A librarian or library assistant can do some of her best work in
a Settlement club either in connection with the Settlement
library or independently. Readings from Dickens can be
illustrated by scenes acted in pantomime, with very simple
properties. Indeed, we had not even a curtain when Miss La Creevy
painted Kate's miniature, when the Savage and the Maiden danced
their inimitable dance, when Mrs. Kenwigs and Morleena held a
reception for Mrs. Crummles, the Phenomenon and the ladies of
their company, when after they had recited from their star parts,
Morleena had the soles of her shoes chalked and danced her fancy
dance, and Henrietta Petowker took down her back hair and
repeated "The Blooddrinker's Burial." The old man looked over the
wall, too, and threw garden vegetables and languishing glances at
Mrs. Nickleby who encouraged his advances. There was no time for
the girls to learn the parts in the busy, crowded, late-open
holiday evenings of department stores, but they all entered into
the pantomime and interpreted the reading with spirit, as they
did at another time in some of the Shakespeare scenes, Rosalind,
Celia and Touchstone, Hamlet and Ophelia, Bottom and Titania,
with attendant fairies, and Shylock and Portia. The Dickens
scenes were repeated for a younger club, just trying its dramatic
wings in charades, and when May-time came these younger girls of
twelve to fifteen gave a very successful representation of an old
English May-day with Robin Hood and his merry band, a Jester, a
Dragon, a Hobby-horse and Jack in the Green, Maid Marian and the
Lord and Lady of the May on the library green.
The opportunity of a library in a small town, where there is more
leisure than in a city, is in the formation of young people's
clubs. One day, a year or two ago, I visited three libraries on
the Sound shore in Connecticut. In one, the librarian had made
her basement useful out of library hours by organizing a class of
chair-caning for boys who were beginning to hang around the
streets, and were in danger of being compelled to learn the art
in the Reform School if they did not acquire it as a means of
keeping their hands from mischief at home. In the next town, the
librarian mounted and identified all the moths and butterflies
that the children brought to her and gave them insect books. In
the library beyond, the children were formed into a branch of the
Flower Mission in the nearest city. The club need not always be
for reading, but must depend on the resources or interests of the
boys and girls. There is no need of debating clubs in our
library, for the city is full of them, but they may be the very
best thing that the librarian in the next town can form.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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