The Froebellious Child in Catherine Sinclair's Holiday House

David Rudd

The Lion and the Unicorn, Volume 28, Number 1, January 2004, pp.
53-69 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/uni.2004.0009

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/51363

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 Catherine Sinclair’s Froebellious Child 53

The Froebellious Child in Catherine Sinclair’s

Holiday House
David Rudd

Catherine Sinclair’s Holiday House (1839) is frequently seen as a turning

point in children’s fiction, a bridge between earlier didactic literature and
the more liberated, later work of Lewis Carroll and others. Peter Hunt
describes it as “a landmark text,” deserving, “with some reservations,” its
“revolutionary reputation” (49). For F. J. Harvey Darton it was “the best
original children’s book written up to that time, and one of the jolliest
and most hilarious of any period” (220). Humphrey Carpenter and Mari
Prichard describe it as “an almost revolutionary novel” (256), and
Barbara Wall, as “the first modern children’s novel” (45). It sometimes
seems, though, that such comments arise from an overemphasis on the
book’s first half. This is most obvious in Mary V. Jackson’s fulsome
praise, which manages to avoid any mention of the book’s traditional
death-scene ending (231–36). Anthologized extracts (especially of the
chapters, “The Grand Feast,” “The Terrible Fire” and “Uncle David’s
Nonsensical Story”) also make the work seem more modern than it is in
its entirety, leading Dennis Butts to suggest that the book is “much more
conventional in form than its reputation as a literary milestone would
suggest. It is really a very moral and religious tale . . .” ( “Victorianism”
83). As Lynne Vallone notes, nineteenth-century readers were also aware
of an uneasy tension in the book: “Charlotte Yonge (1869), like many
readers since, remained unconvinced by this ending to the novel, feeling
unprepared, after the larks of the first half of the book, to stand ‘beside
the ordinary stamp of pious death-bed’” (282).
Certainly, Laura’s final comment to her Uncle David is jarring: “‘Mrs.
Crabtree first endeavored to lead us aright by severity,—you and
Grandmamma then tried what kindness would do, but nothing was
effectual till now, when God Himself has laid His hand upon us’” (223).
But the ending is not so cut-and-dried, particularly when we consider

The Lion and the Unicorn 28 (2004) 53–69 © 2004 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
54 David Rudd

Sinclair’s disapproving comment in her first children’s book, Charlie

Seymour (1832)1: “Having been once requested by a friend in the country
to select some books for Sunday reading for her children, it surprised me
to observe what a large proportion of the volumes recommended had
frontispieces to represent a death-bed . . .” (Heywood 22). Thus, one can
either see the ending as a “sell-out” by Sinclair—an almost literal deus ex
machina in that nothing was effectual “till God Himself laid His hand
upon us”—or, as I shall argue, as more integral to Sinclair’s purpose. It
seems to me that the book is chiefly an exploration of different
conceptions of the child, and the consequences of these for the rearing of
children. This, in turn, led her to struggle with the problem of freedom
within constraints, in which Frank’s death plays a central part.
Holiday House details the development of the perennially naughty
siblings, Harry and Laura (a year older than her brother, though neither
age is given), who are contrasted with their older brother, Frank, a
paragon of virtue. Several critics persist in speaking of Harry and Lucy—
as does John Rowe Townsend (34) in his frequently revised standard
history, Written for Children, and this mistake lives on in Dennis Butts’s
entry on Holiday House in the recent Cambridge Guide to Children’s
Books. The reason would seem to be a confusion with the children in
Maria Edgeworth’s Early Lessons storybooks (1801), which feature a
Harry, a Lucy, and a Frank, the last being as pious and virtuous as
Sinclair’s character. We witness the children’s fun and games in the early
part of the book, made the more transgressive through the presence of
their tawse-wielding2 governess, Mrs. Crabtree, who is contrasted with
the children’s liberal guardians, their uncle, Major David Graham, and
grandmother, Lady Harriet. As the quotation from Charlotte Yonge
indicates, Frank’s lingering death becomes central in the latter half, the
book ending with Harry and Laura’s reformation.

Raising the Child

Different ways of conceptualizing and raising children are at the heart of

Holiday House: the older notion of a sinful being who needs to be
brought within the fold using necessary force; a more utilitarian notion
holding that facts are to be crammed in at every opportunity; and a newer
dispensation, which stresses an open and relaxed approach to childrearing
and education (which also raises concerns about sparing the rod and
spoiling the child). The governess, Mrs. Crabtree, is determined to “make
them good children, though she were to flay them alive first” (29). To her
comment, “‘You ought to be . . . painted black and blue like them wild
 Catherine Sinclair’s Froebellious Child 55

old Britons,’” Harry wittily responds: “‘I am black and blue sometimes
without being painted’” (50). However, the Crabtree treatment is shown
to be singularly ineffective: Harry and Laura are inveterate recidivists.
Laura, although a year older than Harry and “twice as often scolded by
Mrs. Crabtree,” is still as mischievous as ever (12). Mrs. Crabtree’s
beatings are so ineffectual that when she is finally dismissed, Harry
declares, “‘I am going to do some dreadful mischief to-night, so you will
be wanted to keep me in order’” (182). The whole raison d’être of
punishment is reversed: Harry’s affectionate concern for his governess
actually encourages him to be naughty so that she can beat him and be
seen as a necessary presence. It is scarcely surprising, then, that despite
her reputation, “all the terrors of Mrs. Crabtree, and her cat-o’-nine-tails,
were generally forgotten soon after she left the room” (18).
This doesn’t warrant Jackie C. Horne’s suggestion that “Mrs. Crabtree
. . . is not really severe at all. Only a sadist on the surface, she takes
pleasure not in the actual act of punishing the children, but in playing her
role as disciplinarian in the game of desire” (25). Horne draws on James
Kincaid’s well-known work, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victo-
rian Culture (1992), for this interpretation. Kincaid writes that the child
is a figure used by adults, its innocence and purity a lure for adults’ erotic
desires. The “naughty child” is a variant of this innocent figuration, but is
still seen to perform on behalf of the adult. Horne sees Crabtree caught
up in this “play of desire,” having “no real desire to make her charges
good children, for that would bring an end to the game and to her role in
it” (25). The passage from Holiday House that Horne then cites to
support her case—“‘You a good boy! . . . No! no! the world will be
turned into a cream-cheese first!’” (25)—actually undermines it. The
passage comes from the opening chapter, when the children’s naughty
behavior is being established, and is explicitly said to have occurred in
the past, “when Harry was a very little boy” (13). It expresses not
Crabtree’s desire, but her fear—fear about a lack of change in Harry’s
behavior. There is a shift in Crabtree’s role, just as there is in Harry’s
behavior. It is not just naughty children that Crabtree treats in this
disciplinary manner—hence it is hardly a “play of desire.” We also
witness her “busy scolding Betty, and storming at Jack the footboy” (20),
and, elsewhere in the book, we see her “in a rage” with a stranger, a
gardener (213). Crabtree is more simply a representative of an old-style
disciplinarian, common in children’s literature. She is “a daughter of
Mrs. Mason-Teachwell-Bell,” as Jackson (232) describes her. Moreover,
Crabtree is not the only corporal punisher in the book; we find a similar
approach in Laura’s piano teacher, who sticks the points of “a pair of
56 David Rudd

sharp-pointed scissors . . . into the offending finger” whenever Laura

plays a wrong note (184).
Crabtree’s “admirable ‘system’” (11) is, nonetheless, derided, as is
Crabtree herself, her name quite appositely depicting her “knotty”
nature. Before we even meet her, Uncle David speaks of “that old vixen”
(10). The narrator colludes, highlighting Mrs. Crabtree’s malapropisms:
“‘. . . the very statutes in the streets—would come running along . . .
them great pyramuses in Egypt will turn upside down . . .’” (134). It is
she who most clearly represents the “society for the suppression of
amusement” that Sinclair decries in her “Preface” (ix). Thus Crabtree
expresses Puritan misgivings about all things pleasurable or nonutilitarian.
Wasps, for example—unlike bees, the moralists’ favorite—she sees as
“‘Nasty useless vermin . . . What business have they in the world?
coming into other people’s houses, with nothing to do!’” (13). When the
family goes out to celebrate a British battle victory, Mrs. Crabtree objects
to the waste of candles, “‘Can’t people be happy in the dark?’” (135).
Seeming to fear what Mary Douglas terms “matter out of place” (35), she
won’t even tolerate “a grain of dust . . . in any corner of the nursery” (14).
Similarly Crabtree insists on rolling up Laura’s intractable hair “in large
stiff curl-papers, till they were round and hard as walnuts” (15), which
prevents Laura from sleeping.
Crabtree’s educational methods are singularly ineffective. She can take
no credit for Frank’s virtuous behavior. Instead he was fortunate enough
to experience a mother’s love—something that the two younger children
missed.
While there is no specific representative of the utilitarian, “Peter
Parley” approach to education in her novel, Sinclair still expresses her
disapproval of it as a method, in which “every effort is used to stuff the
memory, like a cricket-ball, with well-known facts and ready-made
opinions” (“Preface” vi). As she argues in the “Preface” to Holiday House:
The most formidable person to meet in society at present, is the mother of
a promising boy, about nine or ten years old; because there is no possible
escape from a volume of anecdotes, and a complete system of education
on the newest principles. The young gentleman has probably asked leave
to bring his books to the breakfast-room,—can scarcely be torn away from
his studies at the dinner-hour,—discards all toys,—abhors a holiday,—
propounds questions of marvelous depth in politics or mineralogy,—and
seems, in short, more fitted to enjoy the learned meeting at Oxford than
the exhilarating exercise of the cricket-ground; but if the axiom be true,
that “a little learning is a dangerous thing,” it has also been proved by
frequent, and sometimes by very melancholy experience, that, for minds
not yet expanded to maturity, a great deal of learning is more dangerous
still, and that in those school-rooms where there has been a society for the
 Catherine Sinclair’s Froebellious Child 57

suppression of amusement, the mental energies have suffered as well as

the health. (viii–ix)

Such “hot-housing” is also criticized within the novel. After she has been
asked to leave, Mrs. Crabtree speaks of Laura as “‘perfectly deaved
[deafened] wi’ edication’” under her new teacher (184). When Uncle
David tells his fairy story, he comments affectionately on the old days
when “toys were not then made to teach mathematics, nor story-books to
give instruction in chemistry and navigation” (120).
In contrast to these two rigid methods is the far more open, relaxed
approach of the children’s guardians, Uncle David and Lady Harriet, who
seek to provide the loving environment that a mother might more
normally afford. These two are generally tolerant of the children’s
naughtiness, aiming to guide and nurture the children within a Christian
environment. A key distinction is made between naughtiness and wicked-
ness. These children, it is repeatedly stressed, are high spirited, but they
would never have “told a lie, or done a shabby thing, or taken what did
not belong to them” (6); neither are they cruel or mean. Sinclair’s work
aligns itself with the values of educational theorists such as Johann
Pestalozzi (1746–1827) and Friedrich Froebel (1782 –1852). The latter’s
views are summarized by Hamilton:
Set . . . [the child] in the right environment in a loving home with teachers
who understand how to encourage growth but not to force it, in a place
where he can respond to the simplicities of nature and enjoy the
companionship of like-minded boys and girls, and he will surely come to
a knowledge of his own nature as a child of God and to his oneness with
his fellows. (174)

Both educational theorists stress that learning should not be forced so

that it might develop naturally. They believe in experience and conversa-
tion rather than explicit instruction, giving children space, and letting
them indulge their energies—even tearing, biting and breaking things
(which these two certainly do!). Pestalozzi also stressed the importance
of loving support and, significantly, was against the use of corporal
punishment. Froebel saw the mother (or her equivalent) as particularly
important. It is only Frank, the paragon, who is fortunate enough to
appreciate his mother’s love. Even as “a little boy,” we are told, he
“carefully . . . attended to his mamma’s instructions . . . frequently . . .
studied his Bible, and . . . diligently . . . learned his lessons” (10). Without
a mother’s guiding hand, the younger siblings have grown more trouble-
some. They also usually lack a father, as he spends most of the novel
recuperating on the continent; he can be seen as a precursor to Mr.
Craven in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911).
58 David Rudd

The influence of gardening metaphors, so central to Froebel’s project

of “growing” healthy young children (he invented the kindergarten), are
also prevalent in Sinclair. In her childrearing scheme,
. . . while many natural weeds would be eradicated, and many wild flowers
pruned and carefully trained, some lovely blossoms that spring spontane-
ously in the uncultivated soil, might still be cherished into strength and
beauty, far excelling what can be planted or reared for art. (“Preface” v–vi)

The importance of a space in which to grow seems central to Holiday

House. Sinclair’s deployment of this relatively new educational philoso-
phy fits well with her Christian Evangelical beliefs. Margaret Nancy Cutt
(Ministering Angels 38–39) notes that Evangelicals stressed individual
development in a controlled but loving family environment, itself sym-
bolic of God’s relationship to people. Or, in Lady Harriet’s words,
“‘Parents are appointed by God to govern their children as He governs
us’” (75). Although Laura credits them being led “aright” by Frank’s
death, their general development results from being allowed to mature at
their own rate in supportive surroundings. They are at least six years
older by the end of the novel. Like Froebelesque plants, they are seen to
have grown straight and true. Mrs. Crabtree starts to treat Harry “with a
little more respect than usual” after his part in trying to seize the thief
who attempts to steal Uncle David’s purse (144). In the following
chapter, “The poor boy,” it is Harry and Laura who bring this unfortunate
waif to the attention of their guardians, simultaneously teaching their
elders, as Uncle David says, “‘not to judge hastily from appearances’”
(150). This is followed by Frank’s departure, when Harry first becomes
aware of mortality, realizing, “with mournful apprehension . . . ‘Perhaps
we never may meet again!’” (163). The whip-happy side of Crabtree is
less evident here, undercutting Horne’s claim about Crabtree “endlessly
repeating the same role” (26). With the removal of Mrs. Crabtree, the two
children start “rapidly advancing in education” (Sinclair 184)—again,
undermining her disciplinary approach. Rather, it is through loving and
gentle treatment that Harry and Laura are helped in “that very difficult
transition” to maturity (186).
What Uncle David and Lady Harriet show is that there is no regi-
mented way of bringing up children; instead, they treat the two as people
with their own developmental trajectory which will, given love and
attention, blossom: “family affection, built on a strong foundation of
religion and morality” (167). Uncle David criticizes “the present system” in
which children are sent away to school, and often “scattered to different
schools,” so that they grow up almost strangers (166). “Parents,” mean-
while, rather than “educating their children,” become bored and “begin
 Catherine Sinclair’s Froebellious Child 59

writing books, perhaps theories of education” (167)! Openness, freedom,

a fairly egalitarian environment, and a loving (Christian) home seem to
be what Sinclair endorses instead of a rigid, doctrinal “system.” Uncle David
and Lady Harriet are seen as points of relative sanity in a world of excess.

Excess

Mrs. Crabtree’s excesses have already been mentioned—knocking in

obedience “like a nail into [the] head, with a few good severe blows”
(Sinclair 92)—but this is itself counterposed by the children’s excessive
behavior, which is explicitly flagged up in Sinclair’s “Preface”:
. . . the author has endeavoured to paint that species of noisy, frolicsome,
mischievous children, now almost extinct, wishing to preserve a sort of
fabulous remembrance of days long past, when young people were like
wild horses on the prairies, rather than like well-broken hacks on the road;
and when amidst many faults and eccentricities, there was still some
individuality of character and feeling allowed to remain. (vii)

“Mischievous” is an understatement in the light of their deeds: setting

their nursery on fire, smashing toys and crockery, and cartwheeling a
cake down a hill. It is a meiosis similar in magnitude to that made about
Max’s mischief-making in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are
(1963). Harry and Laura are likewise wild, “racing about as if they were
mad, perfectly screaming with joy” (21). As David Grylls says, “one
boggles at the children’s powerhouse mischief” (94). They epitomize the
“wild Instruments of Madness and Mischief” which Isaac Watts railed
against in Discourse on the Education of Children and Youth (1782) (qtd.
in Summerfield 79). Horne calls it “a frenzied, almost threatening tone”
(24), drawing on earlier comments by Robert Wolff and P. Gila Reinstein.
Frank is not immune to excess: “Never was there a more amiable,
pious, excellent boy than Frank, who read his Bible so attentively, and
said his prayers so regularly” (16–17). He garners the prizes at school,
yet is so selfless that his friend Peter Grey says of him that “‘Frank
scarcely remembers there is such a person as himself in the world,
therefore it is astonishing how he contrives to exist at all’” (167)—which
itself gestures towards Frank’s fate, foreshadowed in a number of ways:
such as Harry’s sudden apprehension at the prize-giving that he and his
brother “‘never may meet again!’” or, in Lady Harriet being given “a
black shade of himself [Frank],” which she refers to as “‘the shadow for
the substance’” (168), commenting that the two of them may meet again,
“‘perhaps very soon,’” obviously hinting at a posthumous rendezvous
(169). Even Frank’s death-bed scene, which dominates the second half of
60 David Rudd

the book, is excessive. Already perfect, Frank is the obvious candidate

for immolation; like Dickens’s Little Nell, he is incapable of further
development. As Mrs. Crabtree presciently declares, Frank is “‘too good
for this world, but he’ll not be here long,’” adding, “‘I wish we were all
as well prepared, and then the sooner we die the better’” (193)—an
unfortunately ironic comment, given the amount of time he does linger.
One does not quite need a heart of stone to read of Frank’s death without
laughing, to borrow Oscar Wilde’s aphorism, but it is certainly extended.
Peter Grey, Frank’s friend, is probably the most excessive character in
the book, especially his appetite. He wishes “‘it were possible to eat three
dinners, and two breakfasts, and five suppers every day’” (12). At a
picnic, where he eats three times as much as anyone else, Peter is heard
to declare, “‘I could swallow Arthur’s Seat if it were turned into a plum-
pudding’ . . . pocketing buns, apples, eggs, walnuts, biscuits, and
almonds, till his coat stuck out all round like a balloon” (56). The self-
interested Peter is regularly contrasted with the selfless Frank. Mrs.
Crabtree, whom Peter provokes whenever possible, dubs him “the father
of mischief” (134). He seems to delight in provoking her, unsettling both
her equipoise and her language, triggering malapropisms: “‘Peter Grey .
. . ought to be put into the monkey’s cage at the Geological gardens.’”
But Peter retorts with more deliberate parapraxis, saying that she would
need a “thrashing-machine” to handle him effectively (134). He makes
manifest the flimsy basis of her control, as, for example, neatly leaping
out of a window when she threatens to whip him “round the room like a
whipping-top” (29). When Mrs. Crabtree finds herself at the top of a long
ladder, leading to a hay-loft, Peter greets her at the top:
“Now you are the besiegers and I am the garrison,” cried Peter, when he
saw Mrs. Crabtree panting and toiling in her ascent. “We must make a
treaty of peace together, for I could tumble you over in a minute, by
merely pushing this end a very little to one side.”
“Do not touch it, Master Peter,” cried Mrs. Crabtree, almost afraid he
was in earnest. “There is a good boy—be quiet!”
“A good boy!” whispered Peter to himself. “What a fright Mrs.
Crabtree must be in before she said that!” (93)

Unlike Uncle David, Mrs. Crabtree’s authority is based only on having,

literally, the whip hand. But it is not just adults whom Peter antagonizes;
his behavior even provokes Laura into a crabby mode. She complains,
“‘Peter Grey . . . you are an exceedingly naughty boy . . . As a
punishment for being so rude, you shall have nothing more to eat all this
evening’” (27). Peter also introduces Harry to gambling, taking Harry’s
half-crown off him in the process (176).
 Catherine Sinclair’s Froebellious Child 61

The children’s guardians are the points of moderation in this excessive

cast. But, coming from different generations, they have slightly differing
views. Lady Harriet certainly has a tendency to moralize, leading
Barbara Willard to lament her “endless preaching,” despite being “a truly
delightful lady, kind and gentle” (vii). Lady Harriet seems a forerunner
of the Duchess in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, believing that
there is a moral in everything, if one could but find it. Uncle David, on
the other hand, is far less dogmatic in his moralizing, functioning more
like a mirror, refracting and undercutting others’ excesses with parodic
wit. In response to Mrs. Crabtree’s rule-bound dicta, he thus retorts with
his own impish examples: “‘you must never speak ill of Mrs. Crabtree
herself, till she is out of the room’” (16). His one piece of “serious,
important advice” to the children is, “‘Never crack nuts with your teeth’”
(20)—an aphorism rarely found stitched into samplers.
This lack of moral injunction comes across clearly in one of the most
famous chapters in the book—“Uncle David’s nonsensical story about
giants and fairies”—which contains some quite Carrollian nonsense, like
the famous line about the giant Snap-’em-up being so tall that he “was
obliged to climb up a ladder to comb his own hair!” (123). It should also
be remembered that the book was published at a time when fairy tales
were still considered by some to be inappropriate reading material. This
said, their Uncle’s tale does purport to espouse a moral—except that, as
others have also noted (Horne 30), the morality is confounded, partly by
the title itself, a “nonsensical story,” and partly, again, by the play on
excess. Hence the reformed Master No-book, thanks to the good fairy,
Teach-all, becomes “the most diligent, active, happy boy,” astonishing
“all the masters at school by his extraordinary reformation” (128).
The ironies are various, but it is notable that Harry draws parallels
between this reformed character and his own brother—“‘Frank, you must
have spent a month with the good fairy’” (129)—rather than his Uncle. In
fact, it is the latter’s envious position, “‘sitting all day at the club with
your hat on your head, and nothing to do but look out of the window’”
(119), as Harry puts it, that prompts the tale—a story in which the
reformed No-book comes to abhor idleness (and holidays, too), “laying
about him with his walking-stick in the most terrific manner and beating
little boys within an inch of their lives”—but only those who are “lazy,
idle, or greedy” (128). Although Mrs. Crabtree, with her punitive
inclinations, is an obvious target here, their Uncle David is the most
likely recipient of such treatment!
Uncle David is exactly like one of those “noisy, frolicsome, mischie-
vous children” from “the days of yore” described at the beginning of his
62 David Rudd

tale, when “holidays continued yet in fashion” (120). These are the very
sorts of children that Sinclair openly celebrates in her “Preface.” It is not
insignificant, then, that Uncle David is himself often described in
childish terms, “as full of fun and spirits as the youngest boy in a
playground” (146); nor that he himself names Peter Grey as No-book’s
“first cousin” (120).
This mischievous modern Prometheus had yet to come into being in
children’s literature. Before this, he (usually) was only a literary,
Romantic ideal. His—and her—arrival was due partly thanks to Sinclair’s
example. Certainly she held on to the framework of the moral tale, but
her use of techniques that Mikhail Bakhtin would describe as
“carnivalesque” allowed her, with her rich cast of characters, to exceed
its bounds.

The Carnivalesque

“Excess” has already been discussed, but other relevant elements of the
carnivalesque might include an emphasis on the body, on eating, and,
perhaps especially, on an inversion of the established order. Mrs.
Crabtree seems especially to fear such inversion. Hannah More describes
an uprising of “the rights of children,” in Strictures on the Modern
System of Female Education (1799), seeing them adopt “something of
that spirit of independence, and disdain of control, which characterize the
times” (qtd. in David Grylls 196). In “The Grand Feast,” for instance, the
children write invitations for tea at their grandmother’s writing-table:
“Master Harry Graham and Miss Laura wish to have the honour of
drinking tea with us to-morrow at six o’clock” (22). This “spirit of
independence” is halted by Mrs. Crabtree, who forbids them food at their
feast, leading Peter Grey, almost the personification of the carnivalesque
in his bodily appetites, to call their home “Famine Castle”: “‘Shall we all
be cannibals, and eat one another?’” he asks (28). Peter also tries to
invert the order of things by tumbling Mrs. Crabtree off the ladder,
terming her the besieger, and forcing her to call him a “good boy” (93).
It is also in keeping that one of Uncle David’s favorite punishments for
Harry, “to keep him in mind of his silly adventure[s],” is to have him
“wear his coat turned inside out” (178). Another rather pompous, noise-
hating relative, Lord Rockville, lives at Holiday House itself and
ridicules the children’s tale of being chased by a mad bull. Later he is
pursued by the bull himself and is forced not only to break into a run, but
also climb a tree. The inversion is completed when he “burst[s] into loud
peals of laughter” (106), finding himself unable to regain any gravitas.
 Catherine Sinclair’s Froebellious Child 63

As Holiday House itself only appears in two chapters, it might seem an

inappropriate title, certainly less so than an earlier prospect, Laura
Graham, which better conveys a sense of character development, and
would have tied it more closely to its subsequent sequel, Sir Edward
Graham (1849). This later novel, which was retitled The Mysterious
Marriage in later editions, has Peter Grey return and become engaged to
Laura (Cutt, “Catherine Sinclair” 176). In terms of the carnivalesque,
Holiday House is quite fitting. The house itself is presented as a magical,
escapist realm, as Laura exclaims:
“Oh, I am too happy! I scarcely know what to do with so much happiness.
How delightful it would be to stay here all my life, and never go to bed,
nor say any more lessons, as long as I live!” (67)

But the free-and-easy connotations of the word “holidays” occur else-

where in the book, too, invoking the very notion of childhood that
Sinclair wishes to celebrate. Uncle David speaks of the good old “days of
yore,” when “Lessons were . . . considered rather a plague—sugar-plums
were still in demand—holidays continued yet in fashion” (120), whereas
the reformed, whip-wielding No-book “detested holidays” (128). Harry,
too, we are informed, is known at school as “‘the holiday maker,’ because
if ever a holiday was wished for, Harry always became leader in the
scheme” (183).
Aside from the stress on holidays, other standard markers of the
carnivalesque should also be noted: gambling, horse-racing, drunken-
ness, fairground and sideshow attractions, references to circus acts, to
nursery rhymes and chapbook characters. There is even a bawdy, topsy-
turvy drinking song that Uncle David teaches to Harry:
“I wish I were a brewer’s horse,
Five quarters of a year,
I’d place my head where was my tail,
And drink up all the beer.” (52)

The carnivalesque is manifest in the book’s structure and title as well.

The chapters in the favored first half (which actually comprises two-
thirds of the book’s length) have a light, episodic feel, which is partly
explained in Sinclair’s “Preface,” where she writes that her tales of “the
terrors of Mrs. Crabtree” and the antics of Harry and Laura (x) were
originally oral before expanded into published form. The shift in tone in
the latter half is similar to other children’s books which originated in this
way;3 Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908), for example,
where the rollicking adventures of Toad, based on stories Kenneth told
his son Alastair, become part of a larger, pantheistic structure.
64 David Rudd

The title of Holiday House’s introductory chapter, “Chit Chat,”

emphasizes this oral, inconsequential feel; the following eight chapters
continue the paratactic structure, but have little internal linking. They
begin with such phrases as, “One night” (31), “Once upon a time” (19,
60), “One fine sultry day” (84), and “One evening” (94). They end on the
words of the chapter title, which are capitalized, as the punchline of a
joke might be; for example, “The Grand Feast” ends with:
. . . and whenever any one of those little boys or girls again happened to
meet Harry or Laura, they were sure to laugh and say, “When are you
going to give us another GRAND FEAST.” (31)

This oral style is more overt in the book’s central chapter, “Uncle David’s
Nonsensical Story about Giants and Fairies,” which is “told” by the
Uncle. Although the chapter starts this way, it ends up as the most serious
in the book thus far, foreshadowing later events. There is a distinct
turning point, as the episodic events give way to a more consequential
narrative. The first half, in other words, depicts a present-centered,
transient world; each day brings forth fresh adventures that, however
eventful, are just as easily forgotten.
Sinclair seems to be trying to recreate the experiential reality of the
child—as the Romantics conceived of it—as a present-centered world
where events are not rationally linked, cause to effect. This ephemerality
especially annoys Mrs. Crabtree, who complains that the children’s
memories are “like a sieve, which let out everything they were desired to
keep in mind” (15). At the end of the book, Sinclair is explicit about this
self-centered, carefree existence, quoting a poem by Princess Amelia.4
Unthinking, idle, wild, and young,
I laugh’d and talk’d, and danc’d, and sung
And, proud of health, and frolic vain,
Dream’d not of sorrow, care, or pain,
Concluding, in those hours of glee,
That all the world was made for me. (224)

It is, again, carnivalesque in its attention to the pleasures of the body,

invoking a sense of what I have elsewhere termed a “time-out” atmo-
sphere (Rudd 102–8), a time when holidays are the norm. Kenneth
Grahame’s The Golden Age (1895) and Dream Days (1898) seem to
evoke the same mood, but with a more wistful elegiac feel. But this is
only the first half of the poem; the second helps forge the book’s unity,
reflecting Frank’s death:
But when the days of trial came,
When sorrow shook this trembling frame,
 Catherine Sinclair’s Froebellious Child 65

When folly’s gay pursuits were o’er,

And I could dance or sing no more;
It then occurr’d how sad ’twould be
Were this world only made for me. (224)

In the words of the popular song, “The Carnival is Over.”5 The sobering
effect of Frank’s death might make Sinclair’s book seem merely a
product of its time, but I think not. Sinclair did not like the fact that so
many children’s books ended with a deathbed scene; more significantly,
her avowed aim was to celebrate that almost extinct, noisy, frolicsome
and mischievous child—not the outmoded Franks.6 That Frank’s death is
so labored could well have to do with Sinclair’s own loss of a brother,
James, in similar circumstances; in her “Preface,” Sinclair writes that
James was the model for Frank.
Frank’s death differs from many earlier fictional deaths, where it is the
naughty child who pays for transgressing. As David Grylls notes, “Harry,
like Mrs. Sherwood’s Augusta Noble [in The History of the Fairchild
Family], plays with prohibited candles, but instead of lighting the fire he
must live in for all eternity, he merely burns half the house down” (94).
Not only does Harry escape the flames, but his Uncle is “hardly able to
help laughing . . . [at] such mischievous children!” (Sinclair 37). That
“father of mischief” (134), Peter Grey, who is regularly contrasted with
Frank, also rudely thrives.
Frank certainly provides no incentive for children to emulate his
example, while the others do. Instead, he seems to function precisely to
tease out the deeper implications of Holiday House in line with Sinclair’s
Evangelical views, which are close to those of Froebel and Pestalozzi.
Children are to be nurtured in protected spaces, such as gardens or
kindergarten; they are seen as holy innocents, linked with the Garden of
Eden. Here they can be watched over by a greater power, but one with
earthly representatives, too. The role played by two gardeners, indepen-
dently, is notable. When Harry is trapped in an upstairs room at a
neighboring house because the key has broken in the lock, it is a gardener
who climbs a ladder to receive him. In contrast to Peter’s similar
confrontation with Crabtree, this man compassionately “spread his arms
out, while Harry slowly let himself drop” (118). When Frank is ill, again
a gardener performs the charitable act; this one saves strawberries for the
dying boy and inadvertently refuses to sell them to Mrs. Crabtree (213).
This larger, protective space has always been present in the book as the
very thing that guarantees the children’s freedom. I think that the title
Holiday House is also meant to encompass this more holy space in which
there are, in the words of Jesus, “many mansions,” or in modern
66 David Rudd

translations “rooms,” (John 14:2). Carnival itself, it should be remem-

bered, can only exist within a realm of law, of normality.
This, then, makes Frank almost literally the deus ex machina: a Christ-
like figure who dies on behalf of the other children. He consolidates
Harry and Laura’s realization that they are part of a larger pattern, that
the world is not just made for them. As against the old punitive covenant
of Mrs. Crabtree, of lex talionis (which, it should be remembered, Frank
is instrumental in having removed), Frank represents the new covenant of
loving thy neighbor as thyself.

The Froebellious Child

The book has a unity whereby the children’s freedom to play is

vouchsafed by this larger scheme. This is not to say that the book is read
in this way. Sinclair’s delight in excess, both in terms of content and
structure, ensures that “the middle . . . arouses expectations that exceed
the closure” (48), to use Alan Sinfield’s description of the dissident
reading process. Sinclair both depicts and enacts this, giving substance
and, indeed, encouragement to the “Froebellious” child (if I can risk such
a portmanteau term), whose time was yet to come. Moreover, Sinclair
suggests that adults such as Uncle David could themselves be more
childlike. One thinks of Carroll’s future Father William, balancing an eel
on his nose. It is hardly surprising, then, that readers, such as “one lively
little girl of nine years old,” were “exceedingly dissatisfied with the last
chapter,” and rewrote it for themselves (Sinclair, “Postscript” 347)—in
effect demonstrating the power of “the middle” of her text.
Sinclair’s Froebellious child is distinct from the more stereotypical,
“rebellious” child of the Romantics. Rather than an isolated person, the
emphasis is on the plural, children, in relationships, connected to peers
and family. While I would agree with Horne’s contention that Sinclair’s
“novel questions this [Romantic] construct,” I would disagree that it
“ultimately abandons it for a more traditionally feminine didactic tale”
(31). For Sinclair questions both the Romantic construct and the femi-
nine didactic tale, working in a tradition engaged in problematizing and
rewriting such notions, as argued by Mitzi Myers and Victor Watson.
There is a more cynical take on this Froebellious child, looking at the
process in Foucauldian terms. For the book dramatizes an obvious shift
from Crabtree’s older, disciplinary regime—where punishment is delib-
erately a spectacle, inscribed on the body (Harry’s “black and blue”
coloring)—toward what Foucault terms “bio-power” (History 140–45).
That is, the child imagines that he or she is constantly under surveillance
 Catherine Sinclair’s Froebellious Child 67

from above, hence internalizing authority and confessing all misdemean-

ors, which Foucault outlines in Discipline and Punish and “Body/
Power.” Crabtree has many of the qualities of this surveillance:
She seemed always watching . . . and . . . had more ears than other people,
or slept with one eye open, as, whatever might be done, night or day, she
overheard the lowest whisper of mischief, and appeared able to see what
was going on in the dark. (Sinclair 8)

However, Crabtree can never succeed while she herself is observed

engaging in surveillance. Thanks to the “prodigious bunch of jingling
keys in her pocket,” she is “like a rattlesnake” (14) who warns of her
approach. It is only her more liberal guardians and, ultimately God, who
can foster this notion of an all-seeing being and of the children
internalizing their own sense of conscience, of a need to confess. But in
this very move, as Foucault details, “power reaches into the very grain of
individuals . . . their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives”
(“Prison Talk” 39).

David Rudd is a senior lecturer in the Department of Cultural &

Creative Studies, Bolton Institute, U.K. He has published sixty papers
and three books on children’s literature, the latest Enid Blyton and the
Mystery of Children’s Literature (Palgrave 2000). An earlier version of
this paper was first presented at “The Child Reader, 1740–1840” a
conference at De Montfort University, Leicester, England, July 2002.

Notes
1
Barbara Willard (vi) mistakenly refers to this as being written after Holiday
House.

2
A “tawse” was a piece of leather, split into separate strands, used for corporal
punishment.

3
For Barbara Wall, this shift in narratorial stance makes it a flawed work,
“uneven in tone and uncomfortably episodic in structure, with an uneasily
shifting narrative stance” (43).

4
Princess Amelia was George III’s favorite daughter who, like Frank, also
died tragically young, helping to bring about the return of the king’s insanity.

5
This song was penned by Tom Springfield and was made famous in the
1960s by the Australian pop group The Seekers.
68 David Rudd

6
An abridged edition by Olive Allen (1908) “excluded the moral and religious
passages and the sad ending” (Carpenter and Prichard 257).

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