Recently my adult daughter visited, and she returned home with a couple dozen children’s books from our collection of several hundred, the ones she most wanted to keep. I wish she could have taken them all.
It’s hard to describe the connection I feel with these books when I page through the shabby volumes, a few literally disintegrating with age. It’s even harder for me to explain why today, at the age of 68, I want to read them all again. This can’t be normal. Or is it?
Children’s literature contains wonderful stories, many of which I read and reread countless times and remember in detail. It’s not just the stories I hold tight, though: it’s the books. Just as some families hand down bibles from one generation to the next, we did the same with children’s books. A few dating to the 1930s bear my mother’s name scrawled in a childish hand. Many more have inscriptions from my father, who gave me books at Christmas every year. He bought most of them at a secondhand bookshop called Dana’s, which occupied a cellar in downtown Providence, Rhode Island, and sold used first editions of the Oz books for two dollars each. He consulted with the clerk on his selections and rarely missed.
Every evening, when Dad got home from work, I would perch on the arm of his upholstered chair while he read aloud to me. Decades later, I read the same books to my daughter, ostensibly for her benefit, but just as much for my secret joy.
Lists of children’s classics abound on the internet, and I won’t add another. But I want to share with you a couple of my favorites that you may not have heard of and briefly consider how they reflected their place and time.
The Bertram books
Published in 1934 and 1937 by a newspaperman named Paul T. Gilbert, who had also apprenticed with a circus, the stories tell of a little boy who adopts a series of absurd animals and brings them home. Bertram and His Funny Animals featured, among others, an insatiable hippopotamus, a dancing bear, a kangaroo who snatches Bertram’s brother, Baby Sam, to keep in his pouch, and a sick giraffe who has to be nursed by Bertram’s long-suffering mama.
By the second book, Bertram and His Fabulous Animals, Gilbert had apparently exhausted the comic possibilities of real large animals and turned to the fantastical, including a squeazle-weasel, an anting-anting, and my favorite, the miki-miki, a bloated green creature who receives clandestine shipments of candy (which he shares with Bertram) by mail every day.
Goofy as they are, the Bertram books reflect a slice of early twentieth-century middle-class life that is purely conventional in its gender roles. Bertram’s stay-at-home mama wears dresses and aprons and deep-fries doughnuts for lunch. When Bertram fears tearing holes in his stockings, the dancing bear remarks, “Your mother can darn them, can’t she? That’s what mothers are for.” The mama’s invariable retort – “As if I didn’t have enough to do already!” – has lived on for years as our family’s inside joke.
Each time Bertram pleads for an animal, his mama says no. But once he smuggles one into the house, she’s often unwittingly drawn into the scheme. After Bertram brings home a giraffe hitched to his red velocipede, he puts the giraffe in the basement and cuts a hole in the sitting-room floor for the animal’s head to poke through, startling the minister who has come to call. But the giraffe catches cold and coughs all night, ark! ark! So Bertram’s mama doses him with cough syrup, rubs his throat with goose grease, wraps it in red flannel, and puts the giraffe to bed.
Bertram’s daddy is away in Omaha on business when each story opens. Since this is the 1930s, however, he remains the undisputed head of the household. Each story ends when the daddy returns home, takes charge of the situation, and ushers the offending animal out. So off goes the giraffe in a wheelbarrow to the zoo.
The setting for the stories is never made clear, but they have a vaguely Midwestern feel. Gilbert was born in Minnesota and lived most of his life in Chicago. But like so much children’s literature of that era, the Bertram books portray an idealized, small-town middle America. Still, it was a Depression-era America, and in fact Gilbert began writing the stories when he lost his job at the Chicago Evening Post.
While the animals in Bertram are diverse, the people are anything but. Everyone is white, including Julia Krause, Baby Sam’s nursemaid. Her name gestures to an ethnic German heritage, no doubt reflecting the late nineteenth-century surge of German immigration to the Upper Midwest. That’s as ethnic as the Bertram books get. The stories are not overtly racist, but there are hints of the stereotyped thinking that one would expect in something published for a mainly white audience in the 1930s. In “Bertram and the Ticklish Rhinoceros,” Bertram says to his brother, “I tell you what let’s do, Baby Sam. Let’s play African hunter. You be the hunter and I’ll be a rhinoceros.” Fortunately the story then turns to Bertram’s travails with the rhinoceros and does not comment further on Africa or Africans. As Bertram’s mama would say, it’s a mercy.
Paul T. Gilbert’s granddaughter, Susan Gilbert, has a website on his life and work at bertramstories.com.
My granddaughter turned one on Wednesday. This could not be more timely!
Don´t let them go. If your daughter doesn´t want them... WE DO! (I have all my mother´s , our´s, etc packed up for Jony. ( I have Bill´s Hardy Boys collection..which all of my kids read.) No kids in sight, but he does want to have them. We had the complete Oz Collection, but Mom gave them to her sister. They are no more. I have a few which I passed on to Maya. She said she had to edit for racism (I don´t remember that) Re your comment on the Bertram books. One has to remember the time and place they were written.