Daisy Ashford

"Mr. Salteena was an elderly man of 42 and was fond of asking peaple to stay with him.”

— Opening of The Young Visiters, by Daisy Ashford

Who can remember what childhood was really like? Who would really want to? What comes back to me of childhood are a few hazy outlines, like half-remembered snippets of dreams glimpsed just before awakening and quickly forgotten. As a child, I’m sure I knew that the world around me was a very real place and that I was indisputably its center, but I somehow can’t recapture the innocence of a boyish imagination still unclouded by age or experience. Perhaps it’s the natural order of things that such perceptions disappear, which is why most authors can never truly portray children or childhood. Even if you rattle off the names of a dozen wonderful stories or novels which seem to do just that (To Kill a Mockingbird springs to mind), these are still only the clever impersonations of children filtered through adult sensibilities.

A work which does present an authentic child’s view of the world, however, is The Young Visiters, or Mr. Salteena’s Plan written by Margaret Mary Julia Ashford (“Daisy”) and concerning not children and their habits but manners, class, courtship and marriage in Queen Victoria’s England. The manuscript was handwritten in a red-covered exercise book in 1890, when the precocious Daisy was nine years old. Here was a child who, from the earliest age, seems to have been permitted unlimited access to the family library and to have absorbed whatever she wanted of its contents, principally Victorian fiction, whose tone and trappings she made irresistibly her own.

Why read this short novel? Because it presents a picture of the Victorian world, refracted through the prism of its literature and transformed once again by the perceptions of a bright and uncannily observant child who is, underneath it all, still very much a child. The result is an unintentionally hilarious comic masterpiece which has not been out of print since its first appearance in 1919.  read more »