THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A CHILD.* IT would have been more
satisfactory if this very singular book had come into the world accompanied by some sort ef definition of the class of work it is supposed by its author to belong to. But as no indication is given, we are compelled to decide the question for ourselves upon internal evidence. And internal evidence suggests that we should take it as a piece a genuine—though net necessarily veraeious—auto- biography. But take it whatever way we will—whether as dubious biography or crude fiction of the realistic type—we have no hesitation in pronouncing it a preposterous and un- justifiable performance. In the first place, the title is a misnomer. An Autobiography of a Child means in fiction an imaginary history of a child's life written as a child might write it at the age of the hero or heroine of the events recorded in the book. And in biography it means a child's true history written by itself in childhood. This book is neither of these things, and does not profess to be either of them : it is merely a slipshod memoir, written by a middle- aged woman, of the zeal or imagined experiences of her own diatoblography of a ChM. London : William Blackwood and Sons. (C8.) remote childhood. Supposing all that the writer tells us to be true, we grant that these experiences were extraordinary enough to almost justify their publication ; though we should still have to find fault with the taste of the woman who could deliberately sit down in middle life to tell in print such discreditable tales of her own mother, and to dress up her record of family scenes in the sensational style that appeals to the largest public of the day. If the object of the writer was to save other children from similar ill-usage to that which her heroine suffered, she should have told her story simply and seriously, given vouchers for its state- ments, and dedicated her publication to the Society for the Pre- vention of Cruelty to Children. But she gives no vouchers, and apparently has no object in view but that of making amusing copy out of her memories. For every now and then she throws into the gruesome narrative a remark or two of light and cynical character, calculated to convince the reader that after all a violent mother and an indecent convent education do not prevent a child from getting a great deal of fun out of life, and that when it is all past and over one may look back upon it chiefly as amusing experience. The book is anonymous. And not only is the author's name suppressed, but, with one odd exception, all the names of the people who come into the story are left out. We are told that an Irish boy who was the precocious lover of the seven-year-old heroine grew up to be no less notable a person than Mr. O'Donovan Bosse,. And this name and the coincidence of the outbreak of the Franco-German War with the time of Angela's departure from her convent-school at twelve years old, are the data by which the book may be given adefinite place in time. " Lysterby " is a name we do not find in any gazetteer, but allusions to the historical and political associations of the neighbouring towns suggest that the place intended should be looked for on the map of England somewhere near Warwick, Leamington, Coventry, and Nuneaton. No doubt a good many readers will be able at once to identify Angela and her parents, as well as the pretty place where the convent-school was situated. For the family, if they ever existed at all, must have been people in a good social position, and their habits and characters were so extraordinary that their portraits cannot fail to be recognised.
The mother, who in more senses than one may be called the most striking figure of the book, was a Scotchwoman ; very beautiful, with yellow hair, blue, unsmiling eyes which froze the heroine's soul whenever she met their glance, and white sculpturesque hands continually occupied in seizing, clutching, banging, and generally maltreating her children. She was very learned also, and very courageous, had exquisite taste and success in dress, and a most admirable gift of perfect truthful- ness. Nobody in her family told lies ; lying was, indeed, a thing inconceivable among them. It is almost a relief, how- ever, to learn from a good deal that happens in the book that the children could act lies if they did not tell them, and that they did not scruple to deceive their mother when necessary. The antipathy with which this beautiful virago inspired Angela in childhood, and the way in which the antipathy died out in later life, are among the mysteries that "seem strange" to the writer. For our part, granted the banging habits– which in their grotesque irrelevance remind us of nothing so much as the traditional ways of Punch in the show with his wife and baby—granted these habits, we have no difficulty in understanding the antipathy. We are only puzzled how to reconcile the writing of the book with the view of the mother that came to the author in middle life. But upon this matter we must allow her to tell her own story I recall this feeling [the early antipathy] as part of my child- hood's sufferings, and I wonder that the woman who inspired it should, in middle life, appear to me a woman of large and liberal and generous character, whose foibles and whose rough temper in perspective have acquired rather a humorous than an antipathetic aspect. But children, but girls are not hnmourists, and they take life and their elders with a lamentable gravity."
The book shows the mother liberal chiefly in blows, and these, it is particularly explained, she never administered in punish- ment, but only out of resentment against the children for being alive, and sometimes, in the case of Angela, out of jealousy.
If a visitor showed kindness to the child, the mother would snatch her away and bang her head on the floor. Once a foot- man interfered, and immediately gave warning in order that he might speak his mind with a clear conscience. Once a young lady in a silk gown saved her, but the young lady never came to the house again. This ogress had-
"A troop of pretty, engaging children, mostly girls, only one of wh Dm she was ever known to kiss or caress, and to the others she w ,s worse than the traditional Stepmother in fairy-tales. It was on y afterwards I learned that these proud creatures I, in my abject sot tnde, hated and envied, lived in the same deadly fear of her with which her cold blue eyes and thin cruel lips inspired me."
All these girls were beautiful, and Angela was beautiful too. There was a town house in Dublin where the mother and the children lived with a very nice stepfather, whose place in the family it is not easy to ascertain. One is at first inclined to think that he was the father of all the children except Angela, but that is a theory that will not work, for one finds out by degrees that a great many of the "proud creatures" were her elders, and tormented her as only older and stronger children could. And, again, some were younger, and one of the younger ones, a little vixen of five years old, was told by the mother that she was "a queen and Angela her slave," with results of mutual antagonism that led to pitched battle, in which the slave knocked the queen down and left her lying low, "with an ugly red stain on her white cheek." After this disaster arrangements were made for the removal of Angela to a convent-school at "Lysterby," where new persecutions awaited her. Looking back upon the time of this transporta- tion, the author is puzzled to account for the sudden trans- formation of her nature :— " The start in Lysterby ends my patient martyrdom. Here I became the active and abominable little fiend unkindness and ill. management made of one of the gentlest and most sensitive natures. The farther I travelled the road to childhood the more settled became my conviction that grown-up humanity, which I gradually began to loath more than even I once had feared, was my general implacable enemy. I might have grown sly and slavish in this conviction ; but I am glad to say that I took the opposite course. I may be said to have planted myself against a moral wall and proudly defied all the authorities of Church and State to come on,' hitting in blind recklessness out at every one, quite indifferent to blow and defeat. Little Angela of Kildare and Dublin, over whose sorrows I have invited the sympathetic reader to weep, was a pallid and pathetic figure. But Angela of Lysterby held her own,—more even than her own, for she fought for others as well as for herself, and gave back (with a great deal more trouble at least) as much pain and affliction as she endured."
Truly, as the writer observes in her first chapter, "memory is a random vagabond and plays queer tricks." The author's memory appears at this point to have played her a great many queer tricks. She must have forgotten that in describing the scene between herself and her five-year-old sister, she said : "I was a proud, fierce little devil." She must also have for- gotten how much spirit she showed in her attempt at running away from the town house in Dublin, and how very pleasant she found all the grown-up policemen who came to her rescue. It was not the grown-up world that Angela most dreaded at home. But upon her own showing, that bevy of proud sisters, whom she describes so well that for once we are inclined to take her report without a grain of salt, 64 were not kinder to me than my mother. I was an alien to them, and I loved strangers. They could not understand a sensitiveness naturally morbid, and nurtured upon affection. It was impossible that they could escape the coarsening influence of my mother's extraordinary treatment and neglect of them. Left to grow up without love or moral training, cuffed and scolded, allowed illimitable liberty from dawn to dark, they were more like boys than girls. They never kissed one another, or any one else. They were straightforward, honest, rather barbarous in their indifference to sentiment, deeply attached to each other under a mocking manner, vital, and surprisingly vivid and individual for children. There was not a particle of vanity or love of dress amongst the lot, though beauty was their common heritage. Their fault was that they never considered the sensibilities of a less breezy nature ; that they were rough, unkind, for the fan of the thing, and could never understand the suffering they inflicted upon me."
Girls like this are just what one expects to find in the house of the mother Angela describes and the cheery Irish step_ father who was so good-natured and pleasant and saved even Angela many a beating. What a sensitive boy suffers from his comrades at school, a sensitive girl has to endure at home, where the tone is given by a majority of elder sisters of this robust, unsoftened mettle. But Angela lived only part of her time at home before she was sent to school. Her mother hated her and put her out to nurse in the country, where she was perfectly happy with the kindest of peasant foster-parents. She had also a mad grandfather, whom she found a charming and sympathetic companion_ And even at the convent-school, though there was one terrible nun, called "Sister Esmeralda," who persecuted her, and a brawny lay-sister who beat her cruelly ; yet it was the evidence, true or false, of the " nizan little cad" Frank, that got her into trouble. And at Lysterby as elsewhere, many influential grown- up people were kind to her. - Her stepfather came like a genial god with handsome face and golden beard, and had her out to spend the day, at the 'Craven Arms.' Hampers of good things came from home at Christmas time, and were eaten in the dormitories with a freedom from restriction quite astonishing to parents acquainted with the rules of modern preparatory schools about the consumption of home contributions. Mother Aloysius is a most consoling figure, and the episode of the Bishop is calculated to fill with envy the average sensitive boy and girl who is unhappy at school. On the whole, reading between the lines, and making what allowance we can for the inconsistencies of the narrative, we arrive at the conclusion that Angela must have inherited a good deal of her mother's rough temper, and somehow missed the robustness of character that was a saving grace in the sisters ; and that she only seemed to herself meek at home because she was habitually kept in order by tempers older than her own, though now and then when she came into collision with a younger child, she could show herself as "fierce a little devil " as any of the family. We gather also from many passages of rapid and fallacious psychology, in which the writer, arguing from her own temperament, arrives at some false generalisations about child nature in the mass, that she was hysterical, self-conscious, vain, and morbid in no common degree. And we are sorry to say that the style in which the book is written, and some of the matter it contains, lead us to fear that the middle-aged woman has not left all these traits of the child behind. The obvious insanity or semi-insanity of the mother [we accept the mother for the moment on the daughter's showing] may be pleaded as an excuse for the bed taste of the daughter's book, as it no doubt was the cause of much of the child's misery. But people who turn 'Queen's evidence must not expect their statements to pass unchallenged or their attitude to be spared criticism. And we could not conscientiously take leave of this preposterous volume Without saying that there are some things in the chapter called "A Princess of Legend" which are so disgu.sting that they ought to discredit any writer. Angela may, or may not, have been cruelly whipped by the nuns. She may, or not, have broken the statue and told lies. She may, or not, have been made to prepare for her first confession in a very injudicious manner. But nothing can excuse the coarseness with which the writer allows herself to make fun out of her own childish mispronunciations of words which no woman of decent feeling can bear to think of as coming from a child's lips. Nor was there the slightest necessity for introducing into the Av,tobio- graph?' of a Child the ugly story of Molly O'Connell. We do not deny that there are many lively scenes and amusing episodes in the book. But these elements will not redeem it in the eyes of people of good taste and good sense. We have only to say in conclusion that we sincerely hope that it will not set the fashion for a whole series of similar productions by Other writers carrying memories of violent mothers and stormy homes. The instinctive loyalty of children almost always keeps them silent about the scandals in their homes, in'the years before they have come to discretion. And one of the best uses men and women can make of discretion, when they come to it, is to go on keeping the holy silence this anonymous writer has wantonly broken.
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