What Makes a Bad Book Good: Elsie Dinsmore

Prologue

Item: One co-author of this article found a pack of Old Maid cards drawn by her three daughters. The pairs were daintily dressed Victorian children of no particular literary background: Jamie and Janie, Nancy and Norma, standing for their portraits with their hoops and sand pails. Except for one pair, drawn by daughter #2: a child labeled Enna maliciously smashing a doll, and its mate, a crumpled heap of a child labelled Elsie.

Item: Daughter #1, with swollen eyes, laughing and crying simultaneously, "I get so mad at myself every time I read Elsie Dinsmore! I know it's an awful, soupy book but I always weep buckets just the same!"

Item: The co-author, realizing her daughters were near Biblical illiterates, undertook to read some Bible to them one night, starting with the story of Joseph. She did not recall that Joseph is left languishing in the pit while the story of Judah and his daughter-in-law Tamar is interpolated. Suddenly into it, she plowed bravely ahead, providing exegesis on such matters as Hebrew law in respect to brothers fathering children for the deceased, spilling seed on the ground, harlots, the double standard which would have allowed Judah to send Tamar to the torch for adultery, while he went scot-free, and finally the birth of twins, one of whom thrust an arm from the womb, was quickly tagged as first born with a red thread, and then inexplicably was delivered second. It took half an hour to cover thirty verses, and at the end there was silence for the space of several moments. Then daughter #3, age ten, turned from staring into the darkened backyard and said, "Do you mean to tell me Elsie Dinsmore read that?"

Daughter #2 did not draw Frank and Joe Hardy as the only literary figures on the Old Maid cards. Daughter #1 did not say, "I know Pollyanna is a bad book but I weep buckets." Daughter #3 did not exclaim, "Did Nancy Drew read that?" No. The bad book whose power all these items attest to, the bad book that had become such a part of their lives was Elsie Dinsmore. On the basis of this evidence, along with testimony too numerous to quote from readers of Elsie both young and old, as well as their own fascination with the story, the co-authors maintain that any book as bad as Elsie Dinsmore must have something good about it to exert such power.

There is an honorable tradition of making a good book bad: Gulliver is bowdlerized. Uncle Remus speaks BBC English. Tom Sawyer is abridged, or straitjacketed into 3rd grade word lists, or cast into a comic book so one can almost avoid reading entirely. The Little House on the Prairie indeed finishes the process, by becoming a bad TV show.

In this paper our interest lies in the opposite direction. Are there any patently bad books that are good? And good in and of themselves, without outside tampering or mutilation? Perchance are there any great bad books, so transcendental in their badness that they will survive the ages? Friends, there is one. The authors maintain that Elsie Dinsmore is such a classic. Unfortunately, Elsie Dinsmore has been out of print more than a generation, and if remembered in critical works it is only as an object of ridicule. We hope however, that once we have brought this literary injustice to your attention, all of us, true to the Modern Language Association motto, Ex obscuritate, lux! will help to restore Elsie to her rightful pedestal in American letters.¹

It was in part this MLA tradition which narrowed our selection from the wide range of better-known dreadful books. Black Beauty is available in every dime store, and Horatio Alger is enjoying a revival on the paperback racks. But Elsie surpasses Alger in badness, and is, in addition, a woman. Ah, you say, but that still leaves Black Beauty. One co-author, a social historian, did seriously urge as our model that epitome of cruelty and injustice to women...