In which Rymenhild is warned to beware of wickedness

[rymenhild]

During a visit to my family home this week, I have accomplished very little dissertation work. I have, however, spent much of the time uplifting my mind and my morals with some edifying words. You see, the local public library had a book sale this week. I acquired, for the price of a single dollar, John S. C. Abbott's enthralling book The Child at Home: Or, the Principles of Filial Duty (New York, NY: The American Tract Society, 1833) (full scan; Project Gutenberg e-text).

I have learned from Abbott that if you take the smallest step off the path of righteousness to pick flowers on the way to school, you will probably be led farther and farther astray until you die and go to hell. If you should play with your little friends and make them laugh, and your aunt should come scold you for making the children laugh so loudly, and you lie to your aunt, saying, "It was not I who made them laugh," be warned. A young girl who did precisely that died at the age of eleven with a troubled soul, and while Abbott does not tell us certainly that she went to hell, it is possible that she may have done so.

I have also learned that it's kind of God to put all the sinners in a permanent prison so that the few who do get saved can live in eternal peace, untroubled by any wickedness. By the way, heaven must be appallingly boring. Anyone who has ever been known to enjoy attending parties or even playing with other little children in the streets is unlikely to go there.

What have you been reading lately, O Friendslist? Is it immoral pap that will ruin your virtue and deprive you of your hopes of heaven? If so, send me a recommendation, because I think I need a change of pace.

Comments

[gramarye1971]

I continue to love the world and find the protagonist mind-numbingly boring.

That's what struck me most about the book when I first read it; the attempt to create an 'everyman' character completely backfired to the point where I almost actively didn't care what happened to Richard. It takes a lot for me to really not care about a protagonist.

[genarti]

Yes, likewise. I'm skimming for worldbuilding in this reread, basically, which includes denizens of London Below. (Thus Door, the Marquis, and... everybody who isn't Richard, basically.)

Though I think part of it may, as someone (Sandry, I believe) was saying to me recently, be the fact that it's a book that was adapted from a television script. It doesn't seem to have been adapted enough, because it takes "show, don't tell" TOO far -- there's very little under the surface of Richard's thoughts that isn't shown anyway by what he says. And that's one of the things I find most annoying about him: the fact that he keeps on saying "I don't get it" and making dumb assumptions aloud even after he should have had it proven to him that none of his assumptions are likely to be correct. I don't mind him making them based on prior understanding of the world; I mind that he doesn't know how to stop making himself stand out as not only a Topsider but an idiotic one, and that he's apparently the world's slowest learner. And I think some of that may be because internal monologue gets you precisely nowhere on tv, unless you've got an actor with very eloquent facial expressions, and there wasn't enough adaptation to make Richard work for the book as well.

Mind, I haven't actually seen the show, so possibly he's just as irritating there.