Eleanor Farjeon (13 February 1881 – 5 June 1965) was an English author of children's stories and plays, poetry, biography, history and satire. Many of her works had charming illustrations by Edward Ardizzone. Some of her correspondence has also been published. She won many literary awards and the prestigious Eleanor Farjeon Award for children's literature is presented annually in her memory by the Children's Book Circle, a society of publishers.
These days, Eleanor Farjeon's most widely known work is the popular children's hymn "Morning has Broken", written in 1931 to an old Gaelic tune associated with the Scottish village Bunessan. Her other popular hymn is the Advent carol "People, Look East!", usually sung to an old French melody, and a favourite with children's choirs. "Morning has Broken" is one of the many poems to be found in the anthology Children's Bells under its correct title "A Morning Song (For the First Day of Spring)", published by Oxford University Press in 1957 and bringing together poems from many sources, including the Martin Pippin books.
The story under consideration is entitled “Anthony in blue Alsatia”
This text is about a little boy Anthony with a very rich imagination and a romantic nature who once reading the morning newspaper realized himself as one of the passengers of the train he reads about. This story is an Anthony’s dream and he splendidly and incredibly accurate describes everything that happens to him, the mystery which will never be solved connected with a quite little man, who left the train and disappeared in the wood, the passengers form the train and beautiful fields outside. His trip to The Blue Alsatia finishes very suddenly when a young girl he meets says, “Stay”. And the Blue Alsatian Express went on without him.
The theme is a boy’s dreaming of adventurous travels, particularly to Alsatia, inspired by an article in the morning newspaper.
The idea is that dreaming is not a bad quality for a man, because it allows doing such things you would or could never do.
The genre of the given text is a short story.
Literary time is probably the first half of the 20th century, judging by the realities of the text.
Literary space is England (real) and Alsace (imaginary)
There are four parts in this text: the exposition is the beginning of the story- the reading of the article, the complication is in a dream of Anthony, the climax is when a little man left the train, and the denouement- Anthony’s return to reality.
The main character here is Anthony. He is an acute and shrewd boy who is able to distinguish between necessary and not meaningful information for him. This is understood through the case of simile: they slipped as through gauze. In order to underline that the boy has a great power of imagination and that he is impressed by the breakdown the author resorts to a long sentence with parallel constructions: “it described the blue smoke rising from the heated axle, the engine-driver sprinting along the lines like madman, soldiers… “. Besides, the boy has a very romantic nature. The author describes him indirectly. Also, there are other characters in the story, they are: a nervous lady, a fat millionaire and his wife who was very hungry. They were concerned with business, were lack of time and were too busy to look out of the window and take pleasure of nature outside. So, we can see a contrast between the world of real life in which the passengers live and the world of imagination where lives Anthony.
At the beginning the story is a third person narration, interrupted by dialogues but then in order to make a deep emotional appeal the author applies for stream of consciousness. There are interior monologues, for example: “Oh, no…of course not!” Constant moving of nature carried the rhythm of the story.
There are a lot of stylistic devices in the text, such as extended metaphor which helps the author to describe boy’s imagination and his specific order of mind. For example: “He felt that the gauze, which could not contain the torrents of world’s activities, might house this butterfly and not brush off its bloom”. A special device in this text is framing because we can see a story in a story here and framing is used to express that a story is imaginary. The author applies inversion to intensify the atmosphere of mystery. For example: “To whom has it not happened, time and again, on his way to the Seaside, the Moors, or the Highlands, to cry in his heart, at some glimpse of Paradise from
the carriage windows: " That is where I really wanted to go — that is where I would like to get out!”. The author uses also repetitions, for example, word “Heavens” repeated several times or “That is where…” Rhetorical questions are also used to make the readers believe to Anthony, for example: “Never?” Inner monologue here opens the inner world to the readers. Exclamatory sentences assist to a rhythmic effect. The sounds of the laugh such as: “Ha-ha-ah! Ha-ha-ha!” imitate the sound of the train and make the story more realistic.
The general tone of the story is rather sentimental because of amount of descriptions of nature. The author reaches the ironic effect by phrases of the passengers. The humorous note to the story adds the question “What happened to him?” when the man left the train.
In conclusion, not everybody can dream as Anthony does. It depends on a personality. But I guess the author wanted to say that it is not so bad to dream now and then.
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