On the first page of her sketch pad, Margaret Waring Buck provides a simple explanation for the drawings that follow, “Caught wild mouse in clothes hamper in upstairs bedroom closet. Sketched it then let it go.” The ensuing series of sketches picture the mouse in a variety of moods and positions – cleaning itself, climbing the sides of the hamper, and avoiding daylight, which appeared a minor annoyance. “Active when first caught,” Buck observes, “Only annoyed by light in eyes.”

Born in New York City in 1905, Buck was a graduate of the Art Students League in New York, an art school that has been continuously operating since 1875. A resident of Mystic, CT, until her death in 1997, she wrote and illustrated books about nature for children and published the bulk of her work during the 1950s through the late 1970s.

Included in the Margaret Waring Buck Papers, housed in Archives & Special Collections, are many nature sketches like the ones of the mouse, which Buck drew from observation. When I first began looking through Buck’s published work I assumed that as a naturalist she drew at least some of her illustrations of animals from real life. Her sketches, however, shed light on just how closely Buck’s encounters with nature informed her work. Accompanying the mouse sketches are drawings of two baby opossums that visited Buck’s back porch over the course of several months. Another beautiful series of watercolor sketches feature a detailed day-by-day description of a caterpillar, caught and kept by Buck in a plastic terrarium, transforming into a butterfly. Such intimate encounters were a routine part of life for someone who was naturally curious about the intricacies of life in the natural world.

Buck sketched the mouse in December 1966. While most of the sketches are unaccompanied by notes, some include observations on the mouse’s behavior and appearance. Below a drawing that emphasizes the mouse’s long, tail, doe eyes, and whiskers, she notes, “Tail white under, whiskers long, used as antennae.”

More mouse sketches, drawn over the course of the next two months indicate that the mouse – or one of his friends – became a repeat visitor to the hamper. Buck included the precise date and time of her encounters with animals next to her drawings of them. The following timeline offers some insight into her ongoing interest in the mouse: “Jan 23 – got out; Jan 31 – caught again – in collar[?] in hamper” and then finally, “Jan 31 – Goodbye, off to woods.”

Of course, this was not her last run-in with mice. A post-script, written two years later, indicates that Buck’s clothes hamper remained a popular temporary home for the small creatures during the winter seasons. She continued using these encounters as opportunities to sketch and observe them.

Rebecca D’Angelo is a senior undergraduate student in History and Anthropology. She is a writing intern and student curator in Archives and Special Collections at the Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut.

The idea to create “For Young Naturalists” was a product of two major influences: my desire to curate an exhibition (which I’ve always wanted to do) and my desire to explore the NCLC Collections. I’ve always been aware that Archives and Special Collections is home to over 40,000 children’s books and serials, but until this semester I had never viewed any of them.

Though I originally intended to focus on ocean ecology in children’s literature as a way to complement themes covered in the final two Edwin Way Teale Lectures of the semester, my exhibit quickly took on a new interpretive life. Children’s books are powerful tools for teaching children and young adults age-appropriate information about a variety of topics.  As I browsed the books, I tried to determine how each book conveyed information, simply entertained, or communicated a broader message to their readers.  I then considered artistic choices made by the authors and illustrators, and how relationships between humans and the ocean, and amongst ocean creatures, were depicted.

I discovered that the ethic of each book reflects the beliefs and attitudes of the time period in which they were produced. The earliest examples from the nineteenth century, including The Ocean and its Inhabitants: With their Uses to Man (1844), describe the process of extracting oil from whale blubber, and the common usage of this oil. This provided a stark contrast to later examples, such as Whales Way (1972), which anthropomorphizes humpbacks and vilifies the humans who hunt them.

I also discovered that time affects content in another way: as our knowledge of ecological relationships becomes more complex, so do our stories. In My Grandpa and the Sea (1990) the main character’s grandfather begins to farm sea moss as his traditional fishing methods can no longer compete with more efficient technology. Ocean Sunlight: How Tiny Plants Feed the Sea (2012) describes, in simplified terms, why phytoplankton are crucial to all ocean life.

“For Young Naturalists,” on display through this Thursday, includes children’s books and associated artwork from the late 19^th century through the present, though the majority of the materials included date from the late 1960s – to the early 1990s.  Three of my favorite items in the exhibit are outlined below.

Along the Seashore, Written & Illustrated by Margaret Waring Buck (1964)

Margaret Waring Buck dedicated Along the Seashore (1964) to “beginner naturalists;” I chose to use a modified version of this descriptor as the title for this exhibition. Along the Seashore is only one of several examples of Margaret Waring Buck’s work in Archives & Special Collections. As an author and illustrator who lived along the Connecticut shoreline, Buck focused primarily on illustrating books about nature for children. Her papers, which include original artwork for her other nature-themed books also include sketchbooks filled with nature drawings based on observation. Along the Seashore is a unique encyclopedia for seashore discovery. Covering plants to water birds, it provides children with the common names and basic facts about species they might find along the seashore, complimented by realistic sketches. I love the neatness of Buck’s artwork and the dignity she confers on her juvenile readers by entrusting them with complex knowledge about ocean creatures.

The Year of the Seal by Victor B Scheffer, Illustrated by Leonard Everett Fischer (1970)

This book, intended for young adult and adult readers, but appropriate for younger audiences, follows the development of a baby Alaskan fur seal during the first year of its life. The book is similar to another written by Victor B. Scheffer, a biologist, and illustrated by Fischer, titled The Year of the Whale, which follows the development of a baby sperm whale calf during the first year of its life. Though Year of the Seal is informational, it is also poetic. Commenting on man’s attempts to describe the ocean writes, Scheffer writes in an aside, “The ocean rolls on, untouched by words. It rolls to the turning of the earth, and the heat and pull of the sun, and the drag of the moon, and the influences of all the solid and gaseous matter of the universe.” Original illustrations for both The Year of the Seal and The Year of the Whale, as well as a third book included in the exhibit (The Journey of the Gray Whales by Gladys Conklin, 1974) are housed in Fischer’s papers at Archives & Special Collections.

An Ocean World, Written & Illustrated by Peter Sis (1992)

Sparse in text, Peter Sis’s beautiful watercolor illustrations follow the journey of a whale, recently released into the ocean, in his attempt to find a friend. Though the book is less realistic, it is highly imaginative, depicting the young whale in a variety of situations – coming face to face with a submarine, finding love with another whale – that are comical, jarring, relatable, and insightful. The image on the left, featured on the poster for the exhibit, depicts the moment when the whale is first released into the ocean. Though it depicts humans performing a “helping” act, the dark colors in the background and the inherent ambiguity of the image when viewed out of context (Is the whale being removed from the water? Or put back into it?) accurately suggest a complex relationship between man and whale.

Rebecca D’Angelo is a senior undergraduate student in History and Anthropology. She is student curator of the exhibition Archives and Special Collections at the Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut.

Mrs. Belcour.  Come, come, cheer up; endeavour to forget that Manly ever lived.

Belinda.  Never, madam ! The only consolation I can afford myself is, that he fell fighting those battles which must for ever remain imprinted on my heart.

Mrs. Belcour.  Yes: he with your gallant father fell by their noble general’s side on Egypt’s shores ; with him they conquered, and with him they fell. (Hook 7)

When you are reading a British comedy from 1805—and the comedy is titled The Soldier’s Return, and you have just learned that poor Belinda our protagonist is about to be “married to-night” (4), to a certain Lord Broomville, and believes that now “all my ideas of future happiness are crushed—destroyed” (7)—and then read the above exchange, learning that Belinda’s intended is believed to be dead, you can immediately conclude that the man’s resurrection is imminent.

I mean, come on. A dead lover and an unhappy arranged marriage to an older man? In the world of comedy, the dead man can’t resurrect fast enough in such a situation. You just need to pay attention, and wait and watch for his return. And sure enough: in Theodore Hook’s The Soldier’s Return, the soldier returns after only about three scenes, and, of course, to his own distress, “I have found Belinda, the object of my hopes and anxiety, on the eve of marriage with a lord Broomville” (11).

Thus we have all of the things you need for a standard comedy, with the true lovers separated by forces outside of their control, who ultimately, of course, reunite through a series of implausible events. It’s predictable, yes, but ultimately it’s really all about how we get there to this end, and this play does so in the most amusing and unpredictable methods possible. Theodore Hook, our playwright, has a sharp wit, and the play excels at the mockery of the British upper crust, with aristocrats saddled with ridiculous names like Lord Broomville; with young foppish men dressed so absurdly in “the present slang fashion” (10) that the lower class can “take a fellow of the royal society for a groom” (10); and with supposedly cultured people who “positively abominate” (20) the opera, yet “every body goes, and ’tis the every body that makes it delightful” (2).

The American edition of the text includes a list of both British and American casts

Unfortunately, though the play was performed in London in 1805 at Drury Lane, Hook himself seems to have received little press for this play, possibly because of his age. “[The Soldier’s Return was] his first effort” (Barham 14), and “placed the author in the proud position of a successful dramatist—ætat 16” (14), but I could find no contemporary reviews, merely affectionate but nonspecific references to Hook himself, as “that lively young author” (“The Arbitrator” 183). The play received apparently little notice, and his own biographer too gives only backhanded praise, saying “inartificial as was the plot, and extravagant the incidents. . .  the whimsicalities of an Irishman, played by Jack Johnstone, the abundance of puns, good, bad, and indifferent, borrowed and original, the real fun and bustle, carried it along triumphantly” (Barham 14).

In America, it was “performed at the New Theatre, Philadelphia” (1) in 1807, but here too, no one took notice of The Soldier’s Return, though its top-billed actor, a Mr. Rutherford—who played Lord Broomville—seems to have attracted some attention in other roles. One William Wizard calls him “Little RUTHERFORD, the Roscius of the Philadelphia theatre” (Wizard 117), which makes little sense until one sees a different article, which says “this gentleman’s person is much in the way of his theatrical success ; and, indeed, when, one after the other, so many individuals present themselves on the boards, all below hero-measure, we cannot but lament it deeply that no expedient can be thought of, for adding to their inches” (“The Theatre” 1). It seems Rutherford was a short man, and, since William Wizard also writes satirically that a great critic “finds fault with every thing—this being what I understand by modern criticism” (Wizard 117), this was a problem.

Young Hook’s play in America was thus presented in an environment of animadversion towards his lead actor, and, actually, towards drama in particular. Theater itself was not well regarded, as an American book here in the archives, A Serious Inquiry into the Nature and Effects of the Stage, by the Rev. John Witherspoon (1812) reveals even in its opening pages. The opening recommends that “Dear Christian Brethren. . . in the name of the Great God our Saviour, whose Disciples you are. . . WITHHOLD ALL SUPPORT FROM THE PLAY-HOUSE” (Miller et al. 5), as “in its origin and history it has been a public nuisance in society, in its present constitution it is criminal, under every form it is useless, and it must necessarily tend to demoralize any people who give it their support” (5).

Nuisance, criminal, and useless? I think not, but still understand better perhaps why this play or any play may not have met great success in America at the time. Our play was merely in an environment not ready to receive it, and that needn’t hurt the play itself now. The play is really a witty romp through the aristocracy and comedy itself, coming to a completely surprising conclusion which lampoons conventional comedic formula: Manly has no choice but to challenge Lord Broomville to a duel over his intended marriage to Belinda (typical), but meeting him in person, finds that “O gracious heaven!—it is, it is——my father—!” (33).

Thus, at the end of this play we are left with a surprise which we were not expecting. The father has been in the way of the marriage all along, but we didn’t even know it, and neither did he! Hook has employed the trope of the parent preventing the marriage, and subverted it, while simultaneously subverting the trope of the duel! For such things, along with the witty exchanges, should it be remembered.

Consider this finally: A fashionable young man, Racket, asks his beloved, Miss Dashaway, “why, am I not the very top of fashion?” (23), to which she responds mockingly “yes true ; because ’tis with men as with liquors, the lightest will always be uppermost” (23). Funny, right? So, yes, perhaps this play itself may have seemed too light, but even being short, written by a sixteen-year-old, and largely forgotten, The Soldier’s Return is a gem that continually and humorously tests our comedic expectations.

Let’s not let it languish all the way at the “very top” of drama.

Daniel Allie is a senior undergraduate student in English. For his blog series Hypocrite Lecteur he will spend the Spring 2014 Semester exploring nineteenth-century literature in a variety of genres from the Rare Books Collection housed in Archives and Special Collections at the Dodd Research Center.

Works Cited

“The Arbitrator.” Beau Monde, or, Literary and fashionable magazine 2.14 (Nov. 1897): 181-185. Web. British Periodicals. 15 March 2014.

Barham, Rev. R.H. Dalton. The Life and Remains of Theodore Edward Hook. London: Richard Bentley, 1849. Web. Google Books. 15 March 2014.

Hook, Theodore Edward. The Soldier’s Return, or, What Can Beauty Do? A comic opera, in two acts. Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, 1807. Print. [Dodd Center call number: A208]

Miller, Samuel, et al. “An Address.” A Serious Inquiry into the Nature and Effects of the Stage, Rev. John Witherspoon. New York: Whiting and Watson, 1812. Print. [Dodd Center call number: A1019]

“The Theatre.” The Town 2 (January 3, 1807): 1. Web. American Periodicals. 15 March 2014.

Wizard, William. “Theatrics.” Salmagundi; or, the Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq., and Others 6 (March 20, 1807): 117. Web. American Periodicals. 15 March 2014.