With A04_Schooldays at the Abbey, published by Collins in 1938, we begin the cluster of nine books known as the “Retrospective Titles.” They fall after A03_Girls of the Abbey School (1921) and the order resumes again in publication time with A11_The Abbey Girls Go Back to School (1922). The nine retrospective titles were published between 1938 and 1957, three years before Oxenham’s death. They feature younger girls [Read more…]
A03_The Girls of the Abbey School
A03_The Girls of the Abbey School introduces the important character of Janet (Jen) Robins, who will go on to become one of the strongest exemplars of the “Abbey spirit” of helpfulness and good will. Published in 1921, a year after Oxenham attended the 1920 Vacation School where presumably she discovered, as the Abbey Girls themselves will soon, how wrongly she had been dancing, the book contains a lot of dancing. It is dedicated “To those members of the English Folk Dance Society [Read more…]
A02_The Abbey Girls
After A01_Girls of the Hamlet Club, Elsie Oxenham published eight books, many dealing with the Camp Fire movement, before returning to Miss Macey’s school and establishing the true beginning of the story of the girls who live in the Abbey of Gracedieu. A02_The Abbey Girls was published in 1920 but is set two years after Cicely’s story, running from February through May 1916 in “Abbey Time.” There is no mention of the War.
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First Generation, Retrospective, Second Generation, Connectors, and “Abbey Time”
Elsie J. Oxenham’s fictional universe is a large and complicated one, and in the Abbey Girls’ world time moves slowly. Oxenham wrote more than 87 novels and numerous short stories, and she had multiple publishers. While there are some stand-alone novels, she tended to write series novels [Read more…]
A01_Girls of the Hamlet Club+
Elsie J. Oxenham’s ninth book, published in October of 1914, is the “origins” story of the Abbey Girls series, and is one of the books that contains the most folk dancing, culminating in a lengthy description of a performance of folk dance and song to honor the first-crowned May Queen of the series. If you are a folk dancer [Read more…]
Join me in “Dancing with the Abbey Girls”
Flowers, May Queens, pretty girls in brightly-colored, loosely-swinging frocks dancing English folk dances on the green garth of an old Abbey, friendship, babies, and spirituality—this is the world of Elsie J. Oxenham’s Abbey Girl books, published between 1914 and 1959. [Read more…]
How to make a book of “24s”
Twenty-Four Country Dances for the Year 2020
For most of the 18th century and a few decades into the 19th, English country dances were published in books of 12 or 24 pages. These books had titles such as “Astor’s Twenty four Country Dances for the Year 1803 with proper Tunes and Directions to each dance as they are performed at Court, Bath and all Public Assemblies.” These collections were promising the buyer that the tunes contained within were the latest and greatest hits in the fashionable world. In the late 18th century dances were not “called” as they are today–instead the honored topmost lady would announce the tune of her choice and then she and her partner would start dancing with the couples below them–a lot of pressure! But the books of dances helped relieve the pressure.
These books are usually about 6 inches high and 12 inches wide, with a paper cover on the front (sometimes on the back as well), a frontispiece, and 24 interior pages, one dance per page. On occasion, a “24” book will consist of 12 pages, with 2 dances per page. Books of only 12 dances were also published. Below is a facsimile of two pages from Thompson’s 24 Country Dances for the Year 1803 (Ralph Vaughan Williams Library, EFDSS).
Most small books were not stitched in the fold as one might for a bound book (that is, opened to the 12-13 center pages and sewn along the crease of the folded sheets to create the cluster of pages known as a “signature”) but rather were just stabbed through from the top sheet with a single stitch of linen thread, so the cover didn’t have to be more than a single sheet. Sometimes the cover has a back sheet that wrapped the whole. The left-hand margin is generous because, when the purchaser had enough booklets lying on the pianoforte, she could send them off to be bound permanently together in the cover of her choice.
The reason for the size of the books and the numbers 12 or 24 rather than 7 or 18 or 25 or anything else was all about the publishing process: printers used very large pieces of paper, printing multiple pages on both sides of a sheet. These sheets were then cut and folded. It is easy and fun to make such a book yourself.
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