What Katy Did Next

What Katy Did Next
Susan Coolidge

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics.Likened to Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, What Katy Did Next is a timeless classic for both children and adults to enjoy.The story of Katy Carr, the lanky, good-hearted tomboy who learns to be gentle and patient, is continued in this third instalment of Susan Coolidge’s popular Katy series. When Mrs Ashe, a widower, discovers that her visiting nephew has scarlet fever, she sends her only daughter Amy to stay with the Carr family. Amy finds a true friend in Katy Carr, and Mrs Ashe invites Katy to join them on a trip to Europe. After some initial reluctance, she agrees.We follow Katy as she is reunited with her old friends from Hillsover, including the mischievous Rose Red Browne. Katy’s journey takes her to rainy England, where she finds out what constitutes a ‘fine day’ for the English and what a Dickens-commended muffin tastes like. The Carr family from her most popular Katy series was modelled on Coolidge’s own family, with the protagonist Katy modelled on Coolidge herself.

WHAT KATY

DID NEXT

Susan Coolidge

This Story is Dedicated

TO

THE MANY LITTLE GIRLS

(SOME OF THEM GROWN TO BE GREAT GIRLS NOW),

Who, during the last twelve years, have begged that something more might be told them about KATY CARR, and what she did after leaving school.

CONTENTS

Title Page (#u034114eb-6121-5ecb-828f-3cb2111b49cd)

Dedication (#u8d532491-ca87-517b-8407-fcd1efdf19bb)

History of Collins

Life & Times

Chapter 1 An Unexpected Guest

Chapter 2 An Invitation

Chapter 3 Rose and Rosebud

Chapter 4 On the “Spartacus”

Chapter 5 Storybook England

Chapter 6 Across the Channel

Chapter 7 The Pension Suisse

Chapter 8 On the Track of Ulysses

Chapter 9 A Roman Holiday

Chapter 10 Clear Shining After Rain

Chapter 11 Next

Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from the Collins English Dictionary

Copyright

About the Publisher

History of Collins (#u3597f807-8304-59e8-a2cd-c2f74605e504)

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 published in 1824, 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, Ready Reckoner, 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 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, encyclopaedias 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. 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.

Life & Times (#u3597f807-8304-59e8-a2cd-c2f74605e504)

What Katy Did

The title of this novel is intended as a subtle joke around a play on words. In the US, bush-crickets are known as katydids, because the males elicit a mating call that sounds like the trisyllabic mantra ‘ka-ty-did’. On the original front cover of What Katy Did, there was a drawing of five anthropomorphic katydids. The joke is that the katydid insects see and tell ‘what Katy did’ as she goes about her tomboyish mischief in the story. The author imagines they are saying, ‘Katy did this, Katy did that’ as ever-present tattletales, in much the same way that young children are driven to tell the truth about the wrongdoings of their siblings and friends.

The Author and her Female Contemporaries

Susan Coolidge was the oddly modern-sounding pen name of Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, the daughter of wealthy American parents from Cleveland, Ohio. She worked as a nurse during the American Civil War. Woolsey was 30 years old when the war ended and she decided to devote her life to writing children’s books. Curiously, she never had children or married, despite her interest in children’s literature.

Woolsey published What Katy Did in 1872, at the age of 37, and established herself on the literary stage. She continued authoring books until her death in 1905, at the age of 70. Parallels can be drawn between What Katy Did, The Secret Garden (1911), by Francis Hodgson Burnett, and Pollyanna (1913), by Eleanor H. Porter. All three books tackle the subject of paraplegic paralysis in one way or another.

In What Katy Did, the eponymous Katy admires the robustness and goodness of her invalid cousin Helen. She then suffers temporary paralysis herself, due to a fall from a swing, and Helen teaches her how to cope with her affliction until she recovers. In The Secret Garden, there is a reversal, in which Mary teaches her sickly cousin Colin to fight his affliction and learn to walk again. In Pollyanna, the eponymous Pollyanna is paralyzed when struck by a motorcar and finds the will to recover thanks to the love returned to her by the townsfolk.

Clearly, Hodgson Burnett and Porter were both influenced by the work of Woolsey and saw potential in reworking the general theme of mind over matter. The message that things will improve by encouraging the body to heal with the application of thought is an interesting one to consider. There is more than a hint of Christian faith underpinning these stories, suggesting that minor miracles can be generated simply by thinking positively with determination and perseverance.

If we consider the era in which these books were written, it becomes apparent why these books were successful. The fields of medicine that dealt with the causes and treatment of paralysis were not yet developed, so the idea of using the mind to overcome such disabilities seemed as good as any. Moreover, those who did show improvement and recovery were deemed to have done so for positive reasons, while those who remained unchanged were thought to have lapsed faith. In short, it was a self-fulfilling belief system, so it was assumed to be true.

There was also the prevailing notion that unabashed children, and girls in particular, were somehow in possession of a magic charm that overrode the jaded cynicism of adults. Of course, all three authors happen to be female themselves, but one would be hard pushed to find a boy in literature imbued with similar charm. This is the veneration of female virtue that prevailed at that time. It is the ‘marianismo’ of the female, as contrasted with the machismo of the male. In What Katy Did, this is especially so, as the implication is that Katy suffers her accident precisely because she is a tomboy. When she eventually recovers, her cousin teaches her how to be more feminine and appreciative in her outlook. Thus, femininity is good for the girl and good for those who are touched by it.

An American Childhood

Of course, What Katy Did is also a tale of American childhood. In this respect, it shares a good deal with Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which was published just four years later, in 1876. Twain – real name Samuel Langhorne Clemens – was born in the same year and had been a journalist during the American Civil War. Both stories are good yarns, in the sense that they have effective characterization and plots that keep the reader amused and entertained. As such, Woolsey and Twain jointly set the precedent for what the modern children’s novel should be. There was certainly a ready market in the post-war climate, in which parents were beginning to forget the horrors of war and their children had either been too young to remember or had been born in the aftermath.

If What Katy Did is about the process of childhood, then What Katy Did at School is about the transition from childhood to adolescence, and What Katy Did Next is a coming-of-age story. It is also a travelogue aimed at the aspiring classes of American society, who were likely to have the finances and the adventurous spirit to take a trip around Europe at the close of the 19th century. Heritage is seemingly far more important to citizens of the US than those of Britain, possibly because the country is historically young. It’s a bit like an adopted child wanting to trace its birth parents, or providing provenance for an antique – the hope is to find meaningful connections and more depth and value through genealogy and history.

Katy is invited to travel to Europe as a reward for taking care of Amy, the daughter of Mrs Ashe, while Mrs Ashe herself was nursing her nephew through illness. They travel by steamer across the Atlantic to Ireland, then to England, and on to continental Europe. Coolidge describes Katy’s surprises and disappointments at the things she experiences along the way. Essentially, it is a vicarious read, for the amusement and escapism of the reader.

With the passage of time, the What Katy Did books have acquired a new significance as documents of a bygone era. In an age when crossing the Atlantic is typically achieved in passenger airliners in a matter of hours, it is fascinating to consider the pace of travel by sea in those days. The same goes for journeying overland before the age of motor vehicles. This upper-class European adventure from one point of cultural and historical interest to another was known as The Grand Tour.