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the experience of reading in Britain, from 1450 to 1945...

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Listings for Author:  

O.F Walton

 

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Mrs O.F. Walton : Christie's Old Organ; or, Home Sweet Home

Upon the age of ten or eleven I moved in a world evoked by a series of volumes published by the Religious Tract Society in the Edwardian period. The outstanding authors on the Society's list were Hesba Stretton, Mrs O.F. Walton and Amy Le Feuvre. I knew nearly all their books, but three of them stood out, and I remember them most vividly to this day: 'Little Meg's Children', 'Jessica's First Prayer', and Christie's Old Organ'. Most of the titles, incidentally, were phrased possessively.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Patricia Beer      Print: Book

  

O.F. Walton : Christie's Old Organ

'In the 1920s Janet Htitchman acquired her literary education among the derelict bookshlves of an orphanage, which included a huge collection of "drunken father deathbed conversion" stories (Christie's Old Organ, 'The Little Match Girl', A Peep behind the Scenes), as well as everything by Dickens, old volumes of Punch and the Spectator and The Life of Ruskin. "My undigested reading made me look at the world with mid-Victorian eyes", she recalled'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Janet Hitchman      Print: Book

  

O.F. Walton : A Peep Behind the Scenes

'In the 1920s Janet Hitchman acquired her literary education among the derelict bookshlves of an orphanage, which included a huge collection of "drunken father deathbed conversion" stories (Christie's Old Organ, 'The Little Match Girl', A Peep behind the Scenes), as well as everything by Dickens, old volumes of Punch and the Spectator and The Life of Ruskin. "My undigested reading made me look at the world with mid-Victorian eyes", she recalled'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Janet Hitchman      Print: Book

  

Mrs O.F. Walton : Christie's Old Organ

'Especially effective [at transmitting conservative values to the working classes] were the pious works of Hesba Stretton, Mrs O.F. Walton, and Amy Le Feuvre, stories with titles like "Little Meg's Children", "Jessica's First Prayer", "Christie's Old Organ", and "Froggy's Little Brother". In an Oxfordshire village in the 1880s, Flora Thompson recalled that children and mothers alike borrowed them from the Sunday School library and cried over them.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: children and mothers     Print: Book

  

Mrs O.F. Walton : [pious novels]

'Marjory Todd read [the books of Hesba Stretton, Mrs O.F. Walton and Amy le Feuvre but felt later that] "I would not now willingly expose a child of mine to the morbid resignation of any of these books... yet I think that children, when their home life is secure and happy, can take a lot of that debilitating sentiment... We sharpened our teeth on this stuff and then went on to greater satisfaction elsewhere", including "Pride and Prejudice", "Jane Eyre", "Alice in Wonderland", Captain Marryat, Kenneth Grahame, and E. Nesbit'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Marjory Todd      Print: Book

 

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