Alison Uttley is best known for her Little Grey Rabbit books – beginning with The Squirrel, The Hare and The Little Grey Rabbit (1929) – publication of which continued for nearly fifty years, with charming illustrations by Margaret Tempest (latterly Katherine Wigglesworth). They were part of a story-telling tradition that stretched from Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit to Jane Pilgrim’s Blackberry Farm series, a tradition featuring anthropomorphic creatures and describing a rural life that has now largely disappeared.A Traveller in Time is rather different. Not only was it aimed for older readers but its content stems from vivid dreams the young Alice Jane Taylor had when living in Derbyshire. Born in Castle Top Farm near Matlock, Alice (Alison was her pen name) recounts how in her sleep “I went through secret hidden doorways in the house wall and found myself in another century. Four times I stepped through the door…” Despite a degree in Physics from Manchester University she continued, according to her biographer Denis Judd, to believe “in fairies and in time travel”. All this suggests that this young adult novel is going to be difficult to categorise — part fantasy, part historical fiction, part autobiographical, even part romance.Both Castle Top Farm and its neighbour Dethick Manor were in existence in the 16th century. Just as Uttley’s The Country Child (1931) featured Castle Top Farm under the name of Windystone Hall, so Dethick Manor appears in the guise of Thackers. It is to Thackers that the sickly Penelope Taberner Cameron comes to recuperate one winter, and where she starts to slip away sideways into the reign of Elizabeth I, in the early 1580s. Here she meets a distant ancestor, Dame Cicely, and the owner of the house, Anthony Babington, his wife and his younger brother Francis. Despite significant gaps in Penelope’s visits these past denizens soon take her mysterious coming and going for granted, with only the dogs and one individual instinctively sensing that she’s physically out of place.The feeling of reverie, told almost as a series of vignettes where nothing much happens, makes this a very somnolent story. This allows plenty of time for Uttley to lovingly evoke a past way of life – in the kitchen, on the farm, in private rooms — and compare it with what it must have been like for her as a child on a farm at the tail end of the Victorian period (she was born in 1884). But the friendships she makes with Tudor gentry and servants alike are leading to dark events, overshadowing the joys she has from this dual life.Between 1569 and 1570 Mary Queen of Scots had been under house arrest in Wingfield Manor, a few miles from Dethick and Castle Top. Though Uttley is a little vague about dating events, the young heir Anthony Babington (born in 1561, he was at this time a page in the service of the Queen’s gaoler the Earl of Shrewsbury) is described as having been smitten with her. The Queen was brought back here in 1584 and in 1585, which is the period in which the latter part of A Traveller in Time is set (and exactly three hundred years before Alice’s birth). Penelope – living at the turn of the century – knows that Anthony Babington was executed in 1586 and the Queen of Scots in 1587, or about three hundred and twenty years before; having that foreknowledge which comes from being from the future makes all the joy from her sojourns in Tudor times very bittersweet.Uttley almost convinces us that this or that could have happened in her story, despite any reader’s reservations that Elizabethans would have so easily accepted such a strange visitor in their midst. The author has such an intimate and affectionate feel for the minutiae of everyday living — feeding animals, using household objects, singing songs, experiencing the changing seasons — that it forms a cantus firmus to the more wayward counterpoint of secret plots and the fierce antagonism of one individual, both of which threaten to leave her stranded in the past.Above all we come to love the characters we meet. From the present, Great-Aunt Tissie and her brother Barnabas, to some extent Penelope’s pragmatic sister Alison, the author’s namesake; from the past, Dame Cicely, Tabitha the servant maid, Jude the humpback and of course the Babington family, especially Francis with whom the young Penelope forms an almost but not quite platonic friendship. As the time nears for Penelope to leave — as leave she must — it feels a little like the moment when the children in Hilda Lewis’ The Ship That Flew or C S Lewis’ Narnia series start to grow into adults and the magic begins to fade. Except that the intensity of Penelope’s time travelling remains strong, as she tells us in the opening sentences: “To this day every detail of my strange experience is clear as light…”This was such a strange but magical story that it now leaves me curious about The Country Child. It confirms the simple epitaph that appears on Alison Uttley’s gravestone, writer, spinner of tales, and recalls, of course, that the original Penelope of the Odyssey was also a weaver…http://wp.me/p2oNj1-Tj
Feeling a bit overcome by stress this time of year, I decided I needed to escape into a classic British children's book, books which are not just for children, after all. For the past several days, I would look forward to retreating to bed early, entering the world of Penelope Taberner Cameron. I would have loved this book when I was young, as I have always been fascinated by time travel. As an adult, I loved the story, but also appreciated the rich, evocative language and the dream-like, wistful style of writing. Penelope lives in the early twentieth century, but is able to pass into sixteenth-century England when she is visiting her family's manor house in the country. Here is the classic British plot of three children being sent away from London to stay with older relatives in a very old country house which holds secrets from its past for the right person to discover. Penelope, the youngest of the three children, is considered a bit dreamy, so her sister and brother don't pay much attention to her mentions of her travels. Her aunt, however, is aware that some family members, through time, have had this gift, and validates Penelope's experiences. Over several years of visits to the house, as Penelope is growing up, she travels back to a specific time in the life of the house, a time when the Babingtons owned the house and Penelope's ancestors were servants there. The Babingtons were involved in a plot to unseat---in fact, to murder---Queen Elizabeth in order to place Mary, Queen of Scots on the throne and restore the Catholic religion to England. Penelope is well aware the plot failed, with tragic ends for Mary as well as the Babingtons. As she continually visits the past, she comes to love the Babingtons and their servants. In particular, she quietly falls in love with the younger Babington son, Francis, a feeling which is reciprocated. While she visits the past, time stands still for her in the present, so that she returns to just the moment she had left. While in Elizabethan England, she is uneasily, subtly aware that tragedy looms, but she is unable to quite realize it, thoroughly voice it, or stop it while she is in that time. There is a sort of nightmare feel to that, and , indeed, the author notes in a foreword that some of the scenes in the book came directly from dreams she had. Some of the closing scenes describe Christmas celebrations in Elizabethan England, which include the visit of mummers to the manor house. (This tied in nicely for me with the season and with another book I was reading.) This book is superbly written and , having originally been published in 1939, has stood the test of time. I read its wistful ending with a sigh, knowing my visit with Penelope was at an end. What a lovely read!
Do You like book A Traveller In Time (1997)?
You'll probably notice the different spelling. I'm going with the British spelling as A Traveller in Time by Alison Uttley is a British novel. As the title implies, the novel is a time travel story but the time travel is a method for uniting the present (1934) with a wonderfully told historical fiction set around the Babington Plot.Penelope Thacker is a bit fey as apparently all the Penelopes in the Thacker family and she begins to experience things from the past but try as she might, she cannot change them. As Penelope begins to live half her life in the past she learns how to live in the 1580s. Alison Uttley fills the world of the Thacker Manor with the mundane details of running a home and farm along with the big events surrounding the imprisoning of Mary Stuart.Uttley's novel has enough historical information to teach the basics of the Babington Plot without hitting one over the head with facts, dates and figures. Readers knowledgeable of the events will enjoy filling in the missing details. Readers not as familiar with the history can still follow along and enjoy the time travel aspects of the novel.
—Sarah Sammis
Is there an American anywhere in this country who lives in the same house where his great-grandmother was born? This story is set in a world so foreign to us it might as well be fantasy, a world where families and the land they live on are deeply bound together -- forever, it would seem. A self-sufficient world where money is nearly irrelevant. Actually, it is the common world as people experienced it before the Industrial Revolution -- when most never travelled farther than a day's walk from home. But, rather than dwell on the isolation, frustration suffocation etc etc that industrial people tend to imagine that world would be like, Uttley finds deep roots and full-throated pleasures, a society where, for example, girls sing rounds together at their work without self-consciousness.Uttley pulls this off because she is a brilliant writer. I felt like I had gone time travelling myself and wandered into an Elizabethan era farm in Derbyshire. Her prose is delicious and wholesome, like the world she describes.I think this book could be opened at random and read as an meditative exercise. There is a plot of sorts, but just enough of it to hang a different world on. It concerns a pre-adolescent girl living in pre-WWI England. She has the gift of 'second sight', and finds herself pulled into a drama unfolding on the same farm three hundred years before she is born. Uttley wrote this in the late 30s, as war clouds loomed over England and, as she looks back on the rural world of her childhood and the older Elizabethan world, I couldn't but feel a sense of sadness and loss brooding over the pages.It's really a most remarkable book. Thanks to Goodreads friend Anne for pointing it out.
—Pondering Pig Newton
I was given this book for Christmas but I'd never heard of it before. It was a nice surprise to find it a really good read.A young girl, Penelope, visits her aunt and uncle's house and finds herself transported to Elizabethan times and embroled in the plot to free Mary Queen of Scots, who is imprisoned in a house nearby. Only in the present is Penelope aware of the tradgedy which lies ahead, drawing closer whenever she travels back in time.As a backdrop to the unfolding drama is the slow country life of twentieth-century Derbyshire, vividly and beautifully described.I'll be keeping this on my shelf next to the classics.
—Bex
