Deborah Lutz Quote

This mania for scribbling wasn’t an unusual activity for literary middle- or upper-class children in nineteenth-century England (many poorer kids were working at a young age, including Charles Dickens, who pasted labels onto jars at Warren’s Shoeblacking factory and warehouse when he was twelve years old and his father was in debtor’s prison). In the late eighteenth century, young Jane Austen filled the beautiful notebooks her father had bought her with sparkling imitations and parodies of fashionable society novels, calling them Volume the First, Second, and Third. John Ruskin made a forty-five-page book with red covers, ruled with blue lines, when he was just seven. Using a book print like the Brontës, he included illustrations and called it Harry and Lucy. Mary Ann Evans (who later took the pen name George Eliot) wrote a fragment of a historical novel in a school notebook when she was fourteen. Charles Dodgson scribbled family magazines, sewn into cardboard covers, with his ten siblings, such as one called Mischmasch. His adult writing continued in this same vein of delightful ramblings, published under the name Lewis Carroll. The young Stephens had their family magazine, produced weekly, in the 1890s, with Thoby and Virginia (later Woolf) as the main authors and editors and Vanessa and Adrian as contributors. It was an early practice run for the Bloomsbury Group.15