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Rove If You Want To Wednesday
Mar. 27th, 2019 07:31 pmNext week: catching up for real. No, seriously, I mean it this time.
This week:
The Rover Boys on the River (A Story for Young Americans). It's the ninth book in a series featuring plucky bros Tom, Dick, and Sam Rover (it's just their last name), who are approximately in their early-to-mid teens. They read younger to me, but the illustrations and their chaste courtship of an extremely convenient trio of girls tell a different story. They're wealthy Young Americans who attend a military school and love plucky innocuous adventures, though in this book it's a very long time before they get around to any adventuring. They also love pranking their fellow cadets, tormenting local workmen for no reason, and mercilessly mocking the speech of their hapless German friend, who is made by the author to say everything as convolutedly as possible in order to hit every possible problem consonant. It's not clear why said German friend continues to hang out with the Rovers, except maybe that the other cadets are worse.
There's a scene in which they conspire to black up a cadet whose offense is being too "dudeish" in its late 19thC meaning of being a dandy. They cover his face and hands in burnt cork, and send him to meet the colonel in the middle of the night. Then author Arthur M. Winfield completely forgets to write any jokes about the situation, presumably because he thinks all Rover hijinks are self-evidently hilarious and none more so than the Bookly Black-Up. They are not. I know the past is another country, but every country has its standards, and this may be laziest blacking-up scene I've ever read.
There's another multi-chapter episode in which the Rover Boys conspire to "get back" at a circus guy for spooking their "best horse" with his handbills. I felt as I was reading that a horse who can't handle seeing any paper in or near the road (as Sam is careful to explain to his friend Fred just a few short paragraphs before the circus guy shows up) may not actually be the "best horse" for a print-heavy society. Luckily for them, they discover that the circus man is mistreating his animals and neglecting to pay his performers, so they can feel good about the revenge they've already decided to enact.
The Rover Boys also have enemies, young men who resent the Rover's cheery good fortune and seek to undermine them by, e.g., stealing a lot of jewelry from a jewelry store and stashing it in the Rovers' tent. These enemies, being prone to adult vices like losing all their money at cards, seem closer to the age the Rover Boys are apparently supposed to be or a little older, while "virtuous" Rover Boys, when they aren't chastely courting their female counterparts, and mostly even when they are, seem to be about ten or eleven. You could probably do a passable master's thesis on the juvenilization of adolescence in the early twentieth century if you wanted an excuse to read a whole lot of Rover Boys books. If you do, you'll get lots of writing like this:
What FINALLY happens after about ninety years of cadet shenanigans is that the Rovers invite a bunch of friends, including the three girls with whom they're perfectly matched, on a houseboat excursion down the Ohio. The houseboat gets stolen, two of the girls get kidnapped, Rovers and Co. get a manhunt together, the girls and the boat are rescued, and the ne'er-do-wells escape to plague the Rover Boys another day.
This is not a character-driven book or even a caricature-driven book. From time to time the author remembers that e.g. Tom is the cut-up and Dick is more serious, but only from time to time. The girls are distinguished by the fact that each one favors a different Rover Boy. There is one character whose trait is that he is a poet, and is always making up poems on the spot, and the aforementioned hapless German, whose character trait is that he gets every idiom and every consonant wrong at great length. Aleck Pop, the "colored" factotum, is almost a character - that is, he's witty and intelligent to the best of Mr. Winfield's ability and shows clear signs of existing outside the needs of the plot - but he doesn't get much to do except cook and reiterate his fanatical loyalty to the Rovers in dialect. The personalities of the Rovers' "enemies," Dan Baxter and Lew Flapp, are totally driven by the need to get back at the Rovers for the slights of past books, and occassionally to demonstrate their badness by throwing down a hand or two of cards (as in Elsie, cards loom large but specific card games are never mentioned, lest the impressionable young reader get tempted to learn the rules and thereby find perdition).
The best part of this book by far is the parade of ads in the back for more wholesome adventuring books about clean-living boys and girls learning new skills and technologies while maintaining the manly or maidenly virtues of the American republic. There are the Moving Picture Boys, the Motion Picture Chums, the Motion Picture Girls, The Outdoor Girls, and the Railroad Series, to name just a few.
Own If You Want To
Would you like to own this magical chunk of unmitigated of-its-timeness? If you do, send me a comment or a private message and I'll send it to you through that thrilling new advance in communications, the U.S. Postal Service. Please be warned that it's not a good book in any meaningful sense. I could also just scan the best parts (the ads for other books) and post those using that shining monument to American pluck and can-do spirit, the Internet.
This week:
The Rover Boys on the River (A Story for Young Americans). It's the ninth book in a series featuring plucky bros Tom, Dick, and Sam Rover (it's just their last name), who are approximately in their early-to-mid teens. They read younger to me, but the illustrations and their chaste courtship of an extremely convenient trio of girls tell a different story. They're wealthy Young Americans who attend a military school and love plucky innocuous adventures, though in this book it's a very long time before they get around to any adventuring. They also love pranking their fellow cadets, tormenting local workmen for no reason, and mercilessly mocking the speech of their hapless German friend, who is made by the author to say everything as convolutedly as possible in order to hit every possible problem consonant. It's not clear why said German friend continues to hang out with the Rovers, except maybe that the other cadets are worse.
There's a scene in which they conspire to black up a cadet whose offense is being too "dudeish" in its late 19thC meaning of being a dandy. They cover his face and hands in burnt cork, and send him to meet the colonel in the middle of the night. Then author Arthur M. Winfield completely forgets to write any jokes about the situation, presumably because he thinks all Rover hijinks are self-evidently hilarious and none more so than the Bookly Black-Up. They are not. I know the past is another country, but every country has its standards, and this may be laziest blacking-up scene I've ever read.
There's another multi-chapter episode in which the Rover Boys conspire to "get back" at a circus guy for spooking their "best horse" with his handbills. I felt as I was reading that a horse who can't handle seeing any paper in or near the road (as Sam is careful to explain to his friend Fred just a few short paragraphs before the circus guy shows up) may not actually be the "best horse" for a print-heavy society. Luckily for them, they discover that the circus man is mistreating his animals and neglecting to pay his performers, so they can feel good about the revenge they've already decided to enact.
The Rover Boys also have enemies, young men who resent the Rover's cheery good fortune and seek to undermine them by, e.g., stealing a lot of jewelry from a jewelry store and stashing it in the Rovers' tent. These enemies, being prone to adult vices like losing all their money at cards, seem closer to the age the Rover Boys are apparently supposed to be or a little older, while "virtuous" Rover Boys, when they aren't chastely courting their female counterparts, and mostly even when they are, seem to be about ten or eleven. You could probably do a passable master's thesis on the juvenilization of adolescence in the early twentieth century if you wanted an excuse to read a whole lot of Rover Boys books. If you do, you'll get lots of writing like this:
It had been arranged that all bound for the houseboat trip should meet at the American House, and thither the boys made their way on reaching the Smoky City, as Pittsburg is often called, on account of its numerous manufactories. [. . . ]
"I'll not be sorry to leave Pittsburg behind," said Nellie. "There is so much smoke."
"Well, they have to have smoke-- in such a hive of industry," answered Dick.
What FINALLY happens after about ninety years of cadet shenanigans is that the Rovers invite a bunch of friends, including the three girls with whom they're perfectly matched, on a houseboat excursion down the Ohio. The houseboat gets stolen, two of the girls get kidnapped, Rovers and Co. get a manhunt together, the girls and the boat are rescued, and the ne'er-do-wells escape to plague the Rover Boys another day.
This is not a character-driven book or even a caricature-driven book. From time to time the author remembers that e.g. Tom is the cut-up and Dick is more serious, but only from time to time. The girls are distinguished by the fact that each one favors a different Rover Boy. There is one character whose trait is that he is a poet, and is always making up poems on the spot, and the aforementioned hapless German, whose character trait is that he gets every idiom and every consonant wrong at great length. Aleck Pop, the "colored" factotum, is almost a character - that is, he's witty and intelligent to the best of Mr. Winfield's ability and shows clear signs of existing outside the needs of the plot - but he doesn't get much to do except cook and reiterate his fanatical loyalty to the Rovers in dialect. The personalities of the Rovers' "enemies," Dan Baxter and Lew Flapp, are totally driven by the need to get back at the Rovers for the slights of past books, and occassionally to demonstrate their badness by throwing down a hand or two of cards (as in Elsie, cards loom large but specific card games are never mentioned, lest the impressionable young reader get tempted to learn the rules and thereby find perdition).
The best part of this book by far is the parade of ads in the back for more wholesome adventuring books about clean-living boys and girls learning new skills and technologies while maintaining the manly or maidenly virtues of the American republic. There are the Moving Picture Boys, the Motion Picture Chums, the Motion Picture Girls, The Outdoor Girls, and the Railroad Series, to name just a few.
Own If You Want To
Would you like to own this magical chunk of unmitigated of-its-timeness? If you do, send me a comment or a private message and I'll send it to you through that thrilling new advance in communications, the U.S. Postal Service. Please be warned that it's not a good book in any meaningful sense. I could also just scan the best parts (the ads for other books) and post those using that shining monument to American pluck and can-do spirit, the Internet.
