This was one of my very favorite books growing up. I'm rereading comfort food books because I don't sleep when I read upsetting books, whee! And for your own writing it's essential to read things you love and think about what makes them so important to you.
The heroine, Margaret Thursday, is an orphan who lives with the maid who raised her, but this year the money to support her did not show up, so her beloved Hannah and the vicar can't afford to keep her and have to send her away.
That's a terrific story beginning right there. Margaret is very proud of the fact that she was left on the church steps as a baby with three of everything of the very best quality, so that even though she has the most precarious existence and no family, she has an inner pride and strength that gets her through everything.
It's fascinating to me that this is the very opposite of the Harry Potter books. Harry is abused and neglected in a cruel wealthy household. Margaret is loved and cared for in a kind poor household. And when Harry gets sent away at the same age as Margaret, he discovers not just wealth but a proud heritage. Margaret never finds out who her family is and gets sent to a horribly abusive orphanage where she and the others are starved and terrorized.
Even en route to the orphanage, though, Margaret makes friends with three other orphans traveling there too, Lavinia, Peter, and Horatio Beresford. Lavinia is going into service as a maid and asks Margaret to take care of the boys, as Horatio is little and Peter quite dreamy.
I definitely prefer this out of the frying pan, into the fire type of narrative. It's a constant race between Margaret and the forces that are making her life difficult. She's on the run the whole time.
The evil Matron immediately picks out Margaret as someone whose spirit isn't broken yet and decides to make an example of her, so she's locked in cupboards and sent to bed without supper and so on. Even their first evening there, the Matron opens the basket of clothes Hannah lovingly sewed and packed for Margaret and mocks them, causing Margaret to talk back and tell her that same story: that she was left with three of everything of the very best quality and money was left for her each year.
It's very funny to track this story throughout the novel as its retold, since Margaret changes the details and improves it each time. But that's part of what makes her such an excellent character. She insists that she has value, even while everyone is trying to stomp her into the mud.
The orphanage is outrageously awful, but she's managing, making friends and telling stories to everyone while on potato peeling punishment, until Peter "borrows" some expensive books and Margaret decides the police will be after him. She makes plans for a great escape, even dictating the note for Peter to leave for their teacher.
But she refuses to leave without the clothes Hannah made her--and she needs her original street clothes, since the orphans wear absurd uniforms. There is a harrowing sequence where Margaret has to sneak out of her bed at night and make her way to the top of the building, to the room where Matron has stored all the orphans' clothing so she can sell it. (There is really no end to how believably awful Matron is. She even eats a huge steak after overseeing the orphans' skimpy meal.) This sequence shows great bravery, but it's also terrifying, as we know, even if Margaret doesn't, that climbing out a window onto a ladder at night in a giant nightgown is incredibly dangerous. The narrator even points out how easily she could have been killed, presumably so no young readers take this escape as life advice.
I adore the entire escape, as it's full of perfectly minimal connections and specifics. For example, Margaret and the boys have met the stable boy Jem when he drove them to visit Lavinia, and Jem jokingly told Margaret how to find his room in the stable if they ever needed to run away from the orphanage. She does exactly that, though. Jem takes them to his parents, who run a canal boat, and the next stage of the adventure is on.
Each stage requires quick thinking, physical challenges, determination, and that reliance on her inner sense of self-worth. I love how every character takes on all sorts of different jobs, even the hardest, dirtiest jobs, with no sense of fastidiousness, even though they weren't raised to do them. You wouldn't find Harry Potter scrubbing floors or leading a canal boat horse through a week of rain.
Something that has always bothered me about Harry Potter is his utter laziness and lack of application, which somehow doesn't keep him from getting everything he wants. Terrible student, but passes all his classes. He's treated like a star without having done anything. That part isn't his fault, but it gives him this absurd and unconsidered privilege that is extremely distasteful to me.
That's in part what this book is about. I would much rather see Margaret Thursday opening canal locks and Lavinia doing the hard work of a scullery maid and even six year old Horatio leading the canal horse, walking miles each day. At one point Lavinia's boss, Lady Corkberry (what a great name!) tries to get Lavinia to stay with them as a guest, since they've discovered that Lavinia and the boys are the grandchildren of an earl, but Lavinia refuses and laughs and says she couldn't do that since everyone knows her as the scullery maid.
There's a running theme about this and even overt references to the works of Frances Hodgson Burnett, who wrote multiple books in which children work hard and then discover they're from wealthy and privileged backgrounds. It's so much a narrative expectation that it's a surprise when Margaret turns down the Beresford siblings' grandfather's invitation to come live with all of them in his castle in Ireland. She's found something she's great at, acting, and intends to make her own name for herself.
That's some independence and strength of character I'm not sure I'd have. Certainly Harry Potter wouldn't. He never works for anything up until the last book in the series. Maybe it's because I'm a teacher, but the way that kid never does his school work and cheats and so on drives me crazy.
In a narrative as in real life, we want to feel like people deserve what they get and get what they deserve. It seems the Harry Potter stories posit that because Harry has had a rough time of it with the Dursleys, he deserves to have things come easy after that. But narratively speaking, that doesn't work. We don't like people or want good things for them because they've had a hard time. We like them and want good things for them because they are fighting for that goal themselves, even if it's impossible for them to achieve it.
This is getting dangerously close to the nightmarish prosperity gospel nonsense, but that's not what I mean. Look at Margaret, Peter, and Horatio at the end of this book, before Lavinia and the grandfather ex machina show up, planning to have their own little house together. They don't realize how impossible it is that three children will earn enough money to survive, let alone rent or buy a little house. It's an impractical fantasy, but they're too young to understand that. They literally can't do it. But they've worked so hard on the canal boat and in the theater that we're hoping for good things for them anyway.
I'm getting very good insight into some characters I'm writing. Children who have to fend for themselves in life are put into impossible situations, so the choices they make are never going to be great ones. Say they're not properly fed. Do they steal food? Do they go to neighbors and try to eat there? Do they eat windfall apples? Do they try to cadge food from friends at school lunches? There is no good solution here because children are supposed to be fed by their family. If they aren't, that's not the child's fault, but it ends up being the child's problem to solve, with none of the resources or experience necessary to solve it. So on top of neglect and suffering, there is the weight of breaking rules and crossing lines, social or legal. Then those children carry the extra weight of guilt and consequences from crossing those lines. Children always blame themselves for what happens to them.
Except Margaret Thursday! Such a great heroine. I even like that her flair for the dramatic is what makes her get the children to run away from the orphanage, since it's unlikely the police would be called over a couple of missing books that could easily be returned.
I'm also fascinated by the downfall of the villain, the Matron, because she gets shamed by the villagers and deposed by the committee and then just sort of disappears. It's a lot like Marla in Dig. We don't see a great comeuppance for either one, not like we often see in Joan Aiken's excellent books, which feature some truly dire consequences for terrible villains, especially those who torment and neglect children.
I wrote five books in a row with terrible, abusive, neglectful parents. In the first one, the parent dies to set the child free. In the second, she gets deposed and ousted from the clinical and antiseptic family McMansion and both parent and child get set free. In the last three, a series, the parents and child get set free when the home is destroyed, but then the child works very hard and buys back the land, saving it from development, and there's an amazing rapprochement between them with ultimate understanding, at least from the child's side.
I think we're getting somewhere.
There's a sequel to this novel, but I seem to remember it's terrible. Maybe I'll read it again and see.
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