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Hello and welcome to the Storytime for Grown Ups Christmas Spectacular. I'm Faith Moore and for the months of November and December, we'll be reading A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Each episode I'll read one chapter from the book, pausing from time to time to give brief explanations so it's easier to follow along. It's like an audiobook with built in notes. So gather your family together, brew a pot of tea or a mug of hot chocolate, find a cozy chair and settle in. It's story time. Hello, welcome to our video Victorian Christmas Spectacular. Over the weekend, I had the servants in our lovely Victorian house dust away all the cobwebs and they have hung up lovely garlands made out of evergreen. And mistletoe is hanging from every doorway. And there is a beautiful fire, log fire in the fireplace. Tea is brewing, hot chocolate is simmering on the stove and we are ready to get started. Started. So I admit that this is a little early to get started for Christmas and normally I am a stickler about when Christmas begins. The Christmas season begins, by the way, in case you were wondering, when Santa Claus reaches Herald Square in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, that's when you can turn on your Christmas music. That is when the Christmas season begins. According to me, however, you now have a pass. I am making an exception for all of us that we can begin the Christmas season right here, right now. Because we are going to get started with our Christmas Spectacular, which this year is a Victorian Christmas. We are reading A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett and I'm so excited. It's going to be a complete change of pace from Frankenstein. I hope you have put that behind you. You've put it in your closet, locked the door to come back to maybe next September and October. But now we are joyfully marching forward into the Christmas season and it will become more and more Christmassy as we go along out there in the world. But here in our Storytime for Grown Ups Victorian Mansion, it is Christmas time. I hope that you have gathered your family and friends, young and old, together to listen to this show. Whether you are gathered together in real life right now listening, or whether those people are spread far and wide and you're going to check in with them later. I hope that you have found people to bring to your Victorian Christmas here on Storytime for Grown Ups. Or if that is not the case and you don't have anyone to celebrate this Christmas time with, please take us, adopt us. We, the Storytime for Grown Ups community, are your friends and family and we are all out there listening with you. So young, old kids, grown ups, everywhere in between. Welcome. I am so glad that you're here. This is our intro episode, which means we are not beginning the book today. We will start the book on Thursday and then we will continue on every Monday and Thursday with this book until kind of almost the end of December, right before Christmas, we will finish this book. So, but this is the episode that we always do at the start of a new book where I introduce the book a little bit, I talk a little bit about some, maybe some historical things that you might need to know. And we're going to be talking about a few logistics because our Victorian Christmas has a lot going on. It's not just the book, you guys. We're going to be doing all kinds of really fun stuff and I want to talk to you about that. But I actually want to begin this episode just talking a little bit about what a Victorian Christmas even is. We talked about this a little bit last Christmas time when we were reading A Christmas Carol. And by the way, A Christmas Carol is still available to listen to you. Just scroll down your podcast feed and you'll find it there. And it's a great Christmas read, of course, it's the best Christmas read. And so on the off days, or as we get closer to Christmas, if you're interested, you can just binge that it's still there in the same way that we're reading this with notes along the way and questions and comments. So you can check that out. That's still there. And in the introduction episode of that book, we did talk a little bit about Victorian Christmases because that book is really about the that. And Dickens, who wrote A Christmas Carol, was one of the main authors, if not the author, who kind of enshrined the Victorian Christmas such that we can now read about it and know what was going on at that time. So I'm just going to review that a little bit so that we can set the scene for ourselves, because we are imagining that we are having a Victorian Christmas. So the Victorian era happened in England. It encompasses the reign of Queen Victoria. That's why it's called the Victorian era. And it took place, it began in 1837 and it continued on until 1901. So quite a long reign for a monarch. And it was a time of huge technological progress and change in England. And some of these changes affected the way that Christmas was celebrated. Lots of traditions that were born at that time are still the traditions that many of us follow and celebrate now. At Christmas time. I'll just talk about a few of them. One was Christmas cards. Christmas cards were invented during the Victorian era, and one of the reasons for that was that the mail system was excellent during the Victorian era. And you could send cards or letters that would arrive sometimes the same day or the next day. So sending cards to your friends and family to celebrate the season and to send them season's greetings was something that people started to do and it became a tradition. Another thing that started in the Victorian era was Christmas as a time to gather with family. It wasn't always that because it was hard for people to travel vast distances, but the railroad system suddenly allowed people to travel much farther, much faster. And they started to use Christmas time as a time to go and visit their family, either their parents or their kids, or their aunts, uncles, their cousins, whatever it was, their grandparents. People started to come together to see each other at Christmas time. Another tradition that really took hold at this time was the Christmas tree. We think of Christmas trees as sort of ubiquitous for Christmas, but it began in England because Prince Albert, who was Queen Victoria's husband, came from Germany and he brought over the tradition of Christmas trees. So Christmas trees became a tradition during this time, as did presents. Presents used to be a New Year's Day tradition, but they became a Christmas tradition around this time, as did the notion that Christmas was a time for children. So really, Christmas as we know it, or as we see it represented in kind of Christmas movies or on our Christmas cards that we send for was really invented during the Victorian era and solidified by Charles Dickens in A Christmas Carol. But also, it really was there, it really was going on, and now we are bringing it back. We are resurrecting the Victorian Christmas here on Storytime for Grown Ups. So we're going to try to recreate this and we're going to do this in a bunch of different ways. But all of the ways we'll try to harken back to the various Victorian Christmas traditions that I was just talking about a second ago. So I'm going to take a little bit of time at the start of this intro episode to talk about some logistics, like I was saying, logistics about how our Victorian Christmas is going to work. And after that, we will talk a little bit about the book A Little Princess and its author, Frances Hodgson Burnett, so that by the time this episode is over, you will have all the information that you need to go into this book and to participate as much or as little as you'd like in the. The Storytime for Grown Ups Victorian Christmas. Okay, so the first and most important way that we are going to have a Victorian Christmas here on Storytime for Grown Ups is of course, through the book that we have chosen first, because the book is a Victorian novel. I'll talk much more about that in just a little bit. But it was published in the year 1905, so it's actually just after the Victorian era ended, but it takes place probably around 1900 or so. So it's just on the cusp of the Edwardian era, which was came next. But the vibe is very much Victorian. So the first way that we will have a Victorian Christmas is by spending time in the Victorian world of a little Princess. But the other way that our book selection will help us have a Victorian Christmas is because it is a book that is not just for grownups. I've been talking about this a lot, right? This is a book written for children, although it is very enjoyable for adults as well. So the Victorian tradition of coming together with your family members and the holiday centering around children is something that we're going to be doing as well by reading a book that you can share with the children in your life. So I hope that we've got some children listening now. Hi kids. If you're out there, I'm so, so happy and excited that you're here. And if you are a grown up and you haven't yet shared this with the kids in your life, there is still time, right? So the idea is if you've got grandchildren or nieces and nephews or godchildren or kids living next door or whatever it is, kids you don't live with but care about, essentially. You can let them know that this is going on and then they can listen to this book. And you can listen to this book either at the same time or on your own. And then you can call those kids or do a video chat or go visit them or whatever it is, and you will have something to talk about together, a shared experience, essentially. So I hope that you will do that. And hello and welcome to the kids that are already here. But of course, if you don't have kids in your life, that is totally fine. Like I was just saying it a minute ago, you're still very, very welcome at our Victorian Christmas. But I encourage you to share this experience with someone. Right? That's the idea. I want us to connect with each other. This is one of the ways that we can do it. And there will be more as we go along. But I think that people have gotten very isolated in the last several years and I'm hoping that we can use this time to reconnect. So if you don't have kids in your life, or even if you do, you can also do what I'm about to say. But if you don't have kids in your life and there's someone you think might enjoy our Victorian Christmas, even if you haven't chatted with them in a while, just reach out with a link to the show and tell them that you would love to share this experience with them, see what happens. I mean, the worst that can happen is that they don't join in, right? So I hope that you will do that. But also, and I said this before a minute ago, I'm going to say it again, we all, all the storytime for Grown ups listeners out there. We are a community too, and this is a time for us to come together and there will be lots of ways for us to do that throughout this Victorian Christmas. But of course this is the first one. We are all here now listening. So hello, welcome storytime listeners young and old. I'm so glad you're here. And as part of this I will still as usual be taking questions and comments after each episode and I will still be choosing a few each time to discuss at the beginning of each episode. So if you are listening with kids, I encourage you to have them write in as well with their questions and comments. Please just let me know in the email that the person is a kid and also how old they are. And if I get a note enough kid and grown up comments, I'll try to do like one kid comment and one grown up comment each episode, but we'll see how that goes. So that's the first thing. The book we're reading and the way we're reading it is part of our Victorian Christmas. But there are two other, I guess, categories of events that will be part of this experience. The first is that every two weeks I will announce a new Victorian Christmas themed activity that you can participate in if you want and if you don't, don't do it. But these will be things that you can do or things that I will give to you that have to do with Victorian Christmas traditions. Some of these things will happen over in our online community, the Drawing Room, and if it's going to be one of those things, I will let you know in advance and you can decide if you want to sign up for that and join in or not. But some of them will also be open to everyone and these Activities will be every two weeks, and they will be announced on a Thursday. So I will announce the first one of those in our next episode on November 6, which will also be the first episode where we read from the book. The other category of events that we'll be doing is giveaways. I said a few moments ago that gift giving became a part of Christmas around the Victorian era. So I have some gifts which I will be giving away throughout the course of these two months, and I'll be giving them away via a drawing. Okay, so you will enter, and I will explain how to do that in a second, and then I'll announce the winners on the show. And this will happen every two weeks as well. So every two weeks, there will be a new present that I will give out, and I'll announce those on Monday. So I will announce one today in just a moment, because it is, in fact, Monday. But the way to enter these drawings has to do with my novel, which is called Christmas Carol. Now, I know that this might start to sound a little gimmicky, and I'm sorry for that. That's not what I'm going for. I'm not trying to be annoying. What I'm trying to do is give something back to you if you choose to buy my book, because the book really means a lot to me. And sharing it with you, my matters to me a great deal. And I know you are under no obligation to buy anything at all. So I just want to let you know how much it means to me that you would pick up a copy by giving something back to you if you choose to do it right. The book is a modern retelling of Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, but the Scrooge character has been reimagined as a workaholic mom named Carol. So she journeys through her past, present, and future to discover what really matters, which, of course, course, is her family. And if you don't want to buy the book, that is totally fine. That's okay. You can still participate in other things. You can, of course, still listen to the show and write in. But if you want to enter the drawings, all you have to do is buy a copy of my novel, Christmas Carol. It's Carol with a K, because it's her name. So that's how you find it. And then you send me a screenshot of your receipt. If you buy more than one book, you can get entered more than one time. And buying a book at any time enters you into all of the drawings. So if you don't win the first one. Your name will still be in the hat for the next one. And you don't have to buy another book to enter the next one, although you can, I hope you will. Please do. But the link to buy the book is in the Show Notes right now. It's still on pre order. It comes out on November 6th, so this Thursday. But it has to be in paperback. This is important. Okay. The old hardcover book won't count for the giveaways. You have to buy the new paperback with the beautiful new cover by Cynthia Angulo. The way to send me a screenshot. Because you can't do it through the usual contact page, it doesn't allow you to add an attachment. So the way you send me a screenshot is you scroll into the show notes of this episode, you click on the link to the Storytime for Grown Ups page, and there at the top of the page you'll find the details for these giveaways as well as the email address to send the screenshot to. So basically, if you didn't really understand anything I just said, because I know I just said a lot of things, if you didn't catch all of that, but you know that you would like to enter these drawings by buying a copy of my book, then go to my website and which is faith k.moore.com click on storytime for Grownups or scroll into the show notes and click on the link to Storytime for Grown Ups. And there it will explain everything again. Okay, so all the information is there on the Storytime for Grown Ups page and a link to that page is in the show notes. So what is the first giveaway? Right. Who cares about those details? You can find about them later. What am I giving away? Okay, so our first giveaway is going to be a membership in our online community, the drawing room at the House guest membership tier. Okay, so in two weeks I will announce a winner. I will announce it on the show. That person will then email me and I will give them a link to access the drawing room for free for life at the house guest level. This is useful because some of the Victorian Christmas events and activities that we'll be doing will be in the drawing room. So you buy a book, you send a screenshot and you will be entered. Okay, not all of the giveaways have to do with the drawing room, but this one happens to have to do with it. Okay, so also, and I will move on, I promise, from Christmas Carol after this. But also if you buy a copy and you send me a screenshot of your receipt, I will send you a signed sticker to put in the book and that will make it a signed copy. That is really fun if you're giving the book away as a gift, because then you're getting a book, but also it's signed. Or if you just want it yourself, then it will be signed for you. Anyone can have this. It is not a drawing. You buy the book, you get the sticker if you want one. And there are details about that on the Storytime webpage as well. So you can go there to learn more about how. I will send that to you. I will make it out to whoever you want. I will give them a little message and I will sign it. So you can have that for free no matter what, if you buy the book. Okay, so that is that, right? And then on Thursday of this week, I will announce our first Victorian Christmas activity. And it's a really fun one. And the kids can get involved in this one as well. So make sure that you listen at the beginning of that episode for more on that. So basically, if all of that was too much information, just go to my website, click on Storytime for Grown Ups, or use the link in the show Notes to do that and all of the information will be there. Okay, but let's move on. Let's start talking about our book, A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. So you guys know, or if you don't know, I will now tell you that I hate spoilers. I try never to do them. So even though I know that some of you basically don't know anything at all about the plot of this book, I am not going to say much about it here because I actually think it's wonderful to not know much about the book because then you get to just experience it instead of already knowing what's going to happen next. But I do like to tell you a little bit of background information going in so that you have something to sort of hold on to as you begin to listen next time. So Frances Hodgson Burnett was born in 1849 and she lived until 1924. And a little Princess was published, like I just said, in 1905. So if I'm not mistaken, this is actually the latest novel historically that we have read so far on Storytime. The Woman in White was published in 1860, and I think that was the closest to us in time that we'd done so far. So this is even closer to us in time than that. But as I said a minute ago, the world of this book is very much the Victorian world that we Encountered a bit in the Woman in White, but really, like I was saying, it's the world of A Christmas Carol. Because this book takes place in London, just like A Christmas Carol does. And there are other ties to Dickens because the book deals in part with the differences between the upper classes and the lower classes, which is a huge theme in Dickens generally. But it pops up in A Christmas Carol specifically as well. There is another tie between this book and a book that we've read on storytime, because critics at least have made a connection between the opening chapters of Jane Eyre and the book A Little Princess. Because this book takes place in large part at a boarding school for girls, you'll see it's quite different from the boarding school in Jane Eyre, but I think that you'll see that there are some connections there. And critics have also made a connection between this book and an unfinished novel of Bronte's that deals with boarding school as well. So that connection is also fun for us to think about as we go along, if we want to. Now, for the children listening and for anyone else for whom this might be helpful, let us just try to set the scene a little bit, okay? This book takes place in England at a time when electricity had been invented, but still wasn't a normal thing to have in your home. So it was a world that was lit by candles, it was warmed by fires. That was the way that people had to keep warm. People used horses or walking basically to get around. And in the city there were lots of horse drawn carriages going through the streets, as well as people just walking along. There weren't cars or buses or anything like that. But it could get very crowded. And when it rained, which it does a lot in England, it would get muddy and slippery and kind of hard to get around. There was a big difference between the rich people and the poor people. And there was a kind of stuff system for deciding what sort of life you could live. And it was called the class system. And people would have known very decidedly which class they were in and which class the people around them were. This wasn't like a class like in school. It was kind of like a section of society that you belonged in or didn't belong in. But there was also a sort of sense that whatever class you were born into was sort of part of your blood almost. So like if you were a very upper class person, meaning you came from a good family, a wealthy family, your ancestors also came from good families, then even if you fell on hard times, meaning even if you kind of lost all your money or something like that. You were still upper class in some way, and you could still differentiate yourself from people who were born into the lower classes and were servants or shopkeepers or something like that. So people tended to believe back then that there was something inherent inside of you that made you upper class or lower class, even if your circumstances didn't show that. Another piece of historical information that will be important to understand is that Britain, which England was a part of Britain, had rulership over the country of India. Okay? So Britain was and is an empire, meaning that the British monarch rules over countries that are not just Britain. And beginning in 1858 and then lasting until 1947, Britain had control of India. This was called the British Raj, or sometimes the crown rule in India. And so in addition to the population of people who were native to India, there was also living in India during this time, a population of British people. And because Britain was the ruling power, the British people living in India were considered more upper class than the Indian people. And often the Indian people became the servants of the British people. British military officers, for example, lived in India, and they might marry and raise their families there. And they would employ Indian people to serve as, like, the nannies for their children or the butlers in their houses, maybe the cook and other servants, sort of like that. So that's something that will be helpful to know because it'll come up a bit in this story and we can talk about it more as it comes up, if that feels helpful. So the book A Little Princess, it was based on an earlier short story that Burnett wrote called Sara Crew or what happened at Ms. Minchins. That's the whole title. Sara Crew or what happened at Ms. Minchins. By the way, for those of you who've read this book before, you may have just kind of did a double take at my pronunciation of the main character's name. Okay. The main character of this book has a name which is spelled S A, R, A. And that name can either be pronounced correctly as Sarah or Sara, but the traditional British pronunciation of that name is Sara, which is why I'm going to be pronouncing the name that way throughout this book. But here in the States, we often pronounce that name as Sarah. So I'm sorry to those of you who are very familiar with this book and think of the main character as Sarah, hopefully we will get used to it. Okay? But anyway, the short story that this book was based on, it came out originally in a children's magazine, and it came out in December, which I think is cool because we're reading it in December, or at least November and December. But it kind of reinforces for me anyway, the idea that this is a Christmas story, even though it's not specifically about Christmas. And we can talk more as we go along about what I mean by that. But to me, there is a kind of Christmas vibe, even though it's not specifically about Christmas. And I'll talk about why later, once we've started walking around in the world of this book. For those of you who haven't heard of this book before or don't know anything about it, you may know of another book by Frances Hodgson Burnett, which is called the Secret Garden. That book is a lot more famous, but in my opinion, a Little Princess is better. Okay. The other book that Burnett is famous for is called Little Lord Fauntleroy, but I think that one is even less well known than A Little Princess. So let's talk for a moment about Brunette herself. I don't think you really need to know anything at all about an author before you read a book, but sometimes it's interesting to know a little bit about the author. And Burnett is also, I think, the sort of author who sometimes uses elements of her own life to craft her story. So it can be kind of cool to know a little bit about her. So she was born in Manchester, which is in England. She was born in 1849, but when she was 4, her father died and her family fell into financial difficulties. So then they started to move around a lot until eventually they moved to Tennessee in the United States when Burnett was 16. So she writes about England and the class system, and you'll see she really vividly paints the world of Victorian London, but she actually spent a lot of her life in the US So this is also our first writer who is even affiliated with anywhere other than England. So that's cool, too. She began her writing career writing short stories for magazines when she was 19, and she did that as a way to help her family make money. Remember, they had fallen on hard times, so she was trying to help them by making money writing for magazines. Her first novel was called that Lass o' Lowries and was well received when it was published. But it was Little Lord Fauntleroy, which she wrote in 1886, that made her a popular children's author. She had a kind of troubled personal life. She was married twice, and both marriages seem to have been quite unhappy. She lived for a time in Washington, D.C. and she spent a lot of time in England as an adult. She had two sons, one of whom died as a child, which was devastating for her, and the other lived into adulthood. She Burnette lived to be 74 years old, and both A Little Princess and the Secret Garden were written in her later years. She died in 1924 in Long island in New York State, where she had been living for several years after having separated from her second husband. By all accounts, she seems to have been quite the personality. She enjoyed expensive clothes and a lavish lifestyle style. But I was really actually kind of surprised to find this out because you wouldn't really know it from her books, which I think have kind of family and connection and good morals and things like that at the heart of them, which is why I chose this book for Our Victorian Christmas, Our Christmas Spectacular. And in the end she published over 50 novels. Most of them are actually for adults, but her children's novels are the most well known and the most popular popular. So I'm going to stop there. I don't think we really need any more of an introduction, but please do feel free to write to me about anything I just said. And please do go to the Storytime page on my website. There's a link in the Show Notes to find out more about the drawing for the Houseguest membership that's open now, as well as the signed book plates that you can put in your copies of Christmas Carol. And on Thursday we will begin reading this book. I am so glad that you're here. Thank you for gathering together with me and with your family and friends for this Victorian Christmas and I will see you on Thursday. Thank you so much for listening. Don't forget to check out my novel Christmas Carol, that's Carol with a K. Using the link in the Show Notes, I would be so grateful if you would consider buying a copy or a few copies for yourself or as a gift. Go to my website, faithkmoore.com and click on Storytime for Grown Ups for information about all kinds of giveaways and freebies associated with your purchase. And of course, don't forget to get in touch with comments or questions about this episode. Please go to my website, faithkmore.com and click on Contact and and send me your questions and thoughts. Or you can click on the link in the Show Notes to contact me. I'll feature one or two of your entries at the start of the next episode. All right everyone, story time is over. To be continued.