A perennial favourite

My all-time favourite children's book has got to be The Little House, by Virginia Lee Burton. I received a copy of this book from my grandmother when I was 7 years old, and I have loved it ever since.



The story itself is a simple one. In the middle of the 19th century a man builds a little house for his family on a hill covered with swaying fruit trees. Initially a farm house out in the country, she (yes, "she") sees the seasons change, the years pass and generations come and go. Gradually the city encroaches upon the Little House, which, because she cannot be bought or sold, survives to see streetcars, subways, elevated railways, automobiles and huge buildings crowding around her. Eventually a descendant of the original owner comes upon the Little House and recognizes her from her grandmother's old photographs. I'll leave the end of the story to the reader. It is not a terribly sophisticated plotline. The prose is simple and repetitive, suitable for a child in the early elementary grades.

However, the real attraction of the book is the author's illustrations, which won her the Caldecott Medal in 1943. Burton's pictures resemble the primitivist art of Grandma Moses or Grant Wood. Apparently working with water colour, Burton creates visual imagery that evokes a sense of placidity in the book's early illustrations. The landscape consists of a series of geographically implausible curved hills arranged in a sweeping zig-zag or "S" pattern extending upwards to create a sense of distance. These are neighbouring farms, each of which is virtually identical to, or mirror-image of, the Little House's farm. As the viewer's eye moves up the page, the curved farm pattern is repeated, each farm growing continually smaller until ending at the horizon, a long winding road separating them and peeking out from behind the hills at the edges.

The message is obvious: this peaceful agrarian world remains the same, its stability enveloping the lives of the small, barely distinguishable people living in and around the Little House. Seasons come and go, but the Little House stays just the same. Exactly the same activities, whether ploughing, grazing or harvesting, take place on every hill as far as the eye can see. Burton's illustrations even have something of a calligraphic quality to them. The trees lining the hills resemble exquisitely executed Japanese letters, all the same of course, but each line of which is lovingly drawn to communicate something profound to the reader.

Then the first straight line enters the picture: a paved road cutting through the curves and bringing the small houses of an encroaching suburban community, dotted with gas stations, telephone poles and, for the first time, horseless carriages. The curved pattern is broken, but it is not altogether abandoned. It simply takes on the flavour of urban life, with stores and streetcars assuming the place of farm houses and barns. By the end of the story it is mid-20th century, with huge skyscrapers dwarfing the Little House, aeroplanes buzzing overhead, and 1940s traffic clogging the streets. Yet the curved, repetitive pattern is maintained.

This is a book to savour over the course of a lifetime. Although it was obviously written with small children in mind, there is a sense in which one does not outgrow The Little House. One simply progresses from having it read to oneself to reading it to one's own children.