Of Mice and Milne
I am a big fan of children’s literature. There, I said it. I have strongly held opinions about kids’ books, many of which would make me deeply unpopular with the majority of English-speaking Canada, so I choose to keep them to myself…mostly. On a little dedicated shelf in my office, you will find current gems cheek-by-jowl with old classics and some surviving copies from my own childhood. Picture books and beginner novels, books of poetry and nursery rhymes, fairytales and folklore - it’s all there. You’ll find a startling number of protagonist mice and rabbits, which the author and critic Bruce Handy posits as popular choices because children, also being small and relatively powerless in a big, wide, wild world, connect with them. From an illustrator’s point of view, I think it might also be because rabbits and mice are easier to draw than children, and much cuter in little jackets, but what do I know?
Most historical children’s books did not feature mice or rabbits or bears or Heffalumps - they were religious tracts about either extremely horrible children who died young and went to Hell, or extremely saintly children who died young and went to Heaven. Not great choices, all things considered. It puts me in mind of Jane Eyre, who, when asked how she will avoid the fire and brimstone of Hell, responds boldly that she must “keep well and not die.” Wise words from a ten-year-old.
But much like the prayers and hymns found in the Peep of Day series mentioned in this week’s chapter, the texts of these many and varied children’s books on my shelf have become a sort of shorthand in my family - books like The House at Pooh Corner and The World of Christopher Robin were such common reading fodder in my childhood home that snippets of poems and stories and the gentle jokes Milne included have taken up residence in the Burgess family dialect. There are a handful of Sherry Fitch poems that are similarly well-represented. A series of picture books by Lynley Dodd about local village cats were particular favourites, and her rhymes show up quite a lot, too - perhaps unsurprising, given how fond we are of our felines. Even the briefest mention of these literary allusions is sure to raise a smile, and it’s always nice to have material that you know will land.
That got me thinking, while writing this week’s episode, about how powerful those prayer books must have been. The children’s books that punctuated my childhood are only foundational in my immediate family: my husband didn’t grow up with them, so instead of a knowing smile, when I say to him “I’m looking down, Pooh,” or “Scarface Claw, the Toughest Tom in Town” or “And one night, invaders came,” the best I can expect is raised brows. But the prayers and precepts and pericopes (isn’t that a delicious word?) that made up the prayer books and cards in Anne’s world would have been nearly universal for the ‘small fry’ of Avonlea. It must have been very comforting, very assuring, for every child in a generation to have the same touchstones - everyone would know the same songs, and rhymes, and hymns, and prayers, and references to those texts. Those books were also likely to have been foundational to the ‘big fry’ of Avonlea - the adults would likely have read similar tracts, and certainly would be reading and praying from the same versions of the Bible. This sort of cultural continuity is born out in the later installments of the Anne series: when Anne has moved to far-flung places (okay, other towns in PEI), she and all her new chums and bosom friends can quote at length, and do, not only religious texts, but also classical literature and poetry - and everyone gets the references. We can guess that Montgomery did this in her own life, because of the words she not only puts in her characters’ mouths, but on the frontispiece of the novel itself: she quotes a line from Robert Browning’s Evelyn Hope: “And the stars met in your aspect/made of fire and dew.” She must have assumed, probably rightly, that her readers would understand that reference and to what it alluded.
I admit that family in-jokes about Winnie the Pooh or The Old Ladies Who Liked Cats (a marvelous book, now sadly out of print) may not be as erudite as Browning or the Bible, but I think their functions are similar: just like Anne, and Montgomery, we have found words that delight us, and promptly borrow them wholesale for our own use. But they are also a connective tissue, reifying the links between Anne and her friends, or between my family, textual threads that bind us together.
Jennifer