Book Review: Midnight Is a Place

Title: Midnight Is a Place

(This book has been reprinted several times. What you see is the cover design for the book I physically have for sale; I have the original hardcover edition, too, and that one I'm keeping. Since the paperback I have is showing at an unreasonable price on Amazon, the link will take you to a newer edition that's still available as a new book for a more realistic price.)

Author: Joan Aiken

Date: 1974

Publisher: Viking

ISBN: 0-670-47483-5

Length: 287 pages

Quote: “Even in good weather the park around Midnight Court was not a cheerful place.”

In 1842, in the real world, industrialization was raising British awareness of pollution and economic oppression to unprecedented levels. In Joan Aiken’s fictional alternative-nineteenth-century world, the blasted and burnt-out city of Blastburn, later to be taken over by Dido Twite’s horrid uncle, epitomizes everything Dickens’ and Disraeli’s novels railed against. (Did you know Disraeli wrote novels? If not, and if you like Aiken's and Dickens', you are in for a treat.)

Midnight Court is the ancestral manor young Lucas Bell, Anna-Marie Murgatroyd, and some equally unfortunate older people stand to inherit from the thoroughly unpleasant Sir Randolph Grimsby, who, fairly early in the book, burns down the main house rather than pay the taxes on it. Suicide turns out to be the most public-spirited thing Sir Randolph has ever done, and after some horrid experiences of child labor with employers who are trying to kill them, the children settle down to share the outbuildings, associated properties, and income from Midnight Court with the nicest adults they meet.

How the children survive and earn a living is the plot, and will not be spoiled here. Suffice it to say that yes, in 1842, real English and American children did have to work for their livings if they were orphans or even if their parents were poor, and fishing for salvageable items in the sewers, re-rolling remnants of tobacco out of cigar ends, and running machines in factories, were among the jobs actually done by children of thirteen, or even eight years old. In the United States girls, and boys under sixteen, were barred from working underground in coal mines (although children sometimes worked above ground outside the mines); in England children as young as six worked in the narrowest shafts of coal mines.

Lucas and Anna-Marie are typical of the pair of gifted children that appear like a signature in each of Joan Aiken’s novels. Usually, as here, regardless of any age disparities they are fully equal to each other—often the only real peers they have. Anna-Marie is a bit of the strain on the imagination until we remember she’s described mostly through Lucas’s eyes; to him she looks five or six rather than eight years old, then seems to become an adult, overnight, as she realizes that any comforting or nurturing that’s to be done will be done by her. To herself she’s simply herself, a young orphan who learns many things more quickly than the average child. One of those things she learns quickly is that playing mother to her older cousin is less painful than sulking and crying alone.

There were real children like that in 1842: orphans, or functional-equivalents-of-orphans, who had to become “little men” and “little women” overnight in order to survive. One week they might have had nurserymaids and tutors to look after them; the next week they were out on the street, doing whatever cooking and cleaning could be done for themselves, and, if possible, trying to latch on to nice older kids for protection from mean, thieving, bullying older kids. And adults. In Merrie Olde agricultural England such children were probably doing some farm chores, and thus entitled to some help from the lord of the manor. In the cities, or if the manor were being taken over by an unhelpful lord, they had no claim on anything from anybody. They were expected to become thieves or prostitutes or both, then subject to severe penalties if forced into even small steps in either of those directions.

Lucas and Anna-Marie are particularly lovable children. They have no legal claim on each other’s help either, nor are they legally responsible for the care of Lucas’s badly injured tutor. They help each other, and eke out their pathetic wages to pay for the care of the tutor, because they are (I suspect) idealized versions of Aiken’s own children: the way any mother would want her children to grow up. Their niceness is what gives them, and the adults who help them, a plot.

Because there were people like Lucas and Anna-Marie in our world, the idea of a Welfare State came to exist. Couldn’t democratic governments afford to set up whole offices dedicated to the care of orphans? The extent to which the Welfare State has alleviated or aggravated the sufferings of orphans remains a matter of some debate but in any case Anglo-type children no longer find themselves obliged to apply for the very nastiest jobs anyone can imagine.(In China, however, children still reportedly recycle toxic waste...)

Midnight Is a Place is fiction. For a sex-free, romance-free, kid-friendly story (although it was marketed to adults, because it contains violence) it can even be described as “Romantic” fiction—the kind of story that sold during the “Romantic Period” of English literature (the early nineteenth century): It features improbable hair-raising adventures barely survived by improbably lovable characters and a set of coincidences that give the story an improbably tidy ending. Nevertheless, the Romantic Period existed because adventures almost, if not quite, as outrageous as Gil Blas or Wuthering Heights had really happened. I can’t quite believe that Midnight Is a Place is fact-based, but then again I can’t identify at which points exaggeration has to have taken place. It could be based on someone’s real family history.

In any case, all readers are supposed to ask of fiction is an entertaining read, and that Aiken always delivered. Vivid descriptions, an all-prevailing cheerfulness in the grimmest of situations, about as much irony as anyone can stand, make Midnight Is a Place a great deal more fun to read than it would have been to live through.

To order it here won't do the late Joan Aiken any particular good; her heirs would prefer that you buy the new edition directly from Amazon. Do that if you like. If you want to support your favorite web site, you can scroll down to find other books. Or send $5 per book, $5 per package, $1 per online payment, to the usual address as shown at the very bottom of the screen; this web site makes no guarantees as to which edition will be available at that price, but so many editions have been printed, we're sure that one of them will. You'll get that one, and you're warmly encouraged to add as many other books of similar size as will fit into the package for the one $5 shipping fee. (For reference, packages generally hold up to 12 pocket-size paperbacks like the one shown above, up to 2 tall thick hardcover books like the first edition, or up to 6 of the "trade paperbacks" in which many publishers are reprinting classic children's books.)