(no subject)

[rymenhild]

If we were children growing up in nineteenth-century America, we (like Laura Ingalls and her family) might have read some of the following edifying texts from The Youth's Companion:

• Lucy Nelson, the Boy-Girl (who was swiftly cured of her tomboyish ways)


• The Victim (who learned the sad consequences of hiking with a bare neck)


• Child's Grief (containing the cheery thought, "Father and mother tell me, that if I am a good boy, I shall go to see the baby in heaven when I die")


• Little Edward (concluding with the instruction, "Will not every child who reads this, go to his mother and ask her to talk to him about dying and about Heaven")

And I thought Hans Christian Andersen was morbid.