… my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.-Wordsworth

Just saw a PBS series called Manor House. A group of 12 men, women, and children gathered together in one of the grand old English country houses to live as authentically as possible exactly as they would have lived if the year were between 1904-1914. A man, his wife, her sister, two children were the ‘above stairs’ cast. The rest of the people were servants: a tutor, a lady’s maid, butler, housekeeper, footmen, and maids.

It turned out to be more of a reality show than a social experiment. Lots of conflict between the cast, some of it with a suspiciously manufactured feel to it. But after three months of these people playing these roles, it was fascinating to see how these people started to grow into the traditional mindset that they would have had if they actually were the master of the house, the scullery maid, etc.

The people I felt sorriest for at the beginning of the show were the lowest of the low. The scullery maid, for example, worked 18 hour days and had to get up before everyone else so she could start the cooking stove fire and make tea for the next servants, who themselves got up to start the fires for the rest of the house. The first two women who were given the role of scullery maid quit within their first week on the job.

By the end of the show, on the other hand, the people I felt the sorriest for were the master and mistress of the house. They’d spent three months living as the elite in the Edwardian age, and their whole existence had been a dream of beauty and gilded ease. The man and woman playing these roles were a successful business man and his wife, an emergency room doctor. Not, at a guess, people who’d led sheltered lives. Throughout the show they acted like the stereotype of the stiff-upper-lip English, who do not believe in showing emotion. Yet both of them became choked up and teary eyed upon leaving the house.

It was fascinating how much the servants knew about their masters, and how little the upstairs group knew about the servants. This influenced the servants’ attitude toward the people they served. They knew full well that the people upstairs had no idea how they lived. The master of the house didn’t even know where the kitchens were until the end of the show–and that strongly influenced the servants’ attitudes. They were polite enough, but there was very little respect for the upstairs people.

Considering how thoroughly these people became immersed in their roles, I’d say it’s a safe guess that this was a good representation of how servants felt through the ages toward the people they served.

Tangential note: I know Shakespeare used the phrase To the manner born, but more recent authors, such as in the 19th century, used the phrase To the manor born. There are arguments on word geek blogs as to which is correct or whether both versions are correct for different meanings. I like the way the Word Detective explains the two phrases.

Have you seen The Man Who Invented Christmas?

I haven’t seen the movie, but I love the trailer. If a character comes alive in your mind, you can’t make them do what you want. They choose their own path.

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” – Albert Einstein

“The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons. But children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed.” -G.K. Chesterton

Once upon a time, I went to grad school. One of the seminars was on Children’s Literature. It turned out to be the site of the fiercest arguments and the most passionate advocates of any class I ever attended.

Most of my fellow students were teachers in schools where the majority of the student body had parents who were themselves not literate, or who didn’t speak English as their first language, or who were so preoccupied with trying to keep a roof over their head that they didn’t have time to sit down and read to their children.

These teachers formed a cadre, united by their passionate belief that it was absolutely wrong to try to teach children fairy tales, or any kind of fantasy at all. In their opinion, literature’s sole function was to serve as a mirror. It reflected back to the reader exactly the reality that the reader saw all around them. Their fear was that children would not become interested in reading if they read about worlds different from their own.

I was in the other camp. To me, literature should be a window, not a mirror. It lets you look out onto landscapes you would never see otherwise. Sometimes when you look out of a window, you catch sight of your own reflection there. It never looks quite the same as the you in the mirror though. This is like looking at yourself from the outside and seeing a new side of you.

Terry Pratchett wrote an essay about the importance of fantasy for children:

… let’s not get frightened when children read fantasy. It is the compost for a healthy mind. It stimulates the inquisitive nodes. It may not appear as ‘relevant’ as books set more firmly in the child’s environment, or whatever hell the writer believes to be the child’s environment, but there is some evidence that a rich internal fantasy life is as good and necessary for a child as healthy soil is for a plant, for much the same reasons.

The cadre were right about one thing: not everyone is going to enjoy reading fantasy or science fiction or anything that does not reflect the immediate world around them. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be introduced to these stories. For some students, the experience is like opening the door on a whole new world and stepping into your kingdom. You don’t know which group a child is going to fall into until you let them discover for themselves what they like.

Let the children explore. Let them read fairy stories. They might become ferry tales, carrying them into a different world to help them understand their own.