NOTE: The author of this review is an agnostic and from an agnostic environment. I know very little of religion or faiths, so I might get some things wrong here.
Victorian chapbooks were distributed by places of Christian theological worship (churches, Sunday schools...) to a young audience.
The typical Christian chapbook features vices which are considered condemn-able in some capacity in Christian faith, and also feature behaviour for the Victorian child reader to "aspire" to (there is typically a pious foil to the protagonist and their flaws)
Because of the removal of the supernatural element at the end of these tales, protagonists tend to reform. As these were learning tools, there is little in the way of fun here.
This week I'm looking at The Old Man's Story and The Pink Slippers. Both were distributed by Sunday schools in the mid 1900s. I found both texts via archive.org, which is a great resource for old children's literature such as this.
After reading both the Old Man's Story and The Pink Slippers I have to agree with Lewis Carroll's early work which mocked these pieces. They really are terrible and are of the worst conservatism around in the 1900s. If you are of faith this will most likely embarrass, and if you aren't it won't encourage you to convert.
The only uses I could imagine for these stories now would be for this kind of project on cautionary tales, or by religious scholars looking at 1900s beliefs.
The Old Man's Story
A simple enough tale, and humourless. An old man "John" relates to the children of a village a story about an unfortunate incident he learnt from as a boy. This involved him, his friend, and a pennyworth of fireworks... This goes about as well as you can expect.
There are Christian Chapbook tropes thrown in here, but they are subtle and might not crop up on first read. Early in the story, John is stopped by a visitor to the village who asks him if he has ever read what the visitor calls an important book. John having not, the visitor gives him money to buy this book. It is this money that John buys the fireworks with and later shares with his friend.
It was not until my second read did I notice this important book would have most likely been the Christian bible. As this little chapbook is written by a Sunday school it is easy to see why the author would refer to it and frame it as important.
There is also the christian teaching of piousness at the end as to repent (as such) John must now care for Lucy, his friend's sister, and take the place of his friend in her family.
The Pink Slippers
A young girl, Betsy, has a pious and ill mother but her parents are not particularly theistic. Her father prefers the finer things in life to the point the family are obsessed with material wealth. Betsy is friends with a local girl whom she envies because she can have dance classes. One day after been given new pink slippers, Betsy sneaks out to show her friend despite her mother's illness. Disaster follows.
Honestly I found this to be just awful. Sometimes a protagonist's fate in a cautionary tale can seem unnecessarily cruel and its very much the case here. Not only is Betsy humiliated at her friend's dance class, her ill mother also dies, Betsy then falls ill and only gets to hear of her mother's death days afterwards. Betsy becomes a true believer at the end, although the reader is never given an explanation why she does this. As a reader, we only presume this is because she has to be. Otherwise someone else close to her could die.
References:
Dean & Son, 11, Ludgate Hill. (1857). The old mans story. London.
The Pink slippers, or, Cure of vanity. (2019, February 9). Retrieved from https://www.worldcat.org/title/pink-slippers-or-cure-of-vanity/oclc/1050792284.
