Christmas is going to be different this year for Samantha and her family. Uncle Gard is bringing his girlfriend, Cornelia, to spend the holidays with them. Christmas had started out so hopeful for Samantha, with an invitation to a friend’s Christmas party, elaborate plans for building a gingerbread house, and the secret presents that Samantha has been making for everyone. Cornelia’s visit changes Samantha’s plans.
For Samantha, Cornelia’s visit makes Christmas more difficult. At first, she says that she will help make Cornelia feel welcome and thinks to herself that she will have to get a present for Cornelia that is as elegant as she is. However, when Samantha tries to put up the usual homemade decorations that she made herself, the maid angrily takes them down, calling them “dustcatchers.” The house must be perfect for Cornelia’s visit, and Samantha is insulted that people see her decorations as an eyesore or inconvenience. The cook, who was going to help Samantha with her gingerbread house, says that there probably won’t be time for it now because her grandmother has asked her to make extra, special foods for Cornelia’s visit. Grandmary even tells Samantha that it would be better for Samantha to “stay out of the way” of their Christmas preparations.
With Cornelia coming, no one seems to notice or care about Samantha. Samantha finds out that she won’t be able to attend her friend’s party because it is the night that Cornelia is arriving. It doesn’t seem likely that her grandmother will care about her secret Christmas wish for the beautiful Nutcracker doll in the toy store window. Samantha has been without a doll since she gave her own beloved doll, Lydia, to Nellie, who had never owned a doll before. Cornelia is an extra person Samantha needs to supply a present for, but she can’t summon up any enthusiasm for giving a present for someone who is making things so difficult for her.
Throughout the book, Samantha considers different presents that she could give to Cornelia, beginning with the most basic, convenient token gifts that she could give and then forget about, unlike her homemade, heart-felt gifts for everyone else. However, Samantha’s attitudes toward Cornelia change as she gets to know her better during the holidays and comes to see her as a source of fun and support.
When Cornelia actually arrives and begins participating in the usual Christmas activities, Samantha sees that she is far less fussy than the people who were preparing for her arrival. Unlike most other grown-ups, Cornelia is not too dignified to have fun while sledding or get messy while making gingerbread houses. Cornelia even suggests sledding, to Grandmary’s surprise. Cornelia always mentions how nice it would be to decorate a gingerbread house, like she did when she was a girl, Samantha says that she would like that too, but the cook is too busy to help this year. Cornelia says that is no problem because she and Samantha can make the gingerbread house themselves. Cornelia even makes sure that some of the decorations that Samantha made are prominently displayed on the Christmas tree.
By the end of the book, Samantha changes her mind about Cornelia completely. While everyone else seemed to be ignoring Samantha and going out of their way to make Cornelia feel welcome, Cornelia was paying more attention to Samantha and really thinking about what would make Samantha happy at Christmas. Cornelia is the one who correctly guesses what Samantha would really like for Christmas, and in return, Samantha decides to give her best present to Cornelia.
The story ends with Uncle Gard officially engaged to Cornelia.
In the back of the book, there is a section with historical information about how people would celebrate Christmas during the early 1900s.
The book is currently available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive.
Samantha is turning ten years old! She is having a birthday party with some other girls, and Aunt Cornelia’s younger sisters, the twins Agnes and Agatha, are coming to visit. Samantha’s grandmother is very strict, with very precise ideas about the way that things should be done. The twins are accustomed to being raised more permissively. When Samantha complains that her grandmother makes her wear long underwear for most of the year, even when it’s really too hot to wear it. Her grandmother thinks that it will help ward off illness. The twins encourage Samantha to think for herself. Few people wear long underwear anymore or believe that they will get sick by not wearing it, the twins say, and if Samantha doesn’t want to wear it, she should be allowed to make up her own mind about it. Samantha agrees that ten years old should be old enough to decide about simple things, like what kind of underwear to wear.
The twins have a lot of interesting ideas about how to do things differently, and they encourage Samantha to be a little more daring and try new things. When the cook talks about Samantha’s birthday cake and how it will have ten candles on it, the twins suggest that she could make ten smaller cakes, called petite fours, and put one candle on each of them. Samantha thinks that sounds so elegant that she wants to try it, although the cook thinks that it sounds a little strange for birthday cakes. They’re also going to have ice cream at the party, homemade. Samantha and the twins help to make it, although they are annoyed by Eddie, the nosy and bossy boy from next door, who shows up and tries to tell them what to do, hoping for a taste of ice cream himself.
At first, girls the party act a bit self-conscious, trying to be polite and grown-up in their party clothes. After Samantha opens her presents, her Uncle Gard and Aunt Cornelia show up with a special surprise: a puppy named Jip. Jip is a little wild and doesn’t know how to obey commands. He runs off with Samantha’s new teddy bear (a recent invention in Samantha’s time), and the girls have to chase him and get him to drop the toy. Samantha distracts the dog by offering him her shoe, and Eddie, who was watching, picks up the bear. At first, he says that he’ll give it back if they give him some ice cream and let him play with the dog, but Samantha refuses because he was not invited to the party, and she doesn’t like him nosing in. Agatha wrestles the teddy bear away from Eddie before Samantha’s grandmother arrives and tells them that young ladies shouldn’t fight or make spectacles of themselves. Most of the rest of the party is elegant, and the girls are a little more relaxed, now that they look a little less elegant from chasing the dog. However, Eddie gets revenge on the girls by adding salt to the ice cream they made. Even though everything else is fine, including the petite fours, Samantha is still angry at Eddie for ruining the ice cream.
Since Samantha didn’t get to eat the ice cream at her birthday party, the twins and Aunt Cornelia suggest that Samantha return to New York City with them for a visit, and they can all go to a fancy ice cream parlor there. Grandmary agrees and says that she would like to go to New York City herself. On the way to Uncle Gard and Aunt Cornelia’s new house, Grandmary says to Samantha that she hopes that she thinks that the twins get too carried away with some of their ideas. She thinks that they’re too impulsive and don’t think before they act, and while they’ve been raised to be very modern children, she still thinks that some of the old ways are best.
When Grandmary and Samantha see a protest held by women’s suffragists, Grandmary is annoyed at the women, making public spectacles of themselves and inconveniencing passing traffic. She thinks that it’s just another “newfangled notion” that’s a lot of fuss and bother over nothing. She’s never had to vote in her entire life, and she doesn’t see why any other woman would need to. Samantha can tell that this opinion bothers Aunt Cornelia and the twins when Grandmary says it in front of them, but they don’t seem to want to discuss it further.
The twins and Samantha ask to take Jip to the park, and Aunt Cornelia says that’s fine. She has a meeting to attend, but she wants them back home in time to go to the ice cream parlor after her meeting. However, Jip gets away from the girls when they try to put him in Samantha’s doll carriage, and they chase him to the place where the suffragists are meeting. Although Samantha knows that her grandmother doesn’t approve of the suffragists, they have to go after the dog. There, the twins tell Samantha that Cornelia is also a suffragist, and she is speaking at the meeting.
Jip charges right up to the stage where Cornelia is giving her speech, and Cornelia lectures the girls about not thinking about the consequences of their actions and not following her instructions for taking proper care of Jip. Sometimes, they are too impulsive and don’t think ahead. Cornelia explains to the girls about the need to follow agreed-upon rules for safety and how that is different from the changes that her group is advocating. While Grandmary has been saying that the suffragists are also too radical and impulsive and making a fuss about nothing, Cornelia says that much thought, planning, and hard work has gone into their movement to ensure that the changes they’re advocating will be for the better. Grandmary doesn’t appreciate how much thought and preparation the group has done and how long it has taken them to get this far because she hasn’t really thought about the issues at all herself and she has not been to any of previous meetings, where the planning has taken place.
Note:The women’s suffrage movement was already decades old by 1904, when this story takes place, so it’s not really as “newfangled” as Grandmary describes it. It had been building for a long time. However, Grandmary may not have been aware of that because she never needed to be aware. Consider what her life has been like. Remember that Grandmary is a wealthy lady and that marriage and social connections have been the basis of her life. Her husband was wealthy, and she was likely born into a wealthy family. Her life has always been comfortable without her needing to have a job or vote or do anything other than be a wife and mother. Growing up, becoming a well-behaved young lady, and getting married set her for life, and up to this point, she hasn’t had any major problems with money or her lifestyle and hasn’t really needed to think much further than that. She’s used to letting the men in her life handle business and politics and provide her with money, and she now lives on the money that her husband left to her, which is more than ample. Mostly, what Grandmary has needed to manage in her life are the social graces necessary for entertaining her husband’s business associates and their wives and for helping to facilitate her children’s marriages and careers. Grandmary’s daughter was also married to a well-off man before their early deaths. Her son is also a wealthy man, who can provide for his wife, and Cornelia is also from a wealthy family in New York City, a natural extension of their social circle. Grandmary assumes that Samantha, raised in this wealthy social atmosphere, will also naturally meet and marry a wealthy man through the connections of her friends and family, one who will support her and their children in a comfortable fashion. She thinks that, besides caring for her future children, Samantha will likely occupy her time with good works for the less fortunate and that she will give elegant parties for the fashionably-dressed ladies of their social level to solidify their social connections. The elegant affair that her tenth birthday was supposed to be was also practice for her future, as Grandmary envisions it. Grandmary thinks that life will continue to follow this same general course in their family and that there will never be a need for anything different because her own life has been fairly smooth, comfortable, and predictable, largely unshaken, even by the deaths of her husband and Samantha’s parents. But, she’s about to change her mind.
The girls are a little disheveled when they go to meet Grandmary at the ice cream parlor because there is no time to go home and change. As they explain to Grandmary about why the girls look a little disheveled, she tells them that she already knows because she was there, watching the speech. When she saw that Cornelia was the one speaking, she decided to stop and listen, and she was impressed by what she heard. She liked the part where Cornelia talked about the importance of standing up for what is right, and that’s something that Grandmary believes in, too. She is now more open to the suffrage movement than she was before.
The story is partly about growing up and how Samantha realizes that she needs to learn to make her own decisions. She can’t always go by what her grandmother tells her, and sometimes, listening to the twins isn’t always the wisest choice, either. Samantha also begins to see that she has choices to make about the kind of young lady that she will grow up to be. She can be the elegant lady at the party or the public crusader for the causes she believes in or maybe something that combines aspects of both. In the end, Grandmary also begins to see the possibilities of change.
In the back of the book, there is a section about babies and children during the early 1900s. It discusses what children liked to do for fun and how adults would begin training children to be young adults early in life, emphasizing social skills, like dancing, how to behave at the dinner table, and how to engage in polite adult conversation. A girl from a wealthy family, like Samantha, might go to a finishing school instead of college after completing her basic education. At finishing school, she would learn how to manage a household, including how to manage servants (how to hire them, how to tell if they were doing a good job, etc.) and how to throw elegant dinner parties. She might have a coming out or debutante party to introduce her to society as an adult, which meant that she would be ready for introductions and dates with young gentlemen and would probably soon be considering marriage. (This is likely the path that Samantha’s grandmother took in life and the one that she is considering for Samantha.) However, some young ladies did go to college, had careers, or become suffragists, and some did some combination of the above. Samantha’s life is full of possibilities, and her future hasn’t been decided yet. Because Samantha was ten years old in 1904, she would have been eighteen in 1912. For an example of what college life would have been like for an eighteen-year-old girl at a college in the eastern United States in 1912, see the novel Daddy-Long-Legs.
The book is currently available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive.
This book is part of a series by same author about children growing up in Colonial America. Each of the books is the series has photographs of historical reenactors portraying real people from Colonial history. This book focuses on two children who are traveling on the Mayflower in 1620, heading to what would become the Plymouth colony. One of the children is a girl who is a passenger on the ship, and the other is a boy who is part of the crew, a ship’s apprentice. In the section of historical information in the back of the book, the author explains that the girl was based on a real girl who was a passenger on the Mayflower, although the boy was not based on a specific apprentice; he is just meant to show what a ship’s apprentice would have been like at that time and to help explain the duties of the various crew members as he assists them.
The ship’s apprentice is called William Small. He is specifically apprenticed to the ship’s master, Christopher Jones (historical character). As an apprentice, he is learning basic navigation skills and assists the regular crew members with various tasks, including serving food.
The girl is named Ellen Moore. She and the other passengers are traveling in cramped quarters, and people are often seasick or trying to find ways to keep themselves occupied during the long journey. Ellen is traveling with younger siblings, and she plays with them in between performing routine chores, like sewing and preparing food.
During the voyage, there is a terrible storm, and the passengers are all confined below deck without light because lanterns and candles would pose too much risk of fire while the ship is rocked during the storm. William has to help the ship’s carpenter to repair leaks. Before the storm is fully over, Mrs. Hopkins, one of the passengers, gives birth to a baby she names Oceanus (historical person, the real Oceanus made it through the voyage although he sadly died young, possibly about age six, but the date of his death is uncertain).
The book ends with their arrival in the Americas. Because the storm blew them off course, the Mayflower did not arrive at its intended destination in Virginia but further north at Cape Cod in what is now Massachusetts. Because winter was setting in, the passengers decided not to risk further travel and established their colony there, 65 days after their ship first left England.
In the back of the book, the section with historical information explains more about both the characters in the story and the reenactors. The historical Ellen Moore and her siblings were traveling to the colony without their parents, under the guardianship of the other families, acting as young servants in their employment. The book mentions that the Moore children were without their parents because of a family tragedy but is not specific about what it was. I looked it up, and the story is both sad and bizarre. I can see why the author didn’t want to explain it in a children’s book. Apparently, the children’s parents had an arranged marriage and were not happy being married to each other. The children’s mother had a long love affair with another man, and also apparently, all of the children were the biological children of her lover. The mother’s husband began to notice that the children physically resembled his wife’s lover. The couple bitterly divorced, and after the husband was granted custody of the children (which, apparently, weren’t his anyway), he decided to send them away to the Americas with the departing pilgrims, paying for them to be taken on the voyage, never seeing them again. Sadly, Ellen probably did not survive the first winter at the Plymouth colony because she disappears from the historical record during that time. Out of the four Moore children traveling on the Mayflower, only one survived to adulthood, Ellen’s young brother Richard. Richard married twice in his life and had seven children of his own. He became a sailor and ship’s captain and eventually died an elderly man in Salem, Massachusetts, during the 1690s, not long after the Salem witch trials. None of this information about Richard is mentioned in the book, but I thought it was interesting background information. In the book, there is also additional information about the ship, The Mayflower, and the reproduction ship used in the pictures, The Mayflower II.
The book is available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive.
The Colonial Cookbook by Lucille Recht Penner, 1976.
This cookbook explains the history of food, cooking, and dining habits in Colonial America and provides recipes that readers can make themselves.
The first part of the book provides most of the historical background, although each section of recipes also has some additional information. The earliest European colonists in North America had to struggle to feed themselves. In many ways, they were unprepared for their lives as colonists, and not all of them had planned to stay as long as they did. The ones who hadn’t planned to stay long had heard stories about gold and silver in the New World, and they had hoped to stay only long enough to seek their fortunes and return home rich. The realities of life in North America did not meet their expectations and survival turned out to be harder than they thought.
The colonists ended up relying on Native Americans (called “Indians” in this book) to help them survive. As they used up the stores of salted beef and hard biscuits that they had brought with them, they began trading for food with the Native American tribes. From the Native Americans, they also learned farming, finishing, hunting, and foraging techniques that they used to help themselves survive. There were many edible plants and animals at hand, but the early colonists were unaccustomed to which plants in the Americas were edible and how to find them and where to find and trap animals. One of the chores colonial children were given was to gather wild plants for the family to eat, like nuts, mushrooms, dandelion greens, wild leeks and onions, and wild fruit, like plums, cherries, melons, and berries.
Gradually, as the colonies grew, the colonists established farms and farm fields. They needed more land for farming to support their population than modern farms would use to support the same number of people because farming has become more efficient since the colonial era. Later, new colonists came and brought livestock with them. Men and boys usually took responsibility for the livestock on family farms. After animals were butchered, the women and girls would clean and prepare them for eating. Food required much more work to prepare because the colonists had to do all the preparation themselves. Families would not only butcher their own animals but make their own cheese. The book provided details about the processes and tools that colonists used for making their food.
The more specific eating habits of colonists changed over time and varied depending on where the colonists lived in North America and where they had originally come from. For early colonists, meals were eaten off of trenchers made from pieces of stale bread, and the day began with a breakfast of mush or pudding with cider or beer to drink. Later, foods became more varied. People in New England often ate fruit pies for breakfast, and people in the Middle Colonies liked scrapple (a cornmeal mush with pork scraps) and oly koeks (a kind of holeless donut containing bits of fruit). (Neither scrapple nor oly koeks appear as recipes in this book, but there are recipes online.) Southern plantation owners had elaborate breakfasts with many different kinds of food, including ham, eggs, pastries, and more, but poor people typically had mush and scraps of leftovers.
The book provides a variety of recipes, organized by type. Most of the recipes in the book do not look too difficult, although some call for more unusual ingredients, like rosewater. You can still find it, although I’ve usually seen it at specialty cooking stores or import stores. The categories are soups, meat, poultry, seafood, vegetables, puddings, breads, sweets, drinks, and sauces and relishes. Not all of the recipes look like things that would interest modern children. I don’t imagine that many children would be excited at the idea of making Scalloped Oysters, for example. (Seafood was an important food source for early colonists.) Even though children might recognize Pease Porridge from the rhyme, I’m not sure that a thick pea soup would be something that they would be excited to eat, either. Hasty pudding is mentioned in the song Yankee Doodle, but the recipe itself is a little bland. The book does mention that you can flavor it with maple syrup, and there are other cornbread pudding recipes that contain spices and sweeteners in the book.
However, there are some recipes that I think would be interesting to try. The book explains that pumpkins were a staple food for the early colonists, as shown by the old rhyme from the Plymouth:
We have pumpkin at morning And pumpkin at noon If it was not for pumpkin We would be undoon.
The book explains the different ways that colonists would prepare pumpkin. You can bake it and eat it in pieces with syrup, molasses, honey, or cream. The book explains how to cook it, and it also provides a recipe for Pumpkin Pudding, which can be made with either fresh pumpkin or canned pumpkin. I haven’t made it yet myself, but from the recipe, it reminds me of a pumpkin pie without the crust:
Johnny Cakes are a little like pancakes but made with cornmeal. The basic recipe is a little plain, but they can be served with butter and maple syrup.
This book was published in 1976, which was the United States’ Bicentennial celebration. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find an online edition yet.
A group of neighborhood boys want to go trick-or-treating on Halloween night, but they’re upset because it looks like a friend of their, Joe Pipkin, won’t be coming with them. When they get to Pipkin’s house, he seems ill and is clutching his side. His friends worry that he’s sick, but he valiantly reassures them that he’ll be fine. He sends them on, telling them that he’ll catch up with them and that his costume will be great. Specifically, he tells them to “head for the House” which is “the place of the Haunts.”
The
house that Pipkin is talking about is the creepiest house in town. It’s large, so large that it’s hard to tell
how many rooms it has. The boys knock on
the creepy-looking door knocker on the front door, and a man answers the door. When the boys say, “trick or treat,” the man
says, “No treats. Only—trick!” Then, he slams the door without giving them
anything.
Not knowing what else to do, the boys walk around the side of the house and see a large tree, filled with jack o’lanterns. This is the Halloween Tree. The strange man they saw before rises up from a pile of leaves and scares the boys, giving them the “trick” that he promised them earlier. He finally introduces himself as Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud. He begins talking to them about the history of Halloween and asks them if they understand the real meanings behind the costumes they have chosen. The boys admit that they really don’t know the meanings behind their costumes, and Moundshroud points off into the distance, calling it, “The Undiscovered Country.” He says that out there likes the past and the history of Halloween and that the boys will learn the answers if they’re willing to go there. The boys are interested, but they say that they can’t go anywhere without Pipkin, who promised that he would come.
Pipkin suddenly appears in the distance, by a dark ravine, holding a lit pumpkin. He says that he doesn’t feel well, but he knew that he had to come. Pipkin trips and falls, and the light in his pumpkin goes out. From a distance, the others hear him calling for help. Moundshroud says that something bad has happened. Pipkin has been taken away to The Undiscovered Country by Death. Moundshroud says that Pipkin may not be taken permanently but perhaps held for ransom and that, if they follow Pipkin to The Undiscovered Country, they might be able to get his soul back and save his life.
Moundshroud has the boys build a kite that somewhat resembles a pterodactyl, and they use it to travel into the far distant past. The first place they arrive is Ancient Egypt, where the boys learn about mummies and how the Ancient Egyptians viewed the dead. They see Pipkin as a mummy, being laid to rest in a sarcophagus, surrounded by hieroglyphs, telling the story of his life. (Or, as Moundshroud says, “Or whoever Pipkin was this time around, this year, four thousand years ago,” hinting that Pipkin has been reincarnated before and what they are seeing during their journey are his past lives and deaths.) Pipkin calls out to his friends for help. Moundshroud tells the boys that they can’t save Pipkin now, but they’ll have a chance later.
They
continue their journey through time and around the world, seeing glimpses of
Halloweens past in Ancient Rome and the British Isles, where they learn about
druids, Samhain, and witches. Moundshroud
describes how the Romans supplanted druidic practices with their own
polytheistic religion until that was eventually replaced by Christianity. All along, they can still hear Pipkin calling
to them, and he seems to be carried off by a witch. As they pursue him, Moundshroud teaches them
the difference between fictional witches and real-life witches, which he
characterizes as being more like wise women, who don’t really do magic.
From there, they go to Notre Dame to learn about gargoyles. They continue to see Pipkin in different forms, even as a gargoyle on the cathedral. Pipkin tells them that he’s not dead, but that he knows that part of him is in a hospital back home.
In Mexico, the boys experience Dia de los Muertos and learn about skeletons and a different kind of mummy from the ones they saw in Egypt. They find Pipkin, held prisoner in the catacombs by the mummies, and Moundshroud tells the boys that the only way to save him is to make a bargain, both with him and with the dead: each boy must give one year from the end of their lives so that Pipkin may live. It is a serious decision, for as Moundshroud says, they won’t miss that year now, being only about 11 or 12 years old, but none of them knows how long they will actually live. Some of them who were destined to die at 55 would now only make it to 54, and as they reach the end of their lives, the year will seem that much more important to them. Even those who live longer will still want every day they can possibly have. However, each decides that he is willing to make the sacrifice because, without that sacrifice, Pipkin has no chance, and they can’t just let him die.
They
make the bargain and are soon returned home.
When they go to Pipkin’s house to check on him, they are told that Pip
is in the hospital because he had his appendix taken out, just in time to save
his life. At the end of the story, Tom
(who is the leader of the boys through most of the story), wonders silently who
Moundshroud really was, and he hears in his mind, “I think you know, boy, I
think you know.” Tom asks him if they
will meet again, and Moundshroud says that he will come for Tom many years from
now, confirming that Moundshroud was Death all along, which was why they had to
make the bargain with him.
I saw the animated movie version of this story long before I read the book, and it really gave me the creeps! Moundshroud is creepy because he is kind of two-faced. On the one hand, he seems somewhat helpful in helping the boys to find Pipkin and teaching them about the history of Halloween, but on the other, he does not admit to the children that he is Death until the very end, that he is the very thing that they need to save Pipkin from, and that they can only do it by offering a sacrifice of years from their own lives. Although it does occur to me that Moundshroud may not be quite as two-faced as he seems because Pip’s illness and potential death may not have been planned by him but simply the fated situation for Pip, and Moundshroud might have just taken it upon himself to provide a way for Pip’s friends to save him in the least painful way. By not telling them that a sacrifice of part of their lives would be necessary until the very end, after they had come to a better understanding of life and death in the history of Halloween, he may have made the choice easier for them to make. Also, he never says exactly how much time they bought for Pip with their sacrifice. The implication is that Pip is now free from his early appointed death date and will now live a full life, similar to what his friends will have. The exchange does not seem to be an even one, a year for a year, with the children needing to decide how many years they will donate to Pip. Although the kids still don’t know at the end how many years each of them will live, it seems that none of the rest of them is in danger of dying in childhood, and they will all live for many more years.
I wouldn’t recommend this book for young children (it still gives me the creeps, and I’m in my 30s), but it is interesting how they take a journey through the origins of Halloween. The book and the movie were somewhat different, partly because there were more kids in the group in the book and partly because the group of kids in the movie also had a girl in a witch costume. In the book, the kid in the witch costume was also a boy.
Both the book and the animated movie are available online through Internet Archive.
Samantha and her family are spending the summer at their summer home at Piney Point. Besides Grandmary, Uncle Gard and Aunt Cornelia will be there. Cornelia has also brought her younger sisters, a set of twins named Agnes and Agatha. They are close in age to Samantha. Grandmary’s friend, Admiral Archibald Beemis, is also visiting from England.
The family’s summer home isn’t just a single house. They have a lodge in the style of a log cabin and separate guest cottages. This summer, Samantha and the twins will get a cottage to themselves with no adults. The girls have fun exploring the area around the lake together. However, there is one place that Samantha is afraid to go, the island in the lake called Teardrop Island. The only way to get to the island is by boat, and there are sharp, treacherous rocks in that part of the lake. That was where Samantha’s parents had their boating accident and drowned during a storm. To Samantha, Teardrop Island is a place of sadness and danger.
One rainy day, the three girls go up to the attic of the lodge to look for more paintbrushes so they can paint pictures. In the attic, they find old clothes and pictures of Samantha’s family. They also find Samantha’s mother’s old sketch book, labeled “Happy Memories of Teardrop Island.” In the sketch book, she drew pictures of Samantha and her father as they had picnics and played by a waterfall. Samantha was a very young child at the time, and she has no memories of having been on the island with her parents. From the pictures, it looks like it used to be her family’s favorite place.
Seeing the pictures makes Samantha want to visit the island once more, hoping to bring back memories of her earlier visits and her parents. The next day, the three girls go out to the island and try to find the places that Samantha’s mother drew in her book. Teardrop Island turns out to be a beautiful place, and Samantha loves it. The more time she spends there, the more she feels like she has been there before, although her memories are vague and dream-like.
However, the girls forgot to tie up their boat, and they find themselves stranded on the island! A storm comes, and the girls are afraid. When the Admiral tries to come out to the island to help them, he is injured, and the girls realize that they are going to have to find a way to save him! Can they make it home through the storm, or will they meet the same fate as Samantha’s parents?
In the back of the book, there is a section with historical information about how people would spend their summers during the early 1900s. Wealthy families like Samantha’s would go to summer homes in the countryside to escape the heat of the cities.
The book is currently available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive.
Samantha attends Miss Crampton’s Academy for Girls in Mount Bedford. She is doing well and has some friends at school, but she misses her friend Nellie. She knows how poor Nellie’s family is and worries about how they are doing.
One day, Samantha comes home from school to a surprise: Nellie has returned to town with her family. Samantha’s grandmother recommended Nellie’s family to a friend, Mrs. Van Sicklen, who has hired Nellie’s father as a driver and Nellie’s mother as a maid. Nellie and her sisters will also be helping with household chores. They will also get the chance to go to school, although they will be attending public school and not the private school that Samantha attends.
When they begin attending school, Nellie’s younger sisters do fine in the first grade, where they are expected to be beginners, but Nellie herself has trouble in the second grade. Nellie is a little old for second grade, so the other children make fun of her for being there, and she is so nervous that she makes embarrassing mistakes in front of her teacher and the other students. Nellie thinks that perhaps she’s too old to start going to school, but Samantha realizes that what she needs is a little extra help.
Samantha talks to her own teacher and explains the situation. She says that she would like to help teach Nellie what she needs to know, but she is not sure what Nellie needs to know in order to pass the second grade. Samantha’s teacher, Miss Stevens, thinks that it is nice that Samantha wants to help Nellie and gives her a set of second grade readers to study with pages marked for assignments. Samantha tells her grandmother what she is planning to do, and she says that it is fine, as long as the extra tutoring doesn’t interfere with Nellie’s house work too much.
Nellie accepts Samantha’s help at their secret, private “school” that Samantha calls “Mount Better School.” During their lessons, Samantha discovers that Nellie is very good at math because she used to have to help her mother with shopping and had to keep track of her money. Nellie cannot always come for lessons because of her work, but Samantha’s tutoring helps her to improve.
One day, when Samantha is walking home from school with Nellie and her sisters, a mean girl from Samantha’s school, Edith, sees them and criticizes Samantha for spending time with servants. She says that her mother would never allow her to play with servants. Samantha asks her grandmother what Edith means, and her grandmother says that Edith is a young lady. When Samantha asks why she is allowed to play with Nellie, her grandmother says that they are not really playing, that Samantha is helping Nellie, which makes it different. That explanation doesn’t entirely satisfy Samantha.
However, her grandmother is both understanding of the help that Samantha has been giving to Nellie and serious about the need to help others. When Edith’s mother and other ladies of the neighborhood come to visit and complain about Nellie’s family and how Samantha is spending time with them, Samantha’s grandmother defends them and says that Samantha is doing good.
Meanwhile, Samantha’s school is preparing for a public speaking contest with the theme “Progress in America.” To prepare for her speech, Samantha asks her grandmother, her Uncle Gard, and other people what they think about progress and what the best inventions are. They mention inventions like the telephone, electric lights, automobiles, and factories. Samantha is fascinated by the idea of factories and the variety of products that they can make. However, when Samantha reads her speech to Nellie, Nellie is not nearly so enthusiastic about factories as a sign of progress. Nellie used to work in a factory herself, and she knows that they are not pleasant places. She tells Samantha how factories are noisy and how dangerous the machines are for the workers. The factory workers are also very poorly paid, which is why the products they make are so cheap.
Nellie’s stories about factories bother Samantha. When it is time for the public speaking contest, Samantha delivers a changed version of her speech in which she discusses the dangers of child labor and how some form of progress, particularly ones that endanger children, are not good forms of progress. Samantha’s thoughtful speech wins the contest, and her grandmother understands that Samantha has been learning things from Nellie even while teaching her.
In the back of the book, there is a section with historical information about education and child labor during the early 1900s.
The book is currently available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive.
Samantha Parkington is a nine-year-old orphan. She belongs to a wealthy family and lives with her grandmother, called Grandmary, in the Hudson Valley in New York. Grandmary is often strict with Samantha, trying to teach her to be a proper young lady, but Samantha finds it difficult. Samantha’s grandmother loves her, but she has very old-fashioned ideas about how girls should behave. When Samantha wants to try making and selling boomerangs in order to earn money to buy a doll, using instructions from The Boys’ Handy Book, her grandmother stops her, saying that young ladies do not earn money. She would rather that Samantha earn the doll as a reward for doing what she is told and practicing her piano lessons. Samantha also has an uncle, Uncle Gard, who has a girlfriend named Cornelia. Cornelia is a more modern woman, who would see nothing wrong with Samantha wanting to earn some money.
One of her grandmother’s servants, a black woman named Jessie, is kind and motherly to Samantha. Jessie often patches Samantha up after her various escapades and mishaps. Jessie’s husband, Lincoln, is a train porter, and Jessie tells Samantha exciting stories about the places that Lincoln has seen in his work, like New Orleans. Sometimes, Lincoln brings Samantha post cards from these places.
Samantha soon learns that a new girl her age is coming to a neighbor’s house. She has been wanting a playmate, so she goes over to the neighbor’s house to introduce herself. The new girl’s name is Nellie, but she has come to be a servant for the neighbors, the Rylands. Nellie’s family is poor, so Nellie needs to work as a maid help her parents earn money and support her younger sisters. Samantha is surprised when Nellie describes her family’s circumstances in New York City. Samantha has never been poor, and she doesn’t know what it’s like to be cold and hungry. Nellie says that the air in the countryside is better for her, and she gets better food working for the Rylands. Nellie tells Samantha that she has never been to school, and Samantha offers to teach her.
Then, Jessie suddenly announces that she is leaving her job at Grandmary’s house. Grandmary doesn’t seem surprised, but Samantha is. Jessie offers no explanation for leaving, and when Samantha tries to ask, Grandmary and the other servants do not want to talk about it. Samantha tells Nellie about Jessie leaving, coming up with fanciful reasons why she might leave her job, but Nellie offers the practical explanation that Jessie might be having a baby. Nellie knows more about it than Samantha because she has younger sisters, but she acknowledges that adults of this time period do not like to talk about people having babies, particularly in front of children. Neither Nellie nor Samantha entirely knows why.
However, Samantha is still concerned about Jessie. Samantha doesn’t know where Jessie lives, but Nellie does. The two girls sneak out one evening to visit Jessie and learn for themselves what the matter is. This is the first time that Samantha has been to the part of her town where black people live, further opening her eyes to the lives of people from lower classes of society. Nellie is a little surprised at how Samantha, who is more educated, sometimes knows so little about the ways that other people live.
It turns out that Jessie does have a new baby. Jessie reassures Samantha that she and the baby are fine, but since her husband needs to travel because of his job as a train porter, she needs to stay at home with her baby now. Samantha thinks of a way to help Jessie keep her job and care for her baby at the same time, persuading her grandmother to let Jessie come back. Unfortunately, Nellie soon has to leave because Mrs. Ryland doesn’t think that she’s strong enough to work as a maid and decides to send her back to her family in New York City. Samantha gives Nellie her new doll as a going-away present, and she is very concerned about how Nellie and her family will manage.
In the back of the book, there is a section with historical information about how wealthy people and their servants lived during the early 1900s.
Something that occurred to me later is that Jessie is about the right age to be Addy‘s daughter, from another American Girls series. I don’t think that there’s a real connection between Jessie and Addy because the Samantha books were written before the Addy series. However, when I stopped to think about their relative ages (Addy would be about 49 years old in 1904, and Jessie is probably in her 20s), it occurred to me that if Addy had a daughter, she would probably be an adult at this time, and she might be doing something very similar to what Jessie is doing, working as a seamstress.
The book is currently available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive.
Kate Greenaway’s Book of Games by Kate Greenaway, 1889.
A book about children’s games with rules and general pastimes. The book doesn’t distinguish between the two, but I do because, to me, games have specific rules whereas more general pastimes and toys do not.
Many of the games and pastimes would be familiar to people in modern times and are still popular. Some games are like playground games (some of them are even still played on playgrounds today) that require running and motions, and others are more talking games (some of those have become classic road trip games, played in the car). Pastimes include making soap bubbles, flying kites, and using swings.
The book includes games like I Love my Love with an “A”, Blind Man’s Buff, Frog in the Middle, Russian Scandal (This is an old name for the Game of Telephone, before the invention of the telephone became really popular. I’ve also heard it as Russian Gossip, although I don’t know why it’s specifically “Russian.”), French and English (which is basically Capture the Flag), Oranges and Lemons (which is played like London Bridge is Falling Down, only with a different rhyme), and Twenty Questions. Some of the less familiar ones, especially to young Americans today, might be Puss in the Corner (a game that involves players running and changing places with each other and the person who is left without a place being “it” or the “puss”), Mary’s Gone A-Milking (a chase game with a song), What Is My Thought Like? (a talking/guessing game that involves creativity), and The Old Soldier and Judge and Jury (which are both talking games with words that are forbidden to say).
One of the interesting things about this book, besides noticing which games are still played and which are more obscure now, is that the children in the pictures are actually wearing clothes that are from an earlier part of the 19th century from when the book was written. This is a classic feature of Kate Greenaway’s illustrations, also seen in her other books. Modern people who are less familiar with the evolution of 19th century clothing might not notice that detail.
This book is still in print in modern times. It also available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
For more information about Victorian games in general, see the Victorian Games section of my Historical Games site. History and games are both hobbies of mine.
Felicity’s Craft Book by Rebecca Sample Bernstein and Jodi Evert, 1994.
This is a companion book to the Felicity, An American Girl series. It explains about the types of crafts that people would do in Colonial America and gives instructions for projects that readers can make at home.
In the beginning of the book, there is a brief history of crafting in America. It explains that, in the earliest days of the American colonies, people had to get most of their goods from Europe because they had to spend their time and energy on building homes and establishing farms in order to survive. However, as the colonies became more established, people were more able to make goods for themselves, both in their own homes and as professional craftspeople. By the time that Felicity lived, during the late 1700s, there were many skilled craftspeople, and those craftspeople also trained new people in their professions in apprenticeships.
Before presenting craft projects that readers can make, the book also offers a few tips for safety and neatness while making things. The crafts are also divided into sections relating to topics like writing, sewing, games and toys, and scented objects that you can make with plants.
The projects explained in this book include:
A quill
pen and two types of ink – The book gives instructions for making ink from
different types of berries (such as raspberries, strawberries, and blackberries,
which make red or purple ink) and walnut shells (which makes a brown ink).
A wax
seal – To be used with sealing wax or wax from a candle. These were used to
seal letters before the invention of envelopes with glue. (I know that there
are people and companies that still make these because I have one myself and
the sealing wax to use with it.)
Game of
Graces – A hoop with a pair of sticks that were used for a tossing game.
Cup and
Ball Game – A common toy in which a cup is attached to the end of a short stick
and a ball is tied to it. Players have
to move the toy around and make the ball swing into the cup.
Kites –
Made with lightweight paper.
Folding
Fan – Made with poster board and ribbon.
Fancy
Straw Hat – Explains how to decorate a hat with flowers and ribbon.
Fruit
Pyramid – Used as a table centerpiece.
Cross-Stitch
Sampler – A basic sampler using only the cross-stitch. (Colonial girls would create
more elaborate samplers to show off the range of stitches they could make.)
Sachet –
A small bag of potpourri (sweet-smelling dried plants). Colonists would put sachets into trunks and
wardrobes where they were storing their clothes to make them smell nice. (Some people still do this in modern times.) In a later part of the book, they also give instructions
for making potpourri with herbs and flower petals.
Friendship
Pincushion – An embroidered pincushion.
Tussie-Mussie
– A small bouquet, like the kind that bridesmaids and flower girls might carry. (The book says that people in Colonial times
might carry one or maybe a pomander ball if they went to visit a sick person
because they had an idea that breathing bad air would spread sickness and they
were trying to freshen the air with fresh scents. That’s not quite how sickness is spread, but
they were partly correct about sicknesses being airborn.)
Pomander Ball – An orange scented and decorated with spices and cloves. Besides freshening the air, they can also make nice decorations.
In the sections about different types of projects, there is additional historical information about life and crafts in Colonial America. Because, in the books, Felicity’s grandfather owns a plantation and one of the books takes place there, the craft book also has a section about plantations that includes a brief description of plantation life and slavery, noting that the lifestyle and pastimes that plantation owners enjoyed would not have been possible without their slaves to take care of the plantation chores for them.
The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.
