Juliana (Horatia Gatty) Ewing | Biography

In the field of mid-nineteenth-century children's literature, Juliana Horatia Ewing's work ranks with that of Charles Kingsley, George MacDonald, Charlotte Yonge, Mrs. Molesworth, and Jean Ingelow. Most of her stories and poems first appeared in Aunt Judy's Magazine (1866-1885), one of the most important British publications for children, which was edited first by her mother, Margaret Gatty (1809-1873), author of Parables from Nature (1855-1871); then by Juliana and her sister, Horatia Katherine; and finally by Horatia Katherine alone. The second of eight children who survived infancy, Juliana was her mother's favorite child, the heiress to her literary ambitions, and, latterly, her confidante and most dependable contributor to Aunt Judy's Magazine, which provided a small but necessary addition to the always straitened family finances. From early childhood, Juliana was the mistress of the nursery entertainments: known in the family as Aunt Judy, she was the organizer of private theatricals; the leading spirit in imaginative games; the editor of the family magazine, the "Gunpowder Plot"; and, above all, the never-failing source of original stories. Mrs. Gatty delighted in and fostered her daughter's talent, naming two volumes of stories--Aunt Judy's Tales (1859) and Aunt Judy's Letters (1862)--after her; encouraging her to write for publication; and exulting when, in 1861, her first story, "A Bit of Green," was published in the Monthly Packet edited by Charlotte Mary Yonge.

Mrs. Ewing's close, lifelong ties to home and family were among the most significant influences on her life, and her finest work reflects her happy experience of the bond between brothers and sisters and between children and loving adults. Until her marriage to Alexander Ewing in 1867, Juliana Gatty lived in Ecclesfield, Yorkshire, where for sixty-two years her father, Alfred Gatty, was vicar; and her intimate knowledge of village life is shown in such books as A Flat Iron for a Farthing (1872), Lob Lie-By-The-Fire (1874), Six to Sixteen (1875), We and the World (1880), Jackanapes (1883), and Daddy Darwin's Dovecot (1884), which in their shrewd observation of scene and manners are reminiscent of Mrs. Gaskell's Cranford (1853). As the wife of a commissariat officer in the British army, Mrs. Ewing was also familiar with life in the peacetime military. In 1867, she accompanied her husband to Fredericton, New Brunswick, and on their return to England in 1869, they were stationed at Aldershot, where they remained until 1877. Some of her best work--The Peace Egg (1887), Lob Lie-By-The-Fire, Jackanapes , and The Story of a Short Life (1885)--celebrates the humanity and heroism of the soldier. After her return from Canada, Mrs. Ewing never again left England. In the late 1870s her always delicate health deteriorated, making it impossible for her to accompany her husband when he was sent abroad--first to Malta in 1879 and then to Ceylon in 1881. Until 1883, when Major Ewing returned to England to be stationed at Taunton, she had no settled home, and the stories she wrote during those years of loneliness derive much of their power from nostalgic evocation of the domestic happiness of her childhood.

One of Mrs. Ewing's earliest tales remains one of her most famous. "The Brownies" (first published in 1865 in the Monthly Packet and last reprinted in 1954) provided the inspiration for the terminology and ritual of the Brownie division of the Girl Scouts. Using as background and the folk tradition of helpful household spirits who perform useful tasks in secret, Julian Ewing tells a story of two lazy boys who, after searching in vain for a Brownie to do the work of the home, themselves begin secretly to complete these tasks, thus finally proving to their widowed father and grandmother that in truth "brains are a blessing." The same folk tradition lies behind Lob Lie-By-The-Fire, in which an abandoned Gypsy child, after ways of casual disobedience that disrupts the lies of the two kindly ladies who have taken him in, runs off from the Hall at Lingborough to become a follower of a Highland regiment. Through his friendship with a soldier whose addiction to drink has place with a soldier whose addiction to drink has placed him in danger of court-martial and execution, the boy is led to see that he should return to his benefactresses. He does so; but--ashamed of his past ungratefulness--instead of revealing his presence, he secretly performs the farmyard tasks, saving the two elderly women from financial disaster. Thus he becomes the embodiment of the long-departed household spirit rumored to be "the Luck of Lingborough."

Like all the finest writers of children's literature, Juliana Ewing speaks to a double audience: the adult who is reading aloud and the listening child, who at a conscious level may be interested only in the story yet is subtly influenced by the value system it illustrates. Witty, gay, gentle, and tenderhearted, Mrs. Ewing wrote stories that teach as they entertain. The conscientious, but therefore unduly apprehensive young mother in "Timothy's Shoes" (1871), who immediately after the birth of her first child falls into a despairing muddle fearing her children may "have bandy legs from walking too soon, or crooked spines from being carried too long," is told by her fairy godmother, "It's too late to talk about that now my dear." In Lob Lie-By-The-Fire, the ladies of Lingborough, who live in genteel poverty doing good works in secret by denying themselves such small luxuries as sugar, are "heiresses ... to a diamond brooch which they wore by turns." When, walking home with the parson from a village whist party, Miss Betty catches "sight of the brooch in Miss Kitty's lace shawl" and notices "where one of the precious stones should have been, there [is] a little black hole," she exclaims, "Sister, you've lost a stone out of your brooch!"--because "the little ladies were well trained, and even in that moment of despair Miss Betty would not hint that her sister's ornaments were not her sole property."

In Jackanapes, the antics of a harum-scarum child who grows to manhood and heroically lays down his life for his friend on the battlefield are framed by the voices of the characters from his home village: the neighbors; the postman; his aunt, Miss Jessamine; the Grey Goose, who still waddles on Goose Green, where Jackanapes first learned to ride his red pony, Lollo. But though for the village, "Jackanapes' death was sad news ..., a sorrow just qualified by honourable pride in his gallantry and devotion," his is not, Mrs. Ewing insists, "a sorrowful story, and ending badly, ... [of] a life wasted that might have been useful." For "there is a heritage of heroic example and noble obligation, not reckoned in the Wealth of Nations, but essential to a nation's life ...; there be things ... which are beyond all calculation of worldly goods and earthly uses: things such as Love, and Honour, and the Soul of Man, which cannot be bought with a price, and which do not die with death." And the memory of Jackanapes remains to sweeten the lives of those he loved and who loved him. "Lollo, ... very aged, draws Miss Jessamine's bath-chair slowly up and down the Goose Green"; Captain Tony John son--the man for whom Jackanapes died--and his brother officer lovingly bend over the old woman as she speaks of her gay-hearted, valiant nephew. "The sun, setting gently to his rest, embroiders the sombre foliage of the oak tree with threads of gold. The Grey Goose is sensible of an atmosphere of repose, and puts up one leg for the night. The grass glows with a more vivid green, and, in answer to a ringing call from Tony, his sisters, fluttering over the daisies in pale-hued muslins, come out of their ever-open door, like pretty pigeons from a dovecote. And if the good gossips' eyes do not deceivethem, all the Miss Johnsons, and both the officers, go wandering off into the lanes, where bryony wreaths still twine about the brambles."

The quiet emphasis with which Mrs. Ewing speaks to and of the possible best in human nature is the hallmark of her fiction. Though she suffered ill health from childhood and wrote under the constant pressure of pain during her last eight years, her work is remarkable for its gaiety of spirit. Written in a lucid and flowing style, her stories are compassionate and tender, not mawkishly sentimental; deeply Christian, they are never pietistic.