“if you read between the lines/ you’ll know that i’m just trying to understand/ the feelings we lack

[larryhammer]

It is interesting to compare the opening of Eustacia Goes to the Chalet School (#6 in the series) from 1930:

There is no disguising the fact that Eustacia Benson was the most arrant little prig that ever existed. She was not so much to blame for it as was her upbringing. Her father had been a learned professor of Greek, who had married a lady doctor, neither of them being very young. Both had great theories on how to bring up children, and to these they subjected their only child, the unfortunate Eustacia—so called because of the meaning of the name in Greek, ‘rich in corn,’ which the professor interpreted as ‘rich in knowledge.’ We have little difficulty in guessing the effect of those theories when we meet Eustacia for the first time one day in November, sitting in the drawing-room at her Aunt Margery’s, looking round it with a superior air, and mentally deciding how she would rearrange the room, should it be given over to her.

with that of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (#3 in the series) from 1952:

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. His parents called him Eustace Clarence and masters called him Scrubb. I can’t tell you how his friends spoke to him, for he had none. He didn’t call his Father and Mother “Father” and “Mother”, but Harold and Alberta. They were very up-to-date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotallers and wore a special kind of underclothes. In their house there was very little furniture and very few clothes on the beds and the windows were always open.

Eustace Clarence liked animals, especially beetles, if they were dead and pinned on a card. He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.

What is it about the name Eustac[e|ia] that draws authors to using it for a badly raised child?

(I love that little detail of the professor’s “interpretation” of the name’s meaning. Deft, telling detail.)

---L.

Subject quote from If You Could Read My Mind, Gordon Lightfoot.