. Dodgson/Carroll particularly liked to poke fun at didactic stories and rhymes that were used to teach children useful lessons and morals. He liked to twist those more serious stories and rhymes into things that were basically nonsense. Modern readers are more likely to focus on the nonsense and less likely to notice the parodies in the Alice stories because they are not familiar with the original rhymes and stories being parodied, as the original readers of these books would have been. The original readers would have known immediately what he was making fun of. For example, “How Doth the Little Crocodile” is a parody on “Against Idleness and Mischief” by Isaac Watts, which is about the importance of using time well. “You are Old, Father William” or “Ballad of Father William” is a parody on “The Old Man’s Comforts and How He Gained Them” by Robert Southey, which gives advice to the young about how to behave so that they may enjoy a happier old age. These types of poems would have been given to Victorian children as something to read and memorize during their lessons, and so they would have noticed that Carroll was poking fun at them. That’s why I like editions of the Alice books that come with extra notes, pointing out the parodies and original references, so I can be in on the joke. On the other hand, modern readers will have no trouble recognizing the source of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat” as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” or “The Star” by Jane Taylor (first published in 1806, although modern readers think of it as the song instead of the poem, and not all of them know all the verses). It’s pretty common throughout history for bored students to make jokes about the things that they’re required to learn in their lessons, and many of these poems are old enough for Carroll himself to have learned them when he was a student. It’s possible that he may have started playing with parodies of his school lessons or popular songs long before he started writing Alice in Wonderland, although that’s just my personal guess, based on my own school years. I did things like that, and some of my friends did, too. (People older than me also remember On Top of Spaghetti and Joy to the World, the School Burned Down – not Carroll parodies and much cruder than his work, but examples of the way kids can twist things that are commonly known for the amusement of their friends.)
The second important point about the Alice stories is that they are full of puzzles, riddles, and word games. Remember that Lewis Carroll /Charles Dodgson was really a mathematician and scholar, and he liked to play with logic puzzles and word games. There are a lot of puns in Alice in Wonderland, some of which reference places in and around Oxford, like the Treacle Well where three sisters supposedly live – Lacie (anagram of Alice), Elsie (her older sister was Lorina Charlotte – L.C. Liddell), and Tillie (her younger sister Edith’s nickname). Alice in Wonderland is full of inside jokes, riddles, and puns like this. There are many in-jokes for people who are familiar with places in Oxford, and there are many in-jokes that Dodgson and the girls had with each other. Some of the strange characters in Wonderland are apparently parodies of people that Dodgson and the Liddells actually knew. Dodgson himself explained that he is the Dodo in the story. Dodgson spoke with a stutter, and when he would introduce himself to people, his name would often come out, “Do-Do-Dodgson.” “Dodo” Dodgson was an in-joke that the Liddells would have recognized.
Part of the trouble with analyzing Alice in Wonderland is that it’s possible to take it too far. Some of the parodies are obvious to people who are familiar with 19th century literature and poetry, and the references to places in Oxford are noticeable to people who are familiar with Oxford, but there are so many in-jokes in the story that might not be possible for modern readers to understand them all because we might not know all the in-jokes that Dodgson and the Liddells had with each other. So many strange and surreal things happen in the story that it’s possible to read too much into all of it. Some of it may have simply been meant to be silly references to other stories that Dodgson told the children before Alice’s story, long-standing in-jokes, or random silliness, and may not have any deeper meaning than that. When I read other reviews and analysis of the stories, I sometimes get the feeling like the critics are trying too hard, reaching and reading too much into everything. There’s a lot to enjoy about the story just as it is, without over-analyzing it to death, looking for hidden psychology that might not actually be there because a major part of it was based on parody and in-jokes in the beginning. If you want to spend some time appreciating the logic puzzles and word play and comparing the parody poems to their originals, that’s fine, but it’s also fine to just enjoy the book for the imaginative nonsense. It’s a long, strange trip, and I think it’s perfectly okay to just sit back and enjoy.
Note About the Illustrations and Original Version
Something else I’d like to mention before starting on the story itself is that the Alice who is depicted in the classic illustrations is not actually the original Alice Liddell. The illustrated Alice is a blond girl, but Alice Liddell was a brunette with shorter hair. Lewis Carroll apparently suggested that the illustrator use a picture of Mary Hilton Badcock as the model for the book illustrations, and Mary Hilton Badcock did look similar to the finished illustrations, although it’s also possible that the illustrator used a different child with a similar appearance as his model.
Also, the story as Carroll originally wrote it was called Alice’s Adventures Underground. Carroll did his own illustrations in the original version, showing Alice more like the real Alice, and there were a number of differences in the story. For example, in the original version, the White Rabbit drops a nosegay of flowers, which Alice smells, and that causes her to shrink, something that didn’t happen in the later version. If you want to read the original, it’s available through Project Gutenberg.
Charlotte Mary Makepeace is a new student at a boarding school in England. The school is big and confusing, and there are so many new people to meet that she immediately feels overwhelmed. Starting life at a new school can be intimidating for anyone, but things are about to get particularly strange for Charlotte.
An older girl, Sarah, helps Charlotte to find her room and choose a bed, recommending a bed by the window. Charlotte is a little puzzled at why Sarah singled her out and helped her, and the other girls are jealous that she got to the room first and got first choice of the beds. Still, Charlotte is grateful. She is exhausted, and she feels like she isn’t herself. When she wakes up in the morning, she really isn’t herself.
The room where Charlotte sleeps is called the “Cedar” room, and when she first enters the room, the name puzzles her because there are no cedars nearby. However, when Charlotte wakes up in the morning, there is suddenly a large cedar outside the window. The tree did not grow during the night. In Charlotte’s time, the cedar is gone, but Charlotte is now back in the past, when the cedar was still there. Things in the room are arranged differently, although Charlotte’s bed is still in the same place, and instead of seeing her roommates, Charlotte finds herself alone with a girl she has never seen before, who calls her “Clare.”
Charlotte is very confused. Earlier, she was feeling like she wasn’t herself, and now she has the sense that maybe she has really become someone else. Charlotte doesn’t notice any differences about herself in the mirror, but the other girl doesn’t seem to notice that she’s not Clare, whoever Clare is. The girl just keeps talking to Charlotte as if they already know each other. The other girl’s name is Emily, and it turns out that she is Clare’s younger sister. Charlotte finds herself feeling toward Emily the way that she feels toward her own sister, Emma.
Charlotte is forced to go through the rest of the day, her first at boarding school, as Clare. People keep talking about “the war,” and Charlotte doesn’t know what war they mean at first. When she went to bed, it was the 1960s. At the end of a very confusing day, she returns to bed in the Cedar room, where she finds a diary with the name “Clare Mary Moby” written on it and the date, September 14, 1918. The diary really makes Charlotte realize that she has spent the entire day in the past, and she further realizes that the war everyone was talking about is World War I. However, there is nothing else for Charlotte to do but go to bed. When she wakes up in the morning, she is once again Charlotte. Emily is gone, and Charlotte is back in her own time with her regular roommates. However, it quickly becomes clear that this was not just a dream, and this strange incident repeats itself each day, after Charlotte sleeps in the same bed.
Whenever Charlotte shifts to take Clare’s place in the past, she loses a day in her own time, which helps to convince her that she is not dreaming when she is Clare. Every other day, Charlotte switches places and times with Clare, and she sees the school as it was in the past, toward the end of World War I. Apparently, Clare is living Charlotte’s life whenever Charlotte is living hers, and nobody around them seems to have noticed the switch. Charlotte has no idea why this is happening, other than the fact that she and Clare happen to be sleeping in the same bed, in the same room.
Charlotte
is fascinated by her trips to the past, but they are disorienting. She now has two sets of names to learn, the
people in the past and the people in the present. There are different school rules in the past,
too, and she was still getting used to the rules in her own time. Charlotte and Clare also need to do some of
each other’s homework for classes, and there are some things they can’t
do. Charlotte can’t write an essay about
Clare’s holidays because she has no idea what Clare did on her school holidays,
and Clare is very bad at arithmetic, giving Charlotte bad grades.
The next time she makes the switch, Charlotte learns that Clare and Emily do not usually sleep in the Cedar room. Because of the Influenza Epidemic of 1918, girls have been shifted around as the sick ones are quarantined. Meanwhile, in the 1960s, Clare has created a new diary in an exercise book with Charlotte’s name on it. In the book, Clare has written a letter to Charlotte about their situation. She asks Charlotte to look after Emily when they’re together and to write messages back to her. Clare doesn’t think they should tell Emily about what’s happening. Clare worries that Emily will be confused and frightened.
However, Emily soon discovers the truth, and Charlotte comes to rely on her as the only person in the past who knows who she really is. Emily notices differences between the way Charlotte behaves and the way that Clare behaves, but they are uncanny in their resemblance and behavior in other ways. In many ways, Emily is bolder than both Charlotte and Clare, although her boldness is often to the point of being brash or callous. She is sometimes impatient with Charlotte and Clare’s softer natures, but their apparent softness is due to their greater sense of life’s consequences and their sense of responsibility for Emily. Emily finds talk of the war and bombings exciting, but Charlotte and Clare are both aware of the dangerous reality. As Emily gets to know Charlotte, she points out the ways that she and Clare are similar yet different, and she says that the more time Charlotte spends in 1918, the more like Clare she is becoming. Charlotte worries about the resemblance between her and Clare and how natural it is becoming for her to act like Clare.
In the present, Charlotte is initiated into the usual pranks of a British boarding school by her new roommates, and in the past, she sees soldiers in World War I uniforms. In 1918, students whisper about whether a classmate with a German father could actually be a German spy, and Charlotte is introduced to air-raid alarms. In the 1960s, Charlotte’s roommates wonder about her funny moods, her odd need to be alone, and her reluctance to be friends and join them in activities. In both time periods, Charlotte is constantly afraid of giving everything away by saying something that would be out of character for the person she’s supposed to be or asking questions that she should already be able to answer if she were living every day in one time period. The one element that seems constant throughout these shifts is the bed that she and Clare share in the Cedar room. However, Clare and Emily will soon be sent to board with a family in town, only returning to the school as day pupils. When the Cedar room is turned into another quarantine room for the sick, Charlotte is trapped in the past as Clare, and she worries that she may never return home again. What will happen to her, and will she lose her identity as Charlotte, becoming Clare forever?
This book is a modern classic in children’s literature! I decided that I had to read it because so many people have nostalgic memories of this book and have written positive reviews about it. The Cure even did a song and music video inspired by the book. The song even contains words from the book in the lyrics. This is the original music video that goes with the song. (It’s also on YouTube.)
The book is the third book in the The Aviary Hall trilogy. It is available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies). The other two books in the trilogy are also available on Internet Archive, but Charlotte Sometimes is often regarded as the best of the three and is the best known.
Note: Strangely, this book has three different ending, depending on the edition of the book. Older editions (the original and printings from the 1970s) contain the full text, and newer editions are cropped in two different places. The copies on Internet Archive are different editions and have different endings. This one contains the full text of the original. This one and this one have the endings that include Emily’s letter but not the final scene with Charlotte going home from school. The others don’t have the part with Emily’s letter at all. In order to learn the difference between these endings and the significance of Emily’s letter, you’ll have to read the part of my review that includes spoilers.
Further Thoughts
I was amused by the part where Emily laughs at the name Charlotte because she thinks that it’s kind of old-fashioned in 1918, yet Charlotte is from the future. Names often go in cycles of popularity, and certain classic names have comebacks at regular periods. Right now, in the early 21st century, the names Charlotte, Emma, Emily, and Clare (or Claire) are all pretty popular. In fact, Charlotte has seen a recent resurgence in popularity in the United States. Modern children reading this would actually find many of the names very familiar, thanks to a trend of reviving vintage and classic names. In fact, some of the 1918 names are more popular these days than some of the 1960s names, like Janet and Susannah. Don’t worry, they’ll have their turn again.
I also liked the part where Charlotte tries to consider whether she and Clare really look alike. Emily is a little vague about whether Charlotte and Clare really resemble each other, saying that she might have just seen “Clare” in her because Clare was who she expected to see and that she never really looked at her properly until she realized that she was actually Charlotte. Charlotte thinks about a time where she tried to draw herself by studying her own features in a mirror, but the longer she stared at herself, the more disconnected that she felt from the features she was seeing. This is actually a real phenomenon, and I’ve read other books where people have mentioned it. You can get some odd feelings by staring at yourself in a mirror for too long. I’ve tried it myself, and it can get a little eerie, especially if you look yourself right in the eyes and try not to blink. The longer you look, the more eerie it gets. That’s how that old sleepover trick, Bloody Mary, works. This is sometimes called the “strange-face illusion.” Although Charlotte is having a kind of identity crisis from switching places with Clare, this mirror phenomenon is something that anyone can experience.
Further Note: At the time that I first published this review, January 1, 2020, I hadn’t yet heard of the coronavirus, and I had no way of knowing that there was going to be an outbreak that would eventually turn into a pandemic. Now, in February 2020, I’d like to point out some things to anybody who is as creeped out as I am about this disease. (I had the images of the influenza in this story in my mind when I first started hearing about the coronavirus outbreak, and it didn’t do a lot for my peace of mind.)
Coronavirus and the 1918 influenza have some similarities and differences. Normal seasonal influenza has a death rate of approximately 0.1%. The influenza epidemic of 1918, colloquially called “Spanish Flu“, had a death rate of approximately 2.5%, and it was frightening because many of its victims had been young and apparently healthy before infection, and they died fairly quickly after becoming ill, in a matter of days. (I have more information about that down below.) It spread remarkably fast because of the mass movements of people between countries due to World War I and soldiers returning home toward the end of the war, to the point where it’s never been firmly established exactly where the virus originated.
The coronavirus (as of February 2020, estimates may change later) has a death rate of approximately 2.3%, and most of those deaths have been people who are very old and/or had underlying health problems. It’s bad, but oddly, also somewhat hopeful because, unlike the 1918 influenza, where it wasn’t always obvious who was the most as risk, we can tell ahead of time with the coronavirus who is most at risk, which is helpful for protecting people who are the most vulnerable. We know where the coronavirus started, and although it has spread to countries around the world, public health officials have been taking steps to quarantine people who have contracted the disease or who have been to regions with known infections. It has spread, but perhaps not as rapidly as the Spanish Flu because the 1918 public health officials didn’t understand what they were dealing with at first and didn’t take the steps that we are taking now. If there was any good side to the 1918 influenza epidemic, it was probably that it taught us a few things about how to handle pandemics, including what not to do when one is occurring. The two viruses aren’t precisely the same, but being aware of what we have learned from past experience may help us to stop the situation from becoming worse than it might be otherwise. I know that what is happening and what is probably about to happen is not going to be good because this is just not a good situation, and that can’t be helped, but what can be helped is how we respond to it and make use of what we already know. This current situation is not going to last, but what we do while the situation still exists is going to determine how well we come out of it.
This is not a good time for international travel, and if you can avoid traveling until this crisis is over, I would recommend doing that. If you are in a safe place, I recommend staying there until the crisis passes, and wherever you are, follow the instructions you are given by your public health officials. Before this is over, you may actually get the coronavirus. (I might, too, and I know that as I type this. I live in Arizona, and we’ve only had a few cases so far, but that’s so far.) Health officials are working on a vaccine, but that takes time, and it may not be widely available until next year. However, if you are not in one of the at-risk groups, you will likely survive the experience if you get it, and if you do what your health officials tell you to do, you can help yourself to recover from the disease and avoid spreading it to others. If you think you may be in one of the at-risk groups, follow the instructions that your doctor gives you and seek help (by telephone first) if you think that you may be ill. Try not to be too afraid because, although I know this all sounds scary, one of the first steps to handling difficult situations is believing that it is possible to handle them and taking the steps you know how to take. Take care of yourselves, and consider others as much as possible, too.
Further update: I am now fully vaccinated as of May 2021! I got the reaction that a lot of people got from the Pfizer vaccine; I felt like I had the flu for about a day after getting the second shot. But, after that, I was fine, and I recommend it to other people (provided that you aren’t allergic to anything in the shots – that seems to be the one real caveat to getting them). If you’re a conspiracy theorist, I have not experienced any weird mind control, and I don’t feel any different than I did before. I’m still reading and reviewing children’s books, making various random craft projects, listening to the same YouTube videos, and getting irritated with people I think are jerks, so my version of normal is still basically what it was before. I wouldn’t say that the pandemic is completely over yet because many people are still getting sick and haven’t had their shots, but having more people vaccinated is a good sign. My home state ended up being hit pretty hard during the worst of it, and we have seen some improvement since then because more people are being vaccinated. With vaccinations now open to people age 12 and over, I’m hopeful that there will be more improvement by the end of summer.
Themes and Spoilers
There is a lot more that I’d like to discuss about this book, but I wanted to save this discussion for the end because discussing this story and my opinion of it in depth reveals some major spoilers.
The 1918 Influenza Pandemic
First, I love stories with historical background! When I was in school, my teachers didn’t cover World War I and the 1918 Influenza Pandemic in detail. My high school history teacher, for example, was a major Civil War buff, and she spent so much time going over the major battles of the American Civil War and making us watch Gone with the Wind (which I had already seen and didn’t like because I never liked the character of Scarlett O’Hara) that she kind of rushed through the early 20th century with us, charging onward to World War II. If she said anything about the Influenza Pandemic, it wasn’t much, and it didn’t make much of an impression. In fact, I think that the first time I ever heard about the 1918 Influenza Pandemic (although I can’t remember exactly when I first became aware of it) was through fiction, even though one of my own family members died in that pandemic. However, this was an important, worldwide event that came right at the end of the First World War, and it was shocking because the people who were frequently hit the hardest by the disease were people who were normally young and strong, the people who would usually have been the ones most likely to survive under normal circumstances.
No one knows precisely where and how the pandemic began, although people have attempted to go back through the records and isolate the first cases. This is more difficult than it sounds because the earliest cases of the influenza were lighter, not fatal, and people didn’t think that much about them at first. Also, because of World War I, the mass movement of people across countries due to the war, and the masses of troops returning from the front, the disease was spread farther and faster than it might have been otherwise. Charlotte Sometimes shows some of that real-life pattern. Early in the story, when Charlotte first begins switching places with Clare, a member of the school’s faculty in the past talks about how Clare and Emily were shifted from their old room to the Cedar room because they needed a room for the sick children at the school. At this point in the story, people don’t seem to be panicking about the illness because this was the first phase of the epidemic, when people were getting the earlier, less serious form of the disease, but it’s foreshadowing later events. At one point, Charlotte in the past is blocked from entering the Cedar room and returning to her own time because the disease has spread further through the school and the Cedar Room is also turned into a sick room.
This is a major spoiler, but after Charlotte finally returns home to her own time to stay, she learns that Clare is not alive in her time because she also became ill with influenza, the more deadly form, and she died not long after the end of the war and the end of their time-traveling adventures. At the time of her death, Clare was about thirteen years old and apparently healthy otherwise, which is in keeping with the way this particular illness affected many of its victims. There were a couple of factors which made younger people more vulnerable:
Unprepared immune systems and the body’s overreaction – Young people may have had less exposure to less serious forms of the same disease from earlier years that would have primed their immune systems to respond appropriately when they encountered this influenza. The human body has certain natural defenses against diseases, like the way it can raise a fever to kill off invading germs with higher temperatures, but sometimes, a disease can strike so hard that the body overreacts to fight it (the technical name for this reaction is “cytokine storm“), causing more damage to itself. Sometimes, this can even happen to the point where the body’s own defenses damage the body itself so much that the person dies or develops a secondary problem, such as pneumonia, that could potentially lead to their death. This is an important factor to consider when evaluating why this form of influenza tended to kill otherwise healthy young people – their immune systems were the strongest and also less primed than older adults, so they were the most likely to overreact. This is where modern vaccines can help, providing the priming the body’s immunity system needs to properly cope with serious diseases it has never seen before.
Secondary infections – The people who died of the influenza tended to die of the pneumonia that set in as a secondary infection in their damaged lungs, possibly partly as a result of the body’s overreaction. This was before the development of antibiotics like penicillin, which we use to treat such infections now. This is also where vaccines come in handy because people who can avoid getting sick also avoid developing secondary problems from the illness. Unfortunately, there was no vaccine available in 1918. It wasn’t even obvious to the medical professionals of the time what they were really dealing with, and they lacked medicines that could have helped because they were developed later.
This is basically what happened to Clare, an otherwise healthy teenager, when she caught the influenza. Clare, of course, is a fictional character, but her life and fate were based on real people of the time. This was part of what made the pandemic so scary. People of the time noticed that even people who otherwise seemed young, strong, and healthy were dying of this disease, and it was happening fast. If you read grown-up Emily’s letter to Charlotte in the longer endings to the book, Clare died in a matter of a few days after becoming ill. (This still sometimes happens, but in this particular epidemic, it was happening on a massive scale.) It was happening all over the world, in small towns as well as big cities, and there was nowhere anyone could go to escape it.
Because of the shocking spread of the disease and the tragic youth of many of its victims, the event has found its way into fiction, even children’s literature. Before it was depicted on the television show, Downton Abbey, it was named as Edward Cullen‘s impending cause of death if he hadn’t been turned into a vampire in the Twilight young adult series (he was also a teenager, although older), and it was also described in one of the books of the Sarah, Plain and Tall series, set in the American Midwest. (None of the main characters die in that story, although Anna becomes a nurse and the others fear for her safety, and they witness the burial of a baby who died from the disease, as one of my grandmother’s younger brothers did in real life.)
I added a note above, discussing some of the ways the coronavirus and the 1918 influenza were similar and different. What I’ve described regarding the 1918 influenza’s effects on younger people does not seem to be the case with the current coronavirus (as of February 2020). There may be exceptions, just like more typical seasonal forms of influenza occasionally become serious even in cases of normally healthy young people (I’m not an expert, so I can’t say what the chances of that are, it seems that an overreaction of the immune system is still a primary concern with the coronavirus), but the pattern for the coronavirus so far is that it is most dangerous to the very old and those with underlying health problems. In this situation, we can do a lot to help them by protecting those we already know are most vulnerable.
World War I (or, The Great War)
There are many other historical nuggets in this book besides the influenza epidemic. As I mentioned before, Charlotte learns about life in British boarding schools in the past, finding the discipline harder and the food not as good (possibly due to war rationing).
Some of her 1918 classmates are suspicious of another classmate, Elsie, whose father is German, and they talk about how their parents think that Germans living in England should be interned in camps to isolate them from the rest of the population because some of them might be spies. Emily asks what kind of information a schoolgirl like Elsie could possibly find to pass on to harm the war effort, and one of the other girls says that if one of them comments about a letter they’ve received from their father, saying that he is with the troops in France, Elsie could pass that to her parents, and they could pass it along to Germany. Emily says that’s silly because everyone knows that there are British troops in various places in France, and even Charlotte knows that all British mail is read and censored during this time. In other words, nobody could say anything specific enough in a letter to their children that would be a risk if little Elsie happened to hear about it. Elsie is also plainly uncomfortable with the other girls’ suspicions. Modern adults would see Elsie for what she is: a little girl, very much like the others, born and raised in England, with little personal connection to the country where her father was born. She’s been caught up in the circumstances of the wider world against her will, suddenly finding herself labeled as an outsider in the only home she’s ever known. As a child, there’s not a lot that Elsie can do about this situation, and one wonders if the adults would do anything to help if they knew about it. This was the level of wartime paranoia, and the children were getting it from their parents. It’s difficult for children to learn to behave calmly and reasonably when the adults in their lives are not doing so themselves.
The war is always present in the lives of the 1918 children. Charlotte is also forced to take part in an air-raid alarm at school. When she and Emily board with the Chisel Brown family, they talk about Arthur, their son who was killed in the war, and at one point, they hold a seance to try to contact him. This is also based on real life. There was a rise in spiritualism and spiritualist practices because of the war, just like there was after the American Civil War. When society has been through something traumatic and lost loved ones, they sometimes turn to practices like this for comfort and the hope of reaching out to the people they’ve lost. When Charlotte and Emily witness the seance, they hear Clare’s voice calling to Emily. The girls are not able to communicate with Clare further than that, and there’s no real explanation for why this happened. It’s before Clare dies in her time, and we never hear from Clare’s perspective at any point in the book.
The family, especially Mr. Chisel Brown, have bitter feelings about the war because of Arthur’s death. The bitter feelings are reflected in the way they speak. At one point in the story, Mr. Chisel Brown says, “Damned peace-talk, damned conchies (conscientious objectors – people who refused to fight for moral reasons), hun-lovers (German sympathizers). Should all be hanged, I say.” This is about the strongest language in the book. The girls’ bedroom at the Chisel Brown house has a rather horrifying anti-German poster in it called “Mark of the German Beast,” and when Mr. Chisel Brown thinks that the girls aren’t behaving themselves, he says that they have “hunnish manners,” using references to Germans as derogatory terms.
Different Editions, Different Endings
Charlotte Sometimes, 1970s Cover This edition of the book has the full ending.
Another reason to explain about the fate of the characters is so I can explain how different editions of this book are different from each other. There are three possible endings to the book, depending on which edition you have. In all versions, the reader learns that Emily is Sarah’s mother, and that is the reason why Sarah singled out Charlotte and guided her to that particular bed at the beginning of the book, because her mother asked her to be nice to Charlotte and to help her, knowing what was going to happen with Charlotte and Clare.
Some of the more modern printings of the story omit sections at the end of the book that were part of the original story in which Charlotte hears from the adult Emily in modern times and where Charlotte heads home for Christmas at the end of the term. Even books that say they are unabridged (including the one that I have from Vintage Classics) sometimes include the letter and package from Emily but omit the part where Charlotte goes home on the bus with the other children, for some reason. I’ve seen all three ending formats, and each time one of these sections is cropped off the end of the book, it changes the tone of the ending and some of the subtle meaning of the story.
In books without the letter from Emily or the bus ride home, the ones with the shortest ending, the story ends with Charlotte finding Clare’s old diary hidden in the bedpost of their bed with her last message to Clare and no reply, and the book simply ends. It’s just kind of a sad reflection that Clare is now gone, and the adventures are over. Charlotte is just left with the memory of what happened with no further reflection on what’s it’s going to mean for her life in the future. I find this ending rather stark and unfulfilling, and I don’t know why this was done to the book.
In the first section of the book that is sometimes omitted, Emily writes a letter to Charlotte and sends her some toys that they were given as children in 1918: a bag of marbles, a solitaire board (the board game played with marbles as pieces), and some toy soldiers. Charlotte puts the marbles in a glass of water on her dresser (like Emily once did in the past because the marbles look bigger and shinier in water), the first personal touch that she’s given to her place in the dorm because she’s really only spent about half her time there, and she reflects on how her experiences as Clare have become part of her personal identity. She compares her experiences as Clare and the impact that it has had on her to the country’s experiences of the war and how it has changed life for all of them, far after the events were over. World War I changed the world and will remain part of history, just as Clare is now a part of Charlotte’s personal history. I thought it nicely summed up Charlotte’s feelings about how aspects of Clare have become part of her own personality, although there is one further point to be made about Charlotte’s future.
In the final section of the book, which is omitted the most often and is apparently only found in the oldest editions of the book, pre-1980s, Charlotte takes the bus home from school at the end of term after getting the letter and package from Emily. Charlotte is looking forward to Christmas, and she and other children chant a variation of the “No more pencils, no more books” rhyme. (Their variant doesn’t actually use that phrase, although it has the same format.) Charlotte reflects that the countryside doesn’t really look any different in modern times than it did in 1918 and remembers that this is Sarah’s last term at school, so she may never see her (and, consequently, may never hear from Emily) again. The ending that ends just after Charlotte receives the letter from Emily and displays the marbles leaves Charlotte considering how Clare and her experiences in 1918 will always be a part of her, but the bus ride ends with her feeling more comfortable that she is truly Charlotte again, even after these experiences, and will be heading back to her family and her life in the present day. She is changed, but she is now sure of who she is, without her earlier quandaries about her own identity.
Each time a little piece is left off the end of the story, it changes the tone of the ending, but I like the full ending that includes the bus ride the best because, while Clare and the past will always be a part of Charlotte, Charlotte has regained her sense of identity as herself. She is a changed person because of her experiences, but she is still her own person, and her life is going to continue in the present, not stuck in the past. I also think that the part with Emily’s letter is important for settling unanswered questions for both Charlotte and the reader about what happened after the time travel ended and Clare died. In older Emily’s letter to Charlotte, she says that she knows that Charlotte is the worrying type, like Clare was, and she wants her to know that there is no reason to worry about her or her younger self because of Clare’s death. Emily reassures Charlotte that, although she was upset at Clare’s death, her life has turned out well. After Clare died, Emily continued attending the school, staying with her aunt on school holidays. Her father rejoined her and her aunt later when he was finally discharged from the army. When she grew up, Emily got married and had four children, even though she had said as a child that she didn’t want children at all. Emily also tells Charlotte that she has decided to keep the doll among the toys they were given for herself because it reminds her of another that her family used to own, which is another change in her attitude. When she was a child, she pointedly preferred the toy soldiers to the doll.
I like the versions that included the letter from Emily because, otherwise, her story seems incomplete. I also liked the idea that Emily got married and had children even after saying that she wouldn’t. When she was young, Emily didn’t like the idea of having children because of the way she and Clare were bounced around to different homes and schools after the death of their mother. Young Emily didn’t think it was fair to have children and then die, leaving them alone and at the mercy of other people, but as adult, we can suppose that Emily came to realize that dying isn’t the expectation of most parents. Her mother’s death wasn’t something that her mother could have anticipated any more than Clare’s was, and people can’t live their lives based solely on what might happen. Presumably, Emily eventually met and fell in love with a nice, stable man who helped to convince her that they could manage to raise a family together. Emily doesn’t describe her husband to Charlotte in her letter or go into detail about what he’s like, but she says that attitudes change as people grow up and her life has been generally happy. Life often takes people in directions that they never predicted when they were young. Some people who want to get married and have children never do, for one reason or another (there is a teacher at the school whose fiance was killed in WWI in 1918, and she is still unmarried in the 1960s, having devoted her life to teaching), and some who never thought that they would do anyway. As long as a person can be satisfied with their life, even if it’s not the one they originally imagined when they were young, they’re doing pretty well. Knowing that Emily is satisfied with her life as it turned out gives the readers as well as Charlotte a sense of completion at the end of the story.
The Vintage Classics copy that I have also had an extra section in the back with a list of the characters in the book (helpful for the time jumps) and additional information about the author and World War I.
Magic or Psychic Phenomenon?
This brings us to the reason why Charlotte and Clare were switching places, another factor that is impossible to discuss without considering Clare’s ultimate fate. The book never gives an exact reason why it all happened in any version of the story, although the characters speculate about and draw a few conclusions. Their speculations appear in all of the books , even the ones with the shorter endings. Charlotte and Clare have some similarities in their names (they share the same initials and the same middle name) and lives (they are of similar age, their mothers are both dead, they each have a younger sister with similar-sounding names, and they just recently started going to the same boarding school in their respective times). They might possibly look alike since most people don’t seem to notice many differences between them. It’s possible that the physical resemblance might be a product of whatever magic or psychic phenomenon is causing them to switch places, but I don’t think so or at least not entirely because they are definitely physically switching places and not just transferring into each other’s bodies. We know that they are physically switching places with each other instead of moving into each other’s bodies because, in the final switch at the end, Charlotte accidentally goes to bed while wearing Clare’s bathrobe, and when she wakes up in her own time, she’s still wearing it, causing her to wonder what people will think in 1918 because Clare’s bathrobe has inexplicably disappeared. (This is not Freaky Friday, which was about a body swap.)
However, Clare and Charlotte never meet face-to-face and apparently never see pictures of each other, so Charlotte is entirely dependent on other people’s descriptions of how much she and Clare look alike. It seems that they look enough alike to fool people who aren’t really paying attention, but the people who know them the best and are the most observant can spot which of them is which, even if they can’t exactly articulate how. In real life, the author of this book was one of a set of twins, so some of this seems to be based on her own experiences with her twin and how one person’s identity can be tied to another. According to a blog the author kept, the school in the story is based on the boarding school that she and her twin sister attended in Kent. She does not identify this school by name, but she provides pictures, including one of the cedar tree on the campus that provided the inspiration for the cedar tree in the book, and the pictures are of The New School at West Heath, the school that Princess Diana also attended as a child but at a later date than the author. The school used to be called West Heath Girls’ School and is now called simply West Heath School (this page contains a virtual tour of the school that also shows the cedar tree by the playground – link repaired May 13, 2022). It now accepts both girls and boys and provides special help for children suffering from emotional disorders, learning difficulties, and other personal problems.
What I suspect is the final key to the switch, aside from their odd similarity, is that Charlotte and Clare also may have been in a similar state of mind at the time the switches began taking place that made them more vulnerable to losing their identities. This is speculation, but in the beginning, Charlotte was feeling out-of-place and not quite herself in her new school, and it’s possible that Clare was in a similar emotional state, putting them even more in sympathy with each other.
One of Charlotte’s 1960s roommates, Elizabeth, learns the truth of the girls switching places and comes to be friends with Clare, helping Clare in the present as Emily was helping Charlotte in the past. At the end of the book, Charlotte and Elizabeth become better friends and discuss what made the time switch possible. They discuss the similarities in Clare and Charlotte’s lives and the common dates when the switching began taking place, drawing a few conclusions about the switching and how it was able to happen. Part of what they conclude has to do with the similarities between Charlotte and Clare, but they also take into account the fact that Clare is dead in their time. Although they don’t use these exact words to describe it, it all seems to revolve around two souls that are kindred spirits, but also the idea that human souls cannot be duplicated or divided.
Personal identity is an important theme in the story. Charlotte often finds herself worrying about losing her identity as she is forced to pretend to be Clare and to keep up the pretense of being something like Clare even when she’s in her own time so that her personality won’t seem to shift too abruptly. She and Clare seem to have some similarities in their personalities, but Emily and Elizabeth, the only two people who ever know about the switching, both say that Charlotte and Clare aren’t exactly alike. When Charlotte worries that she’s losing her own identity, she tries hard to look for ways that she and Clare are different, which is difficult for her because, again, while Charlotte is living Clare’s life, she never actually meets Clare and has to rely on others’ descriptions of her personality. Even Emily and Elizabeth never see Charlotte and Clare side-by-side to compare. Charlotte is pleased whenever Emily comments that something she says or does isn’t exactly what Clare would have said or done in the same situation. Toward the end of the book, Charlotte tries to press Elizabeth more about the differences between herself and Clare, trying to clarify her own personality by what makes her different from Clare. Elizabeth tries to explain it by comparing the two of them to another pair of girls in their dorm at school. Those two girls are best friends and often like the same things and do similar things, but they are still very distinct people, like Charlotte and Clare are. It’s not an explicit answer, but it does show that Elizabeth can recognize Charlotte and Clare as different people, independent of each other, in spite of what happened and even though others didn’t notice the differences between them. Yet, the similarities between Charlotte and Clare, and perhaps their similar states of mind, seem to be central factors that allowed them to switch places with each other. Two very similar girls in sympathetic states of mind, happened to be occupying the same physical space (the bed at school) at the same time of year (the beginning of the school year), just years apart.
There is also the matter of Clare’s early death. Both Charlotte and Elizabeth are sad when they learn that Clare died back in 1918, but Elizabeth reasons it out, saying that it makes sense that Clare died and that Emily was Sarah’s mother all along. As Elizabeth explains, Charlotte couldn’t have remained in 1918 and grown up there to become Sarah’s mother (as Charlotte feared might be the truth) because, by the time she was an adult, she would also have been born into their time as Charlotte, and there would have been two Charlottes alive at the same time. If Clare had lived to adulthood and become a mother, there would also be two Clares alive at the same time when the girls started switching places. Both of those situations would have been a logical impossibility because no single person can be two different ages, child and adult, in the same period of time. Even if they were in two different bodies, it would be the same soul because it would be the same person, and there could not be duplicates of a unique, individual soul or personality.
I like it that the book takes the fascinating premise that, even if human souls can swap places with each other or be accidentally confused for one another, they are still unique, individual, and whole, separate from each other, indivisible, and impossible to duplicate. As Elizabeth puts it, Clare was the only one who even could have made the journey through time to swap with Charlotte (or anyone else occupying that bed) because there was no living Clare in the 1960s to create a paradox, just as there was no Charlotte in past because she hadn’t been born yet. If Clare was not already fated to die young, the time journey would have been completely impossible. This is also the reason why nobody else switched places while sleeping in that particular bed. Not only did they not happen to have a similar counterpart occupying the same space at a different point in time, as Clare and Charlotte did, but everyone else who slept in that bed survived and was present in both the past and the future. Elizabeth says that it’s like Clare was a kind of ghost, although she was very solid and alive throughout the switching and her death from influenza took place after it was over. The idea bothers Charlotte because that would have made her a kind of ghost when she traveled back in time, too. Is it possible for someone to be a ghost before they’ve died?
There is no complete answer to that. Part of what makes the book fascinating is the possibilities it raises and allows the reader to consider. There are no magic spells in the book. There is a seance scene, as I mentioned in the section about WWI information, during which Emily and Charlotte hear Clare’s voice instead of the young soldier killed in the war that the family was attempting to contact. However, the main phenomenon of the story doesn’t seem to rely on magic so much as some kind of psychic phenomena – kindred spirits who happened to be sharing a particular space and ended up sharing each other’s lives across time.
Anna, Grandpa, and the Big Storm by Carla Stevens, 1982.
The story takes place during the Great Blizzard of 1888. Anna’s Grandpa is visiting her family in New York City, but he thinks the city is boring. He says that there isn’t much there for him to do. One day, Anna is worried about getting to school because it is starting to snow heavily. Anna’s mother says that she can stay home, but Anna is supposed to be in a spelling bee, and she doesn’t want to miss out. Grandpa volunteers to take Anna to school on the elevated train.
As the two set out, Anna begins to get scared because the storm is getting worse. Grandpa urges her on, and the two make it onto the train. Before they can go very far, the tracks freeze over, and the train gets stuck. Anna and her Grandpa are trapped in the train with a bunch of strangers, waiting for rescue.
Anna and Grandpa make friends with the other people on the train, finding ways to keep themselves moving and warm while they wait for help to arrive, like playing “Simon Says.” Even though Anna doesn’t make it to school for the spelling bee, their adventures turn out to be good for the people they are able to help and the new friends they make. Grandpa sees a different side of life in the city and decides to stay for awhile longer so he can spend time with some new friends.
The story is based upon actual accounts of the famous blizzard when many other people were trapped on the elevated trains around the city. The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
The Nutcracker by E.T.A. Hoffmann, retold by Anthea Bell, 1816, 1987.
The reason for the two dates of this book is that the original Nutcracker story was written by a German writer, E.T.A. Hoffmann, in 1816, as the novella The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. Some places, including the back of this book note different publishing dates for the original story because it was published more than once during the 1810s, as part of different story collections. This article gives more details about the original version of the story and different publications. Since then, it has been retold many times and in many different forms, including the famous ballet based on the story. In ballets and plays, the name of the heroine is often Clara, but in this picture book, as in the original story, the heroine’s name is Marie.
In the beginning of the book, which is set in the 19th century, Marie and her brother Fritz, are opening their Christmas presents on Christmas Eve. (The book explains that opening presents on Christmas Eve is a German tradition. A friend in Germany also explained that to me once because, in Germany, presents are supposedly brought by the Christ Child, not by Santa Claus. Since then, I’ve read that explanation may vary, depending on whether the household is Catholic or Protestant.) The children receive many wonderful presents, including a toy castle from their godfather, Mr. Drosselmeier. Marie’s favorite present is a nutcracker that looks like an odd little man. When Fritz is too rough with the nutcracker and breaks it, Marie takes care of it.
Marie stays up late, and when she finally puts the nutcracker away at midnight, she is astonished to see an army of mice coming out of the floorboards. The leader of the mouse army is the Mouse King, who has seven heads. The Nutcracker leads an army of toys against the mouse army. The mouse army appears to be winning, so, to save the Nutcracker, Marie takes off her shoe and throws it at the mice. Then, her arm hurts, and she apparently faints.
When Marie wakes up, she is in her own bed, and her mother tells her that she apparently put her arm through the glass door of the toy cabinet, cutting herself badly. When Marie tries to tell her mother about the battle between the toys and the mice, her mother and the doctor think that she’s ill and confine her to her bed for a few days. Mr. Drosselmeier repairs the Nutcracker and returns it to Marie, telling her the reason why nutcrackers look so strange and ugly, calling it The Tale of the Hard Nut.
Year ago, there was a royal banquet given by the King and Queen who were the parents of Princess Pirlipat. A mouse who claimed to be the queen of Mousolia demanded some food from the banquet as the Queen was preparing it. The King was angry that the mouse took some of the food and wanted revenge. The King asked his Court Watchmaker, who was also named Drosselmeier, to build some mousetraps to catch the mouse queen’s seven sons. When the sons were caught, the mouse queen vowed that she’d take her revenge on Princess Pirlipat. Princess Pirlipat was a pretty baby, but the mouse queen turned her ugly. The King took out his anger on the Court Watchmaker, ordering him to find a way to change Princess Pirlipat back to normal and threatening to behead him if he failed. After consulting the Court Astronomer, the Court Watchmaker learned that the key to breaking the spell on the princess was a special nut, which had to be cracked by being bitten by a man who filled certain special requirements, which all happened to be met by the son of the Watchmaker’s dollmaker cousin. The King had promised that the person who could break the spell could marry his daughter, but the mouse queen interrupted the last part of the ritual, causing the young cousin to turn ugly himself. When pretty Princess Pirlipat saw her rescuer turn ugly, she didn’t want to marry him anymore. The Court Astronomer said that the only way to break the spell on the young man was for him to defeat the new Mouse King – the mouse queen’s youngest son – and for him to find a woman who would love him regardless of his appearance.
Marie knows that the story is true because she has seen the Mouse King herself. She loves the Nutcracker and wants to help him. The Nutcracker returns to visit Marie during the night and makes repeated demands of her for her candy and toys. Marie knows that, no matter what she gives him, the Mouse King will keep returning to demand something else. The Nutcracker tells her that he needs a sword to fight the Mouse King. They borrow one from a toy soldier, and the Nutcracker successfully defeats the Mouse King, giving Marie his seven golden crowns.
As a reward for helping him, the Nutcracker takes Marie to the land where he is from, leading her there through a magic staircase in an old wardrobe. The Nutcracker’s land is beautiful, filled with candy and sweets and gold and silver fruit. (The Christmas Wood that they pass through reminds me of the woods in the wardrobe in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.) The Prince Nutcracker’s home is Marzipan Castle in Candy City, where his beautiful princess sisters live. They welcome Marie and the Nutcracker home.
Then, suddenly, Marie wakes up, as if it were all a dream. However, Marie knows that it wasn’t a dream because she still has the Mouse King’s crowns. Marie tells the Nutcracker that she loves him. There is a sudden bang, and Marie faints. When she wakes up, she is told that Mr. Drosselmeier’s nephew has come to visit them. The nephew is the Nutcracker, restored to human form and now a handsome young man, thanks to Marie’s love. Marie later marries the nephew, and the two of them rule magical Kingdom of Sweets.
There is a section in the back of the book that explains a little more about E.T.A. Hoffmann and the original version of the Nutcracker story.
This book is available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive.
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