Protestant Work Ethic ...for kids!
June 2, 2016 4:28 PM   Subscribe

"None of that for the Boxcar Children, who are so Puritan that Henry worries, out loud, that building a pool on Sunday would be amoral—before Jessie justifies the activity by saying that the pool will help them keep clean. " The Spirit Of Capitalism and 'The Boxcar Children' - Jia Tolentino for the 'New Yorker'
posted by The Whelk (47 comments total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
I love that illo in the article, even though there's no way orphaned kids would have such nice clothes and hair.

I'm familiar with the 1942 version of the story and its sequels (which are easily confused with the similar Bobbsey Twins). The 1924 version sounds like a novel that with another pass or two could fit into V.C. Andrews's oeuvre.
posted by infinitewindow at 4:39 PM on June 2, 2016


The 1924 version, out of copyright and available freely online.
posted by clawsoon at 4:45 PM on June 2, 2016 [7 favorites]


The moment I realized that my childhood was truly over was when I turned 14 and as old as Henry, who wasreally boring. No more childish games for me. Time to become a boring real adult.
posted by ChuraChura at 4:46 PM on June 2, 2016 [8 favorites]


Children's stories that lay the morality on thickly used to be the norm as far as I can tell. I can never understand why these stories keep coming back into vogue. An updated Boxcar Children for today would basically be Into The Wild with younger protagonists.
posted by GuyZero at 4:47 PM on June 2, 2016 [3 favorites]


So what did the kids do in all the sequels? It seems like being orphans, on their own, is the story's hook; what do you build the stories around after they've been enmoneyed by rich grandpa?
posted by clawsoon at 5:12 PM on June 2, 2016 [1 favorite]


> So what did the kids do in all the sequels? It seems like being orphans, on their own, is the story's hook; what do you build the stories around after they've been enmoneyed by rich grandpa?

I remember one where they built a treehouse, and one where they found a hidden room in a house (their house or someone else's, I don't recall) where there was, like, an old rocking horse or something. This may or may not have been in the same book as the treehouse thing.

So, to answer your question: I have no idea.
posted by savetheclocktower at 5:15 PM on June 2, 2016 [10 favorites]


They solve crime! They're really not that different from Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, and Hardy Boys after the first book, just kids' mystery books.
posted by hydropsyche at 5:15 PM on June 2, 2016 [7 favorites]


From an author blurb I found:
Gertrude Chandler Warner was born in 1890 in Putnam, Connecticut, where she taught school and wrote The Boxcar Children because she had often imagined how delightful it would be to live in a caboose or freight car.
So she was an aspiring hobo.

(Also, I confirmed that the hidden room thing is somehow in the same book as the treehouse thing.)
posted by savetheclocktower at 5:24 PM on June 2, 2016 [6 favorites]


hydropsyche: They solve crime! They're really not that different from Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, and Hardy Boys after the first book, just kids' mystery books.

No wonder older generations are so afraid of crime. Given the books they read as kids, it was happening everywhere, all the time!
posted by clawsoon at 5:26 PM on June 2, 2016 [2 favorites]


An updated Boxcar Children for today would basically be Into The Wild with younger protagonists.

Age them up slightly and drop them into a future dystopian setting, and suddenly it's YA Snowpiercer.
posted by Strange Interlude at 5:31 PM on June 2, 2016 [15 favorites]


So she was an aspiring hobo.


An early advocate of the tiny house movement .....
posted by The Whelk at 5:37 PM on June 2, 2016 [12 favorites]


Age them up slightly and drop them into a future dystopian setting, and suddenly it's YA Snowpiercer.

*scribblescribblescribble*
Of course that's a silly idea.
*scribblescribble* .
Nobody would EVER turn that into a book.
*scribblescribble*
So uh, you all can just forget about it, especially cstross. Nothing to see here.
*scribblescribblescribble*
posted by happyroach at 5:55 PM on June 2, 2016 [13 favorites]


So what did the kids do in all the sequels?

Sometimes the exact same thing they did in the first book. Most of the later books follow a formula where the kids are put in some situation where they recreate the boxcar in some different locale. In the very next book they're spending the summer more-or-less alone on their grandfather's private island living in an abandoned barn that they fix up while foraging for food.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:57 PM on June 2, 2016 [4 favorites]


I read the first couple to the kid and they are weird as fuck. One moment you've got these starved deprived homeless children Living and hand to mouth existence, the next, BOOM, they've got a rich benefactor and they are lifted out of all that and get to be a child mystery solving team, except they retain the boxcar they used as a shelter whilst homeless and from time to time live out this Marie Antoinette's farm style fantasy version of their former lives? It's fucked.

Also no poetry to the prose style, which always bugs me.
posted by Artw at 6:03 PM on June 2, 2016 [4 favorites]


By nightfall, things are humming along: Jessie has made a tablecloth, the girls have done some washing, and everyone goes to sleep on fresh pine-needle beds. The following day, Henry finds work mowing the lawn for a doctor who lives in the nearby town; the rest of the kids scavenge dishware and build a shelf.

God, I ate this stuff up as a kid. The appeal of the Boxcar Children is very much like the appeal of The Sims: competent people with no psychological past begin to build their life from the ground up. They're clever and frugal, they survive in ingenious ways, and when shit goes south there's always a wealthy grandfather or "motherlode" cheat to fall back on.

A few years after reading these books, I read Cynthia Voigt's Homecoming series, which was also about abandoned siblings fending for themselves, except it was treated seriously and realistically. The Boxcar Children picked blueberries and cherries; the Homecoming kids counted pennies to buy day-old boxes of stale doughnuts because they were cheap and filling. I remember having a youthful existential crisis trying to reconcile the two.
posted by brookedel at 6:31 PM on June 2, 2016 [31 favorites]


The appeal of the Boxcar Children is very much like the appeal of The Sims: competent people

Wait, what version of the Sims do YOU have?!

Jokes aside, these comments are making me question myself a bit for remembering those first two books (the ones that focus on ersatz homemaking, before they become all about solving mysteries) so fondly. It's just about playing house, and that's fun, right?
posted by sunset in snow country at 6:41 PM on June 2, 2016 [5 favorites]


Man I loved Homecoming, but it was fucking dark. 70s kid lit pulled no punches.
posted by emjaybee at 6:58 PM on June 2, 2016 [7 favorites]


There is actually a sequel in which they attend and enjoy a comic book convention.
posted by Alluring Mouthbreather at 7:10 PM on June 2, 2016 [1 favorite]


The only thing I remember about this series is they didn't have refrigeration, just a cold stream. In retrospect I wonder why raccoons didn't take all their stuff or if they would all die of food poisoning.

More vivid in my memory is the Great Brain series, which had floods and getting chicken pox and kids losing their legs to rusty nails. (Along with, I assume, a bunch of cryptic Mormon references I probably didn't recognize at the time.)
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 7:27 PM on June 2, 2016 [11 favorites]


Just interjecting to say, I read the first sequel to my kids, and thought it was weird as hell this some rich guy would send four kids to live, relatively alone except for, hey who called it, a mysterious caretaker with a weird backstory. This would never happen in the real world of today.
posted by newdaddy at 7:37 PM on June 2, 2016


No, I think you're right in loving them. I loved the Boxcar Children. They solve lots of mysteries, and the second one, on the island, was one of my favorite books when I was very small. Digging for clams and hanging out in barns sounded AWESOME.
posted by ChuraChura at 7:50 PM on June 2, 2016 [6 favorites]


They go canoeing to find a missing person in the third book, and the forth has something to do with uranium. I never read past that.
posted by padraigin at 7:54 PM on June 2, 2016


URANIUM? Now I'm interested.
posted by kiltedtaco at 8:12 PM on June 2, 2016 [2 favorites]


if they would all die of food poisoning.

At least Laura Ingalls told it like it was. Someone goes blind, they get stuck in the house for 4 months during a bad winter, they burn a lot of dry manure for warmth. Ah, rustic living.
posted by GuyZero at 8:14 PM on June 2, 2016 [5 favorites]


Oh yeah!!! The mystery of the uranium mine or whatever. I didn't know what uranium was when I read it and I have only just this moment realized how batshit that was.
posted by sunset in snow country at 8:18 PM on June 2, 2016 [2 favorites]


I mean, they probably didn't know what uranium was when they wrote it.

A synopsis: “Oh no grandchildren, I have a difficult problem only you can solve! My sister is very sick and staying at the ranch I grew up on when I was a child. I am very familiar with this ranch, including the strange rocks everywhere, since the fireplace is made out of them and we mention them in every chapter. Won’t you go help my sick old sister who is probably dying of uranium poisoning since she lives in a house made out of uranium? Try to get her to sign over all the property to you before she realizes she’s sitting on a goldmine. Oh thank you grandchildren you’ve solved all my problems! I’m not hoping you’ll also die of uranium poisoning at all! I kind of love this person, whoever she is.
posted by sunset in snow country at 8:25 PM on June 2, 2016 [15 favorites]


Yeeeeah that's the uranium plot in a nutshell. It's still a pretty good book but the beginning of the end for sure.
posted by padraigin at 8:32 PM on June 2, 2016


In retrospect I wonder why raccoons didn't take all their stuff or if they would all die of food poisoning.

I just reread the entire 1924 book (it took all of 45 minutes). The competent homemaking theme is very much engrained in the book, though the whole thing is still charming. (Though very much too easy, and not even remotely possible today. Homecoming is set in the 1970s or so -- would that kind of trek have been possible for children to pull off at the time?)

That said, my fan theory is now that the doctor secretly drops off food at their house every night.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 8:39 PM on June 2, 2016


Did this uranium stuff happen to happen around the same time as the Convair NB-36 that was mentioned in another thread?
posted by clawsoon at 8:39 PM on June 2, 2016


I also just blew through the 1924 version. It seems legit based on stories of childhood from my grandmothers.

I also loved homecoming and feel like it is maybe possible for the time? I'm 40 something and I almost feel like it could have still happened in my day but barely.
posted by padraigin at 8:44 PM on June 2, 2016


Uranium mines aren't really any more dangerous than any other kind of mine. You have to purify the stuff before it would have any effect on you.
posted by dilaudid at 8:54 PM on June 2, 2016


Children's stories that lay the morality on thickly used to be the norm as far as I can tell.

Oh my god, were they ever. Someone gave my three-year-old a bunch of the classic Golden Books, and while they all extol the typical protestant virtues of the 1950s, the one that makes me seethe is Tootle. It is a very thin story wrapped around a brick of a message: don't you EVER dare do your own thing. You must get 100% A+ in staying on the rails if you want to amount to something and not grow up to be a total failure!

Unfortunately, this is the one my kid loves the most.
posted by lollymccatburglar at 9:57 PM on June 2, 2016 [1 favorite]


I loved Tootle as a kid because he was a train with a FACE. Now the story is ruined for me. Tootle, you do whatever the hell you want with those buttercups in that meadow. Man, are there any other non-Thomas anthropmorphic train stories I can read my kids?
posted by Mister Cheese at 10:48 PM on June 2, 2016 [1 favorite]


By nightfall, things are humming along: Jessie has made a tablecloth, the girls have done some washing, and everyone goes to sleep on fresh pine-needle beds. The following day, Henry finds work mowing the lawn for a doctor who lives in the nearby town; the rest of the kids scavenge dishware and build a shelf.

Oh yeah...

*scribblescribblescribble*
By nightfall, the "Boxcar" was humming again. Jese has managed to get the printer to make silk, and it' spewing out cloth, while the girls have broken the dishes back down to sludge.
"We'll have blankets to sleep on, and hammocks, and clothing, and..."
But sie cannot get it to produce anything BUT silk sheets, and sie cannot turn it off. Soon the feed bin is dry, the stock of Soylent is gone, and the grabbers are blindly groping for more protein to put in the bin...
In the morning, Jese sets out to beg jobs from the Owners, in exchange for a few nutrient blocks, while the other survivors scrounge for castoff electronics to fix the printer...
Nothing to see here. Move along.

*scribblescribblescribble*
posted by happyroach at 11:39 PM on June 2, 2016 [9 favorites]


lollymccatburglar: ...the one that makes me seethe is Tootle. It is a very thin story wrapped around a brick of a message: don't you EVER dare do your own thing.

When your kid hits their teens, they'll rebel by demanding that you plan their life for them and that you set firm, near-impossible goals.

And you'll be, like, "Be creative, kid! Think for yourself, find your own path!"

And they'll be, like, "YOU JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND!"
posted by clawsoon at 4:57 AM on June 3, 2016 [3 favorites]


My adult life is turning into the the boxcar fantasy - running an efficient home and getting ducks 100% in a row.

And then wanting to burn the apartment down.
posted by rebent at 6:00 AM on June 3, 2016 [3 favorites]


  Uranium mines aren't really any more dangerous than any other kind of mine. You have to purify the stuff before it would have any effect on you.

I think the Dene hunters and trappers who carried the ore from Eldorado Mine in Port Radium might disagree: They Never Told Us These Things
posted by scruss at 6:05 AM on June 3, 2016


I loved the Boxcar Children, although mostly what I remember from the first book is picking berries. And scavenging for crockery. I do think the fun of it was that it was playing house!
posted by chainsofreedom at 7:29 AM on June 3, 2016 [1 favorite]


My 2-year-old is obsessed with the Boxcar Children - every evening he begs for just one more chapter and we're on our 6th book straight. Right now I think it's great for him. He loves the realistic descriptions of what, to adults, appear to be boring household tasks. We may find it dull to "set up house", but 2-year-olds sure don't! Learning how to live independently may seem like a poor use of childhood, but in a very real way, that's part of what childhood is FOR (not all of it, but an important part). Yeah, it's tiresome and ridiculous that they buy dishes in like every single story, and I do a bit of on-the-fly editing when I'm reading to my son so ALL the children do ALL the household tasks, instead of splitting down gender lines. It's definitely dated. But, the characters treat each other with kindness and genuine respect, even (and especially) grouchy or difficult characters. I think that's rare in children's books (where villians are often gleefully hated) and especially appropriate for a toddler. He'll read about evil people soon enough. My son likes the mysteries too, and none of them are too scary.

I loved the books as a kid, too. As an adult what really strikes me is how ridiculously privileged the kids are, after the first book. All their rustic/woodsy/self-reliant adventures are lavishly bankrolled by their grandfather, such that there's never any real difficulty whatsoever. As a kid I didn't notice this, in the same way all kids (including me) don't really appreciate how much of their success is the result of their parents' work. That's appropriate for children, though, and the confidence that children build from having autonomy (even if it's the false, bank-rolled autonomy of the Boxcar children) is real and valuable.
posted by Cygnet at 7:42 AM on June 3, 2016 [3 favorites]


I disliked playing house as a kid because it tended to be all about pretend relationships. Sometimes I could convince other kids to let me be the family dog, which was tolerable, but mostly I hated it. But I loved The Boxcar Children, and playing "let's go run away and live in the woods," and books like My Side Of The Mountain that took the idea even further. So yeah, in retrospect, that's some heavy handed morality, but doing and making stuff was so much more exciting than talking about stuff that I ate all that self-satisfied Protestant work ethic prose right up.
posted by deludingmyself at 7:45 AM on June 3, 2016 [5 favorites]


  Children's stories that lay the morality on thickly used to be the norm as far as I can tell

A large chunk of the children's book market used to be for school (and sunday school) prizes. Books had to be morally uplifting to make it onto publishers lists.
posted by scruss at 8:21 AM on June 3, 2016 [1 favorite]


A synopsis: “ . . . Try to get her to sign over all the property to you before she realizes she’s sitting on a goldmine. Oh thank you grandchildren you’ve solved all my problems!"

Here is the whole series of reviews of different Boxcar Children books from Rampant Reads. Just might be better than the books themselves . . .
posted by flug at 8:25 AM on June 3, 2016


Tootle was the worst, yes. And I read it to my kids too many times, it's true.

The notion of a train racing a horse across an open field is pretty funny though so it's got that going for it.
posted by GuyZero at 8:40 AM on June 3, 2016 [1 favorite]


Oh man, I gobbled up the Boxcar Children as a small child (when I also did not know what uranium was; my primary memory of that particular book was that at one point they mixed Coke and orange juice. It sounded disgusting to me at the time, but twenty years later I visited Bavaria and found out it is actually delicious). I adored the secret room only visible from the tree house. Unfortunately it seems that the series has certainly gone downhill...
posted by jeudi at 9:04 AM on June 3, 2016 [2 favorites]


jeudi: Unfortunately it seems that the series has certainly gone downhill...

"But when plans are stolen and the yo-yo is damaged, it’s clear someone doesn’t want this yo-yo to be built."

That makes me curious just because I want to know who'd be so petty as to be anti-yoyo. Are they now living in a boxcar with an HOA?
posted by clawsoon at 9:12 AM on June 3, 2016 [2 favorites]


Are they now living in a boxcar with an HOA?

Henry, Jessie, Violet & Benny in: The Mystery of the Unexpected Assessment.
posted by deludingmyself at 3:08 PM on June 3, 2016 [3 favorites]


fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit: "More vivid in my memory is the Great Brain series, which had floods and getting chicken pox and kids losing their legs to rusty nails. (Along with, I assume, a bunch of cryptic Mormon references I probably didn't recognize at the time.)"

Not to mention the time that Papa's well meaning meddling results in Abie Glassman starving to death. What a rollicking adventure!
posted by Chrysostom at 10:04 PM on June 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


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