clearclassics: What Katy Did and What Katy Did At School

I must have been very young when I first read and re-read these two books. It took several re-reads for me to realise they were set in America, because the spelling was English – they were English editions. Neither book had any pictures, so we (my sisters and I) drew our own. In our illustrations in the first book, the clothes are long and obviously nineteenth-century, but in the second, Katy and her sisters all have short skirts and short hair and their father is a tall thin dude in a suit with a crudely-drawn moustache (not like Dr Carr at all, I remember arguing with the sister who did the drawings). How did we imagine that the first book was ‘olden times’, as we called it, and the second, nowadays?

I always (because of the Collier’s Junior Classics) knew about Louisa May Alcott’s life, but until I googled her recently and found her on Wikipedia, I did not know that Susan Coolidge was the pen-name of Sarah Chauncey Woolsey (1835-1905), born in Ohio, who moved later to New Haven, Connecticut. She wrote over a dozen books, but the ones I’m going to write about today were her first two, published in 1872 and 1873 respectively. When I got older I dutifully tried to read What Katy Did Next (1886),but I found grown-up Katy very boring and sedate (like grown-up Amy in Little Women). The two earlier books were fascinating though, especially the first, and they remain interesting in a social-history kind of way, but also because of the utterly believable characters. What big family doesn’t have an Elsie, neither old enough for the older ones nor young enough for the babies, who is by turns a whinger, a tell-tale, loving, loyal? She is jollied or jeered out of her sulks but everyone knows she’s all right really, if carefully handled. Katy is full of ideas and plans; she can be over-bearing, even cruel, but she always cares for the younger ones – a typical older sister. Clover is the pretty people-pleaser, beloved by adults, who takes full advantage of her charm, but who can achieve some goodness despite this. The younger children are wild and wacky in a way children used to be when they were left to themselves to develop – John (Joanna, female) with her pet chair, Pikery, and and Dorry (male) with his gentle obstinacy, and Phil, the baby and universal pet, dragged into all the games as occasional passive participant. About half-way through What Katy Did Katy falls off a swing and hurts herself and is laid up for two years and this gives rise to a lot of tedious moralizing. Samantha Ellis confesses that it was only when she went back to re-read the book as an adult that she saw how much space was taken up by Katy’s illness, which happens because of her disobedience to Aunt Izzie (their father’s sister and mother substitute – their mother is dead.) I had completely forgotten it too – what I remembered was the fun the children had, at home and at school (Katy’s game, Rivers, is particularly crazy!) and the exotic places they hung out – ice-houses, ridge-poles, lofts outside the house that you climbed into by spiked poles, rosaries. I hadn’t a clue what the first two of these were, the third sounded even better than a tree-house, and the fourth turned out to be a bower, rather than an interminable family prayer. I actually (unlike Ellis) liked the saintly Cousin Helen. Impatient exasperation was the default state of most of the female adults in our world, at home and at school, and we really really treasured those who were pleasant and took time to talk to us and praised us. Cousin Helen reminded us of an aunt we adored.

What Katy Did At School, on the other hand, is very different from the first. Because it’s mostly set at a boarding-school, there are not enough of the very funny younger children, although there is a stand-alone first chapter called ‘Conic Section’ about Elsie’s uncomfortable visit to a farm. Katy and Clover go to a school that takes four days to reach, by boat and train (they are, I now realise, crossing one of the Great Lakes and going east). It is nicknamed the ‘nunnery’, which puzzled us as children, because the Carrs are obviously Protestants and there are no nuns in it, anyway, just Mrs Florence and Mrs Nipson (married women, which was odd too) and the awful Miss Jane. There are no descriptions of classrooms or communal areas at all,and all the action of the book is set on the corridor, Quaker Row, where Katy and Clover’s shared room is. Why the corridor is called after a sect of Nonconformist Protestants is never explained. The overall impression is of a refined female prison, albeit one where the girls get to walk to a nearby bath-house once a week for a bath. There is a nearby boys’ ‘school’ of some sort (is it meant to be an Ivy League college? ) and a lot of flirting out the windows, in which Katy and Clover adamantly refuse to participate, but even as a child I noticed that an inordinate amount of space was devoted to these boys they were supposed to be not flirting with. Then Katy is Blamed In The Wrong for sending a note to a Boy, but instead of becoming bitter, she turns into the patient nurse of one of her accusers, Miss Jane. Yawn and double-yawn. My favourite part of the whole book – which I still get a thrill reading – is when they get their Christmas boxes. They have to wrap up in outdoor cloaks and scarves and blankets to open them, because the rooms are not heated, and as a child I took this for granted – our house was cold too, on Christmas morning – but now I realise that this was in a nineteenth-century snowbound New England winter. They get packets of jumbles and crullers (we didn’t know what these were but they sounded good) and sugar-almonds and sugar-plums (we could imagine), cake, knitted hoods from Elsie (which they should have put on straightaway), books in good binding, inkstands with russia leather (again, sounded good), carved pen-handles, gold chains from Papa for their watches, ribbons from Cecy next door, prunes, fruit, raisins, and candy which they share out with all the girls in the corridor whose hampers still haven’t arrived. And in the other box, there are flowers – roses, geraniums, carnations, bedded in cotton wool, which they revive in warm water and under them all, ‘sewed to the box so that they might not shake about and do mischief’ (this kind of detail is typical) two quilted silk glove-cases (glove-cases! why?) from Cousin Helen, one white and one lilac. Katy and Clover are usually gifted the same thing in different colours, from glove-cases to umbrellas to ribbons. This was a popular gifting strategy for sisters of around the same age when I was young too and we didn’t mind it at all, we were just happy to get what we could. But it’s a bit bizarre when you think about it, and people never did it with boys. When they go home for good, after a long journey on the Erie Canal, they find to their delight that they’ve been allotted a much bigger bedroom for the two of them, at home, as befits their almost-adult status. They’re still sharing, and will be, till one of them marries. This was the norm, even in upper-middle-class families, and historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg describes these close female relationships (sisters, cousins, friends) among nineteenth-century middle-class American women as way more important than marriage. This was probably true of women everywhere, of all social classes.

Why did I love What Katy Did so much? I think it was because we too had a bossy, adventurous older sister (and brother). Aunt Izzie was caring but strict, like our own mother – like everybody’s mother then, coping with large families in small spaces on limited resources. The children’s game of Kikeri which drew considerable parental wrath reminded me of a few completely out-of-control hide-and-seek and other games with rampaging families of cousins (there were 5 of us and usually about 7 of them) where one child always got upset and had to be hastily placated, or someone fell into a trough at the back of the hay-shed, or turned on the hose. Katy’s derring-do reminded me of my oldest sister and brother getting up on the roof of the house once and taking photographs – which Katy would have done, had she had a camera. None of us had an accident like Katy but we came very close, not only then but lots of other times, so we completely disregarded any ‘warning’ the book might have had. Contemporary moralists would do well to recognise that children take what they need out of books and ignore the rest.

On re-reading the second book, I noted that the date 1869 was clearly laid out for all to see, in one of the letters. How did we miss it, as children? Or did we just want to believe that it was the modern day? On the last page of What Katy Did, one of us has scrawled in pencil, ‘one of the best books I ever have had’. Under it someone else has written, in red crayon, ‘Same Here!’

Susan Coolidge, What Katy Did (1872)

___________What Katy Did At School (1873)

Samantha Ellis, How To Be A Heroine, or what I’ve learned from reading too much (London: Chatto & Windus 2014).

Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, ‘The Female World of Love and Ritual: relationships between women in nineteenth-century America.’ Signs: journal of culture and society Vol.1, No.1 (1975).