Books: Minister’s Moppet

BEING LITTLE IN CAMBRIDGE WHEN EVERYONE ELSE WAS BIG—Eleanor Hallowell Abbott—Appleton-Century ($2.50).

Contemporary reminiscences of childhood, appearing in more autobiographical novels than most readers would care to study, usually present a grim picture of the years of innocence, attach dubious value to fabled and Freudian childish joys. Last week a quaint book written in the mood of a less self-conscious age gave a lively account of a happy girlhood in one of the most repressed and inhibited environments in the U. S—the household of a Cambridge clergyman in the 1870’s. Eleanor Abbott’s grandfather was the prolific author of the Rollo books. Her father was first a Congregationalist and later an Episcopal minister. “Before I knew him he had been a Congregationalist,” writes his daughter. In the Abbott household conversations turned largely on pious and literary matters, with the three children reduced to boredom when they were not afraid of saying something wrong. Largely a record of the wrong things that Eleanor said, Being Little in Cambridge begins with a scene of consternation when Eleanor declared she could remember her birth, cheerfully described it to some ecclesiastical visitors. It proceeds lightly to a few glimpses of Cambridge neighbors, including James Russell Lowell, Long fellow, Howells, Ole Bull, who played at a fair the Abbott children gave, recounts an abundance of childish pranks and fears with great relish.

Eleanor’s father would occasionally observe that it would be nice to be struck by lightning while reading the Bible. He said he would rather bury someone than marry him. Frightened and distressed at this cheery conversation, Eleanor and her sister were even more put out when their father, desiring to warn them against sin, would remark dolefully that he would rather see them in their grave than doing any one of a great number of things— using rouge, receiving the attentions of boys, kissing, being bad generally. Finally they came to believe that their father would rather see them in their grave than doing anything. They studied books calculated to deepen their “modesty of mien and deportment.” Learning that men were apt to be turned into “wild beasts” if such modesty was departed from, Eleanor could only picture a raging beast in terms of a dog she had once seen gomad, was consequently very modest lest she send the baker’s boy into a similar convulsion.

Not entirely given over to such pleasantries, Being Little in Cambridge When Everyone Else Was Big also touches on the death of the Abbott children’s mother, their father’s second marriage and their struggles with their stepmother. Occasionally, like Clarence Day’s Life With Father, it suggests that domestic repression and tyrannies created harrowing situations scarcely compatible with the light, affectionate tone in which they are described. When a boy walked home from school with Eleanor it was classified as an “attention”and one of the things her father would rather see her in her grave than see her receive. Eleanor was so concerned she decided to run away, becomea missionary and eat cannibals.