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Transcribed from the 1889 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price,email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

SCENES AND CHARACTERS, OR, EIGHTEEN MONTHS AT BEECHCROFT




PREFACE



Of those who are invited to pay a visit to Beechcroft, there are somewho, honestly acknowledging that amusement is their object, will becontent to feel with Lilias, conjecture with Jane, and get into scrapeswith Phyllis, without troubling themselves to extract any moral fromtheir proceedings; and to these the Mohun family would only apologisefor having led a very humdrum life during the eighteen months spentin their company.

There may, however, be more unreasonable visitors, who, professing onlyto come as parents and guardians, expect entertainment for themselves,as well as instruction for those who had rather it was out of sight,- look for antiques in carved cherry-stones, - and require plot, incident,and catastrophe in a chronicle of small beer.

To these the Mohuns beg respectfully to observe, that they hope theirexamples may not be altogether devoid of indirect instruction; and lestit should be supposed that they lived without object, aim, or principle,they would observe that the maxim which has influenced the delineationof the different Scenes and Characters is, that feeling, unguidedand unrestrained, soon becomes mere selfishness; while the simple endeavourto fulfil each immediate claim of duty may lead to the highest actsof self-devotion.

NEW COURT, BEECHCROFT,
18th January.



PREFACE (1886)



Perhaps this book is an instance to be adduced in support of the adviceI have often given to young authors - not to print before they themselvesare old enough to do justice to their freshest ideas.

Not that I can lay claim to its being a production of tender and interestingyouth.  It was my second actual publication, and I believe I wasof age before it appeared - but I see now the failures that more experiencemight have enabled me to avoid; and I would not again have given itto the world if the same characters recurring in another story had notexcited a certain desire to see their first start.

In fact they have been more or less my life-long companions.  Analmost solitary child, with periodical visits to the Elysium of a largefamily, it was natural to dream of other children and their ways andsports till they became almost realities.  They took shape whenmy French master set me to write letters for him.  The lettersgradually became conversation and narrative, and the adventures of thefamily sweetened the toils of French composition.  In the exigenciesof village school building in those days gone by, before in every place


“It there behoved him to set up the standard of her Grace,”


the tale was actually printed for private sale, as a link between translationsof short stories.

This process only stifled the family in my imagination for a time. They awoke once more with new names, but substantially the same, andwere my companions in many a solitary walk, the results of which werescribbled down in leisure moments to be poured into my mother’sever patient and sympathetic ears.

And then came the impulse to literature for young people given by theexample of that memorable book the Fairy Bower, and followedup by Amy Herbert.  It was felt that elder children neededsomething of a deeper tone than the Edgeworthian style, yet less directlyreligious than the Sherwood class of books; and on that wave of opinion,my little craft floated out into the great sea of the public.

Friends, whose kindness astonished me, and fills me with gratitude whenI look back on it, gave me seasonable criticism and pruning, and finallylaunched me.  My heroes and heroines had arranged themselves soas to work out a definite principle, and this was enough for us all.

Children’s books had not been supposed to require a plot. Miss Edgeworth’s, which I still continue to think gems in theirown line, are made chronicles, or, more truly, illustrations of varioustruths worked out upon the same personages.  Moreover, the skillof a Jane Austen or a Mrs. Gaskell is required to produce a perfectplot without doing violence to the ordinary events of an every-day life. It is all a matter of arrangement.  Mrs. Gaskell can make a perfect