Through an Open Window
32. Which is a Letter from Pollyanna
Classic Literature: Words and Phrases
In 1819, millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a 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.
Soon after, William published the first Collins novel; however, it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed, and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.
Aged 30, William’s son, William II, took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly ‘Victorian’ in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and The Pilgrim’s Progress, making them available to the masses for the first time.
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.
In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of ‘books for the millions’ was developed, although the phrase wasn’t coined until 1907. Affordable editions of classical literature were published, and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everyman’s Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel, and adventure. This series eclipsed all competition at the time, and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry.
HarperCollins is and has always been a champion of the classics, and the current Collins Classics series follows in this tradition – publishing classical literature that is affordable and available to all. Beautifully packaged, highly collectible, and intended to be reread and enjoyed at every opportunity.
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
