‘A Pensive Moment’, by Charles Sillem Lidderdale (1831-1895).
Part 1 of 2
A FAMILY of ten children will be always called a fine family, where there are heads, and arms, and legs enough for the number; but the Morlands had little other right to the word, for they were in general very plain, and Catherine, for many years of her life, as plain as any. She had a thin awkward figure, a sallow skin without colour, dark lank hair, and strong features; so much for her person, and not less unpropitious for heroism seemed her mind. She was fond of all boys’ play and greatly preferred cricket, not merely to dolls, but to the more heroic enjoyments of infancy, nursing a dormouse, feeding a canary-bird, or watering a rose-bush. Indeed she had no taste for a garden, and if she gathered flowers at all, it was chiefly for the pleasure of mischief, at least so it was conjectured from her always preferring those which she was forbidden to take. Such were her propensities; her abilities were quite as extraordinary. She never could learn or understand anything before she was taught, and sometimes not even then, for she was often inattentive, and occasionally stupid. Her mother was three months in teaching her only to repeat the “Beggar’s Petition,”* and, after all, her next sister Sally could say it better than she did.
* A poem by Thomas Moss (1740-1808), minister of Brierly Hill and Trentham in Staffordshire, in which a beggar knocks at the door of a smart house in a well-to-do neighbourhood and tells a pitiable tale of hardship. The poem was one of a collection published anonymously in 1769. See The Beggar’s Petition.
Précis
Catherine Morland is destined to be the heroine of Jane Austen’s comic novel Northanger Abbey, but at the age of ten she would not, Austen tells us, have matched the conventional expectations of fans of romantic literature. Instead of being a fragile beauty, sensitive and dutiful, she was a little urchin, plain, naughty and quite unsentimental. (56 / 60 words)
Part Two
A spinet, that is, a small harpsichord.
Not that Catherine was always stupid; by no means; she learnt the fable of “The Hare and many Friends,”* as quickly as any girl in England. Her mother wished her to learn music; and Catherine was sure she should like it, for she was very fond of tinkling the keys of the old forlorn spinnet, so at eight years old she began. She learnt a year and could not bear it; and Mrs Morland, who did not insist on her daughters being accomplished in spite of incapacity or distaste, allowed her to leave off. The day which dismissed the music-master was one of the happiest of Catherine’s life. Her taste for drawing was not superior; though whenever she could obtain the outside of a letter from her mother, or seize upon any other odd piece of paper, she did what she could in that way by drawing houses and trees, hens and chickens, all very much like one another. Writing and accounts she was taught by her father; French by her mother. Her proficiency in either was not remarkable, and she shirked her lessons in both whenever she could. What a strange unaccountable character! for with all these symptoms of profligacy at ten years old, she had neither a bad heart nor a bad temper, was seldom stubborn, scarcely ever quarrelsome, and very kind to the little ones, with few interruptions of tyranny. She was, moreover, noisy and wild, hated confinement and cleanliness, and loved nothing so well in the world as rolling down the green slope at the back of the house.
Such was Catherine Morland at ten.
* Though numbered among Aesop’s fables, this tale was in fact written by English poet and dramatist John Gay (1685-1732) as a lesson on the moral that friendship, like love, loses meaning if it is spread too generously. See The Hare and Many Friends. Her liking for Gay’s verses and her resistance to the emotional manipulation of The Beggar’s Petition suggest that at the age of ten, Catherine was a girl convinced that friendship and sympathy shall be bestowed sparingly. At seventeen she was taken to Bath, where she began bestowing both in such a recklessly indiscriminate manner that Austen made one of English literature’s greatest comic novels out of it.
Précis
When Catherine felt drawn to anything, she could do it as well as anyone; but music, art and domestic economy all left her bemused and indifferent. Nonetheless, in a further surprise for fiction fans, despite offending against every canon of taste in romantic literature Catherine was not horribly wicked, but actually rather a nice little girl. (56 / 60 words)
