Mamie Pickering's Reading, Part One: The Role of Books in the Social Life of a Late Victorian Child

Abstract

Mamie Pickering's Reading, Part One:The Role of Books in the Social Life of a Late Victorian Child Norman J. Williamson and Angela E. Williamson (Editor's note: In 1980, Norman Williamson presented the Mamie Pickering Thomson collection to the University of Winnipeg Library. The collection consists of the textbooks used in a school near Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, fifty miles west of Winnipeg, from its founding in the eighteen eighties through the nineteen thirties, and the diaries of Mamie Pickering Thomson, who first attended the school as a student, later taught at it, and then sent her own chiidren to it. The books and diaries had been given to Mr. Williamson, a freelance researcher, by Mr. Fred Thomson, Mamie's son. Mamie's diary contains a detailed record both of the books she read and how she obtained them; its earliest entries offer a revealing look at the place literature occupied in a fairly typical small-town North American childhood of the latter years of the last century. In the following article, Norman and Angela Williamson discuss how Mamie obtained her books, and what they meant to her and to the community she lived in. A second article, to appear in a later Quarterly, discusses the specific books Mamie read in 1893. When the thirteen-year-old Mamie Pickering began her diary in 1893, the town of Portage la Prairie, Manitoba was deep in the grip of a recession. The bubble had burst after a boom of land speculation, brought about by the arrival of the railway in 1880, had led the overenthusiastic town fathers to extend the boundaries and legally turn the small town into a city. In fact, Portage was primarily a typical rural community, providing services to neighboring farmers. Although there were a few people who considered themselves to be "society people," the town was dominated by its large middle class-one of whom was Mamie's father. A journeyman cabinetmaker, Joseph Pickering had thought to establish himself in his trade. When the business failed to materialize, he had taken a position as wooden water tower builder with the M & N Railway Co. Then he was laid off as a regular employee, and had to do the same work under short-term contracts with the railway. The Pickerings were forced to give up their home in town in 1892, they moved into an older house just across the town boundary line. But in spite of the ravages of recession, the value of the middle class remained intact. Their children were taught that all things in the universe could and should be judged to be either right or wrong, and all personal action was directed by a strict code of propriety. Regardless of the present financial circumstances of the family, children were admonished to act and dress like ladies and gentlemen. For the most part, Mamie and her circle of friends had learned the lesson well. If any doubt arose in Mamie's mind about the propriety of an object or action, her mother always made the final judgment. For example, when Mamie and her friend, the indomitable Ollie [Olive Oswald], were far out of town on a walk, Mamie could not bring herself to join Ollie in wading in a pool: "Ollie got stuck and got her shoes and stockings wet and dirty so she took them off and went barefoot. I would have loved to do the same but fears of mamma's anger kept me from it and to cap it all she would have let me do it" (19/6/93). Before we become too critical of Mamie's deference to her mother's discipline,we must remember that, a year earlier, Mamie had been severely ill with a pneumatic disorder. The parental discipline we see here and elsewhere was never indiscriminate, always rooted in practical considerations. In any case, the need for parental permission when the issue was cloudy extended to Mamie's reading habits: "at dinner I asked mamma if she would let us [Ollie and herself] read the Old Ladies Journals upstairs and she said yes. I had not thought that she would but I was glad of the...