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A P R I L 1 9 0 3
Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott
An Old-Fashioned Girl, by Louisa May Alcott
A review by H. W. Boynton
There is, in short, no separate standard of taste by which
to determine the value of books written for children. To be of permanent use, they must possess
literary quality; that is, they must be whole-souled, broad, mature in temper,
however simple they may need to be in theme or manner. This truth is not always
observed by the fond adult buyer. The given book seems, he admits, rather
silly, but he supposes that to be a part of its character as a "juvenile." A
theory seems to be building up that the attribute of ripe humor which is wisdom
is rather wasted upon a book for children; that a boy knows a parson and
recognizes a clown, but is only puzzled by the betwixts and betweens of the
class to which most of humanity belongs. It is often asserted that a child's
sense of humor is mainly confined to a sense of the ridiculous. That is true of
his sense of a joke; but children have never been proved insusceptible to the
warmth of true humor, though they may have been quite unconscious of
susceptibility. In the meantime, they are ready enough to put up with its
absence; and they find at hand a type of fiction built upon an artificial code
of sentiment and morals. Children's magazines and libraries are full of stories
written according to this code, the beginning and the end of which is the
prescription of certain things to do and not to do: never to cheat in
examination, always to be grateful to your parents, never to pretend to have
money when you haven't, and always to knock under to authority. By way of
making up for all these deprivations, you are (if you are a genuine school hero
or heroine) allowed to make precocious love to the prettiest girl or the
handsomest boy in school. It cannot be denied that there is something of this
in Miss Alcott, though her successors and imitators have, according to the
habit of imitators, exaggerated the defects of her method and her work. Her
books are, in the main, not only interesting to girls, but wholesome, and
deserve to be handsomely reprinted, as two of them have just been, for the
benefit of the rising generation of Beths and Megs and Pollies.
H. W. Boynton, The Atlantic Monthly, April 1903.
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