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CHRISTMAS STORIES REDISCOVERED
Short Stories from The Century Magazine, 1891-1905
Barbara Quarton, Editor
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 2008, 2012 by Barbara Quarton
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
INTRODUCTION, by Barbara Quarton
A hush falls over a college library in early December. The fever pitch of finals week subsides. Professors post grades; one can almost hear the collective sigh of relief. As students and faculty leave campus for winter break, public places in the library become deserted. The stacks are blanketed in silence.
On one of those quiet December days, I sat alone in my office. After a hectic fall quarter, I was happy to have an opportunity to focus on new projects. I enjoyed a long, productive spell at the computer, and then decided to stretch my legs. Soon I found myself wandering contentedly through the library. Oh, the pleasure of browsing familiar stacks on a gray December day....
As I roamed the vacant stacks I allowed my attention to be drawn to the binding—the hard cover—of a very old magazine. The binding appealed to me because it was obviously original and it was beautiful in a way that few things are anymore. There were many volumes of this magazine, and the entire set took up several shelves. I spent a long time gingerly turning tanned pages and getting to know the layout of each issue. I examined the illustrations and photographs and, skimming the indexes, I marveled at the many now-famous fiction writers, poets, statesmen, and essayists whose works appeared in the magazine: Thoreau, Melville, Crane, Longfellow, Wharton, Twain, Chopin, and Muir, to name just a few. I fell in love with the short fiction and the essays. I had stumbled upon The Century Illustrated Magazine, and it was nearly one hundred twenty years old.
In December, Christmas is not far from my mind. So when I came across the holiday story, “Wulfy: A Waif,” in the December 1891 issue, I read it...and was touched by it. Were other Christmas stories of the period as poignant? I returned to the stacks many times after that to hunt down and read all the holiday stories in The Century. Indeed, I discovered several literary gems.
Christmas Stories Rediscovered is a collection of fifteen Christmas stories first published in The Century Illustrated Magazine during America’s Gilded Age, 1891-1905. Each story is introduced with a bit of historical or literary context. Respectfully, no changes were made to the stories; the reader will find original word spellings, punctuation, dialect, and nineteenth-century turns of phrase left intact. The stories reveal much about day-to-day life in a long-ago time. I hope you find great pleasure—and perhaps a new bond with your forebears—reading these charming old holiday stories.
WULFY: A WAIF, By Vida Dutton Scudder (1861-1954)
The Christmas season magnifies the inequalities between the rich and poor in America. During the Gilded Age, many middle-class Americans tried to help those in need directly, either by doing individual charitable work or by getting involved in social reform movements. In the late nineteenth century, one such reform movement began operating “settlement houses,” where workers lived among the urban poor and offered help. This story describes the experiences of a little waif and his effect on an idealistic young settlement worker.
My father’s a good father; he don’t hardly ever hit me,” wheezed Wulfy.
“No, but he scolds him awful,” interposed Jakey.
They were standing around Miss Margaret’s chair—three little waifs of the street. Jakey, the Italian, with Murillo curves to mouth and eyebrows; Fritz Hutter, somewhat taller, his soft hat worn on the back of his curly head, his face sickly and sweet-eyed; Wulfy, the shortest of the three, his large and rickety head with its wide mouth, giving him something the effect of a Japanese doll. All the boys were dirty and ragged, but Wulfy’s rags carried off the palm. There was more hole than cloth. His face, overspread by a peculiar yellow grease, had a curious smile; at times it was a positive leer of worldly wisdom; again there crept into it something shy, appealing, and—could one venture to use the word—childlike. His eyes, when one could find them, were blue.
“He scolds him awful,” said Jakey.
“Yes, but that’s all right!” said Wulfy. “Yer see, he gives me two cents ter buy my breakfast, an’ sometimes I’m hungry an’ I asks him for fi’ cents, and then he does scold; but that’s ’cause he wants the fi’ cents hisself, don’t yer see?”
All this with an eagerly apologetic tone.
“How old are you, Wulfy?”
“I think I’m ten, but I might as well be twenty-five. I’ll never be no bigger. I’m goin’ to be a little man, yer know, like the little man at the dime museum. I went to the dime museum once, an’ I saw a man swaller two swords!” This speech, somewhat mournful and meditative at the beginning, became gleeful toward the end.
“And you live alone with your father?”
“No. I ain’t got no mother, yer know. There’s a friend of my father’s lives with us. I calls her aunty.”
“And isn’t she your aunty?”
No. She ain’t no relation. She’s jist a friend of my father’s.”
“O-oh,” said Miss Margaret. Her knowledge of life was becoming enlarged. “And is this friend of your father’s good to you?”
“She don’t hurt me. An’ my father’s a good father now. When I was littler I couldn’t dress myself ’cause my leg used to be so bad; he had to help me, an’ course he didn’t like that. Then it used to be hard. But I can dress myself now. He don’t have to do nothin’ for me. He’s a good father.”
The other boys, attracted by picture-books, had wandered away. Wulfy still stood beside Miss Margaret. There was some lop-sided deformity about the tiny, stunted fellow. His weak hands pecked at her dress, and an indescribable guilelessness shone paradoxically through his world-weary little person. He talked in a guttural, gasping fashion, hard to follow; yet there was no accent, except that indefinable accent of the streets which becomes one’s mother-tongue as one descends into the region of the Bowery.
“I had a mother once. A mother’s a good thing to have. When I was little, an’ my leg was bad, an’ I couldn’t get dressed, I used to lie in bed and remember her; an’ do yer know, sometimes I’d feel so bad, I’d feel as if I’d like to die!”
All this with no touch of sentiment, but with the same matter-of-fact tone in which a few moments before he had been telling of his ambition to own a nanny-goat and peddle newspapers.
Miss Margaret, however, who had seen less of life’s hard realities than Wulfy, was still inclined to be sentimental.
“You wanted to die so that you could be with your dear mother again, didn’t you, Wulfy?”
Wulfy looked sideways, with a scared expression.
“No, no! She died in the horspital.”
Miss Margaret waited, puzzled.
“They said they put her in a box and buried her. ’Twas over on Long Island. I shouldn’t be buried on Long Island.”
“Oh, but Wulfy, don’t you know? Your mother wasn’t buried, the real part of her; she went to heaven, and you can go there too when you die.”
Wulfy was blank. Evidently no impression entered his mind.
Miss Margaret looked at the forlorn little figure in silence an instant. Then all those lofty and etherealized conceptions of a future state which had been formed in the most advanced school of liberal theology slipped away from her, and she found herself saying:
“Wulfy, Jesus Christ, who is very good and who loves you dearly, died and went to a beautiful place called heaven on purpose that he might get ready a lovely house all for your mother and you. And when your mother died I think she went there, and I think