Elizabeth Stuart Phelps: Trauma and Children's Literature in the Nineteenth-Century

Dear Bookbird Readers,

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, an American writer in the late nineteenth to early twentieth-centuries, is an influential figure in the history of children's literature. Phelps was born in Massachusetts in 1844, and was a strong advocate for women's rights and the abolition of vivisection in America. She supported herself throughout her adulthood as a writer, and her hunger for social change is inherently present throughout her writing. Phelps found great success as an author of adult fiction, but a large portion of her literature was written for children. She published regularly in children's periodicals such as Youth's Companion and Our Young Folks, and her children's novels, such as the Gypsy Breynton series, were well loved throughout American Sunday schools. Phelps' literature consistently reflects her own goals for her society, and she maintains a recognizable and instructive voice throughout her children's narratives.

Phelps understood the inadequacies of late nineteenth-century American society, and sought to make progressive changes by encouraging young people to take action. Unlike many children's authors in her period, Phelps does not conceal truths about subjects deemed uncomfortable to the upper classes, and she exposes her readers to the traumatic realities of street children and impoverished orphans. In "Bobbit's Hotel," a short story published in Our Young Folks in 1870, Phelps tells the story of Bobbit, "[a] little fellow, not much higher than a yardstick" (482), whose struggle for survival is cut short after a heroic attempt to provide adequate shelter to two orphaned Irish boys. The story takes place on a stormy night in Boston, where Bobbit is standing "in a little snow drift, up to his knees" (482). He had earned fifteen cents earlier in the day by doing odd jobs in the streets, so he sets out to buy himself a good meal from the bakery. At the bakery, Bobbit meets two Irish orphans and takes it upon himself to feed the boys and offer them shelter in his "hotel." Phelps' readers quickly learn that what Bobbit considers his "hotel" is actually "an old locomotive boiler, rusty, and half buried in a heap of rubbish" (484). The storm is relentless during the night, and Bobbit, determined to remain a hospitable host to his guests, freezes to death in his effort to keep the orphans warm and comfortable. Phelps exposes her young readers to the tragic reality

of Bobbit's struggle for existence, and uses his trauma as a means of connecting young people to the real suffering of impoverished street children. In the instance of Bobbit, Phelps uses traumatic experience to spark empathy in more fortunate children, and Bobbit's benevolence restores the forgotten humanity of impoverished street youth.

The protagonist of Phelp's "One Way to Get an Education," is as abandoned by social systems as Bobbit. The story, told by a female physician, centers on a boy who works in the mills; yearning for a better life, young Jake deliberately puts his hand into the machine in order to be let off work so that he may attend school while he heals. Phelps's wrote several other narratives about children in the factories, including Up Hill; or, Life in the Factory, a proselytizing novel for children that pragmatically accepts the fact that some children must work in the mills, and The Silent Partner, a novel concerned as much with women's rights as with labor laws. Both of these narratives depict the grim reality of life as a mill worker, and both sympathize with the plight of the mill-child. In the latter, Bub is a self-directed working boy very like Bob in "One Way to Get an Education," who finds it "mighty hard on chaps as has to stay to work industrious" when his coworkers "get out" because of accidents. In the novel, while struggling for a plug of tobacco, Bub dies in the works when "life, like everything else, was quite too young for Bub. He has got so old, he has given it up" (215-16). With this fiction for...