Company Manners
Last night, I couldn’t stop thinking about "The Two Carolines," so I decided to see what I could rustle up online about it. And even though I use Google every single day, I was still amazed by what I found. Within minutes, I’d not only found that it’s a story, not a book, but I also discovered the name of the story collection in which it appears, the website for the publisher of the collection and the other volumes in the series, the complete text of the story, and cover images from the series.
It turns out that “The Two Carolines” is part of a series called, somewhat creepily, Uncle Arthur’s Bedtime Stories, by Arthur Maxwell. The first stories were created by Maxwell in 1924, and he went on to write and publish forty-eight (!) volumes, ceasing to write them only when he died in 1970. Incredibly, most of the volumes seem to be easily available. You can purchase the first twenty for $748.00.
This is all interesting information. But there’s a dark side to such Googling, the danger of finding out too much, tarnishing the very thing that sparked the search in the first place. In this case, I discovered that “The Two Carolines” ends with the following: “Mother told her, too, that Jesus is the unseen guest at every meal, the silent listener to every conversation.” Perhaps it isn’t so surprising, in hindsight, to realize that this is a “Christian” children’s story, though I have no memory at all of the warning of Jesus’s being an unseen guest. Indeed, according to the Uncle Arthur’s website (there’s a website!), the stories in the Bedtime series “teach Christian values.”
Somehow, though, this doesn’t put me off. Perhaps it’s because these stories were written and published long before “Christian” became a dirty (Republican) word. There’s nothing offensively “Christian” about Caroline learning, as the story’s introduction explains, that “home and company manners should be the same,” and I suspect the other stories are the same. “Christian,” here, seems to connote morals, values, good behavior, kindness—loaded words, some of these, but innocent, too, when you remember their context. A children’s book published in 2010 that purported to teach my child “Christian values” wouldn’t find its way past my doorway (or the underside of my shoe). But one from 1940? 1950? We could all probably stand to relearn our “company manners.” We could all probably stand to incorporate the phrase “company manners” into our vocabulary. And I, for one, am on a quest to find an old used copy of the Uncle Arthur volume that contains “The Two Carolines” and add it to Lucia’s library.
It turns out that “The Two Carolines” is part of a series called, somewhat creepily, Uncle Arthur’s Bedtime Stories, by Arthur Maxwell. The first stories were created by Maxwell in 1924, and he went on to write and publish forty-eight (!) volumes, ceasing to write them only when he died in 1970. Incredibly, most of the volumes seem to be easily available. You can purchase the first twenty for $748.00.
This is all interesting information. But there’s a dark side to such Googling, the danger of finding out too much, tarnishing the very thing that sparked the search in the first place. In this case, I discovered that “The Two Carolines” ends with the following: “Mother told her, too, that Jesus is the unseen guest at every meal, the silent listener to every conversation.” Perhaps it isn’t so surprising, in hindsight, to realize that this is a “Christian” children’s story, though I have no memory at all of the warning of Jesus’s being an unseen guest. Indeed, according to the Uncle Arthur’s website (there’s a website!), the stories in the Bedtime series “teach Christian values.”
Somehow, though, this doesn’t put me off. Perhaps it’s because these stories were written and published long before “Christian” became a dirty (Republican) word. There’s nothing offensively “Christian” about Caroline learning, as the story’s introduction explains, that “home and company manners should be the same,” and I suspect the other stories are the same. “Christian,” here, seems to connote morals, values, good behavior, kindness—loaded words, some of these, but innocent, too, when you remember their context. A children’s book published in 2010 that purported to teach my child “Christian values” wouldn’t find its way past my doorway (or the underside of my shoe). But one from 1940? 1950? We could all probably stand to relearn our “company manners.” We could all probably stand to incorporate the phrase “company manners” into our vocabulary. And I, for one, am on a quest to find an old used copy of the Uncle Arthur volume that contains “The Two Carolines” and add it to Lucia’s library.
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