Hitty: Her First Hundred Years by Rachel Field

Choosing chapter books to read aloud to my girls is not something I've ever really given much thought or planning. Instead, I just pick up whatever I see that looks interesting or that I've recently read a review of, etc. Lately, though, I've been thinking about how I should probably be a little more intentional about what I read, at least occasionally. (How's that for noncommittal? ;-) ) What I mean is this: I don't think think our read-alouds have to always be educational or challenging, but because we are home educators and because I consider reading aloud a very important part of our school day (although the girls don't even realize that we're "doing school" while we're reading), I should get in as much good literature as I possibly can. If you scroll down a bit and look over in the sidebar, you'll see a list of our read-alouds for this year. You'll note that Nim's Island was our third chapter book of 2011, but you'll also note that there's no review of it linked. I meant to review it, but I ran out of time. However, I think I can sum it up in one sentence: a fun read, but nothing that challenged us in any way. It's one of those books that I think Lulu could've read on her own, even at the tender age of six. In thinking about our read-alouds, I'm moving toward consistently choosing books that are harder than my best reader could tackle on her own. I'm sure I won't always do this, but I prefer it this way.

Okay, now that all that preliminary business is out of the way, let's get on to the real matter at hand: Hitty: Her First Hundred Years by Rachel Field. Published in 1929 and awarded a Newbery Award the following year, Hitty is definitely a book that fulfills the requirement I explained above. It's not one of those books I could've continued reading after I'd come a hairsbreadth from reading myself to sleep, somehow managing to keep one eye open enough to read the text, brain on autopilot. (Please tell me you do that, too, at least sometimes!) No, Hitty requires diligence and concentration on the part of the reader. The plot is detailed and the sentence syntax is unlike that of our day. However, I never once grew tired of this story; on the contrary, I was eager each time I picked it up to find out what Hitty was going to experience next. My girls seemed to love it as much as I did. The story is rather simple, actually. It is simply the story of Hitty's hundred years of existence. Hitty is a wooden doll made of lucky mountain-ash wood, and at the story's beginning she belongs to a loving little girl named Phoebe Preble. When Phoebe's family goes aboard a whaling vessel, Hitty goes along, too. It's after this that almost all of the adventures begin. She is shipwrecked; she is taken as an idol on some uncivilized island somewhere in the middle of some ocean; she becomes the possession of a missionary child, a Quaker child, and a slave; she meets the poet John Greenleaf Whittier and sees Charles Dickens; in short, she has no end of adventures. Hitty's adventures are interesting, but what makes the story so absorbing is Hitty's voice. I just came to love her. This little wooden doll speaks with such intelligence and warmth. Although I wouldn't say that this is a funny story, there are moments when Hitty's wit shines through. I think that reading stories like this to my girls, young though they are, has immeasurable benefits. I've noted before how reading the Little House on the Prairie books has expanded my girls' vocabularies; I can't help but think that reading sentences that are more complex that we're accustomed to speaking will have a similar effect. I think it's funny that a couple of my blog readers and fellow bloggers commented about our reading Hitty when I mentioned it last week, and they had opposite opinions. Carrie said that she had to read it when she was twelve or thirteen and that she hated it. Catherine, on the other hand, said that she has already read it to her very young daughter twice, she loved it herself so much as a child. I wonder if this is one of those books that adults think children should love. (This is an opinion that is often bandied about when award-winning books are discussed.) I don't know. I do know that when I closed the book this little doll had come to mean so much to me that I had tears in my eyes. I also know that Lulu immediately grabbed the book and declared that she wanted to read it for herself. I know this is one story we'll be revisiting. Highly, highly recommended. (Please note that since this book was written in 1929, there are many elements in it that are non-PC today. See some of the reviews here for more about this.) Rachel Field also wrote a Caldecott Award winning book, Prayer for a Child, which is a Five in a Row book we own but that I don't think I ever read with my girls. She also wrote another juvenile chapter book that I have a copy of on our schoolroom shelf: Calico Bush. I think I need to pull both of these out and share them.

This review was also published at my blog, Hope Is the Word.

Hitty (aka Mehitabel)

I didn't expect to like Hitty: Her First Hundred Years, by Rachel Field. A story about a doll? A book that is commonly referred to as dated and "not politically correct"? It sounded both ho hum and distasteful.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

Although there definitely are some rather outdated parts in Hitty, as well as a few unfortunate stereotypes, these passages were not as bad as I feared. I thought that the rest of the story was an unusually charming, occasionally exciting, and truly interesting look at American history and "the good old days".

Hitty's story begins sometime before 1830 in the great "State of Maine" (as it is often referred to in Hitty), where she is carved out of mountain-ash wood by an Irish peddler. She is given to young Phoebe Preble (and fans can read more about the Preble family here), and accompanies Phoebe and her parents on a whaling expedition to the South Pacific, where mutiny, shipwreck, a desert island, "savages", an exciting rescue, and "a dirty old snake-charmer" of India (p. 92, also described as a heathen Hindoo) are encountered. And this is just in the first half of the book. That's a fair amount of action for a small wooden doll.

The not-so-PC passages are mostly from some of the parts described above, such as when the natives on the unnamed island are repeatedly described as childish, flamboyant, and possibly cannibals, who take Hitty to be an idol. When Hitty is lost in India, she describes a "babble of strange voices uttering heathenish gibberish" (p. 85). Later in the book, southern Black Americans are described as dirt poor but exceptionally musical, and then Hitty goes on meet "a noisy, unattractive lot of young men and women whose clothes shocked me by their tightness and lack of modesty" (p. 189).

Hitty's perspective is basically that of a rather old-fashioned, upper-middle-class white lady of the 1930's, so these comments are not particularly surprising. I think that the outdated passages are worth discussing*, especially with your kids, but I don't think it should lead readers to condemn the rest of the book when there is so much more to recommend it. Quakers, social class, the Civil War, theft, fashion, growing old, children's unthinking cruelty, and religion - all are touched upon, usually very graciously - in the second half of Hitty's memoir.

Plus, Rachel Field introduced me to the word "wadgetty", a regional term from Massachusetts and Nantucket (which means fidgety) that is used repeatedly and to great effect in Hitty. Although I was shocked to find that wadgetty isn't in the Oxford English Dictionary, it was fun to discover that H.L. Mencken defined it in 1948.

Dorothy P. Lathrop's gorgeous artwork adds a whole new dimension to the story. The original cover (shown above) isn't bad, but I have to admit that I like the new cover, a colored version of the illustration on pg. 13, even more.


Which leads me to the latest edition of Hitty: Her First Hundred Years (and no, it's not a sequel, though like Peter D. Sieruta, I wouldn't be surprised to read about the publication of Hitty: Her Second Hundred Years).

In 1999, a new book entitled Rachel Field's Hitty: Her First Hundred Years was written (or adapted, with substantial abridging and some entirely new adventures) by Rosemary Wells, and lavishly illustrated by Susan Jeffers. A discussion on goodreads.com led me to this interesting article in the New York Times Book section: Children's Books: The Name is the Same.

Boy, people are not happy when you mess with their beloved classics, and there are apparently a good number of Hitty fans out there - see Hitty Preble, presented by the Great Cranberry Island Historical Society; Hitty.org - The Hitty Research Pages; or HittyGirls, to begin with. I've never seen so much discussion of a character from a classic Newbery book, or one with as many related eBay auctions. I hope all of this encourages people (including kids) to read the original Hitty before passing it by as hopelessly outdated and politically incorrect.




*And not just the passages on race. For instance, when Phoebe's father, the captain of a whaling ship, says that if he strikes it lucky on his next voyage, he might "bring back six or seven hundred barrels of sperm" (p. 34), you probably want to explain to your children that Captain Dan'l is referring to oil made from sperm whale blubber.

Hitty Her First Hundred Years

Hitty Her first hundred years by Rachel field is a story about the world from a doll's prespective. This book did not sound very interesting to me when I looked over the cover but I have to say it surprised me. This was the first book I have ever read about a doll and I actually enjoyed it even thought I have seen many low reviews on it compared to the other newbery book winners.
Hitty was a very special doll of her time. She was slightly smaller and wooden unlike a lot of china dolls that were popular during the time. She was made of mountain ash wood which is said to bring good luck, and you can tell that it generally did throughout the story.
The book is set somewhere in the early nineteenth century and tells of the first hundred years of her life into the early twentieth century. Hitty has many adventures and travels from her native state of Maine to many parts of the world and the United States. She is a doll that many people come to love and she goes through many owners and occupations including a snake charmer in India, a doll of fashion, a model for photography and even a pincushion. She gets to see much of the natural world and is even worshipped as a heathen idol.
I like that the book talks a little bit about what was going on during the nineteenth century including slavery and what life was like in the northern and southern parts of the United States during the Civil War.
Hitty meets many interesting and a few famous people along the way in her adventures including Adelina Patti( who I had never heard of but was a famous opera singer at the time) and Charles Dickens. She has seen the perspective of the world from many different people with different views and opinions and has been with people who treat her very kindly to people who are very cruel to her. She is owned by many girls with a variety of ways of life. She learns to accept critisism and compliments being that she is a doll of experience.
I think that most girls would really like this book and maybe even a few boys if they gave it a chance. For me it was a fast read and really easy.

Hitty: Her First Hundred Years

Hitty: Her First Hundred Years by Rachel Field

Copyright date: 1929…Odd to think that my mother might have run across this book as a little girl and read it….I remember reading it myself as a little girl. Like many of the older Newbery books, it is a vision into the past, a little trip into life for kids before tv and computers and Ipods.

Hitty is a wooden doll made in the early 1800’s. Her underpants are embroidered with her name and along the way she becomes the most literate of dolls. One girl after another owns her, though her painted features fade and her various dresses come and go. She has a series of exciting adventures: she lands in a tree, in a shipwrecked, on a deserted island worshipped as an idol (!), on a steamship, under the cushion of an old couch, in an exhibition, and, finally, in an antique store. She manages to survive all her adventures with her dignity intact, finding a way to take pleasure in even the least interesting of her situations.

Hitty: Her First Hundred Years

This is a charming story in which a doll shares her adventures, which over the span of a hundred years have taken her around the globe. She starts life as a small, carved gift from a snowed-in peddler in Maine to the daughter of a whaler. Through circumstance, the family ends up on a whaling ship together and quite a long time passes before Hitty returns to America.

While the story is certainly dated by certain expressions and references to world religions and ethnicities, the point is very strongly made that worth cannot be gauged merely through appearances. Young and old, rich and poor alike are united in the desire to love and nurture little Hitty.