Sentimental Tommy by J. M. Barrie

I think I can best describe this book as a very adorable novel about terrible poverty, death and prostitution. It combines very distressing themes with a whimsical, often comic style, in a way that I think would strike most modern readers as extremely odd, perhaps even inappropriate, but since I basically mentally live in the 19th century, I absolutely loved it. I stumbled across this book in some library collection of rare books about seven years ago and thought it looked incredibly interesting, and have since then been checking in every single library everywhere I have lived in hopes of finding it, and I've been unsuccessful for so long that I sort of started to believe that this book didn't really exist. But I recently found it in a storage section of my university's library, and snatched it happily off the shelf where the record of borrowers informs me it has resided undisturbed for 15 years. In many ways, it reminds me a lot of L. M. Montgomery's work, especially The Chronicles of Avonlea, because it employs a similar thematic device of having children bring about resolutions to conflicts in the adult world, and the two main characters, Tommy and his sister Elspeth, enter the lives of various adult characters, stringing together many otherwise unconnected and lovely stories. I loved the character of Tommy; a selfish, clever, charming, highly imaginative boy, who has a genius for 'something', but no one is sure of what it is yet. The novel has a wide range of incidents pretty much guaranteed to make you cry, especially the story of a prostitute's child who constantly defends her mother, and whom none of the adults make any effort to understand for a long time. There is a lot of what today seems like horrendous sexism, and a very jocular attitude towards rather brutal corporal punishment, but if one turns a blind eye to this, the book has a great deal to offer emotionally and in terms of characters, and the style is absolutely wonderful. The way Barrie captures the games and imaginings of the children is full of both humour and profound interest and love, so that the book can be by turns hilarious, deeply touching, and incredibly sad. I'm definitely going to read the sequel (which our library also has!), but I'm not in the least surprised that this book has lost its late-Victorian popularity (oh, and I forgot to mention the sometimes impenetrable Scots dialect).