Books: Victorian Childhood

DEER CREEK (310 pp.)—Gulielma Fell Alsop—Vanguard ($3).

Gulielma Alsop* can remember when a nickel was a respectable weekly allowance for a little girl. When she went walking with her father, a Quaker who became an Episcopal minister, they were quite apt, as she now recalls it, to discuss such recondite matters as literary style and changing concepts of right & wrong. There were no Sunday papers “in that happy time which has since been called the Gay Nineties,” but in the Alsop house in Brooklyn Heights there was a set period of meditation and contemplation called Searching Out the Heart. There was also a great deal of fun, but very little nonsense, in the Victorian childhood which Author Gulielma Alsop recalls with understandable nostalgia in Deer Creek.

For most readers, home was never like this. Before the Alsop children were permitted to dress, they were required to chin themselves three times. French, German and Latin were taught at home and they had to memorize poetry in all three languages. Competence at the piano, drawing, dancing and sewing were required and so was excellence at swimming, riding and tennis. Father didn’t ask the impossible, but he expected all of his children to be in the first ten in their classes at Packer Collegiate Institute. When Gulielma was too ill to do homework, she was told to maintain her standing by memorizing what went on in class. Father did not permit his womenfolk to wear corsets, because he held that the body, as well as the mind, should remain uncramped.

For Grace. She learned to enter a room gracefully by rehearsing it hundreds of times under her grandmother’s watchful eyes, mastered the curtsy by practicing endlessly with a heavy encyclopedia balanced on her head. But these and other accomplishments were merely part of the endless process of character building. “The Lord’s part of salvation could be left to the Lord to attend to, but our share had to be worked at diligently.”

Deer Creek is by no means this year’s version of life with father. Miss Alsop writes with great charm of city life in Brooklyn and country life in Pennsylvania, of the place that the church and religion had in the life of half a century ago. Readers will find a rounded picture of a full and satisfying kind of U.S. family life that is rapidly dying out.

For Family Eyes. To link their children with a passing generation, Gulielma’s parents both wrote novels about their youth for family reading only. Their daughters have chosen to write for a larger public; Gulielma’s sister, who writes under her pen name, Mary O’Hara, is the author of the best-selling My Friend Flicka and Thunderhead. Gulielma, whose third book is Deer Creek, studied medicine, spent four years in China as a medical missionary, has been staff physician at Manhattan’s Barnard College for more than a quarter of a century.

To make Gulielma and Mary aware that the present was never static, their young minds were constantly fed new thought. Gulielma Alsop sharply remembers the evening my father looked up at me from his book.

” ‘What would you think if you had been descended from a monkey?’ . . .

” ‘A monkey, Papa? But I couldn’t be.’

” ‘From whom are you descended, Sister?

” ‘God’—that was natural and inevitable.

” ‘But suppose it was proved to you that you were descended from a monkey—what would you think about it? What would you feel?’

” ‘I’d think somebody had made a new mistake. I would feel just the same.’

“My father laughed a little. He called me over to his side. ‘I think you’d better have a try at this book. It’s called The Origin of the Species.’ ”

* No kin to Columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop.