Good morrow, fair readers. How are you this glorious June morn? I know ‘tis Friday the 13th, but I still wish every good thing upon you all!
When introducing some of what I learned through our five years with the Amish community, I thought I would share what first opened my eyes to the practical realities of 19th-century life. Picture, if you will, it is after dinner for a family with ten young children, ranging from 14 down to toddler, sitting in the living room of our small cabin. The children have their varied crafts: some knitting or crocheting, some embroidering a quilt, another making a latch-hook rug, whilst the little ones colour and the baby toddles about, sticking his tiny fingers into everything. Mama (that’s me, by the way) is sitting by the stove, closest to our two-wick kerosene lamp, with a second one on the table beside me, as I start to read the book we checked out from the library just that afternoon: Little Women.
As I began reading to my children of the March girls, cosily working their projects in the light of the fire in Marmee’s parlour, I realised I understood and related to this scene in a way I never had before. Were we not likewise strewn about the room, working our projects and reading in the flickering light of a flame burning safely within the glass chimney of our lamps?
Throughout the rest of our tenure with the Amish, each time we checked out a book from the library – typically the classics, as I re-read and introduced my children to Jane Austen, the Brontes, Dickens, Twain, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and innumerable others – I appreciated the events of my old favourites in an entirely new way! I had struggled to read through wavering lamp light; I had baked bread, cooked stews, and canned jams on a finicky woodstove; I had gathered eggs and nuts, gardened, and preserved food to feed my family until the earliest produce was again ready for harvest in spring. And the horses, the buggies, milking, making butter and cheese, butchering animals (NOT a Boardman family favourite!) these were all a daily part of my life.
Pride & Prejudice 1995
As I read of Darcy reading after dinner at Netherfield, I could not but be impressed. As I read of touring Derbyshire in a carriage – or moving from Norland Park in Sussex to Devonshire, or from Mansfield Park in Northamptonshire to Portsmouth – my joints ached in sympathy, even before the fall last year. (Carriage travel is NOT fun! – but more on this in another post.) I shook my head along with Elinor Dashwood at her brother’s plans to tear down a productive grove of walnut trees and ‘thorns’ (likely berry brambles) to make way for Fanny Dashwood’s vanity project of a decorative greenhouse and flower garden. I shared Catherine Morland’s fear as Mr Thorpe recklessly races his gig through the crowded streets of Bath. I have lived the quiet, domestic isolation shared by both Anne Elliot and Emma Woodhouse.
Each of these moments – all of which Austen’s contemporary readers took entirely for granted, for they likewise lived these moments – came alive for me in an entirely new way during my time with the Amish. And I hope, dear readers, that I might share some of my experiences to help them come alive for you, too.
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