Posted on by TracyC

Charlie the Tramp

Charlie the Tramp by Russell Hoban, illustrated by Lillian Hoban, 1966.

Disclosure: I am using a newer edition of the book, published by Plough Publishing House.  Plough sent a copy to me for review purposes, but the opinions in the review are my own.

One day, when Charlie Beaver’s grandfather comes to visit, his grandfather asks him what he wants to be when he grows up. The grandfather assumes that he knows the answer to the question because everyone in the family is a beaver, and beavers naturally do beaver work. (Beaver is apparently both species and profession in books where beavers talk and wear clothes.) However, Charlie stuns his family when he declares that he wants to be a tramp.

Few families would be happy to hear a child say that he wants to be a tramp. Charlie’s grandfather says that he’s never heard a child want to be tramp, and his mother says that she doesn’t think he means it. However, Charlie thinks that being a tramp would be good because he wouldn’t have to learn how to chop trees or build dams or other routine jobs. Charlie thinks that tramps have a lot of fun and just work now and then at little jobs when they need something to eat. Charlie thinks that the little jobs would be much more fun than the ones his father really wants him to do. Charlie’s grandfather says that kids these days just don’t want to work hard.

However, Charlie’s parents decide that if he wants to be a tramp, they’ll let him try it out. Charlie makes himself a little bundle with some food, and his parents let him sleep outside, telling him to come back for breakfast. Both the father and grandfather quietly admit that they both wanted to be a tramp when they were his age, so it’s not just kids these days.

Charlie has some fun, roaming the countryside, sleeping under the stars, and enjoying his freedom. In the morning, he comes home and does some chores to earn his breakfast, lunch, and dinner. In between, he goes out to roam the countryside again.

Charlie begins to notice that something keeps waking him up in the night, an odd sound that he can’t identify at first. Eventually, he realizes that it’s the sound of a nearby stream. For some reason, the trickling sound of the stream seems nice but makes him feel restless. It inspires him to swim in the stream and begin building his own dam, working through the night.

When Charlie sleeps through breakfast, his family comes looking for him and admires the good job that Charlie did on his dam and the pond that he has created. When they ask him about why he was making a dam when he was trying to be a tramp, Charlie says that he likes doing both and can do either sometimes. His family is satisfied that Charlie is a good worker, and his grandfather says, “That’s how it is nowadays. You never know when a tramp will turn out to be a beaver.”

It isn’t that Charlie expects to go through life without doing work because he insisted on working to earn his meals even when he was being a tramp. It was more that Charlie wanted the freedom to decide when he wanted to work and what kind of work he was going to do. However, he is a beaver and has a beaver’s instincts. In the end, he sees the appeal of doing a beaver’s work, building dams, enjoying it because he made the dam himself in the way he wanted to make it. I think it shows that when a person has the knowledge and ability to do something and the interest in doing it, they will eventually use their skills, perhaps in surprising ways. I remember reading some advice to writers that said that people write because “they can’t not do it,” and that’s true of many aspirations in life. Sometimes, when people know what they really want to do with their lives, they can’t resist doing it, and sometimes, people realize what their aspirations are when they find something that they can’t resist doing. Charlie is a beaver because it’s a part of who he is, and he can’t not do it. As he grows up, he will continue growing into that role, just as human children eventually grow up to be the people they are going to be.

This book is available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive, but it’s also back in print and available for purchase through Plough. If you borrow the book and like it, consider buying a copy of your own!

Posted on by TracyC

Lyddie

Lyddie

Lyddie by Katherine Paterson, 1991.

The year is 1843. Thirteen-year-old Lyddie’s father left home to go West and seek his fortune, and he hasn’t been heard of since. Lyddie helps her mother to take care of their farm in Vermont and the younger children, but they are very poor, and her mother has given up hope of their father returning home. The children’s aunt and uncle, Clarissa and Judah live nearby, but they are of little help, full of fire-and-brimstone talk. Lyddie and her brother Charlie, who is ten, more often turn to their Quaker neighbors, the Stevenses, for help. They are kinder than their aunt and uncle, although their mother disapproves of them for being abolitionists and, in her mind, heathens. Lyddie and Charlie are just grateful for their help. Because of their mother’s depression at the loss of their father, she pays little attention to the things that her children do to keep the farm going and the family together.

However, when a bear enters their house and eats the oatmeal that Lyddie was preparing, their mother, primed by Clarissa’s and Judah’s talk of signs of the end times and such, goes into a panic and sure that the world is going to end. Lyddie and Charlie let her go with their younger sisters to stay with Aunt Clarissa and Uncle Judah while they continue managing the farm as best they can. However, even though their mother sees that the world doesn’t end, she decides that she’s going to hire Lyddie out as a maid at the Cutlers’ tavern and Charlie to work at the mill because the family has too many debts and they will have to rent out their fields and animals.

Luke Stevens, the youngest of the Stevens sons, although much older than Lyddie and Charlie, gives them a ride to their new homes and employment at the mill and the tavern and promises to keep an eye on their house while they’re away. Lyddie is lonely and unhappy working at the tavern, badly missing the family farm and her siblings, especially Charlie. Then, one day, a woman visiting the tavern mentions that she’s one of the factory girls from Lowell, Massachusetts. The woman tells Lyddie that she seems like a good worker and that she could earn a good wage in the factories herself. At first, Lyddie doesn’t believe what the woman says that girls can earn there.

When Lyddie is allowed a brief visit home to her family’s farm, she discovers that Luke Stevens has been allowing a runaway slave to hide there. Lyddie isn’t sure what she thinks of it at first. Ezekial, the fugitive, frightens her because she has never met a black man before, and she knows that if she were to turn him in, there would be a handsome reward that could solve her family’s money problems. However, Ezekial seems to understand the situation that her family is in without her father. Although Lyddie and Charlie are not technically slaves, they have become a kind of indentured servant because of their family’s debts. Ezekial is a father himself, hoping to send for his family when he has found a safe place for them. Lyddie still wonders if her own father is alive, perhaps hoping to send for his family when he can. Having come to a better understanding of Ezekial, she knows that she can’t turn him in, even for the reward money.

Her talks with Ezekial make Lyddie understand that working in the tavern won’t solve her problems, though. As a maid there, she basically works all day for her room and board and has nothing else to show for it. Mrs. Cutler just sends a little money to her mother now and then and even then, she doesn’t always bother, and her mother is in little position to insist on proper wages, making Lyddie little better than a slave. Mrs. Cutler cares nothing about Lyddie or her family’s welfare, just trying to get as much labor out of her for as little as she can. Lyddie finally makes up her mind to seek factory employment in Lowell, Massachusetts, seeing it as her only chance to earn some real wages.

Life in Lowell turns out not to be as glamorous as the woman she met at the tavern made it sound, although the wages are definitely better. The company that owns the fiber mill where Lyddie gets a job has all sorts of rules and regulations for the girls who work there, even ones that intrude on their personal lives outside of work. Anxious to give the impression that all of their workers are of good moral disposition, they insist that the girls attend church on Sundays. Lyddie never had the money to pay pew fees back home, so she is unaccustomed to going to church, but finds that other girls in her position tend to go to Methodist churches, where there are no pew fees, saving their precious wages. Lyddie, who never had much time for schooling when she and her brother were trying to keep the farm going, has trouble understanding all of the terms of the employment contract that she signs but signs it anyway. Her employment turns out to be an education that changes Lyddie’s life, although not in all the ways that she had hoped.

Like Mrs. Cutler, the bosses at the factory have little real care for their workers, trying to get as much work out of them as they can for the least amount of pay they have to give them. The work is hard and the hours are long, but Lyddie keeps at it because the pay is the best she’s ever had and she is starting to save up for her family’s future. The poor working conditions contribute to health problems among the girls, and some of them petition for better working hours, but Lyddie is reluctant to do so because girls who are dismissed “dishonorably” from the factory are blacklisted all over town, and she fears not only risking the loss of her job but the potential to find a new one.

Through her interactions with the other girls and young women at the factory, Lyddie also develops into a young woman. She had previously wished that she’d been born a boy instead because a boy would have a better chance of running her family’s farm, but she comes to realize that there are opportunities out in the world for young women who are willing and able to go out and seek them. In Lowell, Lyddie gets a taste for literature through the books that her friend Betsy reads to her and acquires more lady-like behavior by watching the lady-like Amelia. Neither of them plan on working at the factory forever, and their ambitions, to get married or continue their education, cause Lyddie to consider what she really wants for her own future. Through the difficulties she encounters and everything she learns while facing them, Lyddie really becomes her own woman.

In the end, Lyddie is unable to save her family’s farm and reunite their family there. Her mother dies, and her father’s whereabouts are still unknown, so her uncle sells the farm to pay the debts. However, Charlie and her younger sister Rachel are provided for, the Stevenses decide that they will purchase the farm themselves, and Lyddie becomes reconciled to the loss of the farm through her new vision of the future. She is unfairly discharged from the factory after she catches an overseer molesting another girl and stops him because he blackens her name in retaliation. But, by then, Lyddie has acquired some money and new confidence in herself, and she begins making other plans for her future, which may include both further education and the possibility of marriage. One thing that she knows for certain is that, whatever she does with her life, she wants to move forward as her own, independent person.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).