Pollyanna and the Not So Glad Game

Pity would be no moreIf we did not make somebody poor;And Mercy no more could beIf all were as happy as we.

—William Blake, "The Human Abstract"

When Eleanor Porter's Pollyanna was issued by the Boston publisher L. C. Page in 1913, Porter was already a successful author, with the best-selling Miss Billie to her credit. But Pollyanna was more than a best-seller; it was a publishing phenomenon. For two years Pollyanna stayed on the American best-seller list, to be joined in 1915 by its sequel, Pollyanna Grows Up, also published by Page.¹ In both books, Porter sets up and solves mysteries of identity and relationships. Pollyanna is the story of an orphan reluctantly taken in by the bitter spinster Aunt Polly and of the child's transformation of her aunt and everyone else who comes close to her by means of her Glad Game. Pollyanna Grows Up deals with the mysterious origins of Pollyanna's friends Jamie and Jimmy alongside Pollyanna's own maturation and falling in love, together with more examples of the Glad Game at work transforming the unhappy and the unwell.

After Porter's death, her publishers commissioned other writers to carry on Pollyanna's story in twelve more "Glad Books," to marriage and beyond, to her family's travels and the adventures of her children from babyhood to marriage. The sequels' titles indicate the general drift of most of their plots from Porter's original. Harriet Lummis Smith began with Pollyanna's marriage, in Pollyanna of the Orange Blossoms, and then started to move Pollyanna across America for fresh interest in Pollyanna's Jewels, Pollyanna's Debt of Honor, and Pollyanna's Western Adventure. Elizabeth Borton kept changing the locale in her contributions to the series, Pollyanna in Hollywood, Pollyanna's Castle in Mexico, Pollyanna's Door to Happiness, and Pollyanna's Golden Horseshoe. Margaret Piper Chalmers contributed only one book, Pollyanna's Protegée, before the publishers turned to a fourth author, Virginia May Moffitt, for the twelfth and thirteenth volumes in the series, Pollyanna at Six Star Ranch and Pollyanna of Magic Valley. For the final, tired Glad Book, Elizabeth Borton tried her hand at a spy story in Pollyanna and the Secret Mission. By 1950 Porter's two volumes and the other Glad Books had sold two million copies.² The Glad Books by other writers are almost forgotten now, but Pollyanna and Pollyanna Grows Up are still readily available.

Although all the Glad Books pay homage to Pollyanna's powers of positive thinking, it is the treatment of the Glad Game—Pollyanna's strategy for happiness—that distinguishes Porter's two-volume story of Pollyanna from all of its sequels. Without the game, Pollyanna would be little more than an insipid variant on the stories of Anne of Green Gables, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, or Porter's own Miss Billie: the story, that is, of a poor girl transforming the lives of all the unhappy people among whom she comes to live, winning hearts with her unspoiled innocence, and finally marrying happily. The Glad Game distinguishes Pollyanna from these other spontaneously happy heroines,³ for it is a specific technique learned from her father and taught to all she helps.

After her mother's death, Pollyanna's missionary father is sent a barrel of charity goods for himself and his daughter. The child hopes to find a doll, but the only item in the barrel suitable for a child is a pair of small crutches. At the height of Pollyanna's disappointment, the girl later recalls, her father taught her to find something to be glad about:

"Oh, yes; the game was to just find something about everything to be glad about—no matter what 'twas," rejoined Pollyanna earnestly. "And we began right then—on the crutches."

"Well, goodness me! I can't see anythin' ter be glad about—gettin' a pair of crutches when you wanted a doll!"

Pollyanna clapped her hands.

"There is—there is," she crowed. "But I couldn't see it either, Nancy, at first," she...