Janie Laursen
Professor Sánchez-Eppler
Assignment 2: Genre
November 7, 2011
Genre as a Form
As a structure, the Charlieshope Library is the direct descendent of the Franklin Circulating
Library, a similar set of manuscripts made by the previous generation of Hale children between 1839
and 1842. The influence of the earlier collection on the Charlieshope Library is clearly visible; most
strikingly, both libraries’ books are miniature, yet attempt (and to varying degrees succeed) to imitate
the aesthetics of published books. The majority of the manuscripts found in the Franklin Circulating
Library are bound in the same way, with a colored paper cover and a differently colored paper spine.
It is only the later manuscripts that become more decorative, incorporating wallpaper covers. The
Charlieshope Library borrows from both these traditions in its own formatting, incorporating both
decorative wallpaper covers and spine decoration together and separately.
The variety of covers found in the Charlieshope Library, juxtaposed against the general
uniformity of the earlier library, speaks both to the superior organization of the Franklin Library and
to the diversification of contributors in the second generation. The older generations of Hales
created an elaborate bureaucratic system for their organization, which included a committee of
bookbinding. The younger generation, however, never reached such a level of standardization;
instead, the younger generation of Hales worked to encourage authors to contribute volumes to the
library, regardless of their appearance; Ellen and Arthur Hale often solicited new contributions to
the library in their family newsletter The Meteor. As a result of such efforts, the Charlieshope Library
shows a more diverse listing of authors than its predecessor. This expanded diversity and
deemphasis on uniformity is also clear in the books interior; while the older Library’s text aims to
replicate print by using generally consistent serif font, the Charlieshope Library’s text is more
casually transcribed, unevenly squeezed in to books where necessary. Again, the earlier stress on
consistency is replaced by manuscripts that serve to reflect individual authors. The most distinctive
instance of this is Ellen Hale’s inclusion of elaborate illustrations, which are unsurprising considering
her later profession as an artist.
Genre as a Plot Type: “Rebel Stories”
While the Charlieshope Library unmistakably draws on both the aesthetics and styles of the
earlier Franklin Circulating Library, the content of many of the books also shows the clear influence
of contemporary children’s magazines. For the purposes of this paper, I will focus on one particular
genre: what Ellen Hale terms in Peggy’s Stories “rebel stories,” or tales featuring children’s
involvement in the Civil War, because of the particular historical milieu these stories were written in.
As Professor Sánchez-Eppler mentions in her article on the Hale libraries, “Practicing for Print,”
that the children were writing about the Civil War around 1866 is particularly interesting because of
the lag time after the war before there was a significant amount of Civil War fiction published (202).
Yet despite the time before fiction on the war was published for adults, children’s periodicals took
on a special role in communicating information about the war to children both during the war and
after it had ended.
Though none of the books directly mention magazines, to assume the children were reading
such periodicals is not much of a stretch; Merry’s Museum, for example, was published in Boston and
widely popular, and both Ellen and Arthur’s father and their aunt Lucretia published pieces in that
magazine (Pflieger). According to James Marten, in an article on the treatment of the Civil War in
children’s periodicals, such magazines played a crucial role in children’s understanding of the war, as
they served to not only to “provide information about the war, […] but also encouraged children to
get involved in the Northern war effort by inspiring them with tales of bravery and patriotism,
showing them how they could contribute to Union victory, and explaining the causes and history of
the war in its political and moral contexts” (59).
“Milly’s Messenger,” is one such story from the May 1870 issue of Merry’s Museum, written by
Louisa May Alcott. Though a late example, it is not an atypical one. In the story, a troop of rebels
comes to Milly’s house while her father, a Union major, is away. While they make themselves at
home, Milly uses her messenger dove to send a note to her father, and her warning allows him to
both save his army stores and capture the rebel captain and his men. The story concludes with the
rebel captain’s conversion to Unionism.
In many ways, the war stories included in the Charlieshope Library reflect magazine stories’
style. Like the five page “Milly’s Messenger”, the rebel stories of the library are short even by their
own contextualized standards; most are only one of two or three stories included in a volume. In
both cases, this brevity of length encourages a distinct storytelling style: the plots are uncomplicated,
with clear conflicts which have simple solutions. In the case of the Charlieshope Library, the idea of
a “rebel story” was simplified to the point that the majority of the stories follow a very similar and
basic plot line in which a child (or a small group of children) is unexpectedly captured by rebel
soldiers, manages to escape, and then returns home, sometimes resulting in the rebels’ capture.
The way in which many of the Charlieshope Library authors invert the plot to make their
protagonists, and particularly their female characters, active figures in the story – having them
captured by rebels or purposefully seeking them out rather than having rebels invade the heroine’s
home – points to one of the main ways the children’s rebel stories diverges from the periodicals’
stories. War stories featuring girls in children’s magazines largely appeared acting “genderappropriate ways,” acting as nurses for the wounded or participating in home-front charity efforts”
(Marten 64-5). Even when girls did become directly involved in war efforts, as exemplified in
“Milly’s Messenger,” it is under relatively low risk circumstances. In contrast, not only do female
protagonists appear frequently in the children’s’ stories, they either play an active role in their own
escape once they are captured or take the initiative to join the war effort themselves.
Considering that many of the library’s contributors were girls, it is unsurprising that the
authors wrote about girls and that they gave them more agency than was necessarily common in
published literature. What is particularly interesting about this casual refutation of gendered roles in
the war is the way the children relate such instances of girls’ agency to authority. In Ellen’s “The
Escape” from The Desk Stories Volume II, a girl named Elizabeth is sent by a general to discover the
position of the rebel troops. In Mary Snow and Eleanor Williams, written by an anonymous child, Mary
and Eleanor ask their mothers for permission to go to war (“I think we could fight almost as well as
the men,” says Mary), which their mothers grant, and while at war they kill several rebels. By having
authority figures give their consent for girls’ involvement, the authors reimagine the war as inclusive
of girls and children as a whole, unlike children’s periodicals which make children’s direct
participation in the war an anomaly and girls’ active involvement nonexistent. Although this in one
sense gives the library’s rebel stories a more serious edge – the authors are not hesitant to put their
heroes and heroines in real danger – it also allows the stories to be more playfully dramatic, acting as
an expression of the author’s war fantasies rather than as social commentaries.
This concept extends further in that a main purpose of the war stories of children’s
periodicals was to emphasize moral values such as “hard work, obedience, generosity, humility, and
piety,” traits considered “absolutely necessary at times of crisis” (Marten 57). Though some of the
other manuscripts of the library are overtly moral – Peggy of Peggy’s Stories can be particularly critical
of her siblings’ temperment – yet this type of explicit moral commentary is notably absent from the
children’s war stories. The glaring exception to this rule is that both children’s magazines and the
Charlieshope rebel stories display an “earnest romanticism” of patriotism, which in their stories the
children value above all else (Marten 57). In “Milly’s Messenger,” Milly refuses with distinct cold
politeness to make friends with the rebel captain as he leaves, despite that he respected Milly’s wish
that he be quiet so as not to startle her mother. “No, I thank you, sir. I don’t like rebels,” she says, as
she “drew back with such a funny little air of dignity, that the captain laughed outright” (202). Milly
sees herself as performing an act of Union loyalty in her refusal of the captain’s friendship, and the
audience is encouraged to applaud Milly’s patriotism through the success of her plan and her
influence on the captain’s later defection to the Union side. However, by characterizing her act as
having “such a funny little air of dignity,” Alcott simultaneously undermines Milly’s own sense of
self-importance by adding a more critical distance.
In the Charlieshope Library examples, however, the patriotism displayed is in complete
solemnity, with no authorial distance. In Ellen Hale’s “An Adventure at the War” from The Desk
Stories Volume I, a girl named Elizabeth Golon is faced with the prospect of death for her Union
allegiance: “She heard them say that she was to be taken to Richmond the next day, and there killed,
and then one of the men told her that if she would be a rebel she should not be killed. But she said
‘I will not be a rebel, and I will die for my country if it is needful.’" In Ellen’s story, the threat to the
protagonist is both serious and legitimate; the soldiers Elizabeth meets openly acknowledge their
intention to kill her, specifically for her allegiance to the Union. The writing does not generate a
critical distance from Elizabeth in the way Alcott does from Milly. Like Milly’s rebels, the soldiers
laugh at Elizabeth’s convictions: “And then they laughed and jeered at her as they had done before.”
Yet whereas Alcott connects the captain’s laughter to Milly’s “funny” dignity, by using the word
“jeered,” Ellen characterizes the rebels as dishonorable and mocking in contrast to Elizabeth’s
patriotic stateliness.
While Alcott’s story serves to both entertain and instruct children in acceptable, but
harmless, ways in the moral vein of the magazine, the children (in their writing primarily for
themselves and each other) use similar plot devices while removing the limiting critical
distance. Abandoning the magazine’s emphasis on realistic roles for children, the authors of
the library’s stories use their tales to stage their fantasies about the war. Patriotism is thus
allowed to act not as a minor (though charming) character trait, but as primary virtue of their
heroines. The children authors, who clearly share their characters’ patriotism, can in play test
their loyalty by literarily enacting dangerous trials for their characters to encounter and pass,
in effect demonstrating their own devout patriotism.
Though some of the differences I’ve expounded on between the children’s “rebel
stories” and their children’s magazines counterparts are salient most particularly to this
genre, variations of these themes appear throughout the collection. For instance, children’s
autonomy, and specifically girl’s autonomy, is also highly visible in the Library’s shipwreck
stories. Similar the Civil War tales, the authors often circumvent authority’s permission for
adventure by making characters orphans or including parents who readily agree to their
children’s plans or are simply never mentioned. That issues such as children’s independence
and the challenging of gender roles exist across the genres of the collection indicates their
continual presence in the minds of the authors. Yet the authors’ efforts to explicitly deproblematize them also suggest that, though they understood their heroes and heroines
actions often challenged conventions of the proper role of children and girls, their focus was
not intended to be the challenging of perceptions but on their stories’ function as playful
imaginings.
Works Cited
Alcott, Louisa May. "Milly's Messenger." Merry's Museum May 1970: 197-202. Open Library. Web. 1
Nov. 2011.
Marten, James. "For the Good, the True, and the Beautiful: Northern Children's Magazines and the
Civil War." Civil War History 41.1 (March 1995): 57-75. America: History and Life. Web. 3 Nov.
2011.
Pflieger, Pat. "Robert Merry's Museum: Author Index." Nineteenth Century American Children and What
They Read. Web. 01 Nov. 2011.
<http://www.merrycoz.org/museum/index/AUTHOR.HTM>.
Sánchez-Eppler, Karen. "Practicing for Print: The Hale Children's Manuscript Libraries." Journal of
the History of Childhood and Youth 1.2 (2008): 188-209. Print.