Does Anyone Else Think That DOCS Needs To Know About The Woolcots?

I’ve never read Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians before, but I picked it off the shelf yesterday (where it had been reposing undisturbed since June 2005—obviously another Lifeline BookFest buy).

And it’s frankly rather disturbing.

If anything, I think Captain Woolcot and his new young wife Esther might benefit from the assistance of the Department of Child Services.

And this is only my opinion after reading the first fifty pages. Goodness knows what horrors lies in the remaining pages.

It’s not the fact that Turner starts the book by saying, “If you imagine you are going to read of model children, with perhaps a naughtily-inclined one to point a moral, you had better lay down the book immediately” (9).

There’s nothing particularly unusual about that: there was a spate of books in the later nineteenth century that positioned themselves against the sickeningly angelic protagonists of mainstream children’s literature, whether it is via the “all real children are a little naughty” approach that Turner adopts here (and Susan Coolidge, likewise, in What Katy Did (1872), some twenty years earlier than Turner’s work), or the slightly more complex ideological shifts behind such brave, straightforward, intelligent, and logical child protagonists as Carroll’s Alice or Baum’s Dorothy.

No, I can cope with naughty children. But the young Woolcots seem less “naughty” and more “borderline psychotic.”

Take young “Baby,” for instance.

Despite her name, Baby is not the baby; she is the youngest child of Captain Woolcot’s first wife. His second wife, twenty-year-old Esther, has a young child of her own, called “the General.” But Baby is always called “Baby,” and I have a sneaking suspicion that she resents the usurpation of her position by the General:

She had a weakness, however, for making the General cry, or she would have been almost a model child. Innumerable times he [sic] had been found pressing its poor little chest to make it “squeak,” and even pinching its tiny arms, or pulling its innocent nose, just for the strange pleasure of hearing the yells of despair it instantly set up. (13)

Yep, that’s not disturbing at all. Perhaps Baby is annoyed by her family’s apparent lack of interest in which gender she is.

(Mind, poor General is something of a whipping boy for the entire family: when the children are later punished for something I’ll address in detail below, the General, who has no idea what’s happening, “gave a series of delighted squeaks; and Judy in her wretchedness smacked him for his pains” (31). That’ll teach him to be delighted!)

Baby is also later found in the stable, apparently “washing” some pets:

There were two favourite kittens of his [her father’s], shivering, miserable, up to their necks in a lather of soapy water; and Flibberty-Gibbet, the beautiful little fox-terrier he had just bought for his wife, chained to a post, also wet, miserable, and woebegone, also undergoing the cleansing process, and being scrubbed and swilled till her very reason was tottering. (40)

Now, this is positioned as a baby’s attempt to “help,” but I’m sure you’ll forgive me if I’m a little suspicious. The frequent physical attacks on the actual baby, and the targeting of her father’s favourite cats and the stepmother’s new dog? Oh, yes: I think someone is a little jealous of anything that usurps her position in the house.

If I were you, other Woolcot children, I’d be keeping a close eye on Baby.

But, then, your father’s not going to do that, is he? Captain Woolcot is “very particular and rather irritable” (11), which is why he never socialises with his children at meal times.

He also enforces a sharp distinction in the type of food served to the children and to him and his wife: when the children feed on bread and butter and the adult Woolcots on roast chicken, the former rebel and troop down to the dining room to ask for chicken. While their father can’t refuse, since he has a guest present, he does later punish them by refusing to allow them to attend the pantomime.

No matter how often I read this passage, I can’t isolate why this behaviour warrants such a severe punishment.

But, then, Captain Woolcot, apparently, hates his children: “He did not understand children at all, and was always grumbling at the noise they made, and the money they cost” (17). He’s “rather proud” of his eldest son and sometimes takes his prettiest daughter out for a drive when she’s “prettily dressed” (17).

It’s not entirely surprising that he doesn’t care for his children: Captain Woolcot wants to live in the barracks in Sydney, but “every one in the officer’s quarters rose in revolt at the pranks of these graceless children,” so “in considerable bitterness of spirit” he moves to a real house (17).

Even then, he manages some form of revenge: he spends such enormous quantities of money on “three beautiful horses, one at the barracks and a hunter and a good hack at Misrule [his home]” (17-18) that his children “went about in shabby, out-at-elbow clothes, and much-worn boots” and, barring the eldest boy, were taught “by a very third-class daily governess” (18).

This isn’t the charming, genteel poverty of, say, the Marches or the Peppers. This is something else entirely: poverty enforced from a position of authority against only some of the household, punative poverty in response to perceived misdeeds and, in essence, to punish the children for even existing, for taking from Captain Woolcot his sporting, carefree, bachelor existence in the barracks.

I don’t think it’s only the children who are problematic in the Woolcot household.

And what of young Esther, the stepmother? She doesn’t suffer from the caprices of her husband: she eats roast chicken, rather than bread and butter, and, rather than rags and patches, wears “yellow silk” (26) or “a trailing morning wrapper of white muslin with cherry ribbons” (27). But although, in this sharply divided household, she is aligned with the powerful faction, she too needs some assistance:

It’s not simply that she treats the General “more as if it were a very entertaining kitten than a real live baby” (12). (That poor damn child!)

It’s not even that she can casually say of her infant son, “Nell, take the scissors from the General, he’ll poke his eyes out, bless him” or fail to notice that “the General, mulcted of the scissors, was licking his own muddy shoe all over with his dear little red tongue” (46).

Not, it’s that she’s not coping, at all:

The young stepmother leaned back in her chair and looked round her tragically. . . .

A sob rose in her throat, two tears welled up in her eyes and fell down her smooth, lovely cheeks.

“Seven of you, and I’m only twenty!” she said pitifully. “Oh! it’s too bad—oh dear! it is too bad.” (46)

Seriously, someone call DOCS, before Baby sets fire to the house, Captain Woolcot finally snaps, or Esther does something she’ll regret.

(All quotes from Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians. 1894. London: Ward, Lock, 1949.)