Book Review: Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard

Title: Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard

Author: Eleanor Farjeon

Date: 1921

Publisher: Lippincott

ISBN: none

Length: 305 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Richard Kennedy in 1961 reprint; 1921 edition had none

Quote: “‘I have loved,’ he vowed, ‘as many times as I have tuned lute-strings.’ ‘Then...you have never loved in vain.’ ‘Always, thank God!’ said Martin fervently.”

This novel purports to explain a song and game children used to play in Sussex. It’s a tale of merry old pastoral England. Martin the minstrel takes pity on a spineless fellow nicknamed Robin Rue, who, along with his sweetheart Gillian, has been banished from Gillian’s father’s house. Gillian has been banished to the shed, chaperoned by six of the milkmaids who work on her father's farm, “sworn virgins and man-haters all.” (Martin happens to know that all six have quarrelled with their boyfriends.) Martin sets himself the challenge of telling these girls “new love stories” that will move them to be reconciled with their suitors and let Gillian leave the shed--if that's what she wants to do.

This being a fantasy, seven couples will live happily ever after. In a sequel, Martin Pippin in the Daisy Field, Martin will tell stories to their seven children.

About the stories that have such power to set everything right, I’ll say this. Farjeon was a world-class storyteller. I discovered Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard when I was twelve or thirteen. For some girls that may be a sentimental age; I remember schoolmates crying real tears at the thought of graduating from elementary school. For me it was an antiromantic age. I didn’t like novels that ended with marriages. But I liked Martin Pippin, although I maintain that his best story ever was “Elsie Piddock Skips in Her Sleep,” a romance-free children’s story told in the Daisy Field.

Martin makes up these stories out of what he knows about their intended audience. The first story most obviously addresses Gillian’s situation, in which a couple who really are meant for each other splash through a pond like the one that’s separating Robin from Gillian, but goes on to address the quarrel between the milkmaid Joan and her future husband. Each of the other stories touches on the subject of another quarrel.

The six couples are meant to be comic parodies, and they are. The silliness of their quarrels can be painful. After listening to a story about a couple who are separated for twenty years, Jennifer confesses tearfully that she thinks she’s too old for love: “I will be nineteen in November.” The language they use is deliberately archaic; among other things they all mutually address one another as "Master" and "Mistress," as working-class Renaissance English people apparently did. The whole tradition of pastoral stories is that they're meant to be quaint, idealistic, dreamlike. Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard tells one story in which the human hero identifies with one of his ancestors "who was a king and a god and a smith"; in the Daisy Field some of the stories feature fairies. If Martin and friends, themselves, are a little more realistic than the characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the characters in the stories Martin tells aren't.

The whole thing is charming to the point of being twee...I don't mind a wee bit of twee. If you don't, either, you need to know that this is another classic children's book whose Amazon selling prices are being pushed up into collectors' range, although the book sold well and isn't rare, in order for a publisher to make a profit on a reprint edition. Send $10 per book, plus $5 per package and $1 per online payment, to the appropriate address (from the bottom of the screen). Both Martin Pippin books, plus any two of The Little Bookroom, The Glass Slipper, and The Silver Curlew, will fit into one $5 package. Farjeon's other books (she wrote more than a hundred, but several were short picture books) came in a variety of shapes and sizes; how many of them you could substitute for any of those five standard-sized books, in one $5 package, I can't say.