Reading Children: Elizabeth Taylor's At Mrs Lippincote's

Odd image found here.

I was reading the hilarious At Mrs Lippincote's by Elizabeth Taylor (this one not that one*) when I was struck by this great passage about the little boy in the book, who seems to be about seven years old and a very precocious reader. It has inspired a new feature here -- excerpts from books about children who love to read or hate to read or are in the act of reading. Passages that have something, anything, to do with children reading. In this case, the child really loves to read:

Oliver Davenant did not merely read books. He snuffed them up, took breaths of them into his lungs, filled his head with the sight of the print and his head with the sound of the words. Some emanation from the book itself poured into his bones, as if he were absorbing steady sunshine.The pages had personality. He was of the kind that cannot keep a horrifying book in the room at night. He would, in fine weather, lay it upon an outside sill and close the window. Often Julia would see a book lying on his doormat.

As well as this, his reading led him in and out of love. At first, it was the picture of Alice going up on tiptoe to shake hands with Humpty Dumpty; then the little Fatima in his Arthur Rackham book, her sweet, dusky face, the coins hanging on her brow, the billowing trousers and embroidered coat. Her childish face was alive with excitement as she put the key to the lock. 'Don't!' he had once cried to her in loud agony.

In London, he would go every Saturday morning to the Public Library to look at a picture of Lorna Doone. Some Saturdays it was not there and he would go home again, wondering who had borrowed her, in what kind of house she found herself that week-end. On his last Saturday, he went to say good-bye and the book was not there, so he sat down to await its return. Just before the library was to be shut for lunch-time, he went to the shelf and kissed the two books which would lie on either side of his Lorna when she was returned and, having left this message of farewell, made his way home, late for lunch and empty of heart.

If this passage is to be called reading, then the matrons with their circulating libraries and the clergymen with their detective tales are merely flirting and passing time. To discover how Oliver's life was lived, it was necessary, as in reading The Waste Land, to have an extensive knowledge of literature. With impartiality, he studied comic papers and encyclopaedia, Eleanor's pamphlets on whatever interested her at the moment, the labels on breakfast cereal and cod liver oil, Conan Doyle and Charlotte Bronte.

*Completely off topic: did you know that the other Elizabeth Taylor, the actress not the writer,  had double rows of eyelashes?

 

 

 

Comments

[Nathalie]

Palladian is similarly bookish, and every time the governess does something like Jane Eyre, the narrator gives us a nudge. Are you doing the read-along for her centenary?

[Steph]

I didn't realize it was her centenary or that there was a read-along! Just reserved Palladian, thanks, and The Wedding Group. She is so good. (Obsessed with the Brontes, wasn't she?)