Conversations with Lucy

So I'm still here at the AAS, having a grand time.  I hope to post more of my fun finds, but for now, I thought you should have this Conversation with Lucy, as transcribed by Jake:

Lucy: You don't want me to get all fussy, do you?
Jake: What did you say?
Lucy: Well, when things aren't the way I want them to be, I get all fussy.
Jake: Yeah. I wish you wouldn't do that. (missed parenting opportunity, but honest)
Lucy: I can't help it. It's dramatic on my body.

Or something like that. Then much more about it being dramatic. I'm pretty sure she meant "automatic," but it's a funnily appropriate slip up.

So there you go.  So self-aware.  So manipulative.  What are we supposed to do?

I'll tell you what we need: some nineteenth-century children's literature to help Lucy understand how to behave!  How convenient that I'm here, in the nineteenth century, to collect some.  In fact, I was able to request the books that Lucy adopted a while back, both of which are pretty awesome little children's books. 

So here's the plate that tells everyone that she adopted this book:

So Lucy has adopted two books, including one from Letitia Barbauld called Little Marian; here's the awesome frontispiece from it:

It's an odd book, written in a sort of second-person weirdness, all very instructive, telling the child-reader what the moon and the stars are, with lines like "you will see it rise again above the trees."  And then it has a passage that asks: "Do you know where sugar comes from? Sugar comes from cane like a walking-stick that grows from the ground." Shortly thereafter: "And what is tea? Tea is a leaf that grows upon a shrub, and that is dried a good deal."  The weird thing is that what I am most reminded of here is the new collection of Winnie-the-Pooh stories we've been reading to Lucy lately.  But Milne is a lot funnier, and Barbauld is pretty dry and dull (at least in the book, though not elsewhere!).

The other book is Half a Dozen Girls, from sometime around 1874.  It has six stories featuring little girls getting themselves into trouble of the nineteenth-century sort, like not being able to sit still for photographs.  My favorite tale is "Nell -- The Little Pitcher," in which the title character is referred to as a "pitcher" because she overhears things and then says them out loud to the wrong people (little pitchers having big ears and all that).  Here's an illustration from one of Nell's humorous moments:

So, lesson learned: we have to watch ourselves around this girl (Nell and/or Lucy).