Customer Reviews

Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (The Best Sellers of 1902)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

My mother bought an old copy of this in the mid-fifties and read it to me as a bedtime story. I think I remember her telling me that her mother did the same thing for her back in the early part of the century after moving here from Vienna, Austria.

[Miss] Rice had remarkable writing skills, and also a fertile (and rather profound) imagination. All this is displayed firstly in her recreations of the poor white southern dialect coming out of the mouths of Mrs. Wiggs and her family - the speech cadences are marvelous, and very musical. But there are also the little snatches of poetry and proverbs she composed for the beginning of each chapter, which truly border on the sublime. And the occasional descriptive passages are full of feeling and artistry, clear-sightedness and wisdom.

There are plentiful little seed thoughts, scattered discretely to instruct young people, and not only consciously. Even if one doesn't understand this or that little gem, a child would tend to embrace it, taking it in on some level - each one serves its young patrons well, beginning to work it's little lifelong magic. This is a very deep, free-flowing child psychology, several years before Freud's more cantankerous "discoveries" became widely known and intellectually fashionable.

Much of this "short" story is about the interaction between the poor and the rich, and how each serves to enrich the life of the other. This is done in a well-rounded fashion, never becoming preachy, often with beauteous touches of humor, tenderness, and sadness. Sure the story is in big print, and it's obviously not Henry James, but there's nothing going on here that could ever be termed 'simplistic'.

I guess you could say that back in the old days when literacy was considered more a gift than somewhat of a burden, they really knew how to instruct, as it were.