Goody Two Shoes

[dianeduane]

Not about Jade. (Well, only peripherally.)

The inevitable comments are starting to come out of the British newspapers regarding the Big Brother bullying-and-racism flap. A few of the articles are making puns on Jade's last name, including a very specific one: Is it too late to be Goody Two-Shoes?, etc. And something about that brought my head up. What's with these references to the name of the main character in a children's book two hundred fifty years old... a book in which even the identity of the writer is in doubt, and which (I would be willing to lay down at least a ten-Euro note) almost nobody who uses the phrase has ever read?

It seems lots and lots of English-speaking people know the phrase, even after the source has been almost completely forgotten in (at least) popular culture. What kind of book remains so long alive in the language -- if only in title -- while no one knows much of anything about it? Why this strange etiolated fame? ...I'm as familiar with the phrase as anyone else, but had never given a moment's thought to the source. After seeing these news stories, though, suddenly I got curious and went hunting.

"Goody Two Shoes" (with or without the hyphen) turns out to be a shortened version of the proper title, The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, one of several titles for a work first published in England in 1765. (The title page itself is worth mentioning, as it looks like this -- ) 

T H E
H I S T O R Y
O F
Little GOODY TWO-SHOES;
Otherwise called,
Mrs. MARGERY TWO-SHOES.
W I T H

The Means by which she acquired her Learning and Wisdom,
and in consequence thereof her Estate;
set forth at large for the Benefit of those,

  Who from a State of Rags and Care
  And having Shoes but half a Pair;
  Their Fortune and their Fame would fix,
  And gallop in a Coach and Six.

And you might be forgiven for thinking, Oh no, here comes another ghastly "improving" work of that period... if the author didn't immediately tip you the wink, giving himself/herself away:

See the Original Manuscript in the Vatican at Rome, and the Cuts by Michael Angelo. Illustrated with the Comments of our great modern Critics.

...Uh huh.

I confess to having been suckered in, so I took the half an hour or so required (I was making dumplings at the same time) and read the book online at Gutenberg. It's not very long. Yes, it is moralistic, yes, sometimes the dated style and phrasing will nearly send you around the bend: but there's some funny stuff in it...and I can believe that in its time it may have seemed groundbreaking. It turns out to be a rags-to-riches story in which a poor little girl named Margery, made homeless and shortly orphaned by the connivance of a greedy farmer-estate manager and his boss (a thoughtless absentee landlord) manages to make something of herself. She does this -- and here she instantly wins my support -- by teaching other kids to read. And the book has some other surprises in it, among them possibly the earliest instance of product placement I've ever seen (medical preparations referred to in the text have ads at the end...), and some very serious discourse on animal rights, surely not something you'd routinely expect of a work produced in the mid-1700s. Margery has a lively time of it: some scary things happen to her, some amusing things: and at last she comes out on top.

Yes, the author does let you know that Margery's success is at least partially because she is Good and Behaves Like A Good Girl while those around her are behaving badly. (There is a certain Polyanna quality to her behavior:  and there we have yet another character whose name remains famous though most people haven't read the book -- though certainly Disney has intervened on her behalf.) And the author also lets you know that Divine Providence is about, punishing the wicked and rewarding the good. Whatever. I would need to do some research, but there are dangerous signs in this book of someone writing a children's book that is both (argh) improving, and (dangerous new idea) funny.

The book was much loved by five or six generations, and stayed in print for at least a hundred and twenty-five years or so, being published and republished in many editions on both sides of the Atlantic, ripped off, recast, and otherwise digested by its parent culture. Eventually, as happens, its interest for newer generations started to wane, and it fell out of the public consciousness, except for its title character's name.

Some people had strong opinions about this growing, general amnesia about what they felt was a good book that deserved to be remembered. Listen here to the great Andrew Lang getting tetchy about the decline of quality children's literature (he was writing to Coleridge in one of a series of letters to dead writers (there's another great one here, where he writes to Sir John Mandeville, Kt. But never mind that at the moment). To Coleridge, he says:

Goody Two Shoes is almost out of print. Mrs Barbauld's stuff has banished all the old classics of the nursery, and the shopman at Newbery's hardly deigned to reach them off an old exploded corner of a shelf, when Mary asked for them. Mrs Barbauld's and Mrs Trimmer's nonsense lay in piles about. Knowledge, insignificant and vapid as Mrs Barbauld's books convey, it seems must come to a child in the shape of knowledge; and his empty noddle must be turned with conceit of his own powers when he has learnt that a horse is an animal, and Billy is better than a horse, and such like, instead of that beautiful interest in wild tales, which made the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger than a child. Science has succeeded to poetry no less in the little walks of children than with men. Is there no possibility of averting this sore evil? Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!

Hang them!--I mean the cursed Barbauld crew, those blights and blasts of all that is human in man and child.

The tone of the complaint sounds kind of familiar...  You can take a look at a little of "Mrs. Barbauld's stuff" over here and see why Lang was getting so riled. It looks to me like an early form of the Dick-and-Jane form of early-reader material, now with Extra Added Didacticism and Mommy holding your hand real tight. Yes, she too was groundbreaking in her way and her time -- see this longish article setting out reasons why -- but her stuff still sets my teeth far further on edge than Two-Shoes does.)

Anyway. The question I'm left with is: when did "Goody Two Shoes" turn into a pejorative? What happened? Are we just seeing an accretion of scorn, decades thick, for a discarded nursery book whose prose style has fallen out of fashion, and a heroine seen (in modern or pre-modern times) as literally too good to be true?

But also...this whole business makes me look ahead several centuries and wonder if there will come a time when somebody might be referred to as "such a Harry Potter..." ...and almost no one will have read the book, or have any idea why the phrase means what it does -- or realize that what it's come to mean may have nothing to do with the genuine trials or triumphs on paper and film of one young wizard. Two hundred fifty years is a long time: even print, eventually, becomes ephemera. Very few are the books still read even a century after they're published:  how many people now know even the names of the superstar writers, let alone the superstar children's writers, of 1900? Yes, we have the mass media now, and many more ways to disseminate fame. But sometimes I wonder whether that will make the written word more likely to be forgotten, rather than less.

...Who knows. I'm going to go have some of that soup with the dumplings in it. 

Comments

[bunnyk.livejournal.com]

Thank you. :-) Have spent the entire weekend listening to "Goody Two Shoes" by Adam and the Ants, and hadn't even *thought* there might be something behind it! Am off to Project Gutenberg now.

[aaangyl.livejournal.com]

That song was what I thought of too.

[kallisti.livejournal.com]

I had thought of that immediately too...I still get a laugh out the the concert promoter who while putting on a two stage music festival put Adam and the Ants on one stage, and the band Black Flag on the other at the same time...hehehehehehe.

ttyl

[wolfette]

I have a feeling I have actually read that story, or had it told to me as a child. Maybe my Gran?

[scarfman]

The question I'm left with is: when did "Goody Two Shoes" turn into a pejorative?

Perhaps about the same time "square" did.

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

What exactly would it mean to call someone a Harry Potter?

I've already caught myself using 'Hermione' to describe someone who is smart but mostly with book-learning, and who follows the rules to the letter.

[uozaki.livejournal.com]

Probably in reference to an overblown hero complex - someone who's got to solve every problem themselves, and maybe a little too self-confident. At least, if it's going to be pejorative. Could be spun the other way, if it was a complement.

[squirrelette.livejournal.com]

Thank you, I never knew that the expression stemmed from a children's book although I have heard the phrase often enough and didn't ponder on the why of it.

I do wonder now if it developed it's current meaning after having been spoonfed at storytime to young children who became adults with the acquired knowledge that being a "good" girl or boy guarantees nothing.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

More recently: The protagonist of The Ugly American is physically ugly -- and the opposite of what "ugly American" usually means these days. In nonfiction, the book Open Marriage has nothing to do with what's been called open marriage (okay, maybe one paragraph, sort of if you interpret it with malice aforethought).

It doesn't take centuries for this kind of misinterpretation to become established.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

I think the term became pejorative at the same sort of time when moralising and in particular the idea that "good people are rewarded (eventually) and bad ones are punished" fell out of favour. A "goody two-shoes" is seen as a person who is impossibly good and who never does anything wrong and is therfore held up to be 'better' than all of us sinners, and from that has come to mean the sort of person who boasts about how good they are. I would guess (and it only a guess) that the change came somewhere around early-mid 20th century as a reaction against the moralising of the Victorian and Edwardian culture, in particular when people realised that for all the "holier than thou" moral preaching the people then (and in particular their parents and grandparents) were just as fallible, they just covered it up more (I remember my grandmother saying that there were just as many children born to young unmarried girls when she was a child, but that it was covered up as an 'illness' and then the girl acquired a new 'sister').

Fascinating derivation, anyway, thanks for the research. I'd never thought of looking that phrase up, nor did I know the original story.

[dragon-prince.livejournal.com]

hay I Like my sins

and if I dont beleve in the christian god

am I realy a sinner?

[keristor.livejournal.com]

By the standards of many Christian churches (and especially the ones around in the UK in Victorian and Edwardian times) liking your sins makes you an unrepentant sinner and therefore destined for hell, and refusing to believe in the One True God sends you to the same place. Go to Hell, go directly to Hell, do not pass the Pearly Gates, do not collect your Eternal Reward...

But since "the Devil has all the best tunes" (and most of the other people I admire, especially composers and writers (adulterers, liars (they write untruths and call it entertainment!), gluttons... I'm not sure where JS Bach fits, but since he had two wives and lots of children probably Lust comes in there somewhere *g*), according to the above religions), I'd rather go there as well, it would be a lot more fun *g*...

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

When did Goody Two-Shoes become a pejorative?

When we forgot that "Goody" was not a moral label, but a shortening of "Goodwife" and the equivalent of "Mrs," maybe. A long time ago, anyway. There's always been a tendency to admire the dangerous, rule-breaking, rude kids our parents warned us off, amd there's always been a need for something to call the kids who bucked the trend and persisted in thinking it was good to be good. Nowadays it's geek, nerd, dweeb, dork and so on. A while back, over here, it was prig, swot and such like. The phrase I've always heard in American films, and read in American books, to mean that kind of person, is Goody Two Shoes. I've never encountered it as other than that particular kind of pejorative.

[marykaykare.livejournal.com]

I have little say about Goody 2 Shoes, having not read it. Though I will point out there's also a song with that title/refrain.

I just wanted to say I *have* read the original Pollyanna and even at 10 years old I didn't believe here when she said, "I'm glad my legs are broken. Glad! Glad! Glad!" It's a pretty dreadful book really.

MKK

[redlily.livejournal.com]

That's exactly what I was about to say. Furthermore, that I don't care if no child ever reads Pollyanna again, because it's ridiculous.

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, even as a child, I hated that part of Pollyanna. No one is glad about broken legs or an injured back. I can believe that she was happy to be able to walk again--even with crutches--simply because she didn't think that she'd ever be able to walk. (Having been in that position, I can relate.) But happy that she injured herself in an accident in the first place? Happy that she needed crutches? No WAY.

Honestly, I'd have liked Pollyanna a lot better if she'd stopped trying to be everlastingly glad about everything, even if there was nothing to be glad about. I'd have preferred her as an optimistic but normal little girl.

[particle-person.livejournal.com]

This is not the Book, Sir, mentioned in the Title, but the Introduction to that Book; and it is intended, Sir, not for those Sort of Children, but for Children of six Feet high, of which, as my Friend has justly observed, there are many Millions in the Kingdom;

Heh.
--
Have you read about the case of the nursery rhyme "Brow Bender," which vanished from print in 1788 and did not reemerge until the folklorists Peter and Iona Opie overheard their nanny singing it to their children, unchanged except for the addition of five lines never previously reported?

(My source on this is Bill Bryson's Made in America, and Bryson isn't known for accuracy, sad to say. But at the least, it makes a great story.)

[burntcopper.livejournal.com]

huh. interesting. sort of like the phrase 'sweet F.A.' - people think that 'Sweet Fanny Adams' is merely the polite way to disguise 'Sweet Fuck All', when the 'Fuck All' is in fact a corruption of the original phrase. (reference to a rather nasty murder and dismemberment in the 1800s - the phrase meaning that something was such a mess that you could barely tell what it used to be, that it looked like Sweet Fanny Adams)

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

Yes, and according to this page (http://www.hants.gov.uk/museum/curtis/fannyadams/legacy.html), that started with British sailors:

Served with tins of mutton as the latest shipboard convenience food in 1869, they gloomily declared that their butchered contents must surely be 'Sweet Fanny Adams'. Gradually accepted throughout the armed services as a euphemism for 'sweet nothing' it passed into common usage.

As an aside, the large tins in which the meat was packed for the royal navy, were often used as mess tins and it appears that even today mess tins are colloquially known as 'fannys'.

I only just now found out how vicious and gruesome eight-year-old Fanny's death was. Poor little kid.

[madfilkentist]

Another example is "Sambo." This term became unpopular enough that the Sambo's restaurant chain was forced to change its name a couple of decades ago. Yet the book Little Black Sambo, at least in the versions I read as a child, had nothing racist about it; it was about a child who was robbed of his clothes by tigers and then won out because they destroyed themselves trying to rob each other. I never read the original book, so perhaps there are racist elements there that weren't in the schoolbook versions, but I think the problem is that "Sambo" became a pejorative nickname for black people, and people who'd never read the book assumed it must be racist.

[childthursday.livejournal.com]

Although I don't think there's anything specifically racist about the book, there's that whole element of the 'little black boy' - the stereotype of the infantalized African. Having young children read that could be a little problematic. Although you're right, I doubt most people think about the word or its originas beyond "OMG racist!"

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Wasn't he *Indian*, actually? Tigers?

I think the illustrations made him look negroid in at least one edition of the book, though.

Hmmm; and are you saying that it's inherently improper to tell stories about African children? It's one thing to infantalize adult Africans, but this seems legit enough.

[kayshapero]

In the version I recall reading, he looked distinctly Indian, as did his fancy clothes. Also that outwitting the tigers and winning the day made him a hero. I suspect the name was the main problem.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

Same here (UK, early 1960s when I read it). Didn't he eliminate a tiger by getting it to run around a tree until it got so hot that it melted into butter?

The problem, as someone else said, was that the term got applied to all "non-whites" as a pejorative and therefore the PC crowd banned the whole thing. Just as happened with other words, including attempting to ban the word 'black' everywhere (blackboard, blackbird...). The words aren't the problem, it's the attitudes behind them which cause them to be used pejoratively, but it's a lot easier to ban the symptom...

[madfilkentist]

In the version that I read, Sambo's role was passive; he discovered the tigers chasing each other and watched them melt into butter. As I said earlier, I never read the original. I recall one version that tried to avoid the racial issue by making him "Little Gray Sambo," which is just weird.

ISTR that Sambo's parents were named Mumbo and Jumbo, which sound African to me.

[murphys-lawyer.livejournal.com]

It was a mish-mash: Sambo, his parents and brothers ("Little Black Woof" and "Little Black Moth") were African. There haven't been tigers native to Africa for eversolong.

Sambo was one of my childhood heroes because after the tigers had turned themselves into melted butter, his mother made pancakes from them, and he won the pancake-eating contest (169, iirc...)

It's sad but understandable that the story fell out of grace and fashion: it is patronising and stereotypical, and not all in a good way. However, I remember akicif (http://akicif.livejournal.com/)'s daughter having a better written variation on the theme, with the protaganist being Indian and cleverer than Sambo, so the main idea behind the story isn't lost.

[childthursday.livejournal.com]

I do recall one of the characters in Louisa May Alcott's *Rose in Bloom* (sequel to *Eight Cousins*) using "Goody Two Shoes" as a pejorative, so that dates the use to at least 1876.

I had a lovely, illustrated, considerably shortened, version when I was about six or so. There was the bit of preachiness, but the whole story really is quite cool - a little girl making her own way using her wit and wisdom, growing up to have a school and an independent existence. I don't recall Goody Margery ever marrying. Quite advanced for an eighteenth-century book!

[handworn.livejournal.com]

William Hogarth struck a blow against cruelty about the same time period with his Four Stages of Cruelty, which linked cruelty to animals in the first one to the murder of humans in the third and fourth ones.

The Annotated Mother Goose includes only an index of first lines, so is no help in investigating Goody Two Shoes, though it's worth having in general. Cecil Adams at the Straight Dope has a brief discussion of it (http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_291a.html) which notes that the story is sometimes attributed to Oliver Goldsmith.

[jaxomsride.livejournal.com]

I think most people would think of Adam Ant when they hear the phrase "Goody two shoes"
What a long winded story it turned out to be!
Were children supposed to listen and read it all or did their parents and teachers go through it gradually?

Interesting though that birds, especially ravens were known even then to be intelligent.

Mind you damn subversive stuff at the time. Bearing in mind the Enclosures Act and the Abuses of power and privilege that would appear to be illustrated in this text, was it really aimed at children?

As to why it became pejorative, probably because the book did fall out of favour but the phrase was too good to pass up. However without the source to explain the meaning, the meaning changed, because that is what children do to language.

[aunty_marion]

Like smallship1, I always understood 'Goody' to be a contraction of 'Goodwife', rather than being 'someone good'. But I didn't know the original story, and shall now be off to read it - thanks for the link!

I have read other 'moralistic' stories, though more Victorian - my mother still has a copy of Jessica's First Prayer, which we all adored when young, though it never turned any of us into devout Christians... And tucked away on my shelves is a charming little volume entitled simply Toby, by L.E. Tiddeman, presented to (I think!) my great grandfather at his local Wesleyan Methodist Sunday School, "As a Reward for Early Attendance".

[shmuel.livejournal.com]

I actually just read Polyanna for the first time and would definitely classify it as a term that currently means something radically different from the character it's based on. The Pollyanna of the book isn't naive, nor blind to her problems; she deliberately makes a game out of finding the positive aspects of everything that happens, no matter how challenging it is to do so... and it is challenging. (She also, significantly, hits a point where she can't manage it, and has to be helped out by the community around her.) Somewhere along the way "actively looking for the silver lining" got transmogrified into "too blind to notice the dark cloud."