The Emilie Loring Collection

My grandpa’s fourth grade reader changed my notions of what children read at the turn of the last century.

I don’t know of any fourth grade, mine included, that assigns Daniel Defoe to nine and ten year olds.

Emilie Loring and my grandfather, although a generation apart, both studied the classics as a matter of course–in grade school. The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe was one of her favorites, and I found it interesting that Defoe may have gotten the idea for it from a news clipping–a favorite source for Emilie’s story germs.

In 1704, a Scottish sailor named Alexander Selkirk quarreled with his captain and was left on the uninhabited island of San Fernandez with only his gun, ax, and a few other necessaries. He lived on this island four years before he was taken off by Captain Rogers. Selkirk’s adventures probably suggested to Defoe the famous story of “Robinson Crusoe.” [published 1719]

The Jones Readers by Grade: Book Four

This advanced level of reading gave Emilie’s father and Oliver Optic a wide range of literary possibilities when they created their magazine for children, Our Boys and Girls, only a few months after Emilie’s birth. I’m impressed with the respect that they gave their young audience.

Oliver Optic wrote more than a thousand stories for children, and I can’t think of a more popular children’s author in America for his time. Optic was a teacher, a school principal, and a father, and you get the idea that he fulfilled these roles with great good humor. In the first issue of Our Boys and Girls, he started an adventure story that unfolded week by week to keep children–and their parents–reading the new magazine.

As “The Starry Flag, or The Young Fisherman of Cape Ann” begins, Bessie Watson wheedles her father to allow her just one more swim before they leave the coast and return to the city. Bit by bit, she goes too far from shore, and her father, who swims poorly, is unable to follow. (I perked up immediately when I saw “Bessie.” I am ever on the lookout for how Emilie gained her nickname.)

Around the point appears a young fisherman, rowing his dory full of fish. Optic stops to introduce the young man, his unfortunate family and financial circumstances, his honest and forthright character, and his desire to buy a 21-foot boat called “The Starry Flag” before he returns to the narrative:

“To be continued,” the bane of impatient readers everywhere, and the tool of publishers likewise. A young man named Alfred wrote to the magazine, “I don’t know why, but you always stop in the most exciting part of the story. I don’t mean that it is not all exciting, but where you end, it is always most so.” Optic’s response was droll: “Sorry, Alfred, but suppose you stop in the middle, and wait for the next number.”

I admit to racing through the story–scroll after scroll, through all twenty-six installments–to get to the conclusion. Oliver Optic was a great storyteller, and I have never yet begun one of his stories without finishing it. I wonder how much of his technique Emilie later incorporated into her own writing.

The magazine’s table of contents included many popular authors of the time whom George knew as a publisher and Optic as a fellow author. George was thirty-four at this point, and the authors he chose were, by and large, at least a decade older, if not two–authors with established reputations to admit them readily into the homes of “our boys and girls.” [That was partially true; Fitz Hugh Ludlow’s The Hasheesh Eater and tales of his wild west travels may not have endeared him to the parlor set.]

Julia Ward Howe

I always think of Julia Ward Howe as an old woman, like this, the ancient author of the venerable “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” But in 1867, when she wrote for the magazine, her historic lyrics were just five years old, and she was forty-eight, probably more like this next photo. Her message to Our Boys and Girls readers anticipates Emilie’s assertion that “the beautiful things of life are as real as the ugly things of life.”

Sophie May (Rebecca Sophia Clarke)

If ever mischief had a friend, Sophie May was that friend. She told stories from the miscreants’ point of view so empathetically that one felt sure it wasn’t all so very bad to tell a tall tale, creep away from home without permission, and get into precisely the trouble one was warned against.

In time, Sophie May would dedicate one of her books to Emilie/Bessie, the inspiration for her “Flyaway” character. In these first issues of Our Boys and Girls, she told three stories of orphans who started life in trouble and managed, by both accident and pluck, to redeem themselves.

More Authors Long Forgotten

Our Boys and Girls is a sampler of writers once famous and now long forgotten. It’s a treat to read such variety.

Paul Cobden appeared only as “Author of ‘Madge Graves,’ ‘Bessie Lovell,’ &c., but he soon published under his own name with Lee & Shepard. His volumes reminded me that Emilie’s father designed every book put out by the firm, from colors, to paper, to fonts and artwork.

Emilie Loring readers will recognize two more OBG authors, not because of their works but because of their names: Willard Small and Stephen Kilburn. “Willy Small” is a character in Here Comes the Sun! and Jeff (not Stephen) Kilburn is in It’s a Great World!

Post-Civil-War Issues

A column called “The Orator” dealt with serious subjects, considered seriously. Scarcely twenty months had passed since the surrender at Appomatox and Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, and the Lee & Shepard men brought the issues straight to the children, written by well-known public figures: divisions between the political parties, Lincoln’s death, conditions of living for Native Americans and formerly enslaved people, immigration, suffrage, temperance, and what it meant to be a man or a woman living in the late nineteenth century.

“The Thirty-ninth Congress”

The Congress which has just passed away has written a record that will long be remembered by the poor and friendless, whom it did not forget… Its key-note of policy was protection to the down-trodden. It “quailed not before the mightiest and neglected not the obscurest. It lifted the slave, whom the nation had freed, to the full stature of Manhood; it placed on our statute-books the Civil Rights Bill as our national Magna Charta, grander than all the enactments that honor the American code, and in all the region whose civil governments had been destroyed by a vanquished rebellion, it declared, as a guaranty of defence to the weakest, that the freeman’s hand should wield the freeman’s ballot.

Understanding Optic and Baker, as I have come to, I can see both of them choosing this essay by Edwin P. Whipple:

Lighter Fare

Between stories, poems, and speeches were tucked bits of information and entertainment, much as Reader’s Digest did a hundred years later.

I’m not sure who “W.” is, but my guess is Willard Small. He read many modern languages as well as six or more archaic ones, and this was likely something he would have observed.

Emilie Loring’s Writing

Our Boys and Girls truly grew as Emilie did, and the level of her comprehension, imagination, and literary skill did, also, as her personal reading expanded to Dafoe, Dickens, Scott, and others. Joined with these were the dramatic sensibility, optimistic outlook, and sense of humor that she gained from her family’s amateur theatricals and her father’s irrepressible example.

I’ve wrestled repeatedly with how to describe Emilie Loring’s books. See “Nope, Sorry, That’s Not Romance.” and “Chick Lit? Romantic Comedy? Literature?” ”Contemporary novels, now made historical with the passage of time,” is accurate but not descriptive. What I yearn to write is a description that acknowledges the rich vocabulary and level of thought that underlay Emilie Loring’s development as a person and as a writer. I know that my own vocabulary has been broadened by her books, and I’ve never felt that they condescended or that they were pitched to any but an intelligent, mature audience.

Emilie Loring’s story-telling and her use of language were unique to her, and they began with the earliest examples set before her. Her novels, with their sparkling dialogue, their light romance, and page-turning intrigue underscore the first lines of her biography:

Books have histories. They spring from a place and a time and a pen that mark them as uniquely as fingerprints.

Happy Landings: Emilie Loring’s Life, Writing, and Wisdom

I’m still looking for that one, best description. If you have one, send it right away!

Happy Landings!