REVIEW: Madge Hilton
Dec. 23rd, 2019 06:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllMadge Hilton: Agnes C. Maitland Blackie (inscribed 1934)
This family tale with a moral is set in the Victorian era. Indeed, the queen herself makes a cameo, but the moral lesson I couldn’t get out of my head was that maybe MPs shouldn’t go to New Zealand for months on end, taking their invalid wife for her health and leaving their 10 children to the care of others. In this case, governesses and a nurse and an uncle as a guardian, who can’t quite deal with the need for day-to-day guidance of these growing children.
It is not giving birth to 11 (ELEVEN!) children that affected Mrs Hilton’s health, but the death of one of scarlet fever, which she possibly caught herself.
As the title suggests, the story is mainly concerned with Madge, the second eldest daughter. Heedless but affectionate, a word in time from her mother about the older children’s duty to set an example for the youngest members of the schoolroom party takes root. This is contrasted with Madge’s older sister Leslie, clever, old enough to fancy herself put upon by being taught by the same governess as her young siblings, but not wise enough to guard her tongue. She lets her standards slide until she ends up behaving very meanly.
This is all against the backdrop of family life. The children sometimes split into two camps. Two brothers, younger than Leslie, attend boarding school, one brother, Fred, ought to be joining them according to age, but has been kept back tue to delicacy, much to his ire. There’s a young assistant French governess who comes to teach them in their parents’ absence, and these kids are expected to speak in French a lot of the time. Some of them become rabidly anti-French because of it.
The pacing is weird, the parents take chapters to decide whether they are going or not. The action is often halted, a la Angela Brazil, for stories told to the children, although the most tedious bit was a playscript of a play the Hiltons put on with their best friend, which never explained to me how they turned a stuffed bird into an active part of proceedings, which was the most interesting question.
Although wrongs are righted in the end, and the smaller faults left unchecked leading to worse faults in many of the children is well tracked, there were too many dull bitss. An encounter between Robin and a child who blacks shoes for a living isn’t one of them, showing up how different their problems are.
This family tale with a moral is set in the Victorian era. Indeed, the queen herself makes a cameo, but the moral lesson I couldn’t get out of my head was that maybe MPs shouldn’t go to New Zealand for months on end, taking their invalid wife for her health and leaving their 10 children to the care of others. In this case, governesses and a nurse and an uncle as a guardian, who can’t quite deal with the need for day-to-day guidance of these growing children.
It is not giving birth to 11 (ELEVEN!) children that affected Mrs Hilton’s health, but the death of one of scarlet fever, which she possibly caught herself.
As the title suggests, the story is mainly concerned with Madge, the second eldest daughter. Heedless but affectionate, a word in time from her mother about the older children’s duty to set an example for the youngest members of the schoolroom party takes root. This is contrasted with Madge’s older sister Leslie, clever, old enough to fancy herself put upon by being taught by the same governess as her young siblings, but not wise enough to guard her tongue. She lets her standards slide until she ends up behaving very meanly.
This is all against the backdrop of family life. The children sometimes split into two camps. Two brothers, younger than Leslie, attend boarding school, one brother, Fred, ought to be joining them according to age, but has been kept back tue to delicacy, much to his ire. There’s a young assistant French governess who comes to teach them in their parents’ absence, and these kids are expected to speak in French a lot of the time. Some of them become rabidly anti-French because of it.
The pacing is weird, the parents take chapters to decide whether they are going or not. The action is often halted, a la Angela Brazil, for stories told to the children, although the most tedious bit was a playscript of a play the Hiltons put on with their best friend, which never explained to me how they turned a stuffed bird into an active part of proceedings, which was the most interesting question.
Although wrongs are righted in the end, and the smaller faults left unchecked leading to worse faults in many of the children is well tracked, there were too many dull bitss. An encounter between Robin and a child who blacks shoes for a living isn’t one of them, showing up how different their problems are.
