We are republishing Pollyanna in its original, serial format. Thanks to the Internet Archive, digitized installments will appear in future editions of The Beldingsville Beacon.
Palimpsest: a very old text or document in which writing has been removed and covered or replaced by new writing.
“Pollyanna” was simply a proper noun in 1912. It was specific to a fictional protagonist in a serialized story that ran in seven weekly editions of the The Christian Herald from November 27, 1912 to February 19, 1913.
The Oxford English Dictionary traces subsequent the usage of the word.
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In 1928, Hart Crane used “Pollyanna” as an adjective in a letter. He described Southern California as the “Pollyanna greasepaint pink poodle paradise.” In 1939, P.G. Wodehouse published a Blandings Castle story, Uncle Fred in Springtime, with this: “The Ovens home-brewed is a liquid Pollyanna, forever pointing out the bright side…” After the Second World War, the usages multiplied with “Pollyanna-like,” “Pollyannaisms,” “Pollyannaish,” et cetera — most them suggested cheerfulness and naivety.
“Perhaps I am being a Pollyanna for a change (I'm usually such a gloom-pot).” Tennessee Williams wrote in a Letter in Five O'Clock Angel (1954)
Eleanor Porter was already a seasoned magazine writer and a successful author. Her recent novel, Miss Billy (1911), had been a bestseller, and the sequel, Miss Billy’s Decision (1912) was already out when “Pollyanna” appeared as a serial.
When the book Pollyanna came out in 1913, it was an unprecedented sensation.
Pollyanna sold a million copies in 1914, and continued that pace for more than a decade. The name “Pollyanna” was licensed to appear on pinafores, board games, card games, puzzles, plays and several moving pictures. The book was popular the world over and was immediately translated into Japanese and Turkish.
However Pollyanna had come at an ominous time. Calamity was but months away.
In August 1914, the world blundered into The Great War. It was a “modern” kind of conflict — more cruel than anybody alive could have imagined. By December, the trenches in France and Belgium had already claimed an astonishing two hundred thousand casualties. News reports were immediate and graphic. For Eleanor’s readers, Pollyanna was a distraction from rage, grief and fear.
What’s more, it offered an effective program to help navigate the new century’s daunting negativity: The Glad Game.
Some readers saw the story as a sugar-coated Christian sermon. After all, it first appeared in the world’s foremost evangelical weekly; from 1874 to 2006, The Christian Herald advocated Christian callings such as missionary work and social reform. Other readers suspected that the “mind-over-matter” Glad Game was an oblique endorsement of Christian Science. Suspiciously, Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910) was also a New Hampshire woman.
However, “redemption” in Pollyanna is not found by accepting Christ through prayer. Rather, we are freed from despondency via the Glad Game, a secular diversion invented by a Christian minister who compiled “rejoicing texts” from The Bible.
“…Pollyanna mirrors the religious attitudes and debates of its time,” writes Oxford University scholar, Ashley N. Reese, “emerging as a piece of social and religious commentary in a time of extreme transformation in America—from Puritanical religious judgments to that of a more socially aware faith.”
I believe that the enduring appeal of the Pollyanna story depends mostly on the way Eleanor Porter fused the quest for spiritual solace with secular America’s zeal for self-improvement — to bless readers with a way to find “Gladness” in a sad and fallen world.
Pollyanna is in the Public Domain and available online. The above images are from the Internet Archive. E-book, PDF and other formats for Pollyanna are at Gutenberg.org . Images are borrowed from online, public domain sources.