Pictures and Plums, for Fingers and Thumbs - Sue Purkiss

 This is a post I wrote some years ago for The History Girls. Children's books as they used to be!

I'm indebted to a friend of mine for this month's post. She was having a clear-out, and decided that a pile of books which had belonged to her grandfather finally had to go. Most of them went to Glastonbury Rural Life Museum - but I managed to divert a few of them my way. Here's one of them.

You should just about be able to say that the inscription inside the book is dated 1905, and says: 

Rowland Edgar Weston

From his Mother

on his sixth Birthday.

The publishers are EP Dutton & Co New York, and Ernest Nister London. It's a collection of verses, short stories and nursery rhymes: a few are credited to the author, but many aren't - and I can't see any credits to the illustrator.

Of course, they are very clearly from a bygone age. But the illustrations are charming, I think. Here's a poem about curly hair.

This - below - is not the kind of story you'd find in a modern book. I think you should just about be able to read it - it's about Jessie, whose twin brother Philip catches measles, leaving her bored and with nothing to do. But Mother reproaches her, saying: "I would not cry so much, or you will melt away like the sugar princess on the cake." Suitably chastened, Jessie trots off for a walk and comes back with a huge bunch of daisies and grass, which she puts into a pink mug and takes to Philip, who is "so pleased." (Really?) And that's it. Nothing like a nice little moral message.

But this is the one I know you're all going to love. It predicts our girl's future. Just in case you can't read it, here are the last two verses:

When I'm in the twenties,

  I'll be like Sister Joe;

I'll wear the sweetest dresses

  (and maybe, have a beau!).

I'll go out in the evening,

  and wear my hair up high

And not a girl in all the town

  shall be as good as I

When I'm in the thirties,

  I'll be just like Mamma;

And, maybe, I'll be married

  to a splendid big Papa.

I'll cook, and bake, and mend,

  and mind, and grow a little fat

But Mother is so sweet and nice, 

  I'll not object to that.

Well, it's of its time. Probably Dickens would have approved. It certainly looks as if young Rowland enjoyed it: it's well-used, and he's coloured in some of the pictures and even drawn one of his own at the back, of a house with a hedge beside it with a gate. I love it!