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Gem Books from 100 Years Past: 1924

Apr23

It was indeed a different era. What was going on in 1924 when these books were being published and read? The 1924 Paris Olympics, Leopold and Loeb murders, the premiere of Rhapsody in Blue by Gershwin. Vladimir Lenin died, and Mallory and Irvine disappeared while attempting to summit Mt. Everest. Robert Frost won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and crossword puzzles were all the rage after Simon snd Schuster published their first book of crosswords.

As far children’s literature was concerned, the field of books written especially for children was just coming into its own. The Horn Book Magazine, the oldest bimonthly magazine dedicated to reviewing children’s literature, was founded in Boston in 1924. The Newbery Medal for “the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children” was only a couple of years old. The medal-winning book for 1925 (published in 1924) was Tales from Silver Lands, a book of Central and South American folktales, collected and recorded by Charles Finger. Two other 1924 books were “runners-up” for the Newbery: The Dream Coach by Anne Parish and Nicholas: A Manhattan Christmas Story by New York Public Library’s head children’s librarian, Anne Carroll Moore.

Unfortunately, all three Newbery-honored books from 1924 seem to me to be not horrible, but forgettable. The South American folktales are perhaps of interest to scholars and storytellers, but I doubt the average child would glom onto them. The other two books are more the sort of books that adults think children should like than they are the kind of story that children do enjoy.

Still, 1924 was a good year for children’s books. Here’s a list, with brief annotations, of eight real gems from 1924. Several of these are not in print, but I would love to see them come back.

To see more books from 1924, with links to reviews, check out this post from the beginning of our 1924 Project.

The Dream Coach by Anne Parrish

Jan11

A Guest Review from Terri Shown of The Dream Coach by Anne Parrish, a 1925 Newbery Honor book.

Embark on a tranquil journey through the pages of The Dream Coach, a 1924 publication that, while potentially lulling readers into a peaceful slumber, may not resonate with every audience. Despite its promise of a celestial odyssey, the collection unfolds with narratives that are predominantly lengthy, meandering, and easily forgettable.
The initial tale, “The Seven White Dreams of the King’s Daughter,” follows the unfortunate Princess Angelica on her unhappy birthday, marred by the burdensome formalities of royal life. Witnessing her distress, an angel endeavors to uplift her spirits by bestowing seven white dreams, each portraying moments of freedom – a daisy in a field, a little white cloud in the blue sky, a lamb frolicking in lilies, a butterfly in flight, a small egg in a soft nest, and a snowflake dancing.
Next, “Goran’s Dream” unfolds in Norway, where six-year-old Goran faces solitude as he cares for the animals in his grandmother’s absence. The story takes an unusual turn as Goran’s dream, a whimsical and somewhat perplexing Alice in Wonderland-type scenario, adds a layer of complexity to his winter experience.
In “A Bird Cage With Tassels of Purple and Pearls (Three Dreams of a Little Chinese Emperor),” the Dream Coach shifts its mission, aiming to impart a lesson rather than providing comfort. The young emperor, having confined a songbird, experiences a transformative dream where he understands the hardships of captivity. Filled with newfound empathy, he releases the bird, demonstrating personal growth.
Concluding with “King” Philippe’s Dream, the narrative takes us to France, where a young boy envisions his relatives transformed into natural forces during a slumber. He dreams that all his close relations turn into forces of nature like river, rain, wind, and snow. His little cousin becomes spring and the dream goes on till he awakes to find he is back with his parents.
While the tales may not be exceptional, there’s a sweetness and a touch of exoticism that might appeal to certain readers. The charming highlight of the book, however, seems to be the black-and-white illustrations, which are visually appealing and serve as a complement to the narratives.

The Dream Coach may not captivate many modern readers. Yet, for those seeking a calming bedtime experience, there may be some enjoyment within its pages.

Theras and His Town by Caroline Dale Snedeker

Jan10

This fiction book recommended for children grades 5+ begins with the author very obviously teaching her child readers about Ancient Greece and Ancient Greek culture, Athens in particular. We get short sections about how seven year old Theras of Athens goes to school, goes to the marketplace, worships Athena on the Acropolis, etc. Finally, something actually happens, and Theras is in danger. But that episode ends quickly and happily, and we are back to Theras’ daily life: Theras and his mother, Theras and his father, Theras wants to become a soldier, etc.

The book is written in three parts, and the second part is about how Theras goes to live in Sparta, obviously written to contrast life in Athens with life in Sparta. Athens is much better. Theras, and we along with him, get to experience what it’s like to be a Spartan boy. Then in part three we get a travelogue, an exciting journey but a travelogue nonetheless, through Ancient Greece with stops in Orestium, Mantinea, Corinth, the Bay of Salamis, and Eleusis before Theras and his friend Abas finally return to Athens. This third part of the book is actually the best with rather stirring adventures and mishaps and near escapes, but it still feels like a teaching book rather than a storybook.

I can see why this book is recommended in many homeschool curricula. There is a dearth of good historical fiction set in Ancient Greece. And I did enjoy learning about and being reminded of the way of life in the Greek cities of Athens and Sparta around the time of Pericles and Herodotus, who both make an appearance in the book. But to say that this book is a “living book” with excellent writing and living ideas would be a stretch. Educational, yes. Enjoyable, maybe. Life-giving, not really.

There are some ideas that parents may want to discuss with their children who are reading about Theras and Athens and Sparta and the rest. For instance, when Theras and his father visit the temple of Athena, the author tells us that the Athenians believed that Athena frequently visited and blessed her favored city of Athens and its citizens:

“All this Theras believed. But you must not think him foolish for so believing. Athena was his goddess. The wise, grown-up men in Athens believed in her, respected her, and loved her. And often they prayed to Athena so truly and thought her so good and kind that their prayers reached to the true God after all.”

I didn’t care for the pedantic style of the writing in this book, a style that I didn’t find so prominent in the other (later published) books that I have read by the same author. Theras is written for a younger audience than either The White Isle or The Forgotten Daughter, both books by Snedeker that I read and reviewed. I think Ms. Snedeker either improved in her writing skills or was just better at writing for an older audience. Theras and His Town is OK, but just not excellent or very memorable.

When We Were Very Young by A.A. Milne

Jan8

Just as I was making my way through this collection of poems by Winnie-the-Pooh creator, A.A. Milne, I saw someone fretting about reading these very poems as a part of her homeschool curriculum (Ambleside Online). She says they have been reading the poems aloud, and “Honestly I don’t get it. The kids ask me what it was about and I honestly have no clue.”

I sympathize. A lot of poetry used to make no sense to me. Then I learned to just enjoy the rhyme and the rhythm and the language and the word pictures for what they are: just fun, although sometimes serious or thoughtful, turning things round and upside down, and looking at the world from a different perspective. It doesn’t need to all make sense. The poems in When We Were Very Young look at life from a child’s point of view, a British child of the early twentieth century, and that can be disorienting. But it can also be fun.

Have you ever thought about the clouds looking up at the green sky? What about a mother who gets lost because she won’t obey her son with a ridiculously long name? What’s the one thing you think you would remember from a trip to the zoo? (“But I gave buns to elephant when I went down to the zoo!“) And what is the matter with Mary Jane? And what would you do if you were king (or queen)?

These poems aren’t meant to be got (understood). They are just intended to be enjoyed. I recommend When Were Very Young and the other Milne collection of poems, Now We Are Six, for family read aloud to all ages. A poem a day keeps the doctor away. Just read the poem out loud in your very best rhythmic and ridiculous voice. No commentary or explanation. If they ask, ask them what they think. Just read and move along. Think of them as nursery rhymes, for that is what they are, and jolly good ones, too.

When We Were Very Young was first published in 1924, and I read it as part of our 1924 project. 100 years after its first appearance, this book of silly little poems is still a living book.

Round the Year in Pudding Lane by Sarah Addington

Jan6

A Guest Review from Jeannette Tulis of Green Door Children’s Heritage Library in Soddy Daisy, TN. Round the Year in Pudding Lane by Sarah Addington

This book was so clever, it made me laugh out loud. It’s an especially good book to read aloud if your children know a lot of nursery rhymes because there are so many references to classic Mother Goose rhymes, and they are worked into the story in such a charming fashion.

This is a story of one year in Pudding Lane where Santa Claus, a young boy, lives with his family: Mr. and Mrs. Claus, and the twins, plus a new baby. On Pudding Lane are also the Woman who lived in a Shoe with all her children, Old Mother Hubbard, The Candlestick Maker and, well, you get the idea.

Round the Year in Pudding Lane is a book full of kindness and generosity. Each chapter deals with a different holiday or season of the year. I especially enjoyed the last chapter of Christmas surprises. This book was published 100 years ago (1924), and I read the e-book free on Internet Archive. I had recently read another book by this author, The Boy Who Lived in Pudding Lane, which was about the boyhood of Santa Claus and how he grew up to be the famous personage of Christmas. It is available as a reprint. 

Red Caps and Lilies by Katharine Adams

Dec29

Another book first published in 1924, Red Caps and Lilies is historical fiction set during the first days of the French Revolution. An aristocrat family attempts to come to terms with the rapid descent into chaos and revolution that begins in Paris, 1789. Soon it is obvious that thirteen year old Marie Josephine, her older brother Lisle, and their beloved maman, along with servants and relatives and friends and other various and sundry folk, must flee Paris and even France to ensure their own safety. But who will help them? Whom can they trust? And will they be betrayed by their own pride and disbelief that their lives could possibly be in danger in the first place?

I could quibble with this historical novel from another generation. The plot is a little creaky at times, with lots of unexpected meetings and paths crossing at just the right time. The events of the family’s escape are told and then retold and retold again as the family gathers and each one recounts his adventures to the others. Some character growth is evident in Lisle, the proud aristocratic teen, who is humbled by his experiences, and in Grigge, the peasant who has good reason to hate the aristocratic family but finds reason to help them anyway, All in all, though it’s a harmless little story with a fairly happy ending.

I guess I’ve become accustomed, for better or for worse, to something a little more ambiguous and and a little more unpredictable. I knew from the beginning, or at least near the beginning, that the family would escape and that all would turn out well. There was just no real suspense in the story, even though I think the author tried to create some. Still, if you want a historical novel that give a young adult reader some introduction to the time of the French Revolution with good and noble characters and a few daring escapes, you could do worse than reading about these French “lilies” cast out to fend for themselves among the “red caps” of the mobs of Paris.

You can read this “oldie but goodie” on Internet Archive if your library doesn’t give you access to a copy.

The Boy Whaleman by George Fox Tucker

Nov8

In searching for children’s books published 100 years ago in 1924, I found a set of three books called The Three Owls, edited by New York Public Library children’s librarian Anne Carroll Moore. In these three volumes Ms. Moore collected various thoughts, essays, and booklists, written by herself and others, related to the children’s literature of her day. In the first volume of The Three Owls, a children’s author named Henry Beston (later to become husband to children’s author Elizabeth Coatsworth) reviews The Boy Whaleman, saying, “Of all the accounts of whaling voyages I have read for some time, quite the best is this boy’s book by George F. Tucker. It is the record of a youngster’s one cruise in an old-time whaler, which was rather a decent ship as whalers go.”

Mr. Beston and I are in agreement, not that I have read that many accounts of whaling voyages to compare. The book is more of a travelog than a story, although travel is not quite the word for the experience of a sailor who took ship on a whaler. More appropriate terms come to mind: hard work, danger, adventure, or “stink, grease, and backache” as the description of a whaleman’s work went at the time. The book takes place in the early 1860’s as the boy Homer Bleechly, age fifteen, takes ship from New Bedford, Massachusetts on the whaler, Seabird. He will be eighteen and a man by the time he returns to his home in New Bedford.

“My father, when a young man, went whaling for a single voyage which lasted for more than three years. He was a sailor, or, to use the regular phrase, a foremast hand, and at the end of two years, he became a boat-steerer or a harpooner. When I was a little boy he used to take me on his knee and tell me stories about the life of the whalemen, –of chasing whales and harpooning them, of angry whales smashing boats and chewing them to bits; of towing whales to the ship and cutting them in and trying them out; of losing the ship and remaining all might in the open boats; of encountering great storms and riding them out in safety; of meeting after many months another New Bedford vessel, and getting the latest news from home; and of visiting in the Pacific Ocean islands inhabited by savages.”

All these stories from Homer’s father are a foreshadowing of almost exactly what happens to Homer Bleechly on the Seabird, and Homer narrates his voyage with gusto and with much intelligent detail about the life of a whaleman. Some parents may cringe at the gory descriptions of slippery blood and guts covering the ship’s deck, of plunging a harpoon into the whale’s eye, or of scooping the spermaceti out of the whale’s head cavity. But a young person who is hungry for adventure can take these things in stride just as Homer apparently did. There are also mentions of the South Sea islanders as savages and uncivilized and of cannibalism both in the islands and in sailor stories that Homer and the others tell each other, but these things are not dwelt upon.

The work and culture of a whaling ship are the main focus of the book, and the story is somewhat slight in comparison to the details about the sea, the lore of whales, seamanship, financial matters in regard to whaling, and Homer’s shipmates in forecastle. It’s something of a coming of age story, but again the emphasis is not on Homer himself but rather on the Seabird and its job and the events of the voyage.

Reading this book made me want to read more about so many things: Tahiti, whales, Commodore Perry, whaling and seagoing, Captain Cook and his voyages, the Essex, the Bounty mutiny, Pitcairn Island, whale ships, missionaries to Polynesia and Micronesia, Magellan, the opening of Japan to Western influence, ambergris, and much more. I have a whole list of books to read next, but, alas, not enough time to read them all in addition to my many other reading projects.

The Pearl Lagoon by Charles Nordhoff

Nov2

What are boys (and girls) reading in the way of adventure stories these days? Most of the the realistic fiction I read these days for middle grade readers is “problem fiction”: mom is sinking into depression and the child must cope with the fallout, or the main character is autistic or has a learning disability, or the bad developers are going to turn the local park into a parking lot. Nothing wrong with that, but where’s the adventure? Many young readers are into fantasy fiction, which does have the adventure element, but it’s not usually an adventure that the reader can imagine participating in himself.

Well, the novels of yesteryear for young people were full of adventure. Sure some of the adventures required a suspension of disbelief, as does this 1924 novel, The Pearl Lagoon. Nevertheless, excitement and danger used to be abundant in fiction written for young people. In The Pearl Lagoon, Charlie Selden, the protagonist and narrator, is an all-American boy of sixteen, living on a California ranch, isolated and starved for adventure, when his Uncle Harry, “a buyer of copra and pearl-shell in the South Seas,” comes along with an offer that can’t be refused. Uncle Harry wants to take Charlie back to the island of Iriatai in the South Pacific, to help him hunt for pearls in Iriatai Lagoon.

Needless to say, Charlie jumps at the chance to go with Uncle Harry, and the adventure begins. The book includes fishing trips with Charlie’s new Tahitian friend, Marama, a boar hunt, a near-deadly shark attack, some rather perilous pearl diving, exploration of a hidden cave, and a climactic encounter with pirates who intend to steal all of the pearls the divers have found. Charlie grows older and wiser over the course of a life changing and thrilling experience.

The South Sea islander characters in the story are portrayed as “noble savages.” If the musical South Pacific and other stories of that nature are offensively “colonizing” to you, then Nordhoff’s 1924 vintage portrayal of the islands and their culture and people will be, too. Charlie says of his friend Marama,

“My friend could read and write, but otherwise he had no education in our sense of the word. He knew nothing of history, algebra, or geometry, but his mind was a storehouse of complex fishing-lore, picked up unconsciously since babyhood and enabling him to provide himself and his family with food. And when you come to think of it, that is one of the purposes of all education.”

The people of Tahiti and Iriatai are described variously as natives, savages, brown, formerly heathen, and superstitious. But they are also admired for their skill, courage, honesty, and loyalty. Charlie’s uncle, like the author Nordhoff, has come to think of Tahiti as his home, “the most beautiful thing in all the world.” You can read the book and decide for yourself whether Nordhoff shows love and respect for the Tahitian and other South Sea island peoples or not. I believe he does, and I recommend the book as a stirring romantic adventure, in the best sense of the word romance. (Romance, according to Sir Walter Scott, the great romantic novelist: “a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents.”)

The Pearl Lagoon is marvelous, and uncommon, indeed.

Billy Mink by Thornton Burgess

Oct26

Do you think children are traumatized by reading about animals who hunt and kill and eat other animals?If the book is straight nonfiction or even narrative story about a particular animal, I think most children will take the encounters between predator and prey rather matter of factly, as long as the descriptions aren’t too gruesome and bloody. Everybody has to eat, and it’s just true that larger animals often eat smaller ones.

However, in this first book of animal stories that I’ve ever read by Thornton Burgess, the animals behave like animals, but they are also anthropomorphized to some extent. Billy Mink hunts and is hunted by other predators, but he also wears clothing in the illustrations. He lives and acts like a mink, but he also thinks like a person. And he is given a human-like personality with feelings of delight and anger and frustration and satisfaction. Billy is an engaging little fellow, and the reader can’t help rooting for him to escape from the traps that are set for him by a hunter or from Hooty Owl who swoops down and surprises hime, almost catching him.

But the problem with this story, and perhaps Burgess’s books in general if they’re all similar to this one, is that both predator and prey are given names and personalities like Jumper Rabbit and Reddy Fox and Billy Mink. So as I read I wanted Billy Mink to escape his predators, and I wanted him to be able to eat and not starve to death, but I didn’t want him to actually eat Jumper Rabbit. (Spoiler: Jumper escapes, but several of the Robber Rats do not.) I suppose it’s okay for Billy Mink to eat a couple of rats. Nobody really loves rats, do they? But the whole hunter and hunted part of the story could be disturbing for some children.

All that said, Billy Mink is a well told little story. I can picture reading it aloud to a class of kindergartners or first graders. Burgess uses fairly simple sentence structure but somewhat challenging vocabulary to tell an engaging story. I wasn’t bored even though it’s a story for younger children, and I can see this series becoming one that a certain kind of child would fall in love with.

Billy Mink was published 100 years ago in 1924. It’s a good book, but not the kind of book I can imagine being published or popularized in the twenty first century. If you want to read something by Burgess with your children, I’d suggest starting with Mother West Wind’s Children or The Burgess Bird Book for Children, unless you’re particularly interested in minks.

The Rest of the Story: Eric Liddell

Sep4

The late Paul Harvey had a feature on the radio called “The Rest of the Story” in which he would tell familiar stories of well-known people and events or commonplace tales of ordinary people–and then tell “the rest of the story”, the part that not many people know or the part that gives the true story an ironic twist. I’ve been reading a lot of unusual stories myself lately, and I decided to share a few of them with you here at Semicolon.

Olympic gold medalist Eric Liddell is featured in the movie Chariots of Fire. If you’ve never seen the movie, I highly recommend it.

In the movie and real life, Eric Liddell refused to run in a qualifying heat scheduled on Sunday because he believed in keeping the Sabbath holy. He had to withdraw from the 100 meter race, his best event. Liddell began to train for the 400 meter race instead, and he ran the race in the Olympics and won. Eric Liddell broke the existing Olympic and world records in the 400 meter race with a time of 47.6 seconds. After the Olympics and his graduation from Edinburgh University, Liddell continued to run in track and field events, but he always refused to compete on Sunday, citing his desire to please God above all else.

In 1925, Eric Liddell returned to China where he had been born and where his parents were missionaries. He served as a missionary there until 1941 when he was captured and interned by the Japanese who were invading China during World War II. It was there in the internment camp that “the rest of the story” of Eric Liddell’s allegiance to God’s principles above all else took place.