Discussion Report, Group __________________ Reporter:__________________________

Others participating:
 
 
 
 

1. Compare and contrast the use of first-person narrative in this book and Treasure Island.
2. Compare and contrast the way essentially separate stories are linked together in this book and Kipling's Jungle Books (Mowgli sections), and how each story or chapter has its own separate identity.  If you selected a story from each book to include in an anthology of children's literature, what would you choose and what information would you give the reader, assuming that the child would not have read the whole book?
3. Are the children in the Bastable family and the children they meet individualized?  Would the book be equally successful if one or more was left out?  What does each contribute to the story/milieu/theme?
4. Both children and adults are foolish in this book, with comic results.  Compare silliness, mistakes, and laughable scenes in this book and Tom Sawyer.
5. Like the Carr children  (What Katy Did), the Bastables have read a lot of books and frequently mention them.  Do books affect their lives (as we see them), more, less, or the same as the Carrs?  Give examples of reading and response.  Note particularly the title!
6. Like Dick Hunter, the Bastable children are in need of and aware of rather small sums of money.  Find all the references you can to particular amounts of money in the book and figure out what they tell you about the Bastable children's understanding of economic life, in comparison to Dick's.  Remember that we know what Dick earns for shining a pair of shoes, what he pays for dinner, what he needs for rent, how much more it costs when he takes a roommate, how much a suit costs, what salary is enough to live on and what isn't, how to bank money, what it costs to ride a ferry or a streetcar, in late 19th-century New York.  What do we know about the cost of living in late 19th-century London and suburbs?

  Note: British money then:
    2 farthings = 1 half-penny
    2 half-pennies (ha'pennies) = 1 penny
   3 pennies = threepence, aka thruppence
   6 pennies = sixpence, aka "tanner"
 12 pennies = 1 shilling, aka a "bob"
   2 shillings = 1 florin
   2.5 shillings = 1 half crown
   5 shillings = 1 crown
These were all coins.
10 shillings = 1 half-pound (lowest denomination of paper money)
20 shillings = 1 pound (worth about $5.00 then, though of course those $ bought much more than they do now)
21 shillings = 1 guinea (not an actual kind of money in the nineteenth century, just a fancy way of giving a price)