Internet-Enhancing the Family Read-Aloud
Your two children are home from school and are getting tired of having only themselves for company. It’s too cold to play outside, your spouse has chosen to use his rare day off to go off to the Detroit Auto Show, and your butt has apparently bonded to the leather surface to the living room couch. And you finished your last good book on Saturday night.
So you turn to Classic Reader. This is one of several sources of electronic texts which have followed in the footsteps of the great Project Gutenberg, an ongoing effort to make classic literature texts easily and widely available in an electronic format. Classic Reader is somewhat easier to use and to search than the texts that come straight out of PG.
At Classic Reader, you discover a number of delectable Edith Nesbit stories. Nesbit, you conclude, is just the thing to share with your kids at this stage. After all, your older child is impatiently cooling his heels waiting for the new Harry Potter book to arrive this summer. J. K. Rowling has said that she was much influenced by Nesbit; maybe your child would like to see why. And the younger child has just hauled back out Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew for a re-reading. In the first chapter, it refers to the Bastables digging for treasure in the Lewisham Road. Instead of trying to explain the allusion, why not actually read her The Story of the Treasure Seekers? Especially if you can manage it without ever leaving the cozy spot beside the gas log?
In the very first chapter, you run into a serious issue. Absolutely central to the story line of Treasure Seekers is the notion that the six protagonist children are desperate to restore the fortunes of the ancient house of Bastable, and they manage to do so in any number of clever ways. For the story to be any fun at all, it’s imperative that you get a grasp on the concept of British currency of the late 19th century.
Also, the young narrator of the story has a habit of dropping references to people, places, and events from literature, history and the current events of his day. Many of his references are obscure even to you, an old English major from way back. You could simply follow the time-honored custom of making up answers to your children’s requests for clarification. But why spend the mental energy on invention when it is now relatively easy to annotate any text on the fly?
Let’s begin with that money question. You are reading along in the second chapter of Treasure Seekers when the Bastables experience their first success. While digging out Albert-next-door, whom they’ve accidentally buried alive, they come across two shiny new half crowns. They seem very excited. How come?
To find out, first you need the quick and dirty on all those mysterious names for English money. What’s a “bob”? Is it more than a “quid”? Or the same as a “guinea”? So you google the terms “sovereign guinea shilling” and - see here! - you find yourself a reasonably authoritative-looking site that defines terms for English weights and measures.
This is all well and good as far as it goes, but simply knowing that a half crown is worth two shillings and six pence is not especially helpful to someone who is still having trouble with quarters and dimes.
The first thing you need to do to relate the value of the half crown to money the kids can understand is to account for the change in the value of the money since the time the book was written. To do this, you’ll need to visit the web home of the wonderful Economic History Services. In the easy-to-use conversion tool, you enter the date of the book’s publication (1899), the value of the money the Bastables found (this will be a total value of 4 shillings, 12 pence because there were two half crowns), and the closest available year to now, which is 2002. Then click on “Calculate Relative Value.” Since the children are mostly interested in the cash because they want to spend it on stuff, you refer to the retail price index to get an idea of the buying power of two half crowns. You discover that in today’s terms, it would equal approximately 17 pounds and 20 pence.
Of course, that’s still not good enough for American children. But to translate the British pounds to American dollars is even easier. Just go over to Yahoo and key 17.20 into the converter there.
Will your children believe that the kindly but not exactly wealthy Albert-next-door’s-uncle would have been generous enough to have accidentally-on-purpose dropped the sum of $32.42 into the hole where his nephew had been buried alive, just because he liked the enterprise and the imagination of the neighbor children, and was amused by this treasure-seeking game?
You are all deeply suspicious about this. No one you know has ever intentionally dropped even a twenty dollar bill to be picked up and spent by neighbor children, no matter how pleasingly precocious they might be. So you construct a quick spreadsheet on which to record all the children’s income and expenditures as the story progresses, to see if they seem to line up.
Meanwhile, there’s the matter of all these other Victorian references, to people like General Gordon and events like the death of Nelson and “kiss me, Hardy.” What’s all that about? Your kids feel like they’re being left out of an inside joke.
As of a few weeks ago, this type of question is best dealt with at Answers.com. Although I am very fond of Google, this “New Standard in Reference” is much better suited for filling in gaps in your knowledge without interrupting the flow of the story you’re reading. You can even get quick, easy access to images of your subject. You children are back in the loop.
Even with this continuous back-and-forth among reference sites, both of your children remain so enthusiastic about this funny story - which they can now explicate like old pros - that you finish ten chapters in a single afternoon, only breaking to dispatch the youngsters to make cups of tea and slices of buttered toast. By the end of the day, you are all smarter people, with richer vocabularies and rudimentary knowledge of economics as a bonus. But, on the down side, your butt is all pins-and-needles from having never left the couch.