W-day

[altivo]

Back to a more typical Wednesday. The last two or three have been pretty mild.

Today we had some nut case who claimed it was his right to use library computers to run his "business" (whatever it is, probably something nefarious I think) and he pushed and shoved his way up to the director who still told him no. We have an extra ace up our sleeves for that: the computer equipment and software in the building is all paid for by the private trust fund left by our founder, and none of it is paid for by tax money. He was told he could have the same 60 minutes per calendar day that anyone else gets, and that's all.

I hunted up two obituaries in newspapers from 1892 and 1901. The 1892 newspaper was every bit as florid in writing style as anything Bret Harte ever wrote.

I had someone try to get a new library card but discovered that he already had a card and owed us $30 for overdue and lost books. Apparently he really wanted to check out more books because he went to the bank or something and came back 15 minutes later with cash to pay his fines.

Right at closing the phone rang. I should have let it go but I picked it up. It was a woman complaining that she was unable to place a hold request for a book through the online catalog. I explained that some books cannot be checked out of the library and therefore cannot be held. She insisted that this couldn't be one of those. It was, of course. An old copy of Elsie Dinsmore by Martha Finley. It's part of a collection of early children's books that are in our "rare book room" and cannot be taken from the building, though anyone who asks can usually sit in there and read them. For some reason she just couldn't understand the concept. Again and again she asked why she couldn't check the book out. I told her that it is available easily in a modern paperback (only because it's a classic, it's actually a pretty poor excuse for a story) but she insisted that she needed a library copy. I wasn't about to fill out an interlibrary loan request form for her over the phone when it was already ten minutes past closing, so I told her she should come in to the library to do that.

Elsie Dinsmore is one of those dreary Victorian didactic books intended to teach children "proper behavior, faith in god, and respect for their elders." It's just awful stuff, about a girl whose father went away on business and didn't come back for a long time. Her mother was already dead, and she was left in the care of an aunt or step-mother, if I remember correctly, who abused her horribly but her faith in god and her father got her through it all with proper meekness and self-effacement, as would always have been prescribed for a teen girl of the era. The whole text is probably in Project Gutenberg where anyone can download it, but there was no point in suggesting that to this caller. Picture Harry Potter living with the Dursleys, only he never gets to go to Hogwarts at all. That's what it's like.

Comments

[atomicat.livejournal.com]

That story reminds me of one by Edward Gorey, the title of which I'm unwilling to go downstairs to look up.

[duskwuff.livejournal.com]

It sounds incredibly depressing, really. Also, vaguely reminiscent of Pollyanna, or at least part of the same literary tradition.

[soanos.livejournal.com]

Oh, well, I hope it didn't rain.

Seems you have had a lot of more experience in handling difficult customers today. :)

The book you just described to me sounds like quite a dreadful reading experience, so I think I will give that title a miss. I don't read much these days, it seems I have just lost all motivation to read books these days. Depressing books don't really sound encouraging to me. Do we really need more of those? :P

Anyway, I got the impression that all the things that book might instill in a young teenage girl or a zebra like me these days are apathy, depression and lack of confidence. :P

[altivo.livejournal.com]

You got it, except Pollyanna has a happy ending more or less. Poor Elsie was dragged through a series of a dozen or so books in which everything bad that could happen and some things that just couldn't happen did anyway. I don't know where it ended, because it was so bad I gave up on it.

It's that Calvinist/Evangelical notion of "being tested by god" or something. Like the book of Job.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Any number of Edward Gorey's stories have the same flavor and a lot more impact. Of course he was making fun of that genre of literature, and did it most effectively too.

I know the one you're thinking of, but I can't remember the title either. The girl ends up dead and buried and in the final frame you see her tombstone or something like that.

It also resembles his story called "The Gilded Bat" about the girl who became a ballerina and spent her entire life washing out her costume in the sinks of cheap hotels and riding second class trains from city to city until she got consumption and died. Or "The Gashlycrumb Tinies," an alphabet of Victorian children's names that tells the gruesome death that awaited each of the twenty six who are mentioned.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

It did rain but not until after midnight.

I agree. Elsie Dinsmore is not a book to be read for entertainment unless you can take it as parody (which in a way it almost is.) It survives as an example of how NOT to write for children, an epitome of everything that was bad in Victorian culture. Charles Dickens wrote Oliver Twist, a better known but very similar book, and frankly, I think it's just as bad.

Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) is really the founder of this genre, I think. His tales of shame intended to instruct young ladies but actually read by many as a sort of soap opera were the example that many later authors either followed or poked fun at. I had to read Clarissa Harlowe: or the History of a Young Lady (nine volumes long!) when I was in graduate school. I found it absurd and unbelievable but it was a best seller in its time. He also wrote Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (only two volumes) which is in much the same vein. These books provided the model for lots of dreary stuff over the next two centuries, as well as material for a lot of parodies like Shamela (attributed to Henry Fielding) and many of Jane Austen's books and characters...

[soanos.livejournal.com]

Sorry, Iam not familiar with any of those books, being from a scandinavian origin. :)

Probably one reason why I don't read much. :P

[soanos.livejournal.com]

Well, I just find something a bit silly in those types of books.
It is the main character standing there, in the middle of things, waiting to be saved by this mysterious "God" entity instead of doing something and changing their own lives with their own hand.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Probably one reason why I don't read much.

What, because you're Scandinavian? Pooh. Some of the most well-read people I know are Finns and Swedes. XD

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yep. That's my reaction too. It was especially bad in books "for girls" because women were expected to be passive and accepting back then. In Richardson's Clarissa the heroine (if you can call her that) was held "prisoner" for months by an unscrupulous cad who wanted to force her into marrying him. Her door was not locked, nor was her window. She could have walked out of the place at any time, but didn't do so because "ladies don't go out alone." It was preposterous.

[atomicat.livejournal.com]

In the one I'm thinking of the girl's father goes to war and is thought to be killed which in turn sends her mother into a depression which kills her. Her Uncle in turn inherits all of course and sells her to some loutish brute who abuses her and has her selling paper flowers in the street. Finally she does run away but is struck down in the street by a carriage carrying her father who had not died. She dies in his arms and is so changed by her torments that he doesn't even recognize her. Such a lovely heart-warming story (if you're Wednesday Addams).

If anyone really really loved me they'd get me a Gashlycrumb Tinies" poster (B is for Basil, assaulted by bears, oooo-rah!)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Which rhymes with someone who fell down the stairs. Yes, I remember.

Elsie's story is very much like the Gorey. She never gets to see her father. When he comes home, for one reason or another, she is always asleep or sick or absent. He will go into her room and stand by her bed, looking at her and feeling sad because she reminds him of his dead wife or whatever, and then tiptoe out. The next day she learns that he was there and thinks that he didn't come to see her because he hates her. And so forth and so on...

[atomicat.livejournal.com]

Good lord! What sort of sick twist would write that? The guy should be scripting for S&M phone-sex lines. *gag*