Anyone who has spent time in the fictional world of Millicent Margaret Amanda will recall the details of her life. Memorably nicknamed Milly-Molly-Mandy, she lives in the Nice White Cottage in an unnamed little village with a predictable cast of characters who accompany her in the goings-on of her daily life. Walking to school, running errands for the family, going fishing with her friend, taking a trip to the beach, attending a party put on by the women of the village: these are the events of Milly-Molly-Mandy’s world.
The creation of British author and illustrator Joyce Lankester Brisley, the Milly-Molly-Mandy stories were originally published in the Christian Science Monitor beginning in 1925 and later published as collections. The illustrations are colorless but provide a warm and vivid sense of an imaginary world showing the sweet moments that make up Milly-Molly-Mandy’s little world.
Milly-Molly-Mandy is around the age of six and lives with her mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, aunt, and uncle. A map at the front of the book shows the paths through the village that Milly-Molly-Mandy takes in each story to go see Little Friend Susan, Billy Blunt who lives next to the corn shop, Miss Muggin’s shop, the blacksmith, the school house.
Reading as a post-modern adult, the stories can at first seem too, too sweet. Nothing adverse happens, and, if it does, somehow it works out for the best every time. Reading about Milly-Molly-Mandy industriously spending and making a penny over and over and at the end saving up money to buy her own duck one day is so charming as to be ridiculous to the adult. Yet, if one surrenders expectations and accepts the stories as they are, they are a delight. Perhaps they can be seen as a presentation of the world as it could be if sweet innocence were given freedom in a realm not mired by the Fall.
Writing for the Guardian, Lucy Mangan settles upon the perfect description of the Milly-Molly-Mandy stories as “tiny domestic non-adventures.” In these stories, some of the first Mangan read independently as a child, she found both “joy” and “torment.” Mangan explains, “Joy because each story is a miniature masterpiece, as clear, warm and precise as the illustrations by the author that accompanied them, crafted by a mind that understood the importance of comfort reading.”
For Mangan, there was also torment because of the awareness that never would she live in the quaint little village of Milly-Molly-Mandy’s environment, enjoying only the simple pleasures of life, rising to every minor challenge with cheerfulness and ingenuity. Mangan fears that contemporary readers, almost one hundred years removed from Lankester Brisley’s writing, will be bored and unable to relate to the stories. Her concern is unwarranted. There is, perhaps, less torment for little girls of the present age. There is no hint that such a world was ever possible. The story can be accepted joyfully as a flight of fancy, which, of course, it was then as it is now.
Milly-Molly-Mandy’s village is not without hardship like the real world. For example, there is the little girl Jilly who evidently is being raised by Miss Muggins without a mother and father. There is another little girl, Bunchie, living with her grandmother in evidently constrained circumstances. For that matter, there is Milly-Molly-Mandy living in a jam-packed, multi-generational household that seems quite full and undesirable to any sane adult. There’s the fact that Milly-Molly-Mandy is the sole child in a house with two married couples in the prime of life, a fact that hints at something tragic or amiss. And she only has a single frock!
The difference in Lankester Brisley’s imagined universe is that every setback and difficulty somehow turns out for the best and invites more reasons for delight instead of angst and frustration. When a pack of ill-behaved kids form a gang and go about minorly terrorizing the village, Milly-Molly-Mandy and her friends form a secret gang to do good and clean up the messes. They have such fun that they eventually coopt the bad kids into joining the do-gooders’ gang, and everyone is the better for it.
Does such sweetness still have the power to charm young readers? Mangan does recognize the timeless attraction of Milly-Molly-Mandy, writing, “I think the power of Milly-Molly-Mandy to comfort and compel will endure. The stories are simple, not stupid. They provide succour, not sentimentality.”
Milly-Molly-Mandy’s unfailing attention to duty would seem a deficit (putting her in the camp of the unrelatable Boxcar Children). It’s too much to believe that unaccompanied little girls going blackberrying would diligently read the “no trespassing” sign and decide that they simply must go look for berries elsewhere rather than violate the sign, despite the fact that the berries close at hand are likely to go unpicked. That’s absurd. Yet, the reader never tires of Milly-Molly-Mandy, and her goodness is never so overblown as to be cloying.
There are certainly moments of more realism, as when Milly-Molly-Mandy and Billy Blunt fall in the mud and create a terrible mess on laundry day. Given that Milly-Molly-Mandy is renowned for apparently only having a single dress with pink and white stripes, this is quite the conundrum. The day is salvaged with delightful bubble baths outside for the children. Milly-Molly-Mandy’s mother does seem less than pleased, but, as ever, they all manage cheerfully enough.
For reasons unknown, it appears some of the most passionate Milly-Molly-Mandy fans are Australian, including self-described “book addict” Susannah Fullerton and a highly eccentric fellow with a deranged sense of humor who goes by Gus. Fullerton sits down for a brief video describing how enchanted she was with Milly-Molly-Mandy as a girl. She was especially enthralled by the map, tracing the paths through the village and imagining every facet of that otherworldly yet so believable place. And that might be precisely why we enjoy the stories: There is a longing for the simple joys there, the sense of justice and fittingness in every person’s action and the beautiful life they have together.
It’s fascinating to see the sweet innocence of Gus’s webpage dedicated to the minutia of Milly-Molly-Mandy and her creator, the first dedicated webpage on the internet for the subject it appears. Amid the strange satirical content that populates a place known as GusWorld, it’s all the more charming. Few are beyond the reach of true sweetness.
Milly-Molly-Mandy may be too precious for some, but for those still innocent children or the adult who has the patience to give her a full hearing, Milly-Molly-Mandy expresses a happy hope for a world of beauty and goodness not yet besmirched by all the complexities of living in the real one. This is no escapist literature, but rather like a sweet, refreshing drink on a warm afternoon. Or rather, given the context, we should say a warm cup of tea with mother’s cakes to warm us on a blustery day in what we might mistakenly believe the dull and uninteresting landscape of the ordinary.
Whatever the case may be, we need not fear that little girls today will find Milly-Molly-Mandy a bore. When given the chance, they will demanding a rereading, the youngest readers, perplexed by her lengthy nickname, calling for more and yet more of “Minnie-Monna!”
1 comment
Comments are closed.