Storytime for rabbits?
by Anne White
In her early
book Parents and Children, Charlotte Mason takes a side path from talk about nature study and object lessons, to point out the existence of “a
storehouse of thought wherein we may find all the great ideas that have moved
the world,” and says that to access that storehouse, “We read [a child]
his Tanglewood Tales, and when he is a little older his Plutarch,
not trying to break up or water down, but leaving the child's mind to deal with
the matter as it can” (pp. 231-232).
From that
brief statement, we can draw a couple of important points. First, I think we
can take it that Mason was not singling out Tanglewood Tales from its predecessor, A
Wonder Book. We might wonder
if perhaps Mason preferred the second book, without its framing stories about
the children of Tanglewood; but as she didn’t seem to object to such devices in
other books, it seems more likely that she was just reaching for a familiar title.
That confusion is eliminated, though, when we discover that the book Mason was
probably thinking of was the Blackwood edition (described below), which
combines stories from both books under the title Tanglewood Tales.
So, we might
assume that, with that much weight given to Hawthorne’s book, that it would
have played an important and long-lasting part in the later PNEU curriculum.
Strangely enough, it didn’t. In the Programme for Term 43, Form IB ( in the era when Mason wrote School Education), we do have this under the subject heading of
Tales: “Tanglewood Tales by
Nathaniel Hawthorne (Blackwood, 1/-), pages 1-40.” (Two stories, “The Gorgon’s
Head” and “The Golden Touch.”) As a point of interest, this particular British edition
contains three stories from the first book
and three from the second, with a publisher’s note explaining that the framing
stories have been omitted because they were “full of allusions to American
scenery and American customs.”
But by the time of the more readily
available PNEU Programmes, around 1921, Hawthorne had been supplanted by Andrew
Lang’s Tales of
Troy and Greece or (as a second option) Lamb’s Adventures of Ulysses. As Lamb’s book was published decades before Hawthorne’s, this is clearly not just a case of wanting to use a newer book. Troy and Greece might have
been chosen because it covers a wider variety of material than Hawthorne’s
stories, so it would have been easier to keep on plugging it in from term to
term. However, there may be one extra reason that Mason recommends Tanglewood Tales so ardently early on, but then does not keep it in the curriculum, and that is simply that she may not have cared that much about which good storyteller was read, be it Hawthorne, Kingsley, Lamb, or Lang. The real point was
to open the storehouse, to offer a child’s mind that vital matter, not broken
into “little bits of everything” (p. 231), but leaving him/her “receptive and
respectful,” wanting to engage with the story, as humans have done through the
centuries. She speaks of concrete things a child observes in the outside world
which offer “real seed to [his] mind,” and compares them to the world of ideas,
given through books, which (to change similes) must be offered in as large and meaty a portion as
possible, not pre-cut or pureed.
And how does that line up with
Hawthorne’s choice, for example, to cast Pandora and Epimetheus as children
rather than adults? Are we contradicting ourselves by offering a “chicken-nuggets”
version of an adult tale? Eustace Bright, the fictional narrator of the
stories, is criticized for this by the older scholar Mr. Pringle, so perhaps we
should let Eustace defend himself:
"I described
the giant as he appeared to me," replied the student, rather piqued.
"And, sir, if you would only bring your mind into such a relation with
these fables as is necessary in order to remodel them, you would see at once
that an old Greek had no more exclusive right to them than a modern Yankee has.
They are the common property of the world, and of all time."
And this is exactly Mason’s point about the “keys to the storehouse.”
These stories, even “remodeled” to allow young children access, are accepted by
them as the real goods, the OG of tales, if you like. They contain themes that
we begin to recognize in childhood (getting your wish can go terribly wrong; curiosity
blew up the box; a simple life of love and hospitality brings its own rewards);
and others that can make us tearful long afterwards.
All their eyes were
dancing in their heads, except those of Primrose. In her eyes there were
positively tears; for she was conscious of something in the legend which the
rest of them were not yet old enough to feel. Child’s story as it was,
the student had contrived to breathe through it the ardor, the generous hope,
and the imaginative enterprise of youth. (Epilogue to "The Chimera")
