Episode 317: "Best of" – The Literary Life of Charlotte Mason

Summary

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Episode Summary: "Best of" – The Literary Life of Charlotte Mason

The Literary Life Podcast | Episode 317
Hosts: Angelina Stanford, Thomas Banks, Cindy Rollins
Guests: Donna Jean Breckenridge, Karen Glass
Date: February 24, 2026

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Overview

This “Best of” episode from 2021 brings together key voices from the Charlotte Mason educational tradition to explore not just what Mason believed about education, but her personal, “literary life”—how books shaped her mind, her habits as a reader, and her approach to learning and teaching. Special guests Donna Jean Breckenridge and Karen Glass (both Ambleside Online advisors and prolific voices in the Charlotte Mason world) join hosts Angelina Stanford, Thomas Banks, and Cindy Rollins for a lively, thoughtful, and sometimes humorous deep-dive into the intellectual and personal world of Charlotte Mason.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introducing Charlotte’s Angels and Their Projects

[06:42 - 15:45]

• Donna Jean Breckenridge shares about performing as Charlotte Mason, her projects updating "This Country of Ours" for modern language and inclusion, voice narration work, and plans for a Charlotte Mason one-woman play.
  • “It's been fun reading more about her personality, trying to find snippets of things. She was not someone who would, you know, talk about herself. But in her writing, she reveals more than I think she meant to.” [08:53]
• Karen Glass discusses upcoming book projects: a curated, study question-filled edition of Mason’s Home Education, and a reflective essay collection inspired by Mason’s principles.
  • “I curated a series of readings from Volume One... along with each reading, I just... added in a few study questions specifically designed to bring those principles... to rise to the top as you read through.” [14:14]

2. The Literary Life of Charlotte Mason: Framing the Theme

[15:45 - 25:01]

• The episode’s purpose is to look at Mason not just as an educator, but as a reader: What shaped her literary “diet”? How did her reading life influence her educational philosophy?

Memorable Moment:

• Joking about the “literary life drinking game”—take a shot every time Cindy quotes Mason! [17:04]

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3. Commonplace Quotes & Their Resonance

[17:04 - 24:58]

• Thomas Banks: Lord Byron’s “The tree of knowledge is not that of life.” [17:31]
• Angelina Stanford: “God is a mystery and not a fellow conspirator.” (J.B. Priestley) [18:38]
• Cindy Rollins & Karen Glass: On the limits of human intelligence being tied to the limits of human interests, and relationships with ideas.
  • “So it's our interests that lead us to knowledge. Which is not to say that Charlotte is promoting interest-led learning. She thinks real knowledge is interesting.” [19:37]
• Donna Jean Breckenridge (from Mason): “The thing is to keep your eye upon words and wait to feel their force and beauty...” [23:57]

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4. Who Was Charlotte Mason? Her Background and Place in History

[25:01 - 32:34]

• Brief biographical sketch: Mason was an orphan from a large family, educated in the early Victorian era with limited formal schooling—a self-taught woman who became a leading educational thinker.

• Discussion about her social class, the rare opportunity for women’s higher education, and self-education.

  • “For her, to me, the fact that she created, you know, this education and this life for herself that has us still talking about her 100 years almost after her death is truly incredible.” —Karen Glass [29:52]

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5. Mason the Person: Humor, Hardship, and Her Inner Life

[32:34 - 35:01]

• Mason had a subtle wit and humor often overlooked due to her “dense” prose. She worked through grief, ill health, and loneliness, drawing strength from faith and literature.
• Personal reflections on how guests met Mason (primarily through For the Children's Sake).

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6. How Do We Know What Charlotte Mason Read?

[37:23 - 39:32]

• Mason’s own writing is full of allusions—some explicit, many implicit or through “character name drops” that assume literary familiarity.
• She shaped the entire PNEU curriculum largely from her own (very wide) reading, recommending both classic and contemporary works.

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7. The Democratic Spirit & Reformative Impact of Mason’s Education

[40:49 - 46:33]

• Mason’s early work focused on upper-middle-class families (the only audience for home lectures), but she quickly advocated for liberal education for all, including lower classes and mining villages.
• Mason challenged Victorian ideas of class, heredity, and “who could be educated,” pushing for intellectual access for everyone.
  • “I want to give the education that Plato prescribed for his elite to demos—the people.”—Karen Glass paraphrasing Mason [45:28]

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8. The Real Charlotte: Personal Artifacts & Life in Ambleside and Beyond

[49:12 - 60:27]

• The Armitt Museum in Ambleside, UK, holds a trove of Mason’s possessions: rare books, personal objects (picnic hamper, teapots, hymnbook), registration records (she never paid library fines!), and artifacts reflecting the minutiae of her daily life.
• Some discussion of reconstructing her library shelves; devotional books, poetry anthologies, and even her marginalia.

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9. What Did Mason Actually Read? Her Literary Habits

[60:30 - 78:26]

• Mason’s literary diet was broad and deep, including:
  • The Bible (pervasive references, shaped her worldview)
  • Sir Walter Scott (read nightly, references throughout)
  • Wordsworth, Plutarch, Shakespeare, Kingsley, Aesop’s Fables, Pilgrim’s Progress
  • Goethe (especially admired), George Meredith, and Thackeray
  • Dickens and (to a lesser extent) H.G. Wells
  • Both classic and then-contemporary works

Notable Quote:

• “It is absurd to say that you have read Shakespeare or have read Jane Austen, because those kinds of books are like the bread of life... you’re going to go back to again and again.”—Karen Glass, paraphrasing Mason [91:05]

• Mason disdained both “sensational” and “overly didactic” novels, emphasizing books that made the reader think rather than simply feel or receive doctrine.

  • “Novels are divisible into two classes: sensational and, to coin a word, reflectional... The property of arousing reflection eliminates all flimsy work. It confines us to the books of our great novelists.” —Charlotte Mason (read by Karen Glass) [72:53]
  • “She can't talk without referencing not just… contemporary writers, [but] these are sort of her friends. This is what she surrounded her life with.” —Donna Jean Breckenridge [78:37]

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10. Mason On Education, Books, and the Science of Relations

[92:15 - 93:52]

• Mason’s core principle: “no education seems to be worth the name, which has not made children at home in the world of books.”
• Guests reflect: being "at home" in books isn't automatic; the challenge today is to move from book abundance to cultivating genuine reading lives.

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11. Personal Character: Trauma, Empathy, Humor

[82:36 - 89:05]

• Mason’s illegitimate birth, loss, and outsider status may have made her especially compassionate and wary of social hierarchy in both her writing and curriculum.
• She often used sarcasm and subtle wit; her humor emerges more when read aloud, and she's prone to rhetorical feints, praising then sharply critiquing.

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Notable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• On Mason’s Reading Practice:
  “She read Sir Walter Scott every night. How cool is that? Like, I just totally see her in bed with her candle and her, you know, Rob Roy, and she's over the Highlands and having adventures.” —Thomas Banks [95:03]

• On “Have You Read…”
  “It is absurd to say that you have read Shakespeare or Jane Austen, because she said those kinds of books are like the bread of life.” —Karen Glass [91:05]

• On What Books Do
  “Books were a great comfort to her, a source of strength. It wasn't just, ‘oh, let me study this.’ It’s throughout what she says, it’s like she can't talk without referencing... these are sort of her friends.” —Donna Jean Breckenridge [78:37]

• On Mason’s Principles Applied Broadly:
  “This is almost a democratic education she's offering.” —Thomas Banks [44:38]

• On Literary Allusion and Humor:
  “It’s just that when you first are reading her writing and you’re unaware of all of that, it’s just a little bit slow going... Sometimes she’s being just downright sarcastic.” —Donna Jean Breckenridge [88:54]

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Select Timestamps for Major Segments

• 06:42 – 15:45: Guest Introductions and Current Projects
• 17:04 – 24:58: Commonplace Quotes
• 25:01 – 35:01: Biography and Mason as a Reader and Teacher
• 37:23 – 46:33: Mason’s Curriculum Development and Social Vision
• 49:12 – 60:27: The Armitt Museum, Mason’s Material Legacy, and Personal Artifacts
• 60:30 – 78:26: Mason’s Literary Life: What She Actually Read—Genres, Authors, and Opinions
• 78:26 – 89:05: Reflections on Mason’s Relationship with Books and Personal Resilience
• 91:05 – 93:52: On Being “At Home” in Books and the Science of Relations

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Tone, Style, and Atmosphere

• The conversation is witty, informal, highly literary, and encouraging—full of in-jokes about “Charlotte’s Angels,” Victorian quirks, and the shared experience of discovering Mason.
• The depth of reading, discussion, and allusion-model the very literary life that Mason encouraged.

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Conclusion

The episode closes with reflections on the transformative power and comfort of books for Mason—a model of the literary life as both solace and foundation for personal and intellectual growth. Her lasting impact is in democratizing a “literary” education for all, and in mentoring generations in how to be “at home in the world of books.”

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[End of Summary]

Transcript

[Angelina Stanford]

Welcome to the Literary Life Podcast. We've grown quite significantly since our debut in 2019, and we've had many requests to highlight older episodes that new listeners may have missed, as well as revisit listener favorites. To honor that request, I present to you this episode of the Best of the Literary Life Podcast.

[Thomas Banks]

Welcome to the Literary Life Podcast, where your hosts, Angelina Stanford and Cindy Rollins, explore a life shaped by books, stories, and poetry. Each week, we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen, and your commute. The Literary Life is for everyone, because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Hello and welcome back to the Literary Life Podcast. I am Angelina Stanford, and I am here with the mysterious Mr. Banks and. And Charlotte's Angels. So instead of just Farrah Fawcett, we have the other two in the house as well. We have Donna Jean Breckinridge and Karen Glass, who I just a moment ago referred to as two of the nine Muses that live on Parnassus. And I'm really looking forward to our conversation today. If you are new to this podcast,

[Cindy Rollins]

welcome.

[Thomas Banks]

I have a feeling a lot of people are going to be listening to this podcast for the first time when they find out we've got Charlotte's Angels on here. I'm already. My mind is going immediately to merchandise. I hope you realize you're going to end up on a T shirt somewhere now, Charlotte's Angels. But,

[Angelina Stanford]

Ms. Stanford, I think your eyes just turned into dollar signs.

[Cindy Rollins]

Ching.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes.

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

Okay, so I'm already seeing the silhouette. Oh, gosh.

[Thomas Banks]

You guys decide amongst yourselves who gets the middle, and then we'll put this later. This would make you Charlie. And this would make me Tom Bosley. So this is. Yeah, I just. I just. Or maybe I'm Cheryl Ladd. I'm just hanging around waiting for one of you to drop out the hair.

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

Gotta be. Hello.

[Thomas Banks]

I hope you enjoy today's best of episode of the Literary Life Podcast. This is a good one.

[Ella Hornstra]

And it was recorded back in 2021.

[Thomas Banks]

So I thought I'd give you a

[Ella Hornstra]

quick update on what's going on at House of Humane Letters right now. The House of Humane Letters is the company that owns the Literary Life Podcast and allows it to be available for free to all of you. I love when I hear people say that the podcast is essentially a free college class. That's exactly what we're going for. But we do have things available at House of Humane Letters for purchase for people who would like to go deeper Right now is our registration period for our year long classes. If you've got a chance child who's looking for some humanities classes, Latin, History, Literature, Anglo Saxon, Vikings, etc. Etc. Head on over to the website HouseOfHumaneLetters.com and click on our Classes tab and you'll see our full course selections, including Greek. We also offer a number of short term classes for adults and students who want to go deeper into some of the particular topics that we offer. And right now we have a webinar going on that I'm very excited about and I want to tell you about it. This is going to be February 25th and even if you hear this recording a day or two afterwards, you can

[Thomas Banks]

still grab the video.

[Ella Hornstra]

It's called Stories Tell of the lion, the Persian Tale of the Horse and His Boy. I'm really excited about this webinar. It's very important to me that we continue to bring in the entire world of stories, and filling in some of the gaps about the Easter and Middle Eastern literary tradition is a part of that, part of filling out the whole world of literature.

[Thomas Banks]

So I'm just going to read to

[Ella Hornstra]

you the description written by the webinar instructor Ella Hornstra, who's currently pursuing a degree in Classics with a minor in Persian. I'm going to let her tell you in her own words what her topic is about. Less well known than the Narnia books, dedicated mostly to the Pevensy siblings, the Horse and His Boy is a tale of lost and recovered identity that traverses a foreign desert landscape filled with oriental gardens, bustling marketplaces, fishermen with mouths full of the words of poet sages, tyrannical kings and battle worn heroes inconveniently appearing on horseback to retard the journey of the Narnians and our protagonists. Is the setting of this book merely coincidence? Or might its very Middle Easternness tell us something about how to read this story? There is a great tree of stories from which each tale draws, whether intentionally or not, and its Eastern branches are of equal importance to its Western ones. There are many figures and adventures, not only in the Horse and His Boy, but in all of the Narnia books, which recall very distinctly tales and legends of the Persian tradition. If Lewis is telling us something about how to read all stories through the world of his Narnia books, he might be opening the door to the Middle east, to us. Through the Horse and His Boy join Ella Hornstra to discover a world of talking horses, enchanting storytellers white demons and great golden lions that exist in the Persian Book of Kings. The stories tell of a lion, and that lion might be Aslan, on the prowl through the pages of Narnia or Rustum, on the prowl through his trials to free king and country from the grasp of a deadly curse. We will see just how familiar Louis was with these Persian tales and how great of a silent role they may play in our own familiar tradition. Let us discover together just how much of the east is in Fromarnia and the North.

[Thomas Banks]

I think this is going to be

[Ella Hornstra]

a great one and well worth the price of $18. So head on over to HouseOfHumaneLetters.com peruse our full catalog of classes for students from middle school to 87 years old, I believe is our oldest student. So we've got something for everybody. And if you're interested in this webinar, click on the webinar and mini class tabs and find out about that and register or get the recordings if you're listening a little bit later. Thanks so much. And thanks so much for supporting the podcast and supporting our work at House of Humane Letters. Again, that is keeps this podcast free for you and I hope that you enjoy this episode.

[Thomas Banks]

All right, so without further ado, I am going to let Farrah Fawcett introduce the other two angels.

[Cindy Rollins]

All right, so today we have with us Donna Jean Breckenridge. She is an Ambleside advisory member. That means if you go to Ambleside Online, they have the advisory are really the founders of Ambleside Online. And Donna Jean is a longtime advisory member. She lives with four generations, you've got to believe this, in northern New Jersey. She is now covered in snow and just really has an exciting life there with her large family. She comes from a family of pastors, radio evangelists, missionaries. Just the whole bag of tricks that these guys have her family has. But one of the things I love about Donna Jean in the past, one of the things that has made her mark in the Charlotte Mason community or will make her mark in that community in the future, is that she has done a lot of research into Charlotte Mason because she brings her talents to acting out and performing the role of Charlotte Mason in just a wonderful way. Donna Jean, what kind of projects do you have going on within your life right now?

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

Thank you, Cindy. I'm really excited about, obviously, all of the ongoing AO projects that's always close to my heart and getting to be the narrator for Karen's books and some other projects that I have for Audible and my church ministry. I also get to help homeschool my granddaughters. I have three grandchildren and two of them. I get to to help homeschool them because I live here. There's no way out of that, really, but that's a joy in my life. Those two are 13 and 11 years old. And I'm updating, I'm working on a project for this country of ours. I think the book is so vitally important, but there's some outdated language and there's also some things that are omitted that need to be included. So that's a real passion of mine right now. And then what you alluded to is something that's been really close to my heart. The idea of putting on a three act, one woman play of Charlotte Mason using her own words. I've got a young friend who's starting to research with me the clothes to create the correct costumes, period costumes, and just sort of go through Charlotte Mason's life and, you know, portray her. It's been fun reading more about her personality, trying to find snippets of things. She was not someone who would, you know, talk about herself. But in her writing, she reveals more than I think she meant to. So that's really important and something that has been exciting to me. And that's where this conversation, I think, came about, with just sharing some stuff I had found. So I'm looking forward to more research and eventually getting to put that drama out there.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, I'm really excited about that. And we also have with us Karen Glass, also an advisory.

[Thomas Banks]

Cindy, hang on. I'm going to interrupt you really rudely here because it just occurred to me this might be a very confusing conversation to our listeners because Donna Jean is the voice of Karen Glass.

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

That's right. That's so true.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right.

[Thomas Banks]

You may know Donna Jean's voice because she does the audible of Karen's books. So we're gonna be so confused about

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

just trying to freak everybody out here.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, what we're really gonna find out today is who is the real Charlotte Mason? Karen is it? I remember years ago I was speaking at a conference and I kept referring to Charlotte Mason. I' point to Lynn Bruce, who was sitting in the conference. And finally Lynn raised her hand and said, I'm not Charlotte Mason, but we are our next Charlotte Mason. Behind door number two is Karen Glass, and she is an advisory member. Also, we've had her on here before. Very popular episodes, if not our most popular episodes. Karen has written many books about Charlotte Mason, which Donna Jean has put to audio But Karen lives in Poland, so scheduling Karen is not that easy right now. She's written Know and Tell. She's written. Consider this. And her. Her newest book, In Vital Harmony, is absolutely one. All three of those books are absolutely wonderful. But I just love In Vital Harmony. I believe that book is vitally harmonious in the Charlotte Mason world. Karen, what do you have going on right now?

[Karen Glass]

Well, first, I have to put my hand up, too, and say, I also am not Charlotte Mason, just so we're all clear on that point. But I actually have two book projects that are pretty close to being ready to send out into the world that would. That would be more impressive if one of them wasn't actually a year late, because I meant it to come out in 2020. And, well, you know, that just didn't work out. So I had. Now I have two book projects, and they're. Both of them are very, very different from everything that I've done before. One is, well, I Abridged Volume 6. Charlotte Mason's Volume 6 is mind to Mind. And when I finished that, I said, I'm never doing that again. It was harder. It was harder to do that than to write my own books. So I never intended to abridge any other books, and I haven't. But I interact a lot with younger homeschooling moms who are just coming to Charlotte Mason for the first time, and they really, really want Volume One. And I know that, Cindy, you've read it to your patrons, and I think there's another audio version available somewhere, and that does help. But there's still just a lot in Volume One that I feel is, I don't know, just a little bit too much smoke. Just a little bit. Like, literally, Charlotte Mason is talking about the smoky rooms that you have and why you need all this extra oxygen because your fires are sucking the oxygen out of the air of your rooms. It really has nothing to do with what you really go to Charlotte Mason to read about. And so, dare I say it, I curated a series of readings from volume one.

[Cindy Rollins]

We don't use that word.

[Thomas Banks]

Tread lightly, Karen. Tread lightly.

[Cindy Rollins]

You actually did curate.

[Karen Glass]

Okay, I actually did curate a series of readings from volume one. And then I added in the two lectures that used to be in Home Education and were pushed into volume five in later editions. And I added those back in so that. And then I create. So I broke everything down into this series of readings that can be read. I would say a fast reader could read any of them within 10 minutes, and the slowest reader could read any of them in 30 minutes, so they're not long. And then I added in a series of study questions, which I read volume one right after I finished writing In Vital Harmony. So I had those principles just really fresh in my mind. And I read through volume one, and I was just. They were all there. Like all those principles were just woven into all of the things that Charlotte Mason had in volume one. And so along with each reading, I just. I added in a few study questions specifically designed to bring those principles, you know, to kind of, you know, to rise to the top as you read through. So hopefully the idea is, as you read through volume one, all eight lectures, not just the six, you will end up with understand an understanding of Charlotte Mason's principles pretty much just as good as reading in Vital Harmony, but reading in Charlotte Mason's were own words.

[Cindy Rollins]

That sounds wonderful.

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

That.

[Cindy Rollins]

That sounds excellent.

[Karen Glass]

So it's. That's almost ready to, you know, to send out into the world as a book. And then the other project is a complete departure.

[Ella Hornstra]

Most.

[Karen Glass]

I would say that most of the books that I have written kind of fall into. I mean, I would call them myself a little bit didactic. You know, they're teaching books. And this book is a book of essays, so it's much more reflectional.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, that sounds really fun.

[Karen Glass]

But again, it's based off of Charlotte Mason. It's meant to be encouraging and uplifting and not teaching.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, those are some really exciting projects that are up and coming in the Charlotte Mason world. And I know if you're like me, you can't wait to see all these in print and on stage.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, this is really exciting. And thank you so much, ladies, for being with us here today. You all have busy lives, but I'm very excited about this topic today. I'm going to give it. I'm just going to give all the credit to Cindy here. The blonde was the brains behind the whole thing. Plot twist. And this was Cindy's idea. We were talking and she pitched it to me. What if we did an episode on the literary life of Charlotte Mason? And I thought that was just absolutely brilliant. And I loved the idea because we've talked about Charlotte Mason principles a lot on this podcast, but I love the idea of approaching it from what was her reading life like? So I'm thrilled. But before we jump into that, if you're new to this podcast, we like to start each episode with sharing a commonplace quote, because we think our reading life, we're going to walk the walk and not just talk the talk here so commonplacing if you're new to the show is a very old tradition of just simply writing down quotes through things that you read. So we're going to do that right now. So I chose as my quote. It's funny, we have the unofficial literary life drinking game here, where every time Cindy references Charlotte Mason or a quote, we all take a shot. So we might have to put that game on pause for this episode.

[Cindy Rollins]

Do not drive after watching this episode.

[Thomas Banks]

That's right. Do not operate heavy machinery when listening to this podcast. So I chose as my quote something to maybe be a counterpoint. We all think that a literary life is very important. We think that self education is very important for many reasons, all of which we've explored on this podcast. But it's important to remember that knowledge is not salvific.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right?

[Thomas Banks]

And so I found a quote just to be sort of a little counterpoint and just keep us in vital harmony. Right? Keep us in harmony within ourselves. While the desire for knowledge is good, we cannot forget that it's not going to save us. This is a quote from, of all people, Lord Byron, from a long poem he wrote called Manfred. It's one of my favorite quotes. Sorrow is knowledge. They who know the most must mourn the deepest or the fatal truth. The tree of knowledge is not that of life.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, that is good.

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

Oh, no.

[Ella Hornstra]

Byron bringing it home.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, Some pretty grave thoughts for him.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, he needed to have some grave thoughts here. He wasn't going to live very long.

[Thomas Banks]

Well, he often had a lot of, you know, Byron and Shelley, they both had brilliant words on paper and just failed to live them. So hopefully that won't be true of us quite as it will be true of us to some extent. Hopefully not as quite not true of us as those guys. All right, Mr. Banks. Charlie, what you got?

[Angelina Stanford]

So my Commonplace is from J.B. priestley's Literature and Western man, which is kind of a. Kind of a history of literature since the Renaissance. God is a mystery and not a fellow conspirator.

[Karen Glass]

Oh, yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, yeah, I like that one.

[Cindy Rollins]

It reminds me of that verse. You thought that I was all together like you. Yes.

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Like Psalm 50. Yeah, exactly.

[Cindy Rollins]

So you constantly read that and it's like a slap in the face. Yes, I did. I have made God in my own image so many times. My commonplace quote is from Charlotte Mason, but I've gone short instead of long this time.

[Karen Glass]

So

[Cindy Rollins]

there seems good reason to believe that the limit to human intelligence arises largely from the limit to human interests. That's from school Education.

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

Okay, say that again.

[Karen Glass]

Okay.

[Cindy Rollins]

I'm not allowed to. Charlotte Mason says you have to listen. There seems good reason to believe that the limit to human intelligence arises largely from the limit to human interests. So it's our interests that lead us to knowledge. Which is not to say that Charlotte is promoting interest led learning, because she doesn't. She thinks real knowledge is interesting. And when you give that to someone, they will find it interesting. But if you, if you hide that from them because you have some program you're teaching, then they're not gonna have. They're not. They're gonna be bored and not interested and therefore not learn. I think I'm sort of quoting.

[Karen Glass]

Paraphrasing is the science of relations. You know, your, your. The amount that you're going to learn is limited by how many things you form relationships with.

[Cindy Rollins]

Very true. Amen.

[Thomas Banks]

That is very true. That's a point I try to make a lot about the idea that all of the books are talking to each other, that there is no shortcut for learning how to read. You just have to keep reading. And the more things that you can connect what you're reading to, the deeper your reading is. And so you just have to jump in and keep having new things to relate to.

[Cindy Rollins]

I'm in. All right. Karen, do you have a commonplace quote?

[Karen Glass]

I do. And you'll be shocked to know that it comes from Charlotte Mason as well. Mine is from volume six, and I just. I kept the quote as short. So I just. If you'll let me preface it just enough to say that I actually think that this quote may have grown out of some reading that Charlotte Mason was doing herself at the time. Because this quote appears in one of a series of letters that she wrote for the Times. I assume that means the London Times in 1912, where she's introducing or basically presenting, making an argument for liberal education to the wider British public. Specifically, she wanted them to take up the PNEU programs. But generally she was defending a literary liberal education. And so that was 1912. And in 1911, the biography that she's referring to that she's. That I think she was reading was a biography that had just come out about William Pitt the Younger. So that is who she is talking about when she says he, that's. That's the problem. My quote begins with he. And she's talking about William Pitt the Younger. And I think she may have just been reading that relatively new biography where she probably got the idea that this quote is about. So she says he was fortified by illimitable reading by a present sense of a thousand impossibilities that had been brought to pass, of a thousand things so wisely said that wise action was a necessary outcome.

[Cindy Rollins]

Wow. I think I remember that from. She's going over the idea of different people's reading in that section.

[Angelina Stanford]

I think to date, William Pitt the Younger was. Is still the youngest person ever to be the Prime Minister of England. I think he was 23 or something. Ridiculously young.

[Karen Glass]

She actually said that, too. I didn't include that. But in part of her preface to her quote, she mentions the fact that he was the youngest premier and found out that he still was.

[Cindy Rollins]

And that reminds me of something we talked about with Caitlin Beecham, how if you have this literary education, you have lived a thousand lives in some ways, and you do gain a lot of wisdom early on. Unless you're reading romance novels all day

[Thomas Banks]

long, you're getting a different education there.

[Cindy Rollins]

You know how to flutter your eyelashes.

[Angelina Stanford]

One of those life skills.

[Thomas Banks]

You need a lot of work on that, Mr. Banks. All right, Donna Jean, do you have a commonplace quote? And is it also from Charlotte Mason?

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

Yes and yes. And honestly, I'm not cheating. It's actually in the book here in my handwriting. So actually in a commonplace book. This is from her book, Ourselves, in which she says, the thing is to keep your eye upon words and wait to feel their force and beauty. And when words are so fit that no other words can be put in their places, so few that none can be left out without spoiling the sense, and so fresh and musical that they delight you, then you may be sure that you are reading literature, whether in prose or poetry.

[Angelina Stanford]

Lovely.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, wow. That is a woman who reads a lot.

[Thomas Banks]

All right, well, we are going to get started with this conversation, but I'm going to go ahead and say ahead of time that Mr. Banks and I have decided we are playing the role of Ed McMahon because we don't have much to contribute to this conversation except to say, ooh, ah, good book.

[Ella Hornstra]

Nice one.

[Thomas Banks]

So, Cindy, take it away.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay, so we've been throwing the name around Charlotte Mason, and we've been doing that for the whole time we've had this podcast. But maybe some of you don't even even know who Charlotte Mason is. So, Charlotte Mason was an educator. She lived from 1842 to 1923, and during that time, she was in college at some point as a young girl. She then had to begin teaching immediately and then finally did finish her college later. But in the end, she started a teachers college to train Teachers in the Ambleside District, you know, the Lake District of England. And then later she. And during that time, as she was forming opinions and ideas about children and about teaching, she wrote six volumes of books, which we now have, which lay out her pattern of education. I don't even know if pattern's the right word, but her 20 principles, and those are available. They're free online. You can go to ambleside online.org and you can get those for free, or you can buy them here and there in different forms and ways. And as Karen says, she's producing these writings in paraphrases. So that's sort of who Charlotte Mason is. But, Karen, do you have any biographical material about Charlotte that would fit in here?

[Karen Glass]

Well, you know, when you talk about college, I always feel like people may get a wrong impression because she literally. I mean, she went to a teacher's training college. There were no universities for women when she was going to school. And teachers training college that she went to was like the first of its kind. And she went for one whole year while she was a teenager.

[Thomas Banks]

So about what year are we talking about?

[Karen Glass]

I think she would have been about 18.

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

Yeah, it was.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, she went to Teachers College right at the time. Right before her parents died.

[Thomas Banks]

Okay, so we're talking 18,

[Cindy Rollins]

right after her parents died. Yeah, 1860 would be about the time.

[Thomas Banks]

All right, so she's prime Victorian.

[Karen Glass]

Oh, yes, very much so. And this was the first teachers training college. And so she only went for one year. She was only a teenager. And then she just. She had to earn her own living at that age, in that era, which was. I can't even imagine how daunting and alone she must have felt, because it was some friends, you know, who helped her afford the one year of school. But then she was on her own

[Thomas Banks]

and teaching back then, that was the only option. Be a governess, teach at a private school for girls.

[Karen Glass]

Right. So she. So she, you know, she was just thrown into this with this huge responsibility of teaching in what they called an infant school, which would have been kind of like kids from age 4 to 7 is what that usually meant at that young age. And then literally like that, from that moment till the day she died, you know, education was her whole life. But I don't think of her schooling like what she got at that teacher college. I mean, that was not a huge part of the educator that she became, the educational philosopher that she became.

[Thomas Banks]

Right. I mean, so my master's is in Victorian literature, and particularly about women in the Victorian age. And so I'm like chomping at the bit at everything you're saying. Yes. So I don't know this particular teacher's college, but I know about women's education in that period. So any education that she would have had would have been on her own, she would have self educated. Because women were not the life of the mind for women. That was not a thing in the Victorian age. Women were overgrown children. They were pretty armed trophies, they were house ornaments. It would be bad for a woman to be able to ensnare a husband if she was too smart. There were actually conduct books written for women encouraging them not to be too smart.

[Karen Glass]

Right. And, you know, for a woman who didn't have a husband, she had no status, no, you know, no social standing of any kind, really. You know, being an orphan without a family, without, you know, any wealth, very much dependent. So I, you know, for her, to me, the fact that she created, you know, this education and this life for herself that has us still Talking about her 100 years almost after her death is truly incredible.

[Angelina Stanford]

All of this reminds me a little bit of that one condescending line in Tennyson's. I love Tennyson. But his worst major poem, be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever. It's like, oh my gosh, brush by a deadline when he wrote that one.

[Thomas Banks]

Maybe.

[Angelina Stanford]

I don't know.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. So, Donna Jean, do you. What are some of the things that you have learned about Charlotte Mason, just in general about her life as you've studied her for your play?

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

I think what I've been surprised at is her humor, which I really never think of when I read Charlotte Mason stuff. It's so dense. We used to say back, you know, so many years ago when we first were together on the email list that, you know, oh, this is just so hard to read. It wasn't. It was just dense. You don't skim it fast and you don't think of it as being humorous, but I'm finding just more joy in it and more. I'm just seeing a certain attitude about her that, that she has. And then also reading things like In Memoriam where people talk about her. Of course they're writing about her after her death for the most, but she just was an amazing person. She did all that she did with ill health. And that has a different impact on me when I think about that, when I think about how she did what she did following grief, following the loss of both of her parents and having that, you know, as Karen mentioned, that sense of being alone and how she really persevered in this, that. That has a huge. A huge impact on me. And I'm just finding, as I get older, I'm viewing her a little differently. I mean, I first read about her. First time I heard her name was 35 years ago. So it's a long time that this woman has had an influence on my life. And yet now I'm just. I feel like I'm just finding out some new things. For most of these years, our emphasis on AO in our homeschools is rightly on her writing. This is not about elevating this woman to some sort of sainthood. But at the same time, now that, you know, we've sort of established what the philosophy is, what the teaching principles are, it's just sort of intriguing to see a little bit more about the woman and just find just some of these different nuggets of things that she said. And also for me to just see how grounded she was in prayer and in biblical truth and in a. In a focus on God, that. That speaks a lot to me.

[Cindy Rollins]

So I really like that. I really like what you're saying, because sometimes we talk about Charlotte Mason so much that it's almost. And people have been alarmed by this, that there is a sense that we're worshiping her or that she was a little bit less than human. She didn't have children, so, you know, maybe she didn't have the realities of life before her like we so much are in the midst of. And yet she really was a real human being. And I guess probably because we don't know the body of knowledge that she has gleaned from because it's so vast. Maybe we don't get all the jokes. That would be the sad thing. So you mentioned, Donna Jean, you were in. How you came to know that you were introduced to Charlotte Mason. How did that come about?

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

It was like I said, 35 years ago. My brother, who was at a Bible college in Pennsylvania at the time, got a book from the bookstore, and he just looked at it and said, it just made me think of you and gave it to me. And it was in that moment that I was introduced to Charlotte Mason. It was Susan Chaffer McCauley's book for the Children's Sake. My oldest daughter was a month old, and I just can remember, you know, rocking her and reading this book and finding that the ideas that Macaulay wrote about Charlotte Mason, I just found myself sort of nodding that a lot of it was similar to the things in my own childhood. What I would say the best parts of my childhood. And I wasn't at that moment. Again, my daughter was a month old. I wasn't thinking, how am I going to educate her? That was science fiction. That was the farthest thing from my truly. I just wanted to get through the next sleepless night. But I just really loved this whole idea of this fascinating woman from the Lake District, which was intriguing to me. That's where my grandmother grew up. And my whole childhood I had heard all about the Lake District and, you know, growing up with a grandmother with an English accent and she loved America and became an American, but always, always loved where she grew up. And so those things coming together were just fascinating to me. So it was first through reading the book for the children's Sake.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay, so, Karen, I'm gonna ask you the same question. How did you come to know Charlotte Mason?

[Karen Glass]

Well, like Donna Jean and so many of us, you know, from that time frame, it was by reading for the children's sake with my two tiny preschool children, I went to a homeschool conference because I knew I was going to be moving overseas and I'd have to homeschool. And I was just planning on using a standard box curriculum, well known program. But I went to the conference, homeschool conference, for fun. And one of the vendors there handed me a copy of for the Children's Sake and said, you need to read this book. And so I took it home and I read the book. And I had always been a student, you know, one of those students who just think grades are the point. Like, you know, memorize the material, take the test, get an A move on. And that was my whole view of education. I know it's kind of hard to believe. I say that now and people are just gonna just. I could just see the puzzled looks on their faces, like, are you kidding? But no, really, that is how I had gone through school, all the way through my grad, My. My college education. I just thought that education was about taking and passing tests. And I was very good at it. And I read for the Children's Sake and I did a complete 180. It was like the first time in my life I actually got the idea what education was really supposed to be about. And as far as I'm concerned, that's when my education began.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, I always think back on my education when it began, and I always say it was when it was. I was in college and we did How Should We Then Live by Francis Schaeffer. And an idea popped in my head And I was like, what an idea. This is interesting. And then from there on out, ideas, as Charlotte said, one idea led to another until here we are, almost insane. But anyway, so Charlotte Mason was a lifelong reader. She was almost entirely self educated and she was a voracious reader. Now, Karen, how do we know, how can we learn about what Charlotte read? I mean, how have you learned about that?

[Karen Glass]

Well, you read what she wrote and the references that she makes, I mean, sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, sometimes just dropping in the name of a character without mentioning either the title of the book or the author. It's incredible.

[Thomas Banks]

So she presumed a pretty literate audience then?

[Karen Glass]

Absolutely, absolutely. And so she, you know, she mentioned specifically, I mean, she was writing a curriculum, of course, and recommending books for parents to read with their children. And she created a curriculum in which she's recommending these books and she read all the books as well as the ones they didn't put in the curriculum. So, you know, I could not make you a list of all of the books that I know Charlotte Mason read. It's, you know, there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of titles mentioned just in the six volumes that we have. But then you have to look beyond that at all the books that they, they used in the PNEU school and like the books that she recommended for the mother's home education course. It's just, there's no, there's really no lack of material. If you want to find out what Charlotte Mason read. It's, you know, just pick someplace and start.

[Cindy Rollins]

Did she, was she, was it her that designed the PNEU schedules and decided which. I know she must have read all the books, but did she make that final decision or the first decision like, let's do this, let's do this?

[Karen Glass]

I think so. I really, I really think, I mean, she, I'm not saying she didn't have any input, that she wasn't consulting with a couple of other people who were, you know, very active and concerned with the beginning of the pneu. But I really think that because the very first place that they, they used it, they had a, they had a small school on site there that, you know, for the, the girls who were in the teacher training college to practice with the village children. And so I can't imagine anybody but Charlotte Mason coming up with that curriculum.

[Cindy Rollins]

So did she have her. So she probably didn't have all 20 of her principals when they started that school for the local kids. But did she already. Was there already a skeleton of her principles in place at that time she

[Karen Glass]

had all 18 of them. And the 20, what we call 20 today, the ones that she added later are not philosophical principles, they're practices. And she added them to the principles because they were that important. But I think that probably the experience of running that school and the PNEU correspondence school as well gave her the confidence to say these practices are absolutely vital. And so she put them in the principles. But the 18 original principles, those were there in the lectures that she delivered, that she called, that became the book Home Education that was published about the same time that they were forming the pneu. So yes, the principles were always there from the beginning.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay, so as they're forming the pneu, she's been in the past giving these lectures and these lectures form the beginning of the home education.

[Thomas Banks]

I'm going to expose my ignorance here with this question, but it occurs to me I don't really know what social class, social and economic class. And we can ask this because in the Victorian period, this was a huge deal. Who was her audience?

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

So if you were a rich family,

[Thomas Banks]

you had a governess for your kids. So who is she writing this curriculum for?

[Karen Glass]

Okay, Angelina is absolutely right. She is writing this home education. The lectures, they were delivered to those upper middle class families and above who could afford a governess if you read home education. In fact, one of the things that I curated out of the reading, the home education reading, is everything that assumes you have a live in nanny and full time child care help because it's not helpful to, you know, to, you know, to take her advice about, you know, how to, you know, make sure your nanny doesn't talk to your children like this. No, she delivered those lectures as part of a fundraising for either a church or some religious project that they had going that the church was promoting. And that was her contribution was to give these lectures as a way of fundraising for, you know, her church project. And you know, the people who came to those lectures, you know, they were the paying, you know, or at least making donations as part of it. They belong to that upper middle class, they live that lifestyle, you know, people who had servants and families. When they formed the pnu, though, it was an object of theirs to encourage women from the lower class to, they wanted to help educate them as well. Because she wasn't really at that point talking about their school education, she was really talking about their child rearing and their home education and just bringing up children with, you know, it wasn't even just about their intellectual and spiritual growth and health, but their Physical well being. And so they wanted to promote those ideas among women of the lower classes too. So that was like an object with the pneum. We're forming this. You know, these upper middle class women were forming this and we want to help people from the lower classes as well.

[Thomas Banks]

Well, I would think that would really shape a lot of the practical end of things because your upper class education is in large part to maintain the upper class hierarchy. It's, it's not to liberate people and to have social mobility, but it's to. To maintain your sort of elite leadership position, the society. So it sounds like she's kind of pushing against that.

[Karen Glass]

Well, there's a good bit of the, you know, the reform spirit in the whole PNEU movement.

[Cindy Rollins]

And as time went on, when they realized that ideas weren't just working, you know, maybe they didn't know how broadly they could apply it, but as they realized they could apply it across the board to the lower classes, they had some people come along and say, let's try it in this little community school with the underprivileged children, we might call them. And they had such success. I think at that point they realized they had something beyond just the normal educational methods.

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

I think that was really important to her. She would talk about the children of a mining village and using these principles there, and she would talk about a liberal education for all. I think again, and Angelina could speak to this against the backdrop of her times. She was really concerned that this wasn't just meant for a certain class, this was for all. I think that was just a really strong passion of hers or a growing passion over time.

[Thomas Banks]

That is what is amazing to me about her, that she seems to be taking what would have. Well, we would say classical education. It would have just been called education then, but. But it was a little bit elitist and it was for men, it wasn't for women. And the idea that she's encouraging this intellectual and reading life for the lower left classes, that's really just blowing my mind. I guess. I never really thought through and I think my brain's running in a million directions. I think there are so many things that we could draw about our own time from that. And I don't want to get too distracted on the podcast, but I got to chew on this for a while because as Americans, we don't have that social hierarchy like they do in England. And so this, this is, dare I say it, this is almost a democratic education she's offering.

[Karen Glass]

Oh, I absolutely. She was explicit about it, yes, it's in that same series that I mentioned at the beginning with my, with my commonplace quote, that series of letters that she wrote for promoting and proposing. And it was because she'd had so much success even with the children in the mining village that she had the confidence to speak so powerfully. And she specifically said, I'm paraphrasing because she's Charlotte Mason and she uses. What's the word I'm looking for? Elusive language as opposed to explicit. But basically she says, I want to give the education that Plato prescribed for his elite to demos.

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

The people love it.

[Cindy Rollins]

And she really wasn't at odds with the, with the British public school system, which would be the British elite school system. Not. She frequently gives a nod to them and says, you know, yeah, you're doing this really well, but what about the other people?

[Thomas Banks]

They can have people who can't get into Eton.

[Karen Glass]

Right, right, right. Her only complaint with them wasn't what they were doing, it was only that they should have been. She wanted them to read more in English and not just be reading everything in the classical languages.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

Whether it's a tricky thing, they couldn't

[Karen Glass]

read enough if they had to read everything in those languages, they were being short chained.

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

The big concern was getting books to people too. She writes a lot about how to get books to them because without books you couldn't have an education. So that mattered a lot to her as well.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, that's really, really good.

[Thomas Banks]

I feel like Charlotte Macy would really approve of this podcast because, I mean, that's one of our whole principles is the literary life is for everyone and that we're trying to take this out of the ivory tower and put it back in your living room.

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

I can't find the quote here, but she says somewhere, I don't know where I'd written it down, but how the assumption was that people from this certain village or for a certain setting wouldn't understand these things. And she speaks strongly against that. In fact, it's probably tricky to even bring this up, but one of the things that can be off putting about Charlotte Mason when you first read about her is when you read her say that children are neither, you know, good or bad. And I remember I actually had a copy of for the Children's Sake that I gave to someone, just lent it to them and she handed it back to me after just reading the beginning and she said, no, I can't read this because she doesn't believe in people's sin, nature and it's, it's Unfortunate to not understand her in her times, because this time period was such that, you know, the stories of, you know, birth will tell that if you aren't of the higher classes, you were a lower human being. You. You were going to reflect your genetic predisposition. And that's really more what she's talking about, this sort of thing that was going to determine who you would be. She didn't believe that. She was kind of speaking against that, which was a real challenge in her day. And unfortunately, the wording still is a challenge to us today, but for different reasons.

[Thomas Banks]

No, that's exactly right. And I saw right away that that was happening in my early homeschool days when moms would freak out about that sentence. But because I had that background in Victorian literature, I was like, no, no. She's talking about scenes like in Pride and prejudice when Mr. Collins writes to the Bennetts and say, it's not your fault Lydia was just born back.

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

Exactly. Yep, yep. Okay.

[Cindy Rollins]

So Charlotte started this in. She ended up in the Lake District. Does anybody know how. Donna Jean, do you know how she got to the Lake District? By any means?

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

I'm trying to remember. She taught, I think. I think she was about. There's a beautiful picture of her that. That often people have seen. And I think that was around the time she first went to the Lake District. I think she was in her early 20s. And then, of course, you know, that's where she stayed. But the picture of her in that gorgeous long gown next to. It's a very, like, Abraham Lincoln style photograph, because it's actually in 1864, and she's against that, like, leather stuffed chair, you know, and with that gorgeous long gown. But that was when she first went there. And I. Where did I read about how tall she was and, you know, her eyes and all. Just someone describing her. I'm trying to think of that. Here it is. She was photographed during this first visit to Ambleside. So I guess that was. I think it says 1864. She was 22. Her hair, said her friend was of the darkest shade of brown, almost black. Her eyes were blue gray. Her height, 5ft, 4 inches. And she was there to see. She was visiting her college friend, Selena Healis, who was married, and another friend who had started a day school in Ambleside for boys and girls. And so Ms. Healis continued the work here, and that's where Charlotte went and just for the very first time, became familiar with that gorgeous part of England, and I think fell in love with it.

[Karen Glass]

Very easy to do her friend Selena is the reason she moved there later too, when she was a middle aged woman, because she was still there and she invited Charlotte Mason and sort of helped her out to establish the college in that, in that location.

[Cindy Rollins]

So the college is not still there per se, but the buildings are all there and they're being used by the. Is it the University of the Cumberlands? Is that who's using them now or the Cumberland universe? I'm thinking of American university called the University Cumbria. Cumbria, yes. Okay. And on that campus, besides the buildings that Charlotte used, there's a museum, the Arment, which houses all the papers that we have and books that we have that are related to Charlotte at this time. And they keep boxes and boxes of stuff in that library of her stuff. They also have some Beatrix Potter exhibits because Beatrix Potter was not far from Ambleside too. Now Karen, you have been to the Arment before quite a few times, is that right?

[Karen Glass]

Just a couple.

[Cindy Rollins]

Just a couple. And so if someone was going to go to the Armitt, what would they expect to find?

[Karen Glass]

Well, if you want to go for the purpose of Charlotte May's research or interests, it's, it's a very small museum if you think about it in terms of museums. It's an extremely small local museum and it exists to preserve the works and the interesting papers and artifacts of local people. So like you said, Beatrix Potter and John Ruskin and all of the material that the pneum had was donated to the Armitt Museum. And of course the Armitt sisters were, some of them were friends with Charlotte Mason when she lived there. So you know, they knew her. And so the PNEU and Elsie Kitchener eventually donated all of that material to the Arment Museum and it's preserved there. So they have a lot of this paperwork really related to the, the PNEU and its, its operations and things like that. But the museum itself, like one level of it, there's a lot of things to look at, historical things to look at. And then upstairs there's a library. And to me that's the most interesting part is the library like one of the things. And we're talking, since we're talking about the literary life of Charlotte Mason, one of the things they have in that library is the handwritten records of the local library that was operating at the time that Charlotte Mason was living there. And those kind of libraries were subscription libraries, like to borrow books, you had to, you know, pay a subscription. It wasn't free. Everybody who belonged to the library and was, you Know, current on their dues and everything like that. Was entitled once a year to request a book that the library would buy like that they would purchase so you could put in. And they have records of some of the books that Charlotte Mason requested, for example, they have in those library records. Like I said, it's all handwritten. A list of all the patrons for given year and how much they paid in library fines. You guys know how much Charlamasa paid in library fines?

[Cindy Rollins]

How much?

[Karen Glass]

Come on. One guess.

[Cindy Rollins]

Zero.

[Karen Glass]

Zero? She's way too more disciplined than that.

[Cindy Rollins]

I will say I did see her handwriting at that museum at the Arment and I was like, whoa, all that talk about handwriting and look here.

[Karen Glass]

No, her handwriting leaves a lot to be desired.

[Angelina Stanford]

That makes me feel kind of good, actually.

[Thomas Banks]

She is human.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. So moms everywhere, take a deep breath. It's all right.

[Karen Glass]

This is true.

[Cindy Rollins]

Donna Jean, you have a list of. You have a fascinating list of what is stored at the Arment. And looking through that list, were there anything. Did anything stick out or surprise you or.

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

I found myself poring over this list that I found of 60 boxes. And they're in kind of a random order. They even said at the top of the list that there was no overall pattern of organization, which was obvious. But in these boxes you would see lists of things like letters, minutes from different meetings. You would see any. All the things having to do with the pneu articles, clippings from newspapers, a lot of notebooks, photographs. I mean, you don't see these things. It's just written down that it's there. It was listed as CM60, so I assume that meant the 60th box. That's where address is, address of Charlotte Mason's. It talks about in CM32 that Charlotte Mason's picnic hamper is in there. And I just want to see this so badly. I just want to see it and see if I can duplicate it. It said it had in there a pencil case and it said in parentheses African. So I don't know, I assume this is something someone gave her. It says there's a bronze stamp of the House of Education. A pus Parents Union School teapot from the House of Education. And then in another box, CM1, it mentioned another blue teapot. So I'm wondering, does she have two? Are they both blue? I want to know these things.

[Cindy Rollins]

I'm wondering if they gave away mugs as a product.

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

That's right. That's right. You know, anything to raise money. It said there was a fringed stole, an African Woven basket, a tortoise shell shoehorn, a hand mirror and a tie. And that was what was in her picnic hamper. And that was fascinating to me because she would go out with her friend and coachman Barrow on all of these rides out into the countryside for her nature, you explorations for her drives, and could have used, you know, a motorized vehicle later, but she said no, that she was still into the horse. And in the book In Memoriam, Barrow gives a little talk about what it was like going out with her and the different rides they would take all the way through till very close to the end of her life, and the different things they would see different times of the year. So that was. That was fascinating to me. In one of the boxes it says there's an envelope with keys. And all I can think of is that when a historian gathers your stuff, they aren't necessarily putting the most important things. I mean, if someone right now were to say that my purse is a reflection of my whole life, it doesn't necessarily. I mean, I look at this and I think, oh, this must be what she valued. No, it's just what remains. I think her books are the greatest value of what she left behind. But it's interesting. In one of the boxes is a copy of the Story of Charlotte Mason, that book by Essex. Am I right to say it's Cholmondeley?

[Cindy Rollins]

I don't know.

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

Yes, it mentioned, as per our topic here, about her literary life. In one of the boxes it says there's a small book entitled the golden thread by Norman MacLeod and it says owned by Charlotte Mason. It mentioned that there in CM2, a small hymn book that had inscribed CM67. I assume that meant 1867 with the apostrophe. The Book of Common Prayer. Another book called Joyce's Scientific Dialogues that she owned. There's a book by Alexander White, spelled with a Y, called Jacob Baemon, and it's inscribed by the author, written to her. There are two different books of poetry and there's two books that must be like hiking books or books about walks and so on. Then there's copies of her will, all kinds of things like that. But the sort of thing that I would just love to have a bunch of my friends, if we all could just go there and be like, can we just look through these boxes? But that's not healthy.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, maybe we could go there in 2020.

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

That's right.

[Cindy Rollins]

And my brutal disappointment of 2020, it's now 2021, and I actually have airline flight credits.

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

Credits. Yeah, that's right.

[Thomas Banks]

Mr. Banks and I were so close to seeing all of the stuff you're talking about. But alas, yes.

[Cindy Rollins]

I'm curious if Mr. Banks has read any of these obscure books that Charlotte Mason had.

[Angelina Stanford]

I'm gonna say I've not. These are titles mostly unfamiliar to me.

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

There's a photograph that our mutual friend Jeanette sent me, Jeannette Tullis. And it was a photograph from the armit of a collection of books that they said was her personal shelf and that it's hard to see the titles, but it included the Cloud of Witness, A Hidden Life of the Soul that I looked up as written by a Jesuit priest, and a book of the Holy Communion and a couple of others that might be Sophocles, might also be Aesop's Fables. It's hard to read the titles. And then the one, the Cloud of Witness, it's a daily sequence of great thoughts from many minds. So sort of like a. A daily book with all different quotes. A devotional that she would give to graduates of the House of Education.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, okay.

[Cindy Rollins]

And I think that has been republished by someone.

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

I saw that on Riverbend Press that day.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, Riverbend.

[Thomas Banks]

So I'm kind of curious if I can toss in a question here. So I guess if I think of educational reformer, my first thought is, well, she must have read a lot of. Of books about educational philosophy. But what did you got?

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

What can.

[Thomas Banks]

What can you guys tell us about her literary life? So I'm hearing a lot of personal devotionals, and we've heard a reference to a biography like, where did her personal reading tend to fall when she was a little girl?

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

There's a quote in Story of the World, which I think is wonderful, right in the beginning where she talks about. She said, does any little girl in these days of many books experience the joy of the girl of 11? I can recall crouching by the fireside, clasping her knees and listening as she has never listened since to the reading of Anne of Geierstein. And of course, I had to look that up. I didn't even know what that was. But it's Maiden of the Mist, one of the Waverly novels, and she references Sir Walter Scott a lot.

[Thomas Banks]

Ah, big Scott fan.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay.

[Karen Glass]

Remiss if we did not mention the fact that she was a huge Scott fan.

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

That was. That was enormous to her.

[Cindy Rollins]

I think she read Scott nightly. Like, I understand she went to sleep every night reading a chapter from Scott.

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

Wow, that was huge. And then, of course, Wordsworth. You. You know, you're barely through first few pages of Home Education and you're reading his poetry. That was enormous to her, I think, too. Kingsley, Plutarch, Shakespeare, those are. She'll reference them often. I mean, in a way, I think Ambleside Online. There are big parts of Ambleside Online that I think reflect Charlotte Mason's literary life. Because I think what she wanted her students to read, she put them there because she valued those books. And we've tried to duplicate that as much as possible. So I think the two are a little bit in harmony. Her literary life and Ambleside Online's selections.

[Thomas Banks]

Well, I love that because in our modern world, we compartmentalize so many things. And I think about like sort of the educational reformers of our own age, most of them don't really have literary lives. Like, they. They, especially when you're talking about academics, they. They exist just like almost solely in their field. And they can spew out a lot of jargon from their field, but you don't get the sense that they've read widely or that they've loved books. In fact, if you look at any modern curriculum, you feel like somebody who wrote this hates books. No one would put this list together who actually loves books or kids.

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

Or like someone who, you know, talks about home education and you know how to do it and they've never done it. And you're just like, okay, I want this to come out of your life. You know, she talked in one of the things I read when she was eight years old, for her birthday, she got a gift of the book Robinson Crusoe. And I can't remember where I read this. I was trying to find it. But I think she once met Rudyard Kipling. But she's loved Aesop's Fables. That was big to her. Pilgrim's Progress. And it's really important to acknowledge her love for the Bible that's peppered all through her writing where she'll use phrases that, if you're familiar with the Bible, you know that phrase, you know, if I were to just say in the middle of a conversation or in the middle of writing that something is important, that it's important not to lean on my own understanding. Well, if you're familiar with the Bible, you know that's a biblical phrase. And that sort of thing is throughout her writing. And the fact that she made that six volume sort of poetic narration of the gospels in her series the Savior of the World, just shows how important the Bible was to her.

[Cindy Rollins]

So, Karen, do you know of any. So Charlotte wrote the Six volumes. Did she write anything else? Well, she wrote a geography for children, didn't she?

[Karen Glass]

Yeah, she did a series of what she called geography textbooks. Very, very specific, most of it to the English counties. But I think that there are a couple that are sort of about worldwide geography. But she did that when she was younger, and that was very much one of her efforts to support herself when she was too ill to be, you know, actively teaching. And this is long before she formed the pneu.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay, so I see here she also wrote a book called the 40 Shire. So I take it that that's part

[Karen Glass]

of the geography series.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, that's part of her geography series. That makes sense. The 40 shire.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, such a. I'm hearing you guys say that she. So she reads from widely in different genres, Right? I'm hearing that. And I'm. I'm also hearing she read a mix of old books and contemporary books.

[Karen Glass]

Oh, she has. She has so many opinions about what kind of books she read.

[Thomas Banks]

I want to hear all of these.

[Karen Glass]

Okay, I looked up a quote here. This is. This is from volume five. And this is because this is one of the volumes that not too many people read. They kind of. You kind of get to miss this. But if you are interested in the literary life of Charlotte Mason, volume five is your volume, and you could just skip all the beginning part and go straight to book four. Like, part four of that volume and what each chapter is in that book is sort of like Charlotte Mason's discussion of various books. She read a lot of Goethe. We haven't mentioned Goethe, but that's huge.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, okay, that's interesting.

[Karen Glass]

And she's very, very interested in him and his life. He's one of those people that she looked at because one of the things she was always thinking about, education. I mean, have any of you read Pendennis by Thackeray?

[Angelina Stanford]

Never.

[Cindy Rollins]

Ah. Ah.

[Karen Glass]

So Charlotte Mason. I did read Pendennis and it be. And what she said about it in the chapter about it in volume five, you know, it becomes an educational treatise. You know, she picks out. Have any of you read. I've read Pendennis, but that's the only one of the novels from this section that I've read in full. This one's probably a little better known. The Egoist by George Meredith.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, I have read that one.

[Karen Glass]

I haven't read the book, but I read the Wikipedia summary of it. And the Wikipedia summary doesn't even mention the character that Charlotte Mason hones in on and gives you this whole, you know, background and the educational ideas she took from reading the Egoist.

[Angelina Stanford]

I remember the main character or the main character, the principal female character. Her father is a classicist. And there's I think, yeah, a fair bit of talking about education in that book. And it's also one of those questions on like, what is the role of a woman in society and that sort of thing.

[Karen Glass]

Right. Well, the character that Charlotte Mason talks about is there's a young boy who gets taken in and educated, you know, in this household of the egoist. And yes, that's what Charlotte Mason kind of focuses on. And so it's really interesting to read like her takeaways from these different novels.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. Cross, J. I remember the name. An odd name. Yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

But yes, I am so excited about pulling out volume five, Part four. I. Super excited to read what she.

[Karen Glass]

One of the things. One of the. It's not exactly a book, but one of the things that she writes about in there is. Is her take on one of Plato's dialogues, Euthyphro, if I may not be saying it right.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, you got it. Yeah.

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's the great short dialogue where Socrates discusses. The question is, is that which is good good because the gods love it or do the gods love that which is good because it is good in and of itself?

[Karen Glass]

See, Charlotte Mason read it and she said the title of the chapter is called Better than My Neighbor. And for her it becomes a treatise on, from an educational perspective, how not to be that guy who was suing his father.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

So if I can throw in another question. So another great educational reformer of around the same time as Charles Dickens. Does she talk about the work of Dickens at all?

[Karen Glass]

You know what? I'm trying really hard to think she must have read Dickens. There's no way she.

[Thomas Banks]

I mean, Hard Times is kind of his educational treatise.

[Karen Glass]

Right, right.

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

She mentions David Copperfield. But, you know, just in passing.

[Karen Glass]

Okay. Yeah, definitely. I'm just. It's taken me a while to remember it. There's. And now I can't remember which novel it was. But there's definitely. It's one of those times where she just mentions characters without mentioning titles or Dickens name.

[Cindy Rollins]

I think it looks like I just did a quick search on the. Through her series and she does mention Bleak House at one point.

[Karen Glass]

Right. In one of the novels, there's a. Because I remember when I was writing the forward to Mind to Mind, maybe I mentioned, you know, that she. She just names drops, you know, these characters from some Dickens novel. She just mentions them by name. She doesn't tell you the title. She doesn't tell you. She didn't tell you it's a novel. She just mentions them, the characters, as if you'll know who they are. So, yes, she read Dickens.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right. You can actually say Dickens and find out. You'd have to name all his characters to actually do.

[Thomas Banks]

Do a search for Gradgrind. I'm so curious if she said anything about it.

[Karen Glass]

I don't recall her ever mentioning Gradgrind.

[Angelina Stanford]

There's also in Nicholas Nickleby, the abusive schoolmaster. Wackford Squeers.

[Thomas Banks]

And David Coppertow, of course, is a bully at school. And how bad that went.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, yeah, she mentioned Squares in volume six.

[Karen Glass]

Yeah, that's the one where I.

[Cindy Rollins]

The Creakles and the Squeers, who infamously.

[Karen Glass]

There's an H.G. wells novel she mentions in volume six as well.

[Thomas Banks]

Wow. Which one?

[Karen Glass]

Yeah, which one? See, that's one of the things she doesn't tell you the title. But she.

[Cindy Rollins]

She just. Name dropper.

[Karen Glass]

I know, it's terrible. It's Peter and Joan education. What does that mean?

[Angelina Stanford]

H.G. wells.

[Karen Glass]

Yeah, yeah. But the names come out of an H.G. wells novel.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, okay.

[Cindy Rollins]

Wow.

[Angelina Stanford]

That surprised me.

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

He actually refers to David Copperfield as a great educational treatise. So it's not just that she. Everything is for her. Right. And Mr. Krakow in detail for terrorism in the schoolroom, and Mr. Murdstone for the same vice in the home because she doesn't want fear to be the basis of school discipline.

[Thomas Banks]

That's fascinating. I've personally thought there was a strong, like, philosophical tie between Dickens and Charlotte Mason and that they're both essentially arguing the same thing.

[Cindy Rollins]

Does she mention Wells in volume six? Joan and Peter.

[Karen Glass]

That is the name of the novel. Joan and Peter.

[Cindy Rollins]

It says Joan and Peter by H.G. wells, but.

[Karen Glass]

Right.

[Cindy Rollins]

Unless she's just not getting the novel. Correct.

[Thomas Banks]

We're gonna have to add a reading challenge category. Obscure novel mentioned by Charlotte Mason.

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

Yes, that would be.

[Cindy Rollins]

There would be a lot of.

[Karen Glass]

You have a lot of choices. Okay, here's. I have a quote. This is one of Charlotte Mason's quotes from volume five, where she's really showing some of her attitude about her opinions, her strong opinions about reading. I can't find the quote where she actually says it's stupid not to read novels, but she kind of says that at one point.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, here, here.

[Karen Glass]

But she's very particular about it. And she says, I do not offer a plea for indiscriminate novel reading. Novels are divisible into two classes. Sensational and to coin a word, reflectional narrations of hairbreadth escapes and bold adventures need not be what I should call sensational novels, but those which appeal with whatever apparent innocence to those physical sensations which are the beginners of lust. His lips met hers and the touch of her hand thrilled him in every nerve sort of thing which abounds in goody goody storybooks. She says the complete absence of that distinguishes our best English novels. To read that a girl has been betrayed by no means affects an innocent mind, but to allow oneself to thrill with the emotions which led to the betrayal is to get into the habit of emotional dram drinking, a habit as enervating and as vitiating as that of the gin shop. And then she starts talking. I actually want Thomas's opinion about this one because I have not been able to figure this out, she says. By the reflectional novel I mean not that which makes reflections for us after the manner of a popular lady writer of the day, but one she wants you to think, in other words while you're reading. But I cannot figure out who she's talking about.

[Angelina Stanford]

A popular later writer who makes lady writer for us.

[Karen Glass]

A popular lady writer, female writer, someone really.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, is she talking about Mrs. Humphrey Ward?

[Karen Glass]

I don't know, that's. I don't know how we, we're only going to be able to guess because she, she doesn't name names.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, so Mrs. Humphrey Ward was popular. She was Matthew Arnold's niece and she wrote a number of novels with

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

sort

[Angelina Stanford]

of a religious thing, kind of severe. I think she was kind of a very earnest Methodist and Oscar Wilde said of her novels that they remind you of the after dinner conversation of a non conformist chapel or something. But yeah, like her novels like had kind of a. This kind of over earnest severe religious atmosphere all through. Robert Ellesmere was her, was her famous one and I don't know that I've not read her so I don't know that she was, you know, bad in all respects. But yeah, she, she kind of used the novel as a pulpit, I believe

[Cindy Rollins]

has a couple characters like that in his novels, but they're not reflected on.

[Thomas Banks]

Well, well, that's a really interesting distinction she's making is when you first said sensational I laughed to myself because I thought that's what people would have said about Sir Walter Scott's novels. So that was interesting then that as you kept reading, she says specifically, I'm not talking about daring escapes and chases and like the sensation in Walter Scott, but she's talking about almost like a emotionally titillating kind of.

[Karen Glass]

When Victorians use the word talk about the senses, they really do often mean physical.

[Thomas Banks]

Right, right, yeah. She's talking about titillating stuff.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, I think about Dickens and David Copperfield. So he has the downfall of little Emily, but he never dwells on how it came about. I mean, he dwells on it in a. Back aways from it. He never says, oh, he touched her hand, or.

[Thomas Banks]

Well, no. And so just to give some context, the Victorian novelist, not the sensationalist ones she's talking about, but say, like George Eliot, you know, you could not say anything even remotely suggestive in your books or they'd be censored. And that has actually caused some comical confusion for me more than once as a young girl reading a George Eliot novel, in particular, Adam Bede. And I'm just reading along and all of a sudden I'm like, wait, where did this woman get a baby from? I must have missed something. And I flipped back and I found the passage. He closed the barn door. So that was it. And then you were saying, honey, you were saying about Thomas Hardy got in trouble for what line? The book was called obscene because Jude

[Angelina Stanford]

the Obscure, some reviewer, called it Jude the Obscene. There is a seduction quote, unquote scene in which Jude and Arabella walk into a room and close the door. It's understood the room is a bedroom and then it's cut. You know, if it were a movie, the scene would end right there, but they walked into the room and closed the door or something, or she walked into the room and he followed. It's something like very, very benign. Like that. But that was enough to get the book, I think, like burned in public.

[Thomas Banks]

Right. So that gives an interesting backdrop to your quote. So when she says the best of our novels of the day don't sensationalize or emotionally titillate, she's being sincere. There. There's nothing. There's a closed barn door occasionally, and you got to put together what happened.

[Karen Glass]

Right, right. It's hardly anything. So I'm just. I'm just going to read you the conclusion of the quote. She says, if we bear in mind that the obvious reflection, in other words, telling us what to think proposed to us is as vicious in its way as the sensations suggested, we shall find that this test, the property of arousing reflection, eliminates all flimsy work. It confines us to the books of our great novelists. So she's picky.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes. Here, here. So it's really two. Two sides of the same Error. So too much emotional stimulation and too much telling you exact. So one book is telling you what to feel are helping you feel certain things, and the other one is trying to tell you what to think. So, yeah, no, I agree with her completely about that. Those are good distinctions.

[Cindy Rollins]

But what is your. So as you. As we, you know, kind of wind things down here, what is your take on Charlotte Mason's reading life?

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

I think she found a lot of comfort there. You know, I can envision her throughout all these different times in her life. You know, she tells a story of seeing her mother on a couch reading a book. And she asks her mother what it is. And the line is, actually, I should find it in her exact words, because I love how she says it. She looked up with a smile and said, Pope's Homer's Odyssey. In the way in which we give answers to children, which it amuses us to know how little they will understand. Well, of course, that's not how Charlotte Mason felt. She felt the children could understand. But you get the sense that the characters in books, the truth in books, certainly in the word of God, this was a place of comfort for her. She was alone. She was an only child. There wasn't a big family that surrounded her or helped her through difficult times. She eventually did have friends. She loved all the children she taught. But I think there was something very precious to her in books. And I think she came to love them kind of uniquely. And they're not minor things. Books are not minor things to her. She talks about. You'll find this interesting. Let marginal notes be freely made as neatly and beautifully as may be, for books should be handled with reverence. And in another spot, she quoted Milton, where she talked about as good almost kill a man as kill a good book. Who kills a man kills a good, reasonable creature. God's image. But he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God as it were, in the eye. And I think books were a great comfort to her, a source of strength. It wasn't just, oh, let me study this. It's just throughout what she says, it's like she can't talk without referencing not just like you say, the contemporary writers, the people she knows, but these are sort of her friends. This is what she surrounded her life with. And I think to understand her literary life is to understand her better. That's been, you know, interesting to me. She. Throughout reading about her, you read about her health problems, whatever it was, her heart. In those boxes, there was actually prescriptions for her to go Certain places, different treatments and so on. But she always would just get her strength from the word of God. And I think just the characters in books and the truth. And that was what she lived for, that and going around, seeing the beauty that surrounded her. So her literary life was. It was essential. It wasn't just, oh, hey, have you read a good book? This was who she was.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, amen. That's a really good word.

[Thomas Banks]

Donna Jean, I love that she quoted Milton's Areopagitica there. His defense. His defense of fighting censorship, right?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

His defense of the free word.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. Against some of the licensing acts, against books.

[Cindy Rollins]

One of the things that really surprised me about Charlotte Mason and what Donna Jean was saying, that she was the only child, really, of her mother. She was the 13th, I think, child of her father, her mother. And you can imagine how this came about, that she's this only child of this third marriage, but she was born out of wedlock, so you can just imagine the former. The other wives had died, but he had this whole slew of children. And yet she's isolated from those people. You hear nothing about them almost the rest of her Life. I'm not 100% sure about that, but really, they played no part in her life. So she.

[Thomas Banks]

Dickens character, right?

[Cindy Rollins]

She really is. She's. Her mother raised her almost by herself. Sometimes her father was around, sometimes he wasn't. And then, of course, both of her parents died at a very, you know, when she was very young, still 18, I think, but separately, they died separately, and I don't think they were to get even together at that point. So she did not have. She definitely had some trauma in her life, I would say. And it does seem that she found solace in books and the Bible also.

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

Further, you know, if that is true, that, you know, the mom was like 40 years younger than the father and, you know, just what her life was like. Someone, especially in that time, they're going to allude to it very differently. They're going to sort of reshape the narrative a little bit, which makes sense why she would refer to herself as an only child, because in actuality, as far as her life was concerned, clearly she was. But for her to go through all of that, you can understand even further why she's saying children aren't born good or evil. Like, hello, don't relegate me to being, you know, a cast out in society. Because that there was just. It was pretty severe situation there for someone in that category. So I think she had an ability to empathize that was not a reflection automatically of that upper class. I think she had some other factors going on in her life between that. The being alone, seeing. Observing children in other families was a family where, I guess she was working for them. And she began to see these children. I think it was from an Indian family. And. And her eyes were opened one time after another. And it had a great effect on her that she saw things differently. That and her health. And who knows whether it was something we could have easily remedied today, a heart situation, whether it was a result of trauma and loss, which the body keeps the score that's somewhere deep within you, and that's a lifelong conquering, a work at conquering that. But also maybe just some empathy for others. So she's more complex, I think, than the image of her is that we first have.

[Thomas Banks]

That's fascinating. I had no idea the circumstances of her birth. But yes, knowing the Victorian age, this would have made her an outsider. And she would have been one of those children who would have just been born bad because of her illegitimacy.

[Cindy Rollins]

That's a really good point, Angelina. You're right. She would have been born bad. And I'm not sure she knew like Donna Jean says. She says she was an only child, so how much she even knew about her siblings is questionable.

[Karen Glass]

Right. Her mother, who she lived with all of her life, probably wouldn't have gone out of her way to talk about them because they weren't her children and they probably didn't have a relationship with her either.

[Cindy Rollins]

No, she. She was. Even though the other wife had died before she came on the scene, they. You know how even today, you know, people resent that the new. The new person that comes along and gives their father another. Something else to think about.

[Thomas Banks]

Well, and as an illegitimate child, the. The other siblings did not have to legally claim. Like, in our day and age, we would be like, of course that's your sister. Not so in that age, everybody had. Not everybody. A lot of people had, you know, illegitimate offspring. That was simply. Were never acknowledged.

[Cindy Rollins]

But apparently she did have a wonderful childhood in that she was able to read. She was not working in the coal mines and that sort of thing

[Thomas Banks]

that way. Listening to y' all talk about her, she reminded me a lot of Dorothy Sayers. Dorothy Sayers just read a lot as a kid and, you know, was also shut out of a lot of academic things just because she was a woman.

[Angelina Stanford]

Did Sears. Sears was kind of homeschooled in a way, wasn't she? Didn't her Father teach her much?

[Thomas Banks]

Just in her library. Yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

So we know she read before she went to bed at night. And we know that she started these schools. Schools and continued to read. We have so many books listed in her. It would be interesting for someone to write a bibliography of her, of her volumes. Just the books that she mentioned as she went along. That would take a long time, I imagine, because like Karen said, you wouldn't for sure know every time she's referencing a book. But much of what she said comes even just like Donna Jean said, just so snippets of information, snippets of words that just trip off of her tongue have come from somewhere else.

[Thomas Banks]

And that is really, to me, the sign of a reader. Right.

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

It.

[Thomas Banks]

Just like you said, she opens her. All these references, they just come out. These characters are real people to her. She's lived with them.

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

This is what populates her mind. This is how she speaks. This is all of the reality to her. You know, the way we might, along with our books, make all sorts of references to our times and our culture. And depending on how current you are, you could use a phrase that would come from. Well, I won't get political, but, you know, you could use a phrase that comes from the day's news that has become, you know, hashtag whatever. That's what it was to her. Her readers understood, or at least many of them did, her references. The way we might understand a reference coming from popular culture, from a movie, from something happening in the news and. Or sports. And that's how it is. It's just that when you first are reading her writing and you're unaware of all of that, it's just a little bit slow going, especially if you're trying to understand where she's coming from. And it's easy to misunderstand what she's saying if you don't know. Sometimes she's being just downright sarcastic. And if you don't realize that, you might think, oh, what is this deep truth? No, she's making fun of this. But if you don't realize that, it can be harder to understand.

[Thomas Banks]

I love that you guys said she was funny. I would not have guessed that.

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

That's.

[Thomas Banks]

I love that it is a little.

[Karen Glass]

Yeah, you have to really get into her voice, but it's. There's no mistaking it once you see it.

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

I find that it's funnier if you read her stuff out loud when you read. If you're just reading yourself. But all of a sudden you take the time to read something out Loud. And then you just realize, whoa, that was a little snarky.

[Cindy Rollins]

But.

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

But she often, you know, she would say not to leave a sting she had. I mean, I know sarcasm. I joke that that's like, you know, the. The state sport from where I'm from, you know, this is sarcasm. Everybody I know is sarcastic, but she does it in a way that is not hurtful. But there's just enough of. Of, you know, kind of putting something down, being comical about it that, you know, I remember it was Karen the first time I said something about her being funny, and I thought, no, she's not. And then when I would read something out loud, I thought, yeah, she's right. There's some real great humor here.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, in reading her volumes out loud right now to my Patreons, one of the things that hits me is she'll start out talking about someone. Someone. Now, I know she doesn't like, but you don't see it at all in the first couple paragraphs that she talking. And I'm like, no, she doesn't like this person. But she's going on and on about their good qualities, like her Bart. And then she just, boom. She just comes right back and says all that aside. And then she just nails the guy to the wall with. And she is often funny when she does that.

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

My grandmother would have. The one that's from England would have an expression. She would just, you know, say something to me about, did you see that dress? And I'm, you know, teenage girl. And I'm thinking, I don't know if this is good or bad. And I would just have to kind of go with it at first. I think that's how it is with Charlotte Mason. You're just kind of going with it. Like, I don't know where she's going here, but we'll find out soon enough.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, you always have to stick with her before you decide whether she's saying something good or bad about someone. Well, girls, this has been really nice. Do you have any. Any odd thoughts that we didn't cover here about Charlotte Mason that you would like to tell us before we close up?

[Karen Glass]

I have one more thing that I want to share about her. Her thoughts on reading and the relationship that she had with books that I think might be interesting to our listeners here? She said, and this also, I'm pretty sure, is in volume five, like I said, where she spending quite a bit of time talking about books and reading and the role that those play in people's lives and education. And she says that it is absurd to talk about. It's absurd to say that you have read Shakespeare or have read Jane Austen, because she said those kinds of books are like the bread of life. I mean, she does. Not really putting them on a par with the Bible, but it's just that this is intellectual food that you're going to go back to again and again.

[Thomas Banks]

Here, here.

[Cindy Rollins]

That's. That's wonderful. Yeah, it's. So it's absurd to say that you've read Shakespeare or Jane Austen, because I'm going to say.

[Karen Glass]

To say that you have read Charlotte Mason as if it's a done deal.

[Thomas Banks]

Lewis has a real similar quote to that about people who've said, oh, I've already read that. That. That's it. That's a sign you're not a reader.

[Karen Glass]

Yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

And each time you go back to something, if it's living, then it is kind of like the Bible, because maybe it's because we do have the Holy Spirit, but our eyes are opened in different ways. And maybe that's how God made the creation, made creativity to work, that if something is rich and true, then there's always going to be different epiphanies that we have when we're reading it. If you're bad, then, you know, you're one and done. Don't go back to that.

[Donna Jean Breckenridge]

Love this quote of hers where she writes that a corollary of the principle that education is the science of relations is that no education seems to be worth the name, which has not made children at home in the world of books. I think that's what our goal is, to be at home in the world of books. For that not to be, you know, an uncomfortable place. And it's. It's easier for us in a way, you know, compared to when she talks about how to pay for and get books into the hands of children then. But having a plethora of books right now doesn't mean we're necessarily all readers. We have a lot of people who know how, but who don't. So our challenge is to encourage actual reading, you know, and the value of the books. So that's. It's slightly different. It's coming at it from a different approach, but the challenge is still there and still the same to make children at home in a world of books.

[Thomas Banks]

I love that. That's very much the mission of this podcast, to make all of us at home in the world of books.

[Cindy Rollins]

And anything that comes between the child in the books is. It's in a pharisaical way, keeping us from true learning. And so that is one way we can judge what we're doing when we make these curriculum decisions. Is it going to come between the child or me in the book? Or is it going to open up the world of books to my child?

[Thomas Banks]

That's right. That's a really good way to put that. I find that that's one of those ideas that is often misinterpreted. Right. When she says, don't have anything stand between you and the child, she doesn't mean that you don't need a teacher in life. Someone's got to teach a child how to read. Someone's got to teach the child the historical context of a book. But those are all things that will open up the book. And you're right. Cindy and Lewis talks about the same thing. The good guide and the bad guide. And some of them are opening the door, and some of them are slamming it shut. This has been a fascinating conversation for me. I feel like I know Charlotte Mason in a whole new way now. From talking about her, I'm thinking, I have to tell you. I know.

[Ella Hornstra]

I know y' all are.

[Thomas Banks]

Y' all are better Christians than I am. So, like, she read her Bible and her devotional every day, and I'm over here. Like, she read Sir Walter Scott every night. How cool is that? Like, I just totally cool. See her in bed with her candle and her, you know, her Rob Roy, and she's over the Highlands and having adventures. I love that. I love the idea that she's, you know, she's. She's netflixing it at night with an adventure novel. I love that. I just love that. So thank you so much for being here with us and to our listeners. We here at the Literary Life Podcast have all the respect in the world for the life work of these two ladies and highly commend to you the Ambleside Online curriculum and their reading lists. I, for a long time, have been talking about the building blocks of literature and the foundation stories that will then open up the great books to you. And one of the things that impresses me so deeply about Ambleside Online is there it is. You guys have all of the building blocks. The. The legends, the fables, the fairy tales, the myths, the Bible stories. I mean, you will. You will have an amazing foundation of reading with. With that free resource. I mean, talk about dollar signs in the eyes, ladies. If I don't make T shirts, how are you gonna keep that website going? I'm joking. I'm joking. But so thank you so much for that. And if you are, thank you so much for listening to the podcast and thank you very much to our Patreon shout out to you guys who keep us going. We do not accept advertising and we are 100% Patreon supported. So if you enjoy the podcast here and the work that we're doing, it's valuable to you. You can go to patreon.com theliterarylife and find out how you can support the podcast financially. Keep it going, keep it free and see all the different bonus things we have. We also recently just started a bonus event for the well Read Poem. So yes, also check out our sister podcast, the well Read Poem. So we get we've got your poetry covered and we've got your literature covered right here in the podcast. You can go to our website theliterary Life for show notes and all that good stuff. So until then, we will leave you with Mr. Banks reading a poem and keep crafting your literary life because stories will save the world.

[Cindy Rollins]

Thanks for listening to the Literary Life podcast. You can find Angela and thomas [e-mail] you can find [e-mail] and you can find us all talking about books on our Facebook page, the Literary Life Podcast Discussion Group. See you there. And now for our poem.

[Angelina Stanford]

The Village Schoolmaster by Oliver Goldsmith Beside yon straggling fence that skirts the way with blossomed firs Unprofitably gay There in his noisy mansion Skilled to rule, the village master taught his little school A man severe he was and stern to view. I knew him well and every truant knew well. Had the boding tremblers learned to trace the day's disasters in his mourning face. Full well they laughed with counterfeited glee at all his jokes, for many a joke had he Full well the busy whisper circling round Conveyed the dismal tidings when he frowned yet he was kind or if severe in aught the love he bore to learning was in fault. The village all declared how much he knew. Twas certain he could write and cipher too Lands he could measure, terms and tides presage and e' en the story ran that he could gauge in arguing too the parson owned his skill For e' en, though vanquished, he could argue still While words of learned length and thundering sound Amazed the gazing rustics ranged around and still they gazed and still the wonder grew that one small head could carry all he knew but past is all his fame. The very spot where many a time he triumphed Is forgotten.