Kathleen Marple Kalb's Blog, page 20

THANKSGIVING RAGAMUFFINS

You may have grown up celebrating Thanksgiving the way most folks do now: eating too much and falling asleep in front of a football game (or marathon of a favorite show). You probably didn’t grow up celebrating it with trick-or-treating.
Unless you grew up in some parts of New York. If you did, Thanksgiving Ragamuffins are probably no news to you.
To the rest of us, including this rather history-savvy Scotch-Irish Western Pennsylvania girl, they certainly are.
From around 1870, especially in Irish neighborhoods, kids
would dress up in their scruffiest clothes, or even mom’s dresses and makeup, on Thanksgiving morning and head out. “Anything for Thanksgiving?” they’d call, as they knocked on doors, begging for candy and money.
It’s unclear where it started; it seems to have something to do with the then-new Thanksgiving holiday – first celebrated nationwide in 1864 -- and the much older tradition of trick-or-treating on Halloween. Whatever sparked it, the kids had a wonderful time, dashing around and collecting pennies and treats. Of course, it also got more than a little out of hand at times, especially once bonfires and the occasional street fight became part of the festivities.
In some neighborhoods, local leaders tried to control the tradition by turning it into Ragamuffin Parades, which looked a lot like our modern Halloween processions. The costumes that started as a relatively well-off kid’s idea of a beggar eventually evolved to include pirates, bandits and even movie characters.
But as time went on, and Halloween became more of the official “dress up and get candy” holiday, Thanksgiving Ragamuffins faded. City leaders were no longer amused by the idea of grubby urchins running around on Thanksgiving morning begging for money and treats, or even just marching down the street. In the 1930s, no less an authority than the New York Times published a series of articles intended to discourage the Ragamuffin Parades.
The Times and changing attitudes helped knock the parades down, but what really sent them into history was something a bit more spectacular: the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. When you can go see the giant balloons, the Rockettes, and – not for nothing – get a wave from Santa, why would you bother pounding on the neighbor’s door for a stray piece of candy?
The ragamuffins are still out there, though.
A few neighborhoods in the City and Westchester still have Ragamuffin Parades on Thanksgiving. There’s even a street named “Ragamuffin Way” in honor of the event in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
And the ragamuffins live on in the memories of the kids who spent their Thanksgiving mornings begging for treats…and like to tell the grandchildren how they didn’t start the holiday by just sitting down in front of the TV and watching the balloons go by.
There’s nothing like a great “when I was your age” story to start the holiday…and unlike the “walking barefoot through three feet of snow to school” one – it’s actually true!
It’s also the inspiration for a short Ella Shane adventure. “The Thanksgiving Ragamuffin” is one of the many stories in the wonderful New York Tri-State Sisters In Crime Anthology, JUSTICE FOR ALL: MURDER NEW YORK STYLE 5.
I hope this post is a fun start to YOUR Thanksgiving. A very happy and safe holiday to you and yours. And always, always, thank you for reading!

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TALK TURKEY TO ME

We may not agree on a lot of things with our families…but we can all agree on sitting at the Thanksgiving table together and eating turkey, as people have been doing since the Pilgrims sat down with the-
Well, no.
We’ll leave all of the wrong stuff we were taught about Squanto and his helpful friends for another day, and focus on the turkey. Which may, or may not have been on the table for the (unofficial) First Thanksgiving. The seventeenth-century records DO show a lot of wild turkeys in the vicinity of the event, so it’s possible that they were indeed the main protein.
But it’s also possible that they weren’t. (Could have been ducks, geese or deer, too!)
By the mid-19th century, though, turkey was the official dish, thanks to historians writing about those wild birds, but it was no longer an official holiday. George Washington and his immediate successors proclaimed Thanksgiving days for late November, but the practice fell out of favor until Abraham Lincoln brought it back, in gratitude for Union victories – and in hopes of uniting the nation with a special and uniquely American holiday.
And the main dish was as uniquely American as the day.
Indigenous peoples had been eating wild birds for thousands of years when the Europeans showed up. The Spanish conquistadores took some Aztec turkeys (a GREAT name for a rock band, by the way!) back home, and it quickly became trendy at the royal courts.
Fun fact: there’s something to that old caricature of Henry VIII gnawing on a turkey leg – he was the first King of England to serve turkey at a Christmas feast. If you made me guess, I’d suspect that his Spanish first wife, Catherine of Aragon, brought it, but Henry was always on the lookout for a new treat.
In the New World, turkey wasn’t trendy. It was just dinner.
Wild birds were plentiful and easily available, and of course tasty. As time went on, though, it grew into more than a good meal. Some Colonial thinkers, like Ben Franklin, considered the bird noble and brave. He thought it would be a much better choice for national bird than the bald eagle.
The eagle is definitely more elegant on the national seal – but anyone who’s ever seen a gang of wild turkeys stop traffic won’t argue about their bravery.
As the 19th century went on, and Thanksgiving grew into a big national and patriotic holiday, turkeys were a key part of it. Big beautiful roasted turkeys took center stage in pictures of the feast; noble wild birds pranced across November calendars – and goofy turkeys scrambled for cover across kids’ Thanksgiving cards.
We even call it Turkey Day now.
Well, unless we’re talking turkey.
And why do we say that? Well, there’s a nasty little mid-1800s tale about a settler and a Native man going hunting together associated with the expression. But there’s another explanation I like a lot better: turkey was common slang for money.
So it probably originated as vivid shorthand for a serious matter, and got embroidered with other, less pleasant, things.
Which actually brings us right back to the Thanksgiving table, where we also have to find kind and collaborative ways to talk about the past – not to mention the present and future. And sometimes, it’s better to just take another helping of turkey!

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IT'S MY BAG

Whether they’re status bags, practical canvas totes, or phone wallets with glitter trim, purses carry a lot more than just a woman’s stuff. There’s a whole genre of male humor based on the idea that women carry quite literally everything in their bags, and as someone who has a first-aid kit, a sketchbook, one small sock, and two phone chargers in mine right now, I can’t really argue.
But we 21st century pack mules wouldn’t have lasted very long in the Victorian era.
Neither would the phone girls, for that matter.
The basic idea of the purse was pretty much the same as it is now, but the design and making of it were very different. Regency romance readers are familiar with ladies who carried “reticules,” an early version of the purse, and a lot of women carried variations on the theme right through the 19th century.
The interesting twist here, though, is that unlike our modern status bags, where women pay truly stupid money to have someone else make it for them (yes, guilty!) women made these bags themselves, as a way of showing off those ever-important female needle skills. Bags were crocheted, or tatted, or beaded, or embroidered. What mattered was that our genteel lady worked it with her own smooth hands.
And no, you couldn’t fit much in them but some calling cards, a miniature pencil and a “vinaigrette” of smelling salts. Maybe a coin or two, but a sheltered lady would need little or no money.
What wasn’t in that bag was one thing none of us modern ladies could imagine a purse without: makeup. Victorian ladies wore no visible cosmetics, and they certainly wouldn’t risk going out with the possibility that their secret enhancements would fall out of their tiny bag.
It wasn’t until the 1910s and 1920s that women openly carried their rouge and powder, often in beautifully decorated vanity cases.
As for the size of the bag, most fashionable women carried smallish ones. Queen Victoria herself drew an amazing amount of comment when she visited Paris with a good-sized bag decorated with an embroidered poodle. (Of course, her great-great-granddaughter is famous for her impressive, and practical bags!)
Big bags were for servants who did the household shopping, and they carried large sensible baskets.
Women didn’t always carry their bags, either. Throughout the 19th century, the “chatelaine” bag, a purse that attached to a woman’s belt, was also very popular. It wasn’t a new idea; medieval women had worn their castle keys on a belt (hence the name chatelaine!) and Colonial women wore cloth bags known as pockets at their waists. The chatelaine bag, though, is probably closer to our cross-body bag.
There were also all kinds of special bags for special needs. A woman would have her needlework bag for quilting bees, a dance bag to carry her little silk slippers to the party, and an opera bag for her lorgnette and program. These, too, were lovely and elaborately decorated.
And, fellas?
Men carried purses very similar to the ladies’ well into the 19th century. There are surviving men’s purses with beading and tassels and all sorts of decoration. So the next time you boys would like to make a smart comment about our bags, remember, you’ve done it too!

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A FINE SMALL STITCH

Sewing has been THE female vocation for thousands of years. Everyone from queens to pioneers to starving immigrants relied on their needlework in different ways.
From the lost moment some cave woman pointed out by the fire that her man’s bearskin might stay in place with a bone pin or two, women have been (mostly) in charge of sewing, and often judged by it.
Eleanor of Aquitaine, considered a rather bad woman by many of the men writing the chronicles because she traded a boring king for a more interesting one, was nevertheless always praised for the embroidered vestments she donated to churches. It’s clear that she did some of the work herself, and equally clear that the clerics considered it a major mitigating factor for such an otherwise unruly female.
There was nothing unruly about Catherine of Aragon, but she went to war with her needle, too. In the middle of Henry VIII’s impressively ugly effort to dump her for Anne Boleyn, she insisted upon the right to make and embroider his shirts. We can safely assume this had little to do with affection – and plenty to do with hanging on to her prerogatives as Queen. It didn’t help, of course, and I can’t be the only person wondering who did Henry’s shirts after Catherine was gone. (Anne’s lack of interest in housewifely pursuits helped send her to the block.)
For less elevated females, sewing was simply a matter of caring for their families, whether by providing what they needed, or earning the money for food. Before and after the Industrial Revolution, women were usually in charge of clothing and other household goods. In the Colonies, that became a much bigger task, because they often had to grow and process the raw flax or wool before they could even start sewing.
Even in the late 19th century, it was still pretty daunting. LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE readers will remember the scenes of Laura sewing sheets, hating every second of it, hating her blind sister Mary more because she’d been good at it – and feeling horrible about that, too. Sewing wasn’t always the blissful expression of femininity that those Victorian prints show.
For some women, it was a just a living. There had always been seamstresses and dressmakers, and as the middle class expanded in the Victorian era, more women hired out the heavy lifting and contented themselves with pretty fancy work.
Further down the scale, piecework was barely a living at all. Entire families would sew shirtwaists or skirts or whatever was needed, for pennies a basket. It meant long days of (literally) blindingly hard work for a pittance, but for many immigrant families, it was the only way to keep food on the table.
It was for Ella Shane’s mother. Malka (Molly) Steinmetz, barely educated and fighting consumption, couldn’t do anything else. As soon as she was able, young Ellen pitched in. That’s why the adult Ella doesn’t sew. In A FATAL FIRST NIGHT, she offers to sew on a button for a friend, triggering what she calls an “upset,” a flashback to her tenement childhood and her mother’s death.
Sewing for Ella, and for many other women over the centuries, turns out to be a great deal more than just picking up a needle and thread.

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CAN'T HOLD A CANDLE

A modern Halloween offers something for all age ranges: costumes and candy for the small kids; pranks and candy for the bigger ones; drinks, costumes and candy for the grownups. In the late 19th century, though, it was much less of a thing, and there wasn’t a lot to do if you weren’t trick-or-treating, supervising kids who were – or of course, handing out candy.
Unless you happened to be a single girl.
Then you might get a sight of your future husband.
Well, if you believed in the tradition, anyway.
Let’s back up a little, and remember that Halloween is also associated with a lot of serious stuff that the original Colonists didn’t like, starting with witches. And, just for the record, that it is still marked as a high holy day by people who practice some ancient religions. So while Halloween is a play night for most folks, there are people for whom it’s solemn and important.
Just taking a moment to show some respect for a few thousand years of history.
One of the things that came out of that history and got watered down into parlor games was a mild form of magic. It’s not magic in the serious sense of those who practice it, or even in the “Bewitched” nose-wrinkling sense, but more in the sense of young women dabbling in old wives’ tales. (In hopes of becoming old wives one day!)
Which brings us to the mirror and candle.
By the late 19th century, it was a big thing. Young women would go into a darkened room, maybe with a candle, maybe precisely at midnight, and look into a mirror. If you believe the legend, the face you’d see in the mirror would be that of your future spouse.
That’s putting an awful lot of faith in refraction, if you ask me!
Some versions of the tradition were even more elaborate, and incorporated other favorite fall things: in one particularly specific telling, you must stand in front of the mirror at midnight, eating an apple, and the face of your partner will appear over your shoulder.
Specific or not, it was a very fun game, and enough of a tradition that there were tons of Halloween cards riffing on the theme. Some of them were very pretty and serious…but others were funny – or even downright mean, featuring our hopeful young maidens peering into the unpleasant visage of some rich old coot.
Of course, just as the magic part of the legend points to some darker things in the origin, so does the purpose. Young women spent all that time on Halloween trying to divine who they might marry because marriage was still a woman’s main job, and her choice (hopefully choice!) of husband determined the course of her life.
So there’s a lot of serious stuff going on in the middle of all that mild magic and mystery.
That’s also why Miss Ella Shane wouldn’t be caught dead staring into a mirror at midnight on Halloween…unless of course it’s in her dressing room after a show. And, in that case, her future husband might indeed turn up. Which is a story for another day…

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AS AMERICAN AS...

Apple pie may -- or may not be your favorite dessert, but most people like it well enough to eat a slice when offered one. It’s a classic, and beloved in all of its forms. Though, of course, everyone has their favorite – and you do not want to find yourself in the middle of an argument between the crumb-top and double-crust folks. Never mind ice cream versus sharp cheddar cheese.
Apple pie has been a thing for a very long time; we’ve have been eating it since at least the 1300s.
Geoffrey Chaucer, of all people, gets credit for writing down the first recipe, in 1389. But, like many other household staples passed down through the mists of time, it’s fair to assume that unsung women had been making it for a long time before that. Pie actually started as a way to preserve fresh fruit in a portable form. Early crusts weren’t supposed to be especially tasty; some were made of nothing but flour, water, and salt, with the idea that they might not even be eaten at all!
When the British came to the New World, they brought their pie recipes with them and so did other Europeans, including the Dutch and Scandinavians. At first, the local crabapples weren’t much good for pie, but they soon brought over cuttings and seeds from back home. Most of the apples went into mildly hard cider at first, because people needed something safe to drink, and cider was easier to make than the other possibilities, like beer or wine.
Still, once there were apples, apple pie wasn’t far behind.
This is probably the point where people really started caring about the taste of the crust – if you’re scratching out a life on a new continent with limited supplies, you’re not going to waste a crumb.
Nor are you going to feel obligated to save that pie for dessert. Meal times and menus were much different in the Colonial period, and even into the 19th century (another post for another day), and pie made a simple and filling breakfast, or an easy evening bite after a long day’s work. When people did get into the more modern idea of finishing a meal with a sweet, apple pie was sitting right there, looking tasty.
And it was sitting there looking just as wonderful when the advertising and newspaper writers needed a symbol of Americana. The first recorded use of “as American as apple pie” was in 1928, but it was a beloved symbol of the home front for soldiers in both World Wars. By World War II, the boys Over There said flat-out that they were fighting for “mom and apple pie.”
So what did mom put on that pie? Yes, we’ll wade into the cheese versus ice cream argument…just a little. I’m not picking sides, but cheese DOES have seniority; people in New England, especially, have been eating pie with cheddar for centuries. For most folks, ice cream has only been an option since the late 19th century. Still, it quickly became a very popular one. Pie a la mode, after all, translates to “pie in the current fashion.”
At least at my house, where the Professor prefers apple pie to birthday cake, the only bad pie is no pie.

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HEAT UP A CAN

If you grew up dipping your grilled cheese into tomato soup, or picking the mini burgers out of the broth and veggies, you’ve enjoyed one of the most popular – and enduring – inventions of the late 19th century.
People have been trying to preserve food as long as they’ve been eating, but the idea of putting up and saving large quantities really took off during the Napoleonic Wars, when the French government offered a prize for inventions. Nicholas Appert won for his idea to use jars, but it took a few more years, and several different inventors to move over to cans.
By 1812, the U.S. was in the lead, with the first-ever canned food factory opening in New York. Robert Ayars’ plant put everything from oysters to fruit up in tin-plated wrought-iron cans. (That’s why Grandma and Grandpa still call them tin cans.)
At first, they were fashionable novelties for the middle class, but companies quickly realized that plenty of folks appreciated the convenience, and started selling mass-market products at more approachable prices. Soon, too, wars in Europe and the Civil War at home gave the canned food industry a huge boost.
Soup initially was one of the tougher, and higher-end items because of its water content. Everyone was paying an awful lot to move those slurpy cans of liquid, making a cheap product prohibitively expensive to ship.
That all changed in 1897, when Campbell Soup Company Chemist John T. Dorrance realized that he could remove the heaviest part of the soup – the water – and make it much easier to ship. Easier and cheaper, of course.
And so was born the “one can of soup to one can of water or milk” ratio that was the first meal preparation many of us did on our own. The first flavors? Consommé, chicken, vegetable, ox tail…and our good friend tomato.
Canned soup quickly took off across the social spectrum. It was just as good as a simple and filling companion for a working family’s bread as a fancy appetizer in a middle-class home. You can tell by the flavors offered that the makers were aiming for a wide audience: mock turtle, julienne, and cream of celery shared the shelves with the ox tail.
Later in the 20th century, those cream soups gained new attention, and later infamy, as the base for all kinds of casserole creations from housewives inspired by glossy magazines. These days, it’s fashionable to down on them, and sanctimoniously say that you make your OWN mushroom soup, thank you.
Not quite fair, in my humble and personal. Don’t get me wrong. I won’t go to the barricades for cream of celery…but I can’t be the only person who finds Grandma’s Thanksgiving green beans or potluck tuna-noodle a real comfort once in a while!
Canned soup also came full circle toward the end of the 20th century, and after, with premium un-condensed offerings like the mini-burger soup many of us love -- and more of us won’t admit to loving! Some soup went even higher-end; many gourmet companies offer things like lobster bisque in cans even now.
Whether you use it for kids’ lunch, casserole, or a solo dinner in front of the TV, canned soup is one of the rare foods from the 19th century that is still very similar to its original form…and at least for me, that just adds to the comfort! Guess what dinner is at my house tonight?

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HISTORY IN A JAR

It’s on Ella Shane’s vanity in her dressing room, and at home. Rosie the Riveter used it to take her makeup off after a long shift building airplanes. Renaissance and Regency ladies alike kept a jar. And there may well be some in your beauty kit right now.
Cold cream is so basic it’s been around practically forever.
Historians attribute the original formula to the famous second-century Greek physician Galen, who whipped up beeswax, rosewater and olive oil and got something that may have been intended as medicine – but quickly turned into a beauty standby. Even back then, the basic formula probably wasn’t really new; women have been tinkering with household basics to make beauty products as long as they’ve wanted to look and feel better. So, some unacknowledged lady may well have come up with the idea first.
The name “cold cream” comes from the cool and soothing feel on the skin, and the creamy look of the emulsion. It was a good – if somewhat heavy – moisturizer, and excellent for removing most forms of makeup. Before the late 20th century, most makeup relied on some kind of fat or oil base, and cold cream did an excellent job of dissolving it.
By the time of our Victorian ladies, of course, there wasn’t a lot of visible makeup on the street, but cold cream was still around. Ella probably got her first jar when she started performing; cold cream was a key part of the makeup kit, both as a thin layer for a base, and in larger quantities as a remover.
Cold cream was also becoming a commercial beauty product, but in somewhat different forms. The original beeswax and olive oil went rancid pretty quickly. At first, women just bought it in small amounts, but after Robert Chesebrough extracted petrolatum from petroleum in 1869, creative chemists started using petroleum jelly and mineral oils to replace the natural oils. Borax was later added as a preservative, too.
Whatever the formula, cold cream was THE basic beauty cream, and the standard by which all were measured. An early ad for “Pompeian Massage Cream” rather huffily states that it’s not a cold or grease cream, but a cream that cleanses the pores and drives away wrinkles and crow’s feet. (Can I call a taxi for mine?)
Of course, the dirty little secret is that the “Pompeian Massage Cream” probably had pretty much the same ingredient list as the more familiar cold cream. Before FDA regulations, manufacturers could, and did, say just about anything about their beauty products.
They also weren’t held to much in the way of safety standards. Part of the reason we have FDA standards for beauty products is the dangerous stuff that some companies were peddling in the name of cosmetics. You’d be more likely to run across something that just didn’t live up to the wild claims than something that would maim you – but it wasn’t impossible.
So it’s no wonder that a lot of women figured that if cold cream was good enough for Mom and Grandma, it was good enough for them, too. Some of us still do – I have a jar of rosewater cold cream that I use when my skin’s really tired and unhappy!

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PARIS OF THE WEST

San Francisco is one of Ella Shane’s favorite cities…and not just because it’s one of mine, too! In the Gilded Age, San Francisco probably seemed even more amazing than it does now, because it was a real, cultured city hanging out there in the middle of what people still thought of as the Wild West.
(If you think we’re slippery on geography now, imagine trying to understand your world with only the occasional map in the newspaper and maybe a globe at school or the library. So for most people, anything that was a long train ride toward the Pacific was part of a giant mass they just thought of as The West, probably Wild, depending on whether or not they read a lot of cowboy books.)
By the 1890s, San Francisco had consolidated its place as the “Paris of the West,” a real major city, with museums and colleges, and more to the point for performers like Ella, very appreciative audiences for opera and other arts. Opera had been popular there since at least the Gold Rush, and it was one of the markers of a cultured city.
Of course, by the Gilded Age, it was also one of the ways that San Francisco could show that it was every bit as cultured as Eastern cities…and it did. Ella Shane’s San Francisco tours are fictional, of course, but real artists up to and including Sarah Bernhardt took their best efforts there.
It wasn’t just classical performances, either. The Orpheum circuit, one of the top vaudeville operations, began in San Francisco. The variety shows were aimed at a much wider audience than the opera patrons. But there was probably a good bit of overlap – it’s always important to remember that opera was considered a far more popular art than it is now, though a more elevated one than the vaudeville stage.
Speaking of the stage. If you’ve been to San Francisco, you’ve probably seen the current Opera House, a glorious Beaux-Arts landmark that looks like it might have been there in the Gilded Age. But it wasn’t. The War Memorial Opera House is one of the last structures in the style built in the U.S. – in 1932.
Ella and her peers would have played the Grand Opera House, a spectacular theatre that opened in 1876, and quickly became THE place for major performances. Photos show all of the gilt and marble and thick carpets that you’d expect in any New York theatre, and surviving posters and programs verify an old guidebook’s description as “the largest place of dramatic entertainment in the city.”
And you can probably guess what happened to it.
Like so many other buildings, glorious and ordinary, it was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake, and ultimately demolished. The place where it once stood is a park called Jessie Square.
That disaster, though, is far in the future when Ella and her cousin Tommy eagerly plan their Western stands. For them, and for many other visitors, San Francisco is a beautiful and elegant destination (Ella likes her luxurious hotel almost as much as she likes the theatre!) with a distinctly different personality than their home.
Paris of the West, indeed!

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READING BREAK AT WASHINGTON SQUARE

I don’t trust people who don’t read.
Both Ella Shane and her cousin Tommy Hurley say it at different times in the series, and for them, it’s a simple statement of fact.
And there’s a very good reason for it.
Ella and Tommy, like many people of their time, are self-educated, mostly through reading. Finishing high school, never mind going on to college, was only for the well-off or very lucky. A couple of poor Lower East Side kids, even extraordinarily talented ones, would never have been able to afford it.
So they read.
Their shelves are heavy on history, letters of important people like Abigail and John Adams and Abraham Lincoln, and plenty of Shakespeare. It’s pretty much all the stuff you’d expect from a Western Civilization, American History, or English Literature class in their time, probably assembled with the help of some smart librarians and booksellers.
Real life people in their time, and long after, often educated themselves through reading. My grandfather, unable to attend college because he had to work to support his family, set himself a reading course that would put any syllabus to shame. For many people, well into the 20th century, familiarity with the “important” history and literature marked someone as a properly educated person.
Ella’s well aware of this, and it’s why, in her first long conversation with the Duke in A FATAL FINALE, she makes a couple of well-placed references to Donne and Milton. The Duke’s realization that this “theatre person” is actually a very well-read lady, and Ella’s enjoyment of discussing literature with him, is the moment that their courtship starts, even if neither realizes it.
That’s also classically Victorian.
Reading and discussing good books was a very appropriate way for couples to get to know each other. Books were one of the few acceptable gifts for them to exchange; a gentleman could not give a lady any number of things without an implied insult to her virtue, but an improving or classic book was always safe.
Book talk was also useful in long-distance courtships, like Ella and the Duke’s. It’s no accident that he spends a great deal of time writing about his current reading material, and only a few lines on sweet talk. Until they’re at least engaged, and really, preferably married, no respectable couple would put too much in writing.
(Illicit couples happily put it ALL in writing – which is why returning the letters was such a thing…but that’s another post for another day!)
You’ll notice that most of Ella and Tommy’s reading is either historical or classic literature, with very little of the fiction of their time. That’s also deliberate. Part of it is simply they prefer learning to diversion.
But that’s not the only issue. There’s still a prejudice against reading novels as a less-than-serious pursuit, and our strivers would never play into that.
For Ella, there’s also something a bit darker. Many of the popular tales of the time featured poor orphans made good in some way, with florid descriptions of the sad little urchin’s suffering to heighten the joy of their ultimate success.
Ella doesn’t need to read that. She’s lived it.
So don’t expect to see much fiction on the shelves at Washington Square…with one big exception. Ella and Tommy love Sherlock Holmes…and why not?

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