SOURCE: Fisher, Margery. Introduction to Memoirs of a London Doll, Written by Herself, Edited by Mrs. Fairstar, by Richard Henry Horne, pp. vii-xxx. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1967.

[In the following essay, Fisher provides a sketch of Horne, and examines his children's tales “King Penguin,” The Good-Natured Bear, and Memoirs of a London Doll.]

Writing to his friend Elizabeth Barrett in the 1840's, Richard Henry Horne mentioned “a sort of Christmas book for children, called The London Doll”, which he had written not long before. It was not publicly acknowledged as his, though, until many years later. Horne loved mystification and indulged in pseudonyms even more than his contemporaries did. When he contributed an article on “The True and Froggy Art of Swimming” to Fraser's Magazine he called himself Sir Julius Cutwater: a satirical biography of Van Ambergh the lion-tamer purported to be by a New York hardware dealer called Ephraim Watts: elsewhere he might be Lucius O'Trigger or Salim ben Uzair or Pycle, as the occasion demanded. Memoirs of a London Doll is “written by herself” and “edited by Mrs Fairstar”—perhaps with special point, for this most charming of Victorian nursery tales uses a name sometimes given to little nursery lapdogs.

In middle life Horne went further in borrowing from an acquaintance the name Hengist, to replace his own more ordinary middle name. Richard Hengist Horne (for so he is more generally known) was a Protean character in more than his names. A life of alternate excitement in action and intense reflection: a considerable body of works, no two of which are really alike: an appearance bizarre and yet inspiring confidence—he stands out even in such an age of unself-conscious individualists.

Richard Horne was born in Edmonton in 1802 and died at Margate in 1884. As a boy, at Cowden Clarke's school at Enfield, he threw a snowball at Keats: Edmund Gosse recalls seeing him, as an old man, bending a poker by striking it on his braced arm. He moved through this long life in a way which could not be ignored. His contemporaries admired him but thought him vain. He seemed one of those people who must always present themselves. It was always the unusual niches he filled, the out of the way subjects he wrote about. From comments about him in letters it seems that his friends were sometimes puzzled by his constantly changing literary plans. He reacted quickly and positively to the outside world and was always very assured in putting his impressions into literary forms, always ready to experiment with them. Perhaps too ready—for he passed so rapidly from one kind of writing to another that he never reached the first rank in any of them. There is another side to this. Horne had to earn his living, and some of his writing (whether in criticism, journalism, drama or poetry) was done, not wholly but initially, because it would bring him money quickly.

He did not at first intend to be a writer. As the son of an army man he was sent from school to Sandhurst when he was sixteen. He did not complete the four-year course, and after a period probably spent in London he joined the Mexican Navy, serving as a midshipman on the Libertad under an English captain. After some time on the fringes of naval warfare, he made his way through North America and Canada, returning to England in about 1828. These years of travel, whatever they had given him in experience, hardly counted as a useful apprenticeship. He had learned to play the guitar and his repertoire of Spanish songs became familiar at social gatherings to the end of his life, but to make a living he must look elsewhere. He had been writing intermittently for some years, and it must have been easy for him to exchange adventure in action for adventurousness in print.

Something of his Mexican days was carried over—the guitar and the songs, but also the almost gaucho appearance due to his cape and his particular choice of face-covering. Macready's comment on his “horrid moustaches” and Harriet Martineau's on his “somewhat coxcombical curling whiskers” are filled out by Elizabeth Barrett's more detailed description of a miniature of him, in a letter to Miss Mitford:

Imagine a high-browed and broad-browed head, absolutely bald, appearing to the fancy as if all the glistening auburn ringlets belonging to it, had fallen down to the base of the head and expended themselves in whiskers and moustachios! The features are very handsome—the nose delicate and aquiline, the eyes a clear blue, serene and elevated—the mouth strikingly expressive of resolution—the complexion quite colorless, almost to ghastliness—with a Rembrandt light full on it … Somebody cried out ‘It's like an assassin’,—and somebody else ‘It's like a saint,’ A very fine head certainly!—with a fifth Act in the very look of it! But I deprecate the moustache, and half believe and hope that it has been cut away since the picture was painted.

(December 6, 1842. Quoted in Elizabeth Barrett to Miss Mitford, ed. Betty Miller, 1954, p. 151.)

Miss Barrett's hope was not fulfilled. Turner met Horne when he was an old man and was disillusioned “to see in the famous poet, a little thick-set man with a white wrinkled face, a bald head, with straggling locks of curly hair hanging over his coat collar behind, and a carefully curled long drooping moustache in front”.

The literary world of the 1830's might have been made for just such a versatile man as Horne. Family magazines and literary journals were multifarious, and packed with tiny print in double columns. They had two watchwords—variety and topicality. There were favourite subjects (amelioration of the life of the poor, the new colonies in Australia and New Zealand), but a place for articles on almost anything. Horne's flexible prose was formed in pieces for the Monthly Repository (which he edited between June 1836 and July 1837), in the Monthly Chronicle under Leigh Hunt, in the Monthly Magazine, the New Quarterly, the Church of England Quarterly, Fraser's, Howitt's Journal, and for Dickens in the Daily News and Household Words. The ease with which he chooses a style and sustains it in Memoirs of a London Doll is the ease of a thoroughly professional writer.

Horne wanted to be a great deal more than a journalist. But ephemeral pieces might well suit present day taste better than the works he set most store by. Apart from his articles, some of his longer published works are occasional pieces. They show his knack of choosing odd, unexpected literary forms which turn out to be perfectly appropriate for what he wanted to say. The title of one of his early books is provocative—Exposition of the False Medium and Barriers Excluding Men of Genius from the Public. His arguments could as well have been presented quite straight in a magazine article. Instead, Horne wrote a whole book so bursting with facts and ideas that at first reading it seems incoherent. But he has chosen the right form for attacking the stupidity and prejudice of reviewers and theatre managers and for the deeper plea that great creative talent must be free to break with orthodox forms and platforms. He works out his ideas with some historical progression (incidentally, the book is a valuable index to the taste of his time) and there are touches of the freakish hilarity that is unlike the humour of any other writer. This hilarity is still more noticeable in Spirit of Peers and People, which he called a National Tragi-Comedy. This dramatic burlesque crusades for the man in the street who has no say in a government dominated by crown, nobility and church. Like so much of Horne's work it is far ahead of its time, and there is plenty to interest readers today besides the (to us) astonishingly disrespectful portrait of William IV and his court.

Horne's serious reputation rested on poetic drama. He was foremost among the writers who tried to bring back the glories of the English stage, and his tragedies—The Death of Marlowe, Gregory VII and Judas Iscariot—are (the first especially) notable in the Jacobean manner. A reputation of a rather different kind came with the publication of A New Spirit of the Age in 1844. In this collection of critical essays on his contemporaries he was helped (anonymously) by Elizabeth Barrett, who had already worked with him by correspondence on modernisations of Chaucer; but Horne bore the attacks from those who were dissatisfied with his judgment, and the book was in many quarters severely mauled. The essays (entirely by Horne) on Browning and Dickens especially give a valuable idea of their standing at this particular date.

At his death, though, Horne was probably best known for a work that gave him yet another name—“Orion Horne”. Orion, an epic poem in the same genre as Hyperion, was published in 1843 by the Oxford Street bookseller, Miller. He was instructed that the poem was not to be sold to anyone who pronounced its title with a short “i” and that nobody could have more than one copy. Orion was priced at a farthing—and no change was to be given. These conditions were variously interpreted. Some (like Elizabeth Barrett) thought they reflected Horne's poor opinion of the reading public, others that it was all done for advertisement. Horne himself said years later that he was trying to make a price at which unlikely people could read the poem. At all events, the whole affair was typical of him.

It was this man, with his lofty view of man's potentiality, his strong individual imagery and bold ideas, this man regarded as a writer of weight and power, who sat down to write the memoirs of a doll, in a style exquisitely suitable, without condescension or bathos, and in a spirit of evident enjoyment. Why?

In these early years of Victoria's reign it would be true to say that, in the literary world, everybody knew everybody. The interlinked circles of Horne's acquaintance show this very well. Among scientists, Dr Southwood Smith stood out, the reformer of London's sanitation; among radicals, the Unitarian, W. J. Fox; in theatrical circles, Macready and Serjeant Talfourd. Horne discussed his poetry with Browning (and with Elizabeth Barrett on paper, for she had no visitors). He visited Miss Mitford in Berkshire (though she disapproved of his manners). He belonged to a group of disappointed authors and philosophers calling themselves the Syncretics, and to a more convivial group of men and women, brought together by Douglas Jerrold under the formidable title of The Whittington Club and Metropolitan Athenaeum. He acted in some of the amateur theatricals which amused Dickens, Mark Lemon and others of the Punch group. His acquaintance with writers was extended when he worked on the staff of the Daily News and Household Words.

He belonged by right of friendship and kindred ideas to a more domestic circle as well. During the 1840's two houses saw a considerable output of good writing for children. In Clapton, first at The Grange and then at The Elms, the Quaker Mary Howitt was producing tales for children and young people, stories mainly of country scenes and people, full of sweetness and good sense. At this time, too, she and her husband, William, were involved with the People's Journal, a magazine for the pleasure and education of the uneducated, which William Howitt took over from its proprietor wholly in 1847 after financial disputes. The last of Horne's stories for children, “King Penguin,” was serialised in Howitt's Journal of Literature and Popular Progress in 1848.

In the Howitt household Horne met and talked with Eliza Cook (herself editor of a magazine for “the lower classes”) and with Caroline Hill, Southwood Smith's daughter, who held progressive views on education. In this liberal middle-class household Horne found, or confirmed, his ideas about children and the kind of books they should read. He was at this time a bachelor and his marriage in 1847 to Catherine Foggo did not really change his habit of life very much. They had no children, and he seems to have found family life only through his friends. The youngest Howitt children, Charlton and Margaret, were nine and seven when the London Doll was published, and their playmate, Octavia Hill, Caroline's daughter, was ten. There was plenty of material to build theories on, but plenty of fun as well. Letters surviving from Mary Howitt to Eliza Meteyard (another author of stories for the young) refer to a children's party with a magic lantern to which she had invited Horne, among others, “to give dignity to the party”—but Horne also sent along before-hand his guitar and a bag of “properties”. Parts of his doll story suggest a friendly knowledge of actual children (for instance, the description of Ellen Plummy taking her medicine, and of a visit to the Zoo); and there surely must be private allusions and jokes in the story.

One of Mary Howitt's letters invites Miss Meteyard to spend a day and a night at Clapton “as our friend Mary Gillies will be here and I want you to know and love her.” The two Miss Gillies lived at this time in Highgate and a little later in Hampstead. Margaret Gillies was well-known as a water-colourist and also as an illustrator of children's books. The earliest illustrations for the London Doll were her work, and though to modern eyes her drawings seem a little stodgy, they show that she knew the story well and liked it. Her sister, Mary, worked in collaboration with Horne during the 1840's, first on his History of Napoleon (1841) and then along different lines.

Mary Gillies herself may have been the initiator of the series of stories for young children which she and Horne wrote for the publisher, Joseph Cundall, and which he produced in delectable little volumes, often for the Christmas market. One reviewer said:

The mere sight of the little books … is as good as a nosegay. Their actual covers are as brilliant as a bed of tulips, and blaze with emerald, and orange, and cobalt, and gold, and crimson …

(Fraser's Magazine for Town and Country, vol. 33 Jan-June 1846, p. 497)

These publications were known as the “Myrtle” books and the “author” (at this time certainly a composite one) was “Mrs Harriet Myrtle.” A very fair description of the Myrtle books may be found in the London Doll. Little Emmy at the pastrycook's read aloud to her sister, and the doll eagerly listened to “pretty stories of little boys and girls, and affectionate mammas and aunts, and kind old nurses, and birds in the fields and woods, and flowers in the gardens and hedges”. Horne takes writer's licence to advertise his wares by name. After mentioning Mary Howitt's Birds and Flowers and Mrs Marcet's stories of Willie, he goes on to speak of “the delightful little books of Mrs Harriet Myrtle,—in which I did so like to hear about old Mr Dove, the village carpenter, and little Mary, and the account of May Day, and the Day in the Woods,—and besides other books, there was oh! such a story-book called The Good-natured Bear!” The last-named story was Horne's own and there is some evidence that the May Day story was also his. It has an abundance of concrete detail of a kind less evident in some other stories in the series. Another story known to be Horne's, “The Man of Snow,” was too long for the publisher's scheme and he asked Horne to shorten it. But though Horne tried to comply, he found the details he had used essential to the story. “Children do like and delight in circumstantial details,” he wrote to Cundall; “they have not knowledge enough, and experience, to fill up the blanks of concise writing. In three pages and a half, or four pages, there is scarcely time to get up any interest—and no sooner is it got up than it ends. This will never do”.¹ In another Myrtle story, “The New Kite,” he begs indulgence for something quite new in children's books “of the amusing kind”—diagrams: but the publisher must “be sure to direct that all the diagrams are made correct according to the measurements stated—for we may be certain that the children will set to work to measure them, to see if they are right.” His painstaking attitude to detail is conspicuous in the London Doll. He was not able to see the Lord Mayor's Show of 1845, which he used in the story, and after he had sent Cundall the manuscript he followed it with a revision which he insisted was necessary. “I had my doubts and sent two friends with Notebooks to see the last Show. The revision is from their notes. I wish to see the revise, if you please.” The neat realism in the story helps to stiffen it and to balance its sweet simplicity.

Horne and Mary Gillies tried to keep their styles distinct so that the little books would be pleasantly varied, but their agreement was complete as to the note of family affection and pleasure which informs them. Certain trends may be traced in children's literature during the first half of the nineteenth century, with the usual exceptions to the rule. In the '40's, as in the 1800's, it was expected that children would profit from their reading. But by the '40's instruction was easier, the prevailing manner more relaxed, the moral less intrusive, the aim to touch the imagination more than the reason. An anonymous reviewer makes the point in 1846:

What is it that constitutes a good child's book? Is it to put difficult knowledge in as unattractive a form as possible; to make fathers and mothers cold and dry preceptors; is it to strew as many thorns and thistles as possible along the newly macadamised road to knowledge? No, not according to our notions! We think that the true spirit of a child's book ought to be love and cheerfulness, leaving the scholastic knowledge to come in the professedly schoolbooks.

(The People's Journal, vol. I. 1846, p. 322)

He ends with a warm appreciation of the books he is reviewing—no less than the first Myrtle story-books, The Good-Natured Bear and the London Doll.

Horne claimed that he and Mary Gillies were trying to do something new in these little books. Certainly the stories confirm, and so do letters to and from Horne and his friends, that there was in the Howitt and Gillies households a spirit of enjoyment and of free, open affection for children which must have had its effect. The Howitt family was a commonalty, much like the family in which Mrs Ewing's talents grew. Discipline in such homes was not restrictive: it was more a matter of organising life intelligently to give freedom for proper growth. In many articles on education at this time the image of plants recurs—plants which must be staked and pruned but which need, above all, sun and moisture for their well-being.

Horne, who so often demanded “pure air and abundant water” for London's poor, knew that children needed intellectual equivalents of these as well. Often obtrusive and tactless with adults, he had also a gentleness which is evident in the stories he wrote for children.

This side of Horne is epitomised in the title of his book, The Good-Natured Bear, which he and others seemed to use almost as a nickname. It was certainly his favourite among his stories for children and he was teased for comparing it with Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver. “I only said it was of the same family”, he protested to Cundall, “and surely … one may claim to be a ‘poor relation’ without offence.”

He wrote the story in 1844 when he was in Germany, much of the time staying at Bonn. From here he sent stories for the Myrtle books which Cundall and Mary Gillies were assembling in London. “I had always intended to write a Christmas Story for you”, he wrote to Cundall on 19 December, “but no satisfactory idea occurred to me till a few days ago. Since which I have worked away, and done nothing else.” Obviously pleased with the story, he suggested a more substantial payment than he had received for the earlier stories, for the Bear was “a regular design, and of far more skill and structure”. The story has a German domestic setting, vividly realising what Horne had seen himself during his long visit. A large and happy family is entertained at Christmas time by a bear who, in a voice of ursine timbre and grave humour, tells the story of his life. We discover at the very end that the Bear is Uncle Abraham, whose disguise has been assumed to entertain the children and also to attract the attention of the pretty nursery governess. Browning hit off the character of the little book exactly when he called it “furry, warm and genial”. Horne went to a great deal of trouble to get it exactly right. He revised some parts “with a view to greater simplicity—except in those passages where a little heightening is intended to produce an effect of wonder and interest in the child by its very obscurity and strangeness.” He is particular about the illustrations. They must be amusing, but he hopes the artist has given Uncle Abraham “a pleasant countenance—agreeable and humorous—not too old—and on no account ugly”—for this would disappoint the children when the dénouement was reached. He writes anxiously about the type, the reviewing and advertising of the book, and hopes that Prince Albert (who evidently received a presentation copy) was amused “at certain references to Bonn, where he was a student”. In short, the Bear was Horne's book; and even though at first he wished to remain anonymous, he could not resist dropping hints, and even writing a rather heavily whimsical pair of letters for Howitt's Journal, one from a supposed reader inviting the Bear to come and growl at her house, the other a friendly reply.

The Good-Natured Bear was not published till 1846 (Horne was displeased that Cundall missed the Christmas market of 1845) and by this time the London Doll was ready too. A letter to Cundall dated October 1845 emphasised how different this story is. Horne wrote:

I cannot (wisely) oppose your better judgment in the matter of illustrations for the Doll—particularly as I have not yet seen any of Mr Taylor's drawings for the Bear. I only know that if he does the Doll (having done the Bear well) he will be most likely to choose points of humour, and to execute them in a way that Miss M. Gillies could not; but that if she did the illustrations, she would select those points interesting to children for their pretty and pleasing sweetness. Each artist would do what individual nature and talent dictated. It is for you to decide which would best answer the purpose, and subject.

Once again Horne was utterly, professionally absorbed in what he was writing. In January of the next year he wrote to explain to his publisher that the “Editress” of the doll story was to be “Mrs Fairstar”,

because if this be successful, [it] would justify a series (such as Memoirs of a Country Doll—Memoirs of a French Doll—Memoirs of a Dutch Doll (or German & c.) then the whole series might so well be called as No. 1 or No. 2 & c. of ‘Mrs Fairstar's Dolls’. Don't you see?

Horne must have got some way in the planning of a sequel about a country doll, for there are the two little creatures together in the foreground of the frontispiece to the first edition of the London Doll. (This is the first of the four drawings by Margaret Gillies reproduced in the endpapers of the present edition.) But so far as I know no sequel was ever published, possibly because children's stories were not sufficiently well paid for a man living by his pen. We do know that in 1847 Horne was subsidised by Douglas Jerrold to write a novel, “The Dreamer and the Worker,” which was serialised in Jerrold's Shilling Magazine. Apart from the London Doll, 1846 saw the publication of a pantomime, The Ill-Used Giant, Being a new and true version of “Jack and the Beanstalk”. This is a rackety piece of very moderate value. The Myrtle books continued but it is not known how far Horne was concerned with them. The last story for children that is certainly his is “King Penguin” (1848), an odd, rather stiff little fantasy about a Jack Tar shipwrecked on an island whose avian inhabitants are ruled by a highly educated and arrogant King. The story is entertaining but it has (as, indeed, the Good-Natured Bear has) a great deal of rambling adult comment in it. The London Doll shows best of all the relaxed and delicate artistry of these years when Horne stood level with children and shared their pleasures of imagination.

In the neatly planned chronicle of the London Doll he has skillfully combined three points of view—those of the adult, the children, and the doll. The whole conception of the story is adult. The mock-autobiography (of a mouse, a shilling, an old chair and so on) was accepted in the last century as a way of presenting a panorama of social life in town or country, and Horne's story can be read in this way. But it is first and foremost a story, depending on Maria Poppet the doll and on the various little girls who successively make a home for her. Their portraits are drawn affectionately and realistically by Horne, and the doll concurs in his love for them: her tart and caustic remarks (in that voice so often heard in doll stories) are reserved for the vagaries of adult life. To Horne the children are truly the “little mammas” the doll calls them. Ellen Plummy at the pastrycook's and the clerk's daughter, Mary Hope, both make clothes for her: Lady Flora lives in Hanover Square and has not been accustomed to sew, but she explains the sights of the West End to her. As for Italian Brigitta, when she and her brother climbed into a derelict house in Cheapside to see the procession, “the first thing she did was to station me between two broken bricks at the side of the window, so that I could look down from this height upon the whole of the Lord Mayor's Show as it passed in the street beneath”. Each child looks after the doll in the way her particular capabilities suggest—and her particular social sphere. In so short a story, with so many children to introduce, Horne draws his character with remarkable skill. He has obviously taken trouble to get the details of dress and behaviour exactly right, but he has realised the little girls as individuals as well. We see very little of any one of them but we know perfectly what each one is like.

For a writer as original and intelligent as Horne, the doll provides a perfect opportunity for wit. Maria is neither child nor adult, but, consistently, doll. A little arrogantly, very observantly, she surveys the world, dividing the folk in it into ordinary humans, little mammas, and dolls—this last group including anyone who is unusually rigged out, as it were in fancy dress. Thus, the Lord Mayor and his supporters seem to her to be dolls (wooden like herself) in the same way as the statues of Achilles and the Duke of York and the figures of Gog and Magog at the Guildhall.

Of course, Horne was writing for the children of his acquaintance and for all those who were educated to read intelligently. But his story grew also out of his concern for children less fortunate than those who had his books as presents—children who, if they could read at all, might know Jack the Giant Killer or “a bit of Robinson Crusoe”, but often little more. In 1841 (a few years before the London Doll) Horne had been appointed to act as one of twenty Assistant Commissioners in a government investigation of child labour in mines and factories. One of the four Commissioners was his friend Dr Southwood Smith. General instructions were given to examine the children “by themselves, and not in the presence of their parents or employers; and to take every precaution … to diminish the chances of inaccuracy of statement, from timidity, or from the confusion to which Children are subject when spoken to by a stranger”.

Horne's district was in and around Wolverhampton, his brief with those working in metal-goods factories, producing nails, screws, steel pins and so on. His reports are full of facts distressing to read. He wrote with telling restraint but feeling shows more strongly at times. He described, for instance, the “little iron bar” which was put in front of a nail machine, a pitifully minimal safety device:

… to prevent a child who happens to be forgetful from putting its fingers into the cutting aperture. That the accidents which are so continually occurring … are attributable to ‘carelessness’ is, no doubt, for the most part very true; but let us look at the offence comparatively. A Child of the upper or middle classes is practising on the piano-forte: this Child does not go over the fingering of the same unvarying passage from hour to hour, from day to day, from year to year; but has an interesting variety in its practice. Yet the most apt scholar and most assiduous practiser will now and then miss its distances, and be a little out of its time. It is precisely for this offence that one of these poor Children, working in support of itself, and perhaps of its infirm mother, loses a finger or has its hand smashed; and for the carelessness of one second of time is mutilated during the remainder of its life.

(State Papers vol. 13, Children's Employment [Trades and Manufactures] 1843, p. 415)

In another moving passage (p. 495) Horne described the children's prayers. When they told him they said “Our Father” at night he had assumed they meant the whole prayer but discovered they knew only the first two words. When the Commission's report was published in 1843, Elizabeth Barrett read it and was so much affected by this passage in Horne's evidence that she wrote, at white heat of emotion, the poem The Cry of the Children, which appeared in Blackwood's soon afterwards.

To write benevolently of “the poor” was by no means unusual in the 1840's; it is the time, after all, of David Copperfield and The Old Curiosity Shop, of Mrs Trollope's Michael Armstrong the Factory Boy. It is not surprising that when Horne was planning his doll's varied life he should include some children in humble circumstances. But his principles about children's reading would certainly prevent him from introducing into his story anything sordid or distressing. If sadness and pathos were to be there as well as sweetness and pleasure, they must be presented in due proportion. He did not choose to put his poor children into any of the trades he had investigated himself, but for one of them, Ellen Plummy, he chose the milliner's trade (a far wider term then than now), which had come under the same Commission. He would know from the official report that five-year-old children worked as long as seventeen hours in a day, that they were often brutally treated, that they were given backless chairs to sit on so that they would not relax and slow down their work, that they had scanty food to eat and scant time to eat it. Little Ellen goes to work for her Aunt Sharpshins when she is nine and she has a hard time of it, with little sleep or rest and no time for play. But all this is background to the happy picture of two little girls (a bad cold has lent them for once a little free time) sewing for Maria Poppet a fine dress of lemon-coloured merino with a violet sash, under a tent made of bedclothes to keep them warm (and Aunt Sharpshins had at least given Ellen the scraps of material). Horne is quite definite about the poverty of Marco and Brigitta, about the over-crowding in the garret of the doll-making Sprats and the frugal diet of the little girl who plays Columbine in the pantomime; but he makes these things tolerable by the affection and grace implicit in their lives. The laughter between Brigitta and her brother, the happy relationship little Columbine enjoys with the grandmother who plays the dragon, were clearly meant to reassure the young reader.

Memoirs of a London Doll is in more than one sense “a sort of Christmas book for children”. It belongs with the newly translated stories of Hans Andersen and with the German-derived Christmas customs, with Dickens's Christmas tales and with those seasonal publications in miniature which one reviewer thought “far better and more appropriate gifts for children than toys or sweetmeats, and much more likely to prove of wholesome and lasting influence”. Wholesome as Horne's story is, it is no tract, but a story to give pleasure—and, incidentally, to give a picture of the London year. It runs from a Christmas to a Christmas, starting with Twelfth Night festivities and ending with a pantomime, and taking us on a miniscule tour of the city in the 1840's—Holborn, Regent's Park, Bloomsbury, Hyde Park, Finsbury, Cheapside—in a series of vignettes drawn with gusto as well as knowledge. Small wonder that Caroline Hewins,² who read the story in her American nursery not so many years after its first publication, should feel that all “aided in making London as real to me as Boston.”

Like his fellow-journalist Henry Mayhew, Horne tramped this great, growing mass of overcrowding and dirt, with its monstrous contrasts of poverty and riches, finding stories in dust-heaps and railway-stations, fire brigades and parks, docks and cattle-yards, the river and the Zoo. Mayhew's articles, published fortnightly in the Morning Post, described various slum quarters of London, mainly in faithfully reported conversations with the inhabitants. The articles were later published, in three volumes under the title London Labour and the London Poor. Mayhew was in the best sense a reforming journalist. In the London he knew, it was possible for the well-to-do to ignore almost totally the disgraceful social inequalities of the city. Mayhew was determined that they should know how the poor lived and how lack of education debarred them from living in any other way. His work was in print only five years after Horne's doll story which, more generally and more gently, makes the same points.

For his times, though, Horne was blessedly lacking in the preachifying tendency. The memoir form, the first-person narrative, certainly helps him, but without his endearing interpretation of Maria Poppet she could so easily have become a vehicle for improvement, as most dolls in stories did at this time. Mrs Trimmer, reviewing Dorothy Kilner's Dolls' Spelling Books (1803) in an earlier generation, expresses a view which in Horne's day was still colouring doll stories. She writes:

In this pleasing volume we find a little girl acting in the character of a mamma towards her family of Dolls, upon the system of ‘make-believe’, and all little mammas of the same description will find much to amuse, and many things to improve them in the lectures which this young lady gives to her wooden and wax children.

(The Guardian of Education, Vol. 2. Jan-August 1803, p. 424)

Twenty years later the anonymous author of The New Doll, or, Grandmamma's Gift made it clear that five-year-old Ellen was given the doll because she was a “wild” child who must be led to the nursery virtues:

By degrees, the doll was made subservient to all the purposes of education … The love of personal finery was banished, for any reward of good behaviour, if given in clothes, was confined to a new bonnet or frock for the doll; and gluttony, which is generally speaking the great sin of childhood, could be effectively decried by the doll's example.

(Anon: The New Doll, or, Grandmamma's Gift. London: R. Ackerman 1826, p. 21)

Move on nearly thirty years, to the time when Horne's story was published, and you find the same attitude in The Doll and her friends, or, Memoirs of the Lady Seraphina (1852). This is a charming little book (it was at one time attributed to Horne) but its chief point is to contrast naughty, provoking Geoffrey with the patient invalid Willy and to trace the stages of Geoffrey's reformation, which the author neatly relates to his treatment of the doll. Though Seraphina tells her own story (to a Pen, in her old age), the author overshadows her personality with purpose. As she says in her preface:

My principal intention was to amuse children by a story founded on one of their favourite diversions, and to inculcate a few such minor morals as my little plot might be strong enough to carry; chiefly the domestic happiness produced by kind tempers and consideration for others.

([Julia Charlotte Maitland]. The Doll and her Friends. London: Grant and Griffith 1852)

Not as strict as Mrs Trimmer's view, but still there is nothing here to touch the briskly independent, gay and adaptable character of Horne's Maria Poppet, who has something of his own nature in her, just as the Bear has and the Jack Tar of “King Penguin.”

Such reviews as exist of Horne's children's stories accept these as agreeable entertainment, especially to be valued for their essential kindliness. Horne himself believed that children should not be given horrific or sensational books and in an article in Household Words (“A Witch in the Nursery.” Sept. 1851, no. 78, pp. 601-609) he condemned the sadistic, amoral aspect of nursery rhymes and fairy tales. In this he was in tune with educational theories current in his day, theories which colour any reviews longer than mere notices. Indeed, children's books, when they were reviewed at all, were most often used as pegs to hang a theory on: there is little real literary criticism of them. For this reason it is hard to find out what Horne's contemporaries really thought about his books for children. The period when he was writing them was a short one and he would have been thought of, justifiably, as an adult writer who for a time had turned to a different sphere. Because education was so important, this was a matter for congratulation. A reviewer in the People's Journal grouped together two or three Myrtle books, The Good-Natured Bear and the London Doll, and wrote in general terms on the common fallacy “that anybody, who can write nothing else, can write a children's book”. The reviewer ends thus:

There is a great deal of genius and knowledge, both of life and books, in these little volumes, which prove that the authors, be they whom they may, are no ordinary people. We have heard of the pen of a well-known and fine poet being in one, at least, of them. We believe it to be quite possible; and in conclusion say—Dear Mrs Harriet Myrtle, and deeply-experienced and most good-natured of Bears, give us many more such books as these; and excellent Mr Cundall, do all in your power to spread them far and wide.

(The People's Journal, Vol. 1, 1846, p. 322. Possibly by Mary Howitt)

As the good-natured bear of the nursery Horne was evidently widely known and loved: his other works failed to make the impression he desired on his contemporaries. Hurt as much by lack of interest as by adverse comment, in 1852 he left England with William Howitt and two of his sons, bound for Australia and the gold-diggings. Here for the next eighteen years Horne once more led a life of active adventure—not with pick and shovel after all, but first commanding Melbourne's Private Gold Escort, later as an assistant Gold Commissioner, as a barrister's clerk, a prospective Member of Parliament, an administrator for a government water scheme, a lecturer, and finally as Mining Registrar and Surveyor of the Blue Mountain goldfield. These years in Australia have been carefully and fully described by Cyril Pearl in Always Morning (1960), the only biography of Horne. He shows the poet growing older, frailer, more lonely, but always adaptable and always optimistic.

In 1870 Horne returned to England. He expected to pick things up where he had left them. He found Dickens's friendship distinctly cooled, England (and London) much changed, and the whole business of making a living to start again. The novelist Camilla Toulmin, prominent in early Victorian literary circles, remembered Horne at the time when he was renowned as the author of Orion and a member of that exclusive Syncretics Club which she and her friends were pleased to call the Mutual Admiration Society. When the novelist, as Mrs Newton Crosland, wrote her Landmarks of a Literary Life 1820-1892, she recalled how shocked she was to see the alteration in Horne on his return:

… five and thirty years had of course worked great changes, for he was now quite the old man; his gait was shuffling, and though his eyes still twinkled, they had lost something of their fire.

(pp. 280-81)

Horne needed all his courage and optimism now. Nobody had paid much attention to his lyrical drama Prometheus, which was written in the Australian bush. Nobody wanted the new editions which he prepared of some of his early works, and for some years his application for a pension was refused. He had outlived the time that best suited him. Even then, he seems always to have been one of those writers who are too original for their own good. He was never a comfortable writer (for adults, at least) nor can he easily be contained in a definition.

As for his reputation at the present time, it is safe to say that it hardly exists. From a practical point of view he is not an easy writer to study. His works are almost all out of print, though Eric Partridge's fine edition of Orion, published in 1928, must have revived interest in him. Horne is essentially a peripheral figure, mentioned in almost every memoir or collection of letters in his lifetime but rarely discussed at any length. His manuscripts and private papers were dispersed early in the present century. Many of them are now in North American libraries, and the Mitchell Library in Sydney has twenty boxes and more of unsorted Horniana to tantalise scholars on this side of the world. Besides this, a good deal of his work—Orion, for example, and the epic Prometheus, and his blank verse tragedies—could be read now only as interesting examples from literary history.

His prose is another matter. I would, for instance, like to see in print “The Poor Artist: or, Seven Eyesights and one Object,” a remarkable parable published in 1850 and years ahead of its time in hints of evolution and of impressionism in art; as a study of creative man it deserves to be better known. I would like to see his two prose pieces on Australia bound in with William Howitt's Land, Labour and Gold, for these are among the most intelligent and readable products of the early days in the colony. I would like to see a selection of Horne's articles, those which best show that combination of practical fact and highly individual imagination which is so particularly his.

It is this combination, above all, which will endear the London Doll to children. But it is not enough in itself to make Horne outstanding as a writer for children—and outstanding he certainly is, just because writing for children was not a limitation for him. When he wrote the London Doll he did not feel it necessary to assume a special attitude to life, however carefully he might choose a style and story to suit young readers. All through his doll story the point of view is shifting—from doll to child, from a child to a parent, then back to the doll; but behind it all there is a shrewd, man-of-the-world, clear-eyed, almost sardonic toughness which makes the London Doll like nothing else written for children in his day—perhaps like nothing else till Mrs Ewing came along. In his way Horne was a genius, and this book, with its fine balance of intellect and imagination, should go far to prove it.

Notes

1. The letters from Horne to Cundall quoted here and in the following pages are now in the Henry Huntington Library in California.

2. A Mid-Century Child and her Books. Macmillan 1926, p. 119.