Pollyanna

POLLYANNA
Eleanor H. Porter

Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook edition published by William Collins in 2017

Life & Times section © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

Silvia Crompton asserts her moral right as author of the Life & Times section

Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from

Collins English Dictionary

Cover by e-Digital Design

Cover illustration: Shutterstock / michaelangeloop

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780008242138

Ebook Edition © June 2017 ISBN: 9780008242145

Version: 2017-05-30

Dedication

TO My Cousin Belle

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

History of William Collins

Life & Times

1. Miss Polly

2. Old Tom and Nancy

3. The Coming of Pollyanna

4. The Little Attic Room

5. The Game

6. A Question of Duty

7. Pollyanna and Punishments

8. Pollyanna Pays a Visit

9. Which Tells of the Man

10. A Surprise for Mrs. Snow

11. Introducing Jimmy

12. Before the Ladies’ Aid

13. In Pendleton Woods

14. Just a Matter of Jelly

15. Dr. Chilton

16. A Red Rose and a Lace Shawl

17. “Just Like a Book”

18. Prisms

19. Which is Somewhat Surprising

20. Which is More Surprising

21. A Question Answered

22. Sermons and Woodboxes

23. An Accident

24. John Pendleton

25. A Waiting Game

26. A Door Ajar

27. Two Visits

28. The Game and its Players

29. Through an Open Window

30. Jimmy Takes the Helm

31. A New Uncle

32. Which is a Letter from Pollyanna

Classic Literature: Words and Phrases

About the Publisher

History of William Collins

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 co-published in 1825, 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; 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 The 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, encyclopedias, 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, although the phrase wasn’t coined until 1907. 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
About the Author

‘What a most extraordinary child!’ Aunt Polly speaks for all of Beldingsville, Vermont, when she summarises her niece Pollyanna’s character thus; the young orphan, the eponymous heroine of Eleanor H. Porter’s 1913 story, spends her days spreading joy and gladness wherever she goes, leaving a trail of baffled adults in her wake. Indeed, the child is so cheerful – so filled with ‘an overwhelming, unquenchable gladness for everything that has happened or is going to happen’, in her doctor’s words – that her name has become a byword for someone who is relentlessly optimistic, even in the face of disaster.

Ostensibly a book for children, Pollyanna was an unusual candidate to become a bestseller, but within a year of publication it had sold over a million copies. Porter, a relatively unknown forty-four-year-old novelist, must have been as surprised as anyone at the book’s success. She died just seven years later, in 1920, by which time Pollyanna had spawned a sequel, a Broadway play, a board game and a silent film.

It was an extraordinary rise to fame for a woman who had otherwise lived a quiet life. Born in Littleton, New Hampshire, in 1868, Porter was educated at home due to ill health. After proving herself a talented singer, however, she won a place at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. She relocated permanently to Massachusetts after marrying businessman John Lyman Porter in 1892, and worked as a singer at public events and private functions. It was not until 1901, aged almost thirty-three, that Porter turned to writing, composing a number of short stories that were published in magazines. Her first novel, Cross Currents, appeared in 1907, and even in her early work she showed a gift for creating characters who refuse to lose their optimism.

The Glad Game

On the face of it, Pollyanna was just another instalment in Porter’s series of uplifting tales, but both the character and the story captured the public imagination. In a 1915 article in the Bookman, journalist Grace Isabel Colbron examined the phenomenon of Pollyanna, concluding that the book’s success lay in the ‘sincerity’ with which it was written. ‘There is no type of fiction so annoyingly inane, so exasperatingly foolish,’ she wrote, ‘as such books if they are not written with sincerity.’ But Pollyanna, she felt, simply meant well; despite her ‘strenuous “gladness”’, it was impossible to stay annoyed at her for long. ‘We applaud in the child what we would like to be ourselves, and we are proud to think we have once been so brave, so independent.’

And indeed there is something very infectious about Pollyanna’s attitude to life. Arriving in Beldingsville, Vermont, to live with stern spinster Aunt Polly, she finds a community of cynical adults trudging through existence as if it is a chore. ‘Just breathing isn’t living!’ she exclaims at Aunt Polly.

At the heart of Pollyanna’s philosophy is what she calls the ‘glad game’, whose rules are wonderfully self-explanatory: ‘just find something about everything to be glad about – no matter what’. Pollyanna has known sadness and deprivation in her short life, but she refuses to let despair get the better of her. ‘When you’re hunting for the glad things, you sort of forget the other kind,’ she says. ‘And the harder ’tis, the more fun ’tis to get ’em out.’

As Aunt Polly quickly discovers, the glad game makes Pollyanna impervious to punishment. Dispatched to read a health and safety pamphlet after letting flies invade the house, Pollyanna delivers a rave review: ‘I never saw anything so perfectly lovely and interesting in my life. I’m so glad you gave me that book to read!’ Forced to eat bread and milk in place of dinner, she reassures Aunt Polly that ‘I like bread and milk … You mustn’t feel bad about that one bit.’ Even during her greatest crisis, serious injury in a car accident, she cheerfully notes that ‘you never, never know how perfectly lovely legs are till you haven’t got them’. By refusing to feel sorry for herself, Pollyanna unintentionally shames Aunt Polly into becoming a better, happier person – into playing Pollyanna at her own glad game. As Hayley Mills, who played Pollyanna in Walt Disney’s 1960 film, later commented, ‘it’s her originality as a human being that inspires and transforms that community … They rediscover their intrinsic joy, and love, and connectedness with life to her. She just is like a mirror up to them.’

Greeting the Unknown

Pollyanna may have taken the world by storm in the years after it first appeared, but it was not immune to the inevitable backlash that follows all cultural phenomena. It had brought light to a world sliding into its first all-out war, and optimism to a United States still reeling from the corruption and greed of the so-called Gilded Age. But it seems there was only so much gladness audiences could stomach. By the end of the Second World War, Pollyanna had fallen from favour; Disney’s film did nothing to prevent the book’s sales from dwindling to such a degree that the former international bestseller actually went out of print. In 1975, Margery Fisher’s Who’s Who in Children’s Books described Pollyanna as ‘possibly the most exasperating heroine in fiction’, and by now the noun ‘Pollyanna’, first coined in 1921, has become a derisory term for a hopeless idealist.

Porter did not live to witness the worst of the backlash, but even in her lifetime she felt compelled to justify Pollyanna’s relentlessly positive worldview. ‘I have been made to suffer from the Pollyanna books,’ she explained. ‘People have thought that Pollyanna chirped that she was “glad” about everything … I have never believed we ought to deny discomfort and pain and evil; I have merely thought it is far better to “greet the unknown with a cheer”.’

It is hard to argue with that. Whatever Pollyanna’s failings, she certainly meant only to spread joy, as did her creator. On her grave in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a simple plaque pays tribute to Eleanor H. Porter, ‘who by her writings brought sunshine into the lives of millions’.

CHAPTER 1
Miss Polly

Miss Polly Harrington entered her kitchen a little hurriedly this June morning. Miss Polly did not usually make hurried movements; she specially prided herself on her repose of manner. But to-day she was hurrying – actually hurrying.

Nancy, washing dishes at the sink, looked up in surprise. Nancy had been working in Miss Polly’s kitchen only two months, but already she knew that her mistress did not usually hurry.

“Nancy!”

“Yes, ma’am.” Nancy answered cheerfully, but she still continued wiping the pitcher in her hand.

“Nancy,” – Miss Polly’s voice was very stern now – “when I’m talking to you, I wish you to stop your work and listen to what I have to say.”

Nancy flushed miserably. She set the pitcher down at once, with the cloth still about it, thereby nearly tipping it over – which did not add to her composure.

“Yes, ma’am; I will, ma’am,” she stammered, righting the pitcher, and turning hastily. “I was only keepin” on with my work ’cause you specially told me this mornin’ ter hurry with my dishes, ye know.”

Her mistress frowned.

“That will do, Nancy. I did not ask for explanations. I asked for your attention.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Nancy stifled a sigh. She was wondering if ever in any way she could please this woman. Nancy had never “worked out” before; but a sick mother suddenly widowed and left with three younger children besides Nancy herself, had forced the girl into doing something toward their support, and she had been so pleased when she found a place in the kitchen of the great house on the hill – Nancy had come from “The Corners,” six miles away, and she knew Miss Polly Harrington only as the mistress of the old Harrington homestead, and one of the wealthiest residents of the town. That was two months before. She knew Miss Polly now as a stern, severe-faced woman who frowned if a knife clattered to the floor, or if a door banged – but who never thought to smile even when knives and doors were still.

“When you’ve finished your morning work, Nancy,” Miss Polly was saying now, “you may clear the little room at the head of the stairs in the attic, and make up the cot bed. Sweep the room and clean it, of course, after you clear out the trunks and boxes.”

“Yes, ma’am. And where shall I put the things, please, that I take out?”

“In the front attic.” Miss Polly hesitated, then went on: “I suppose I may as well tell you now, Nancy. My niece, Miss Pollyanna Whittier, is coming to live with me. She is eleven years old, and will sleep in that room.”

“A little girl – coming here, Miss Harrington? Oh, won’t that be nice!” cried Nancy, thinking of the sunshine her own little sisters made in the home at “The Corners.”

“Nice? Well, that isn’t exactly the word I should use,” rejoined Miss Polly, stiffly. “However, I intend to make the best of it, of course. I am a good woman, I hope; and I know my duty.”

Nancy colored hotly.

“Of course, ma’am; it was only that I thought a little girl here might – might brighten things up for you,” she faltered.

“Thank you,” rejoined the lady, dryly. “I can’t say, however, that I see any immediate need for that.”

“But, of course, you – you’d want her, your sister’s child,” ventured Nancy, vaguely feeling that somehow she must prepare a welcome for this lonely little stranger.

Miss Polly lifted her chin haughtily.

“Well, really, Nancy, just because I happened to have a sister who was silly enough to marry and bring unnecessary children into a world that was already quite full enough, I can’t see how I should particularly want to have the care of them myself. However, as I said before, I hope I know my duty. See that you clean the corners, Nancy,” she finished sharply, as she left the room.

“Yes, ma’am,” sighed Nancy, picking up the half-dried pitcher – now so cold it must be rinsed again.

In her own room, Miss Polly took out once more the letter which she had received two days before from the far-away Western town, and which had been so unpleasant a surprise to her. The letter was addressed to Miss Polly Harrington, Beldingsville, Vermont; and it read as follows:

Dear Madam,

I regret to inform you that the Rev. John Whittier died two weeks ago, leaving one child, a girl eleven years old. He left practically nothing else save a few books; for, as you doubtless know, he was the pastor of this small mission church, and had a very meagre salary.

I believe he was your deceased sister’s husband, but he gave me to understand the families were not on the best of terms. He thought, however, that for your sister’s sake you might wish to take the child and bring her up among her own people in the East. Hence I am writing to you.

The little girl will be all ready to start by the time you get this letter; and if you can take her, we would appreciate it very much if you would write that she might come at once, as there is a man and his wife here who are going East very soon, and they would take her with them to Boston, and put her on the Beldingsville train. Of course you would be notified what day and train to expect Pollyanna on.

Hoping to hear favorably from you soon, I remain,

Respectfully yours,

Jeremiah O. White.

With a frown Miss Polly folded the letter and tucked it into its envelope. She had answered it the day before, and she had said she would take the child, of course. She hoped she knew her duty well enough for that! – disagreeable as the task would be.

As she sat now, with the letter in her hands, her thoughts went back to her sister, Jennie, who had been this child’s mother, and to the time when Jennie, as a girl of twenty, had insisted upon marrying the young minister, in spite of her family’s remonstrances. There had been a man of wealth who had wanted her – and the family had much preferred him to the minister; but Jennie had not. The man of wealth had more years, as well as more money, to his credit, while the minister had only a young head full of youth’s ideals and enthusiasm, and a heart full of love. Jennie had preferred these – quite naturally, perhaps; so she had married the minister, and had gone south with him as a home missionary’s wife.

The break had come then. Miss Polly remembered it well, though she had been but a girl of fifteen, the youngest, at the time. The family had had little more to do with the missionary’s wife. To be sure, Jennie herself had written, for a time, and had named her last baby “Pollyanna” for her two sisters, Polly and Anna – the other babies had all died. This had been the last time that Jennie had written; and in a few years there had come the news of her death, told in a short, but heart-broken little note from the minister himself, dated at a little town in the West.

Meanwhile, time had not stood still for the occupants of the great house on the hill. Miss Polly, looking out at the far-reaching valley below, thought of the changes those twenty-five years had brought to her.

She was forty now, and quite alone in the world. Father, mother, sisters – all were dead. For years, now, she had been sole mistress of the house and of the thousands left her by her father. There were people who had openly pitied her lonely life, and who had urged her to have some friend or companion to live with her; but she had not welcomed either their sympathy or their advice. She was not lonely, she said. She liked being by herself. She preferred quiet. But now—

Miss Polly rose with frowning face and closely-shut lips. She was glad, of course, that she was a good woman, and that she not only knew her duty, but had sufficient strength of character to perform it. But – Pollyanna! – what a ridiculous name!