Little Dorrit and Goody Two-Shoes

 

Environmental & Science Education, Literacy, Reading, Children, Early Childhood

Ed Hessler

--"I shall thus have much improvement to effect in my sweet child and cannot have her near me too soon. Amiable and dear little Twoshoes!"-- Mrs. Clennam, Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens

The Modern Library (2002) reprint of Dickens's novel includes footnotes and about Twoshoes is this entry. "Goody Two-Shoes," central character in a moralistic 1765 nursery tale, possibly by Oliver Goldsmith (ca. 1730 - 1774). 

 

Who was she? Is she an important fictional character and still important? I learned some answers to these questions after reading an essay about "the first book to take children seriously."

"Before her name became synonymous with sickly-sweet virtue," writes Vanessa Braganza (Smithsonian September - October 2023) "Goody Two-Shoes was the protagonist of the first English children's novel, The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes (1865)".

Margery Meanwell is an orphaned girl, reduced to rags - and "to wearing just one shoe." Her fortune in life improves and "Margery teaches herself to read, foils a major robbery, founds a school, earns her own living, stands up for animal rights and overcomes accusations of witchcraft."  

The novel, according to Braganza marked the beginning of children's literature "as a genre intended to entertain young readers while teaching foundational values like generosity, hard work and the virtues of education." 

Braganza's essay is short, lavishly illustrated and discusses the book's lasting influence on culture, Margery's life, closing with how she earned "her immortal nickname, Goody Two Shoes." One of the illustrations contains a page that will give you an idea of how education and learning to read was conceived and practiced then.

Reading opens two worlds and one of those is reading for pleasure; the other is its necessity in learning what we are taught in school which is a gateway to learning more. The acronym RiF - Reading is Fundamental is the short summary.

 

Charles Darwin had this to say about reading, especially for pleasure. "This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies, and travels (independently of any scientific facts which they may contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.” (ul added)