Reading Children's Classics as an Adult: Oz, Peter Pan and Anne of Green Gables
Hiroki Obara · DeveloperABC GeorgeHow-To
The first sentence of Anne of Green Gables is 148 words long. It starts like this:
Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies’ eardrops and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place;
Then comes a semicolon, and the sentence keeps going. On Project Gutenberg, Anne of Green Gables sits on the Children’s Literature shelf.
The words “children’s book” can suggest something too young for an adult. This post checks the English in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan, Anne of Green Gables and The Secret Garden, using the original text. Short notes on each book are in 30 Free Classic Books for English Learners.
Oz came out in 1900, Anne in 1908, the novel Peter and Wendy in 1911 and The Secret Garden in 1911. All of them are over a hundred years old.
The numbers, next to adult novels
These counts come from the Project Gutenberg text, without contents pages or prefaces. The comparison books are Pride and Prejudice and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. “Different words” counts the first 25,000 words of each book, so that length does not change the result.
| Book | Words | Average sentence | Different words | Words of 9+ letters | Share of dialogue |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Wonderful Wizard of Oz | about 39,000 | about 19 | about 2,300 | 2.8% | 39% |
| The Secret Garden | about 81,000 | about 14 | about 2,700 | 3.4% | 39% |
| Peter Pan | about 47,000 | about 15 | about 3,300 | 3.9% | 21% |
| Anne of Green Gables | about 103,000 | about 15 | about 3,300 | 4.7% | 59% |
| Pride and Prejudice | about 123,000 | about 22 | about 3,200 | 8.6% | 47% |
| Sherlock Holmes | about 104,000 | about 16 | about 3,700 | 5.2% | 76% |
Long words are clearly rarer in the children’s books. Their share of words with nine or more letters is between a third and a half of the figure for Pride and Prejudice. Sentences are shorter too.
The range of words is a different matter. Peter Pan and Anne of Green Gables use more different words in their first 25,000 than Pride and Prejudice does, so a book of short words can still contain plenty you have not met. Oz and The Secret Garden are lower on this count as well.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: it starts in gray
Baum says in his introduction that the book “was written solely to please children of today”, and that “the heartaches and nightmares are left out.”
Chapter 1 runs to about 1,100 words and uses gray ten times. The grass in Kansas is gray and so is the house. This is Dorothy’s aunt:
When Aunt Em came there to live she was a young, pretty wife. The sun and wind had changed her, too. They had taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they had taken the red from her cheeks and lips, and they were gray also. She was thin and gaunt, and never smiled now.
Something close to the heartaches the introduction promises to leave out is there on the first pages.
Then there is the scene where the Wizard is found out. He says, “Not a bit of it, my dear; I’m just a common man.” The Scarecrow calls him a humbug, a fraud, and he agrees: “I am a humbug.” Then he says this:
Think of me, and the terrible trouble I’m in at being found out.
The Scarecrow and his friends are worried about their brains, heart and courage. He is worried about being caught.
If you know the film, the shoes are different too. As the Library of Congress exhibition notes, they are silver in the book, not ruby. The text calls them the Silver Shoes.
Peter Pan: the narrator is a grown-up
The first sentence is famous:
All children, except one, grow up.
What marks this book is its narrator. The word I appears 56 times outside quotation marks, against 8 times in Oz and 6 in Anne. In lines like “I suppose she must have looked rather delightful”, the narrator steps into the story and comments on the characters. At 21%, the share of dialogue is the lowest of the four.
One scene adults may enjoy comes just after Wendy is born: “it was doubtful whether they would be able to keep her, as she was another mouth to feed.” Mr. Darling starts working it out with a pencil and paper.
I have one pound seventeen here, and two and six at the office; I can cut off my coffee at the office, say ten shillings, making two nine and six, with your eighteen and three makes three nine seven,
This makes no sense until you can read the numbers. In the old British money, a pound was 20 shillings and a shilling was 12 pence. Two and six is 2 shillings and 6 pence. Two nine and six is 2 pounds, 9 shillings and 6 pence.
Adding it up gives this:
| Adding | Total |
|---|---|
| one pound seventeen, and two and six | 1 pound, 19 shillings, 6 pence |
| ten shillings saved on coffee | 2 pounds, 9 shillings, 6 pence |
| your eighteen and three (18 shillings, 3 pence) | 3 pounds, 7 shillings, 9 pence |
The right answer is three seven nine, and the text says three nine seven. The sum goes on from there, and the text says “it added up differently each time.”
Near the end, the grown-up Wendy’s daughter asks why she can no longer fly, and she answers:
Because I am grown up, dearest. When people grow up they forget the way.
The last words of the book are “so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.” Gay here means cheerful. Heartless stands next to innocent as a description of children.
Anne of Green Gables: a long sentence and a talkative heroine
The 148-word opening falls into four parts at its semicolons:
- Mrs. Lynde’s house stands where the main road dips into a hollow with a brook in it.
- The brook is said to be intricate and headlong upstream, in the woods.
- By her door it is a quiet, well-behaved stream, because nothing can pass Mrs. Lynde’s door without decency and decorum.
- The brook probably knows that she is sitting at her window, watching.
Split that way, the joke appears: even the brook behaves itself in front of Mrs. Lynde. The sentence ends with “ferreted out the whys and wherefores thereof.” To ferret out is to dig up by searching, and the whys and wherefores are the reasons and details.
After that the book is mostly talk, with 59% of its words in dialogue. Anne’s long words are a subject of the story, and she says so herself:
And people laugh at me because I use big words. But if you have big ideas you have to use big words to express them, haven’t you?
The phrase scope for imagination, meaning room to imagine, appears 11 times.
Anne is taken in by a brother and sister, Matthew and Marilla. In Chapter 1, Marilla explains that Matthew is sixty, that his heart troubles him and that hired help is hard to find, so they are getting a boy. An orphan asylum is an orphanage. The child who arrives is a girl.
Marilla and Anne have some dry exchanges:
“Marilla, isn’t it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?”
“I’ll warrant you’ll make plenty in it,” said Marilla.
Near the end, Anne talks to Marilla about a road she cannot see along:
Now there is a bend in it. I don’t know what lies around the bend, but I’m going to believe that the best does.
The Secret Garden: Yorkshire speech
The Secret Garden has the shortest average sentence of the four. Its first sentence calls the heroine, Mary, “the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen.”
The obstacle, if there is one, is Yorkshire speech. The word tha, meaning you, appears 323 times.
If tha’ likes. But there’s nowt to see.
Nowt means nothing. The word wick appears nine times, and a dictionary will tell you it is the string in a candle. Here the text explains it for you:
“It’s as wick as you or me,” he said; and Mary remembered that Martha had told her that “wick” meant “alive” or “lively.”
The dialect stays inside the characters’ speech, so the narration around it stays plain.
Which one first
By chapter length, Oz has 24 chapters of about 1,600 words, Peter Pan 17 of about 2,800, Anne 38 of about 2,700 and The Secret Garden 27 of about 3,000.
Oz has the fewest words and the smallest range of them. Peter Pan is the next shortest, with a wide range of words and the narrator’s asides on top. Anne is the longest and gives you the most spoken English.
If you read one of these as a child, in any language, you can lean on the plot you remember. Watching Aunt Em or Marilla this time, not Dorothy or Anne, is another way to read.
Which words to look up and why learners stall partway through a book have their own posts.
Reading them in ABC George
I make ABC George, a free iPhone and iPad app for reading Project Gutenberg books with a built-in dictionary. It has no ads and no in-app purchases.
All four books in this post are on the “Start here” and “Children” shelves. Pride and Prejudice can be found by title with the search in “Discover”, which works without a connection.
Press and hold a word and tap “Look up”, and the built-in dictionary answers. A past form like ferreted takes you to ferret. In “Chat” view, a chapter arrives one sentence at a time in speech bubbles, with dialogue on the right and narration on the left, so you can see where Anne’s long speeches stop and the narrator picks up. Switching views and getting to your first book are covered in Getting Started with ABC George.
