by Sheila Ray
Alongside the references to children’s classics and folk tales are those to contemporary girls’ school stories. There is an oblique reference to Dorothea Moore’s Guide Gilly in The School at the Chalet when Gisela is talking about a book she has read and Wanda says, “It was a Girl Guide . . . Her name was the same as yours, Gisela, but they called her ‘Gilly’” (p.235). In Lavender Laughs in the Chalet School, Lavender’s library book is The Two Form Captains (p.138), presumably the book by Elsie J. Oxenham. Thus Brent-Dyer acknowledges the two books from which she used basic ideas, the music school in a Ruritanian country, and the link between an English school and a sanatorium. When the school moves to Howells village in The Chalet School Goes to It, Jo looks at Gwensi’s bookshelves and comments, “Here’s a whole shelf of Elsie Oxenham, and another of Dorita Fairlie Bruce and Winifred Darch. If the kid’s a fan of anything, it’s of school stories.”(p.75).
However, like many of her fellow writers, Brent-Dyer was well aware of the low regard in which school stories were held by adults in the 1920s and 1930s. Teachers and librarians believed that they misled readers, portraying boarding-school life in a more romantic and glamorous light than it deserved. This belief, which has continued to the present day34, is reflected in the Chalet books. When, in The School at the Chalet, some girls put forward the idea of having a school magazine, and suggest organising a party to celebrate the Head’s birthday, both undertakings having been gleaned from the purely imaginary Denise of the Fourth by “Muriel Bernadine Browne”, Jo tells them that some school stories “are awful tosh” (p.129).
Another invented book, Pat the Pride of the School, inspires Polly Heriot to ring the alarm bell in Jo Returns to the Chalet School (1936). “It seemed to Polly that if she could ring that bell . . . they would be so thrilled by the daring of the act that she would become a real live school heroine” (p.130). The real consequences are very different: the alarm bell rouses the whole valley, making Mademoiselle Lepattre and the school look foolish, several of the girls are badly upset and everyone, of course, is, as Jo says, “hauled . . . out of bed on a freezing night for no good reason” (p.156). Jo, embarked on her career as a writer of school stories, has already discarded Malvina Wins Through on Matron’s advice, burnt the manuscript and started afresh with Cecily Holds the Fort. Now, vowing that this will contain “nothing that might not have happened at the best regulated of schools” (p.71), she resolves to remove descriptions of “any pranks . . . that might . . . incite brainless Juniors to imitation thereof” (p.158).
If school stories were held in low regard by many adults, what were young people expected to read? As was said earlier, articles and reviews in the School Library Review and the School Librarian in the 1930s show that, once at secondary school, young people were encouraged to read adult novels. Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells and John Buchan were all regarded as authors who tell a good story and might therefore be enjoyed by readers from the age of 11 or 12 onwards. Up to the 1950s they were looked upon as standard reading fare for the young and, sometimes in abridged editions, were used as class readers. My younger sister, who started at a Yorkshire grammar school in 1946, not only had Scott’s Rob Roy (1817) as a class reader in the first year but also had his Red Gauntlet (1824) as a set text at A-Level.
Nineteenth-century novels were readily available to many girls, and omnivorous readers like Jo were quite happy to tackle them. In The School at the Chalet (p.18), when we first meet her, she is reading Scott’s Quentin Durward (1823); later (p.126) she’s reading John Halifax, Gentleman (1857) by Mrs Craik (Diana Maria Mulock) and she’s also described (p.191) as having read George Borrow’s Romany Rye (1857) and Lavengro (1851), while Grizel, confined to her room in disgrace (p.275), seeks refuge in Thackeray’s Henry Esmond (1852). Brent-Dyer’s characters also link books to places. Paris reminds Jo of Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905) and Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859), when they go there on their way to Austria in The School at the Chalet (p.36), while The First Violin, very much a book of its time and scarcely known today35, inspires Grizel’s mad journey to the Falls of Rhine in The Head Girl of the Chalet School, an adventure which raises the whole question of whether she is really fit to be Head Girl.
Even if they were not as well read as the Chalet girls, most of her readers would at least have heard of these books in the 1920s. Perhaps one of the appeals for girl readers was the fact that reading is always seen as a commendable activity. Nobody ever seems to be told to take their nose out of a book and go out and get some fresh air and exercise or help with some domestic chore, which must in reality have been the experience of many readers.
Nor are references confined to English literature. It is interesting that when, in The Rivals of the Chalet School, Jo says that she’s going to be a writer and not get married, Simone quotes the examples of Madame Le Brun and Madame de Stael, “two of our greatest writers”, who were both married, as was the English writer, Mrs Gaskell (p.32). In The Exploits of the Chalet Girls, Jo mentions that she’s read Josef Egger’s Geschichte Tirols and learnt from it that there might be an earthquake in the Tyrol (p.169). Hilary sits down to do a little work with Les Pensées de Pascal in The New Chalet School (1938) (p.200), while in The Chalet School Goes to It, Simone is teaching with the aid of “La Dernière Classe”(1873), a short story by Alphonse Dudet which had a particular poignancy in the early 1940s (p.223). It describes the last class taught in the French language in a school in Alsace-Lorraine, an area about to be transferred from France to Germany as a result of the 1870 Franco-Prussian war. The work of a distinguished French author and about children (the story is told by one of the boys), “La Dernière Classe” turned up frequently in French text books used in British schools up to the 1940s.36
A writer who seems to have been particularly important to Brent-Dyer is Rudyard Kipling. Grizel, leaving home in The School at the Chalet, receives a new Kipling as a farewell present from the Rector and his sister (p.30). When, in The Highland Twins at the Chalet School, Fiona goes to ask if she can use her gift of second sight to try to “see” Jack, reported drowned, Jo’s eyes fall “on the row of red, leather-bound Kiplings which she had collected through the years. That sort of thing had happened to the unpleasant youth in Captains Courageous” (p.249).
Twice, at least, Brent-Dyer uses the phrase, “that, as Mr Kipling says, is another story”, once in The School at the Chalet (p.335) and again in The Chalet School and the Lintons (1934) (p.269). When, in Jo Returns to the Chalet School, Polly Heriot’s alarm bell prank goes seriously wrong, Jo sends her to the school library to ask the junior librarian for Stalky and Co, and tells her to digest what “The Three have to say about Old Prout”, and we learn that, as a result of this, “the Immortal Trio’s views on the subject of ‘Popularity Prout’” complete Polly’s demoralisation and provide a successful antidote to reading too many school stories (p.157).
In her enthusiasm for Kipling, Brent-Dyer was like many other people in the early part of the 20th century. From about 1890 to 1930 he was the most popular writer in English, in both verse and prose, throughout the English-speaking world. Widely regarded as the greatest living poet and story-teller, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907, and his books were popular far beyond academic and literary circles.37 His work continued to be widely read after 1930 and his stories and some of the more memorable lines of his poetry became common property. I clearly recall being read one of his short stories “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi”, about a mongoose, at the age of about five, and a prefect reading some of the Just-So Stories (1902) to us when I was in the first year at secondary school, when she had to take the class for an absent teacher. My adult relations used to recite and quote bits of Kipling’s verse, and I was somewhat surprised, when I arrived at university in 1948, to find that Kipling was so highly regarded by academics that my English professor wrote books and articles about him. The wide availability of The Jungle Book (1894) on video in
the weeks leading up to Christmas 1993 is an indication of the powerful hold Kipling has had on the Anglo-Saxon imagination for over a century.
Even Robert Louis Stevenson, whose books are referred to more than once — for example, the donkey in the Christmas pageant which takes place during The Exploits of the Chalet Girls is named Modestine after the donkey in Travels with a Donkey (1879, pp. 296-7), while, in The Chalet School Goes to It, Daisy is reading An Inland Voyage (1878) aloud (p.57) — is upstaged by Rudyard Kipling. “Read us something exciting . . . Something like Treasure Island would be nice. I love pirates!” requests Jo, but when Miss Maynard returns with Stalky and Co, Jo utters a squeal of delight (The Head Girl of the Chalet School, 1928, p.167). This incident puzzled me for years after I first read it at the age of 11 or 12. I must have known both books well enough to think that if Jo had expressed an interest in Treasure Island (1882) and pirates, Stalky and Co (1899), a school story, even though it might have been my own first choice, would be a poor substitute! Only on rereading the book quite recently did it seem to make sense; Brent-Dyer, with her fondness for Kipling, would see the substitution as more than acceptable.
One author who features frequently in the early Chalet books, who is a more surprising choice, is Martha Finley, although she is never actually mentioned by name. All Chalet book readers, however, will be aware of the Elsie books, even if they have never seen one. In Jo of the Chalet School, when Jo is convalescing, Dr Jem brings her six Elsie books, of which Jo has heard but never read, “Aren’t they about an awfully good little girl . . . ?” (p.249). Martha Finley (1828-1909) was a prolific and popular American writer for girls, whose books outsold every other children’s book except Little Women for three generations. Elsie Dinsmore was published in the USA in 1867, a year before Little Women, and in London in 1873, but Martha Finley was never as well-known or as popular in Britain as she was in her native country, although she seems to have made a great impression on Brent-Dyer. The fact that the books inspire Jo to want to know more about American history may have something to do with their less than successful voyage across the Atlantic, most girl readers being put off by their historical background rather than wanting, like Jo, to know more.
There were 28 Elsie books altogether, but by 1926 Brent-Dyer may have come across only the first six which have some structural unity revolving around the relationship between Elsie and her father, and which have something of the charm of a soap opera — they are “good bad books”.38 Jo is so inspired by them that she writes her own Elsie book and we are told that she has “caught the style of writing exactly” (p.255). In The Rivals of the Chalet School American Evadne suggests that her friends call themselves the Ku-Klux-Klan to “fight for their rights” and, when everyone is doubtful about what the Ku-Klux-Klan did, they refer to Jo’s Elsie books and are “thrilled” by the account of the Klan’s doings (pp.51-52).
In Exploits of the Chalet Girls Jo says, “I’ve been talking like an Elsie book all this term — the fruits of being head-girl! (p.119) while, in The Chalet School and the Lintons, Frieda suggests that for their entertainment on staff evening, the staff are going to perform some of the Ku-Klux-Klan scenes out of “those Elsie books of Jo’s” (p.117). As late as The Chalet School Goes to It, Betty Wynne-Davies declares that Elizabeth Arnett is going “all goody-good and pi and must have been reading the Elsie books” (p.210). Were they still reading Jo’s original six, one wonders?
Brent-Dyer’s preoccupation with the Elsie books is surprising for two reasons. First they were not nearly as accessible as Little Women and other American girls’ books, such as the Katy books by Susan Coolidge; although copies can now be picked up on the second-hand market I didn’t see any until the early 1970s, when an American student lent me one. Secondly, and even more surprising, is the apparent sympathy for the Ku-Klux-Klan, a secret society whose members dressed weirdly in white robes, masks and pointed hoods, which grew up in the southern states of the USA after the Civil War to oppose the right of black people to vote, and which still exists. Brent-Dyer, otherwise very liberal, tolerant and progressive in her views about nationality, religion and race, never seems to have questioned the morality of the Ku-Klux-Klan organisation and their methods. In this she was reflecting the general British view of the time; it was not until the 1960s that white Americans and white British people began to rethink their long-established attitudes to race and colour, and we know that it is a long and painful process to change these.
Some books inspired Chalet School entertainments. In The Chalet School and the Lintons, far from re-enacting Ku-Klux-Klan scenes, as suggested by Frieda, the staff choose to present Mrs Jarley’s Waxworks. Marie realises this as soon as the curtains go back to reveal Miss Wilson clad in an “ample” black skirt, Paisley shawl and coal-scuttle bonnet, and made up with heavy black eyebrows and to look as if some of her teeth are missing, while her colleagues take the part of waxworks. Mrs Jarley, proprietor of a Waxworks Show, is one of the notable characters whom Little Nell and her grandfather meet during the course of their travels in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840), a lady “stout and comfortable to look upon who wore a large bonnet trembling with bows”.39 Like Mrs Jarley, Miss Wilson has a wand with which she indicates a character while she comments on their known weaknesses and points morals, referring to incidents such as Miss Norman’s shrieks when “a mouse had been introduced into prep” (p.120) or Matron’s belief in the efficacy of castor-oil, at which Joyce, Thekla and Mary, who have received doses after their recent midnight feast, all go scarlet (p.121). No mention is made either of Dickens or the title of the book in which Mrs Jarley appears; perhaps Brent-Dyer assumed that her readers were as well read as the Chalet girls although it scarcely matters as the entertainment is enjoyable in its own right.
Later in the same book, however, there is a quite detailed discussion of Charlotte Yonge’s work when the St Scholastika’s girls borrow one of her ideas for the Magic Cave which is their contribution to the annual Sale of Work. Charlotte Yonge’s Magic Cave was created in a conservatory and Brent-Dyer seems to have added one to the Chalet buildings at this point for the same purpose as it’s not mentioned elsewhere. The Chalet girls are curious about what St Scholastika’s are planning and Hilary Burn hints that it is something to do with Charlotte Yonge’s The Three Brides (1876); Jo says they haven’t got that particular title in the school library although they have several others (p.288). Brent-Dyer’s version of the Peri’s Cave follows that described in The Three Brides quite closely, with “unseen musicians”, Hilary Burn as the Peri, the use of two of the original rhymes, the blindfolding of the “victim” and the present which the victim finally receives.40
When some of the girls, including Jo, have to spend the half-term holiday at school in Jo Returns to the Chalet School and are invited by the staff to “a Grand Sheets-and-Pillowcase Party” (p.223), they are puzzled. Jo explains that they have to manufacture a fancy-dress costume from two sheets and a pillowcase, which may be pinned or lightly stitched but on no account cut, and that there will be prizes for the prettiest, the funniest and the most outstanding. Brent-Dyer may not have remembered the source of this idea, but it seems possible that she was subconsciously recalling a similar event described by Mrs George de Horne Vaizey in Pixie O’Shaughnessy (1903), where Bridgie issues the young people with a pair of sheets and a pillowcase to keep them happily occupied one afternoon in making themselves costumes for a party in the evening. In that book the party is a key event because the beautiful Esmeralda is wearing her costume when she is first seen by her future husband. The three Pixie books were all serialised in the Girl’s Own Paper in the early years of this century before being published as books, and they continued to be popular with girls up to the outbreak of the Second World War; it is quite likely that Brent-Dyer read them as a young girl.41 Of course, sheets and pillowcase parties may have been a fairly common event in days when people had to make their own entertainment, especially when there were domestic staff to wash an
d iron them afterwards.
Religious books are also included amongst the reading of the Chalet girls. Madge, faced with providing a service for a multi-denominational assembly in The School at the Chalet, chooses a short reading from Thomas-à-Kempis (p.58) and offers the same book, albeit under its title, The Imitation of Christ, to the girls to read quietly when they cannot get to church because of bad weather in The Exploits of the Chalet Girls (p.213). In The School at the Chalet, she is reading The Little Flowers of St Francis to the girls (p.187), and in a later book this is described as “a favourite book at the Chalet” (The Chalet School and Jo, p.171). The religious books no doubt reflect another of Brent-Dyer’s own reading preferences, particularly in the period leading up to her conversion to Catholicism in 1930.
One of the few books mentioned by Brent-Dyer not long after publication is H.V.Morton’s In the Steps of St Paul, a book with a strong religious interest. This was published in 1936; in The Chalet School Goes to It (1941), it is being read by Robin (p.35). H.V. Morton wrote a series of In Search of . . . books, which covered England, Scotland and Wales (these may even have inspired the idea of the Lavender Laughs books) and which were very popular during the 1930s and 1940s. Even in the early 1950s, when I was working in public libraries, there were waiting lists for Morton’s books.
References to Shakespeare, all kinds of fiction, poetry, history, the classics, religious books, biography and to books in languages other than English are found throughout most of the first 17 Chalet books. The significance of some of these might have been lost on most readers; for example, there is an animated discussion in Jo Returns to the Chalet School about whether Cyrano de Bergerac would have had a handkerchief (p.241), without any mention of his prominent nose. Nevertheless such references enrich the text.
