Pollyanna. Элинор Портер
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company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books, and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William co-published in 1825, Greek and English Lexicon. Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.
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A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopedias, and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases, and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.
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About the Author
‘What a most extraordinary child!’ Aunt Polly speaks for all of Beldingsville, Vermont, when she summarises her niece Pollyanna’s character thus; the young orphan, the eponymous heroine of Eleanor H. Porter’s 1913 story, spends her days spreading joy and gladness wherever she goes, leaving a trail of baffled adults in her wake. Indeed, the child is so cheerful – so filled with ‘an overwhelming, unquenchable gladness for everything that has happened or is going to happen’, in her doctor’s words – that her name has become a byword for someone who is relentlessly optimistic, even in the face of disaster.
Ostensibly a book for children, Pollyanna was an unusual candidate to become a bestseller, but within a year of publication it had sold over a million copies. Porter, a relatively unknown forty-four-year-old novelist, must have been as surprised as anyone at the book’s success. She died just seven years later, in 1920, by which time Pollyanna had spawned a sequel, a Broadway play, a board game and a silent film.
It was an extraordinary rise to fame for a woman who had otherwise lived a quiet life. Born in Littleton, New Hampshire, in 1868, Porter was educated at home due to ill health. After proving herself a talented singer, however, she won a place at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. She relocated permanently to Massachusetts after marrying businessman John Lyman Porter in 1892, and worked as a singer at public events and private functions. It was not until 1901, aged almost thirty-three, that Porter turned to writing, composing a number of short stories that were published in magazines. Her first novel, Cross Currents, appeared in 1907, and even in her early work she showed a gift for creating characters who refuse to lose their optimism.
The Glad Game
On the face of it, Pollyanna was just another instalment in Porter’s series of uplifting tales, but both the character and the story captured the public imagination. In a 1915 article in the Bookman, journalist Grace Isabel Colbron examined the phenomenon of Pollyanna, concluding that the book’s success lay in the ‘sincerity’ with which it was written. ‘There is no type of fiction so annoyingly inane, so exasperatingly foolish,’ she wrote, ‘as such books if they are not written with sincerity.’ But Pollyanna, she felt, simply meant well; despite her ‘strenuous “gladness”’, it was impossible to stay annoyed at her for long. ‘We applaud in the child what we would like to be ourselves, and we are proud to think we have once been so brave, so independent.’
And indeed there is something very infectious about Pollyanna’s attitude to life. Arriving in Beldingsville, Vermont, to live with stern spinster Aunt Polly, she finds a community of cynical adults trudging through existence as if it is a chore. ‘Just breathing isn’t living!’ she exclaims at Aunt Polly.
At the heart of Pollyanna’s philosophy is what she calls the ‘glad game’, whose rules are wonderfully self-explanatory: ‘just find something about everything to be glad about – no matter what’. Pollyanna has known sadness and deprivation in her short life, but she refuses to let despair get the better of her. ‘When you’re hunting for the glad things, you sort of forget the other kind,’ she says. ‘And the harder ’tis, the more fun ’tis to get ’em out.’
As Aunt Polly quickly discovers, the glad game makes Pollyanna impervious to punishment. Dispatched to read a health and safety pamphlet after letting flies invade the house, Pollyanna delivers a rave review: ‘I never saw anything so perfectly lovely and interesting in my life. I’m so glad you gave me that book to read!’ Forced to eat bread and milk in place of dinner, she reassures Aunt Polly that ‘I like bread and milk … You mustn’t feel bad about that one bit.’ Even during her greatest crisis, serious injury in a car accident, she cheerfully notes that ‘you never, never know how perfectly lovely legs are till you haven’t got them’. By refusing to feel sorry for herself, Pollyanna unintentionally shames Aunt Polly into becoming a better, happier person – into playing Pollyanna at her own glad game. As Hayley Mills, who played Pollyanna in Walt Disney’s 1960 film, later commented, ‘it’s her originality as a human being that inspires and transforms that community … They rediscover their intrinsic joy, and love, and connectedness with life to her. She just is like a mirror up to them.’
Greeting the Unknown
Pollyanna may have taken the world by storm in the years after it first appeared, but it was not immune to the inevitable backlash that follows all cultural phenomena. It had brought light to a world sliding into its first all-out war, and optimism to a United States still reeling from the corruption and greed of the so-called Gilded Age. But it seems there was only so much gladness audiences could stomach. By the end of the Second World War, Pollyanna had fallen from favour; Disney’s film did nothing to prevent the book’s sales from dwindling to such a degree that the former international bestseller actually went out of print. In 1975, Margery Fisher’s Who’s Who in Children’s Books described Pollyanna as ‘possibly the most exasperating heroine in fiction’, and by now the noun ‘Pollyanna’, first coined in 1921, has become a derisory term for a hopeless idealist.
Porter did not live to witness the worst of the backlash, but even in her lifetime she felt compelled to justify Pollyanna’s relentlessly positive worldview. ‘I have been made to suffer from the Pollyanna books,’ she explained. ‘People have thought that Pollyanna chirped that she was “glad” about everything … I have never believed we ought to deny discomfort and pain and evil;