Authors
Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880)
Bibliography
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Questions for Discussion and Writing
NAAL includes a new selection of Child’s writings from New York – presenting her as a prototype of a modern newspaper columnist. “Around town” or “metropolitan diary” columns remained popular throughout the nineteenth century and onward into the twentieth. In literary studies, this kind of persona is often referred to as a flâneur – a borrowed French term signifying a wandering observer, in and of the city, and yet apart from it as well, observing much, but generally going light on moral judgments and passionate responses.
1. What would you say is Child’s temperament, as it emerges in her New York writings? What consistencies do you sense here? Can you think of other and more recent social observers who take a similar approach to the American city? With some metroplexes breaking the ten million mark with regard to total population, is it still possible to write about “New York” or “Chicago” or “Los Angeles” with the measure of confidence that Child evinces here?
2. If this were a blog, how would it work? In other words, if these documents were appearing on-line, from a single author operating independently, and without all the implicit intermediate steps of conventional publishing – acquisition, editing, copy-editing, typesetting, design, and all the other buffering rituals of print media – would you read it with different expectations and inferences? Look around on the web for blogs about a major city you know, and compare them to Child’s reportage in terms of ambitions, reach, and overall mood.