The Tapestry Room: A Child’s Romance was written by Mrs. Molesworth. Mary Louisa Molesworth (1839-1921) was a British author of children's stories and ghost stories best-known in her lifetime for her children’s stories.

Hugh, an English boy, is orphaned and after living with his grandfather for a short while goes to live with his French cousin Jeanne. Hugh moves into the tapestry room in the house of Jeanne’s parents. Jeanne is lonely and bored, and so the arrival of Hugh is a godsend for her. They begin playing together and quickly become friends. Jeanne tells Hugh about Dudu, the raven who hangs around her house, and soon Hugh begins seeing Dudu in his dreams and talking with him, although Hugh can’t remember just what Dudu tells him. But one night he meets Dudu in his dreams, and they have a conversation he does remember, about the tapestry in the room and how to enter it. Hugh does, and in the faerie world of the tapestry Jeanne joins him, and the two of them have several fine adventures and hear some wonderful stories, including a sad and sweet tale from Dudu himself about the great grandmothers of Jeanne and Hugh. And then Dudu says goodbye to Jeanne and Hugh ("...and on the whole, my dears, even if I had my choice, I don't think I should care to live another two or three hundred years in a world where changes come so quickly"¹) and disappears.

The Tapestry Room is a sentimental and good natured children’s domestic fantasy, the kind E. Nesbit would later do so well. It is a collection of individual adventures and stories rather than a novel of separate elements, but each adventure and story is entertaining on its own. The Tapestry Room is not Art and is not even juvenile adventure fiction on the same level as Harry W. French’s The Lance of Kanana, but The Tapestry Room is amiable and entertaining children’s fiction (rather than fiction for teenagers or young adults) and Mrs. Molesworth writes in a simple style with enough descriptions to engage the imagination without particularly inspiring it.

It’s worth noting that The Tapestry Room, though children’s fiction, is Victorian children’s fiction, with the expected effect of moral improvement of its readers:

Like so much children’s literature, Molesworth’s novels might be irreverently described as practicing a bait and switch on their naïve child protagonists (and child readers). Enchantment is the sugar coating for the bitter pill of a moral admonition. Yet, the situation is not quite so simple as this formulation implies, for if The Cuckoo Clock punctuates its magical adventures with didactic advice, The Tapestry Room does not. Further, neither novel ends with a simple moral or clear lesson; rather, Molesworth’s narratives seek to cultivate a generalized sensibility of loss that can deepen children’s emotional connections with others. At the same time, these two conflicted novels glamorize and, to a degree, fetishize childhood innocence, even as they seek to erode it by acquainting children with the struggles of daily existence and the tragic nature of history.²

Dudu is much the best thing about The Tapestry Room. He is an old, lame raven who hobbles up and down the terraces of Jeanne’s house, and appears on the windowsill of her room, inside the room, and inside her dreams, and Hugh’s. Dudu is mysterious and solitary and forbidding, and Hugh wisely decides that it is best to be polite to him. (Jeanne, who describes him as an “ogre fairy” and a “wicked enchanter,” is not so polite to him, but he indulges her, presumably because of her age and her friendship with him). This is the right tack to take, and Dudu proves to be a helpful, if slightly superior, friend to them, giving them sage advice and offering his services if they are ever in need. Dudu is the guardian of the castle in the tapestry. He is self-important, especially about his character and reputation, and has a great deal of dignity and responds negatively when it or he is impugned. He is old, at least a century, and is crotchety and enigmatic, avoiding any explanations about himself, why he speaks, how he moves through dreams, or the nature of the faerie land the children travel through. He is enigmatic and arch and very Lewis Carrollian, and it is a shame Molesworth never wrote anything else about him.

Print: Mrs. Molesworth, The Cuckoo Clock and the Tapestry Room. New York: Garland, 1976.

¹ Mrs. Molesworth, The Tapestry Room: A Child’s Romance (New York: Epstein & Carroll Associates, 1879), 215.

² Elizabeth Gargano, “The Innocent Child in the House of History: Storytelling and Sensibility of Loss in Molesworth’s The Tapestry Room,” in James Holt McGavran, Jr., ed., Time of Beauty, Time of Fear: The Romantic Legacy in the Literature of Childhood (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2012), 99-100.