Sooty – An Aristocratic Cat
/Internet Archive has quite a few of the Junior Press Books published by Albert Whitman & Company (Chicago) in the 1930s. Sooty – An Aristocratic Cat by Ambrosina Hurcum (1935) is one such example. Kittens and their antics must have been as popular in the 1930s as they are today. Like the other books…the story and illustrations are dated but they are interesting to browse keeping in mind when they were published. I wondered how realistic the illustrator captured clothes for children during that time. Did socks not have elastic in the 1930s? The illustrations look that way.
It was a stressful time in America with the Great Depression and so many people transitioning from the countryside into the cities for work. My parents were born in the early 1930s….a bit too young to read when this book first came out. I wondered how many children had access to books like this. My mother’s family moved from a rural area to a small town after she started school. Did the school have a library of books like this? It seems unlikely. My father grew up in the country and went to a small school of other farm children; it seems even less likely that he would have had books like this.
I’ve become a fan of absorbing history via books written in an earlier time. The authors were writing about their present and for a current audience (in this case in the 1930s and for children) without the hindsight employed in histories written about the same period today. The older books offer a way to step back and observe the author’s perspective…how it is the same or different than would be observed today in a similar situation.
