In keeping a weekly eye on my reading pile, it's meant to keep track of what I have on the go but also rein in too much readerly exuberance in starting new books faster than I am finishing ongoing books. So, while I started dipping into Maxine Hong Kingston's wonderful The Woman Warrior (she's a very poetic storyteller--it almost feels tinged with magical realism to me), another glance at the pile and Molly Hughes caught my eye. A London Child of the 1870s has been waiting patiently since before the holidays, so no cutting in line. Seeing as it is not only a memoir, and a slender one at that, but also a Persephone Books title (which I am determined to read more of this year), I pulled it out and plan on spending time with it this week. I might even manage to finish it before the month is out.
No better way of whipping up interest and enthusiasm but to share a little teaser of it today. I started reading the introduction when I initially pulled it from my shelves, but while it was there I discovered it was only the first of three memoirs, Adam Gopnik was giving away a few too many details for my liking. Sometimes introductions are best saved for later!
It starts:
"A girl with four brothers older than herself is born under a lucky star. To be brought up in London, in the eighteen-seventies, by parents who knew how to laugh at both jokes and disasters, was to be under the influence of Jupiter himself."
I was curious about the Jupiter reference and had to look it up. It quite literally means to be born under a lucky star. Apparently Jupiter's sign is Sagittarius, which is the sign of "optimism, faith and growing through risks others wouldn't dare take." So that sets a nice tone and we are off to a good start made even better by this teaser (because readers always love bookish references, right?). I guess when it comes to Victorians I tend to think of Dickens and it is always the poor, eccentric characters he created that come to mind. But surely not all Victorians had drab, difficult lives?
"We were rich in another way, richer, so far as I can observe, than the average children of today. Our parents had accumulated a large number of books, which we were allowed to browse in as much as we liked. Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Lamb, George Eliot, Tennyson, Byron, Coleridge, Disraeli, these were not 'taught' at school, or set as holiday tasks but became part of our lives. The elder ones discussed them at table, and quoted from them, till the Micawbers and Becky Sharp and Lamb appeared to my childish mind as some former friends of mother's, whom I recognized with delight later on when I read the books for myself. Rawdon was my eldest brother's favorite, and I new 'same which I shot Captain Marker' long before I had the faintest notion of its meaning."
Any book that references a family who likes to read is going to be a good one. Even better when I learn more than a few things about the time, place, people and literary references along the way! That reference, by the way, is from the Thackeray novel, Vanity Fair, and is about a duel, which had become a household word.
Now I need to go to my library find/illustrated omnibus editions and compare--well, mostly peruse all the pictures and put it all into context!