Founded by Bertha Mahony Miller in 1924 with a mission to inform the public about the best in children’s writing, The Horn Book Magazine is still in business nearly 100 years later. You can read articles about children’s literature and subscribe to the magazine on the Horn Book’s website. After Rachel Field won the Newbery Medal for Hitty: Her First Hundred Years in 1930, Hitty became an American celebrity. The Horn Book Magazine published three articles about Hitty in the February 1930 issue, which I will summarize in this post. You can read all of the articles mentioned on archive.org. How Hitty Happened By Rachel Fieldpp. 22-26 In 1928, Rachel…
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Mary Angela “Mekitty” Dickens
Charles Dickens had several grandchildren, but Mary Angela, nicknamed “Mekitty,” was the eldest. Her father was Charles “Charley” Dickens, Junior, and her mother was Elizabeth “Bessie” Matilda Moule Dickens (née Evans), the daughter of Charles Dickens’ former book publisher, Frederick Mullett Evans. It is a wonder that Mekitty came to be such an important part of her grandfather’s life, because when his son Charley married Bessie, Charles Dickens didn’t even attend their wedding. Fortunately, after Mekitty was born, he reconciled with the family, and they became frequent guests at Dickens’ country home in Kent, Gad’s Hill Place. On October 31, 1868, when the book, A Tale of Two Hittys begins,…
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Meet Kitty
Anyone familiar with the real Hitty doll knows that she has a wooden body with feet carved like boots and painted black. No one knows exactly where or when she was carved, but some people claim that dolls with similar boots have been found and dated to the mid-19th century, not 1827, when she is supposedly carved in the book Hitty: Her First Hundred Years, by a traveling peddlar. I believe this may upset some die-hard book lovers. However, for me it is simply a fascinating mystery! In 2021, I purchased a small doll on ebay. She is only 6″ tall. She has a shoulderhead (meaning the head, neck and…
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Who is Hitty?
I first read Hitty: Her First Hundred Years by Rachel Field when I was a teenager, and I still have the somewhat battered hardcover copy which I purchased used for $1. The edition was printed in October, 1943, and it had the colored frontispiece of Hitty sitting for her daguerreotype, illustrated by Dorothy P. Lathrop. I remember thinking at the time that it was a really good story, and as a young doll collector, I would have loved to have my own Hitty doll. But few people were making Hitty dolls at that time. Above: photo of the real Hitty in the Stockbridge Library Museum in 2024 (courtesy of Beth…
