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Marjorie Fleming: A Sketch
Being the Paper Entitled "Pet Marjorie: A Story of Child-life Fifty Years Ago".
A touching biographical appreciation on the Scottish child poet Marjorie Fleming, who died at the age of eight. She is best remembered for her diary, kept during the last eighteen months of her life. After her death she became hugely popular in Victorian England, with many editions of her diary and poems being published.
A touching biographical appreciation on the Scottish child poet Marjorie Fleming, who died at the age of eight. She is best remembered for her diary, kept during the last eighteen months of her life. After her death she became hugely popular in Victorian England, with many editions of her diary and poems being published.
52 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1858
14 people want to read
About the author
John Brown
34 booksLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
John Brown was a Scottish physician and essayist best known for his three-volume collection Horae Subsecivae, which included essays and papers on art, medical history and biography. Of his essays, his dog story Rab and his Friends (1859), Pet Marjorie (1863), on Marjorie Fleming, the ten-year-old prodigy and alleged "pet" of Walter Scott, Our Dogs, Minchmoor, and The Enterkine are best known.
In 1847 Brown became a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, and for a while was Honorary Librarian. He held strong views on the inappropriateness of examinations for evaluating student progress and was unimpressed by the view that scientific advances were in patients' best interests.
John Brown was a Scottish physician and essayist best known for his three-volume collection Horae Subsecivae, which included essays and papers on art, medical history and biography. Of his essays, his dog story Rab and his Friends (1859), Pet Marjorie (1863), on Marjorie Fleming, the ten-year-old prodigy and alleged "pet" of Walter Scott, Our Dogs, Minchmoor, and The Enterkine are best known.
In 1847 Brown became a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, and for a while was Honorary Librarian. He held strong views on the inappropriateness of examinations for evaluating student progress and was unimpressed by the view that scientific advances were in patients' best interests.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 5, 2025
A touching biographical appreciation on the Scottish child poet Marjorie Fleming, who died at the age of eight. She is best remembered for her diary, kept during the last eighteen months of her life.
I am post-processing this book for DistributedProofreaders and Project Gutenberg will publish it.
I am post-processing this book for DistributedProofreaders and Project Gutenberg will publish it.
July 15, 2018
This was a very obscure little script. I wanted to like it. It felt like I was reading something written by someone with a psychosis though. It seemed so incoherent! Just a real head-scratcher.. The little 6 year old main character would be expressing guilt and trepidation over not reading her Bible verses in the right frame of mind in one instance and then suddenly be talking about her boy lovers in the schoolyard in the next. ??? And I didn't know if the author was trying to demonstrate the girl's developing writing skills with some pretty horrendous spelling or if that was just the way he wrote. I kinda would suggest one of the other books from the period.
July 25, 2014
Marjorie Fleming was the perfect child of the nineteenth century – she died at the age of eight, before the vile world could corrupt her.
Romanticizing death like this is clearly unforgivable, and much of John Brown’s book in consequently unbearable. But a good half of the book is straight up quotes from Fleming’s diary and letters, and these are really good. "I am now going to tell you the horible and wretched plaege [plague] that my multiplication gives me you can't conceive it the most Devilish thing is 8 times 8 and 7 times 7 it is what nature itself cant endure." It's like an 1810 edition of Kids Say the Darnedest Things
Like everybody in the nineteenth century except Robert Southey, Fleming was a good versifier, and her naive poems are sometimes genuinely funny.
His nose's cast is of the Roman :
He is a very pretty woman.
I could not get a rhyme for Roman,
So was obliged to call him woman.
This passage is from a letter to her mother: "Isabella Heron was near Death's Door, and one night her father lifted her out of bed, and she fell down as they thought lifeless. Mr. Heron said, 'That lassie's deed noo,' -- 'I'm no deed yet.' She then threw up a big worm nine inches and a half long. I have begun dancing, but am not very fond of it, for the boys strikes and mocks me."
There's a lot of good stuff like that, and while Brown's irritating comments are intrusive, Fleming herself is an irresistible piece of work.
Romanticizing death like this is clearly unforgivable, and much of John Brown’s book in consequently unbearable. But a good half of the book is straight up quotes from Fleming’s diary and letters, and these are really good. "I am now going to tell you the horible and wretched plaege [plague] that my multiplication gives me you can't conceive it the most Devilish thing is 8 times 8 and 7 times 7 it is what nature itself cant endure." It's like an 1810 edition of Kids Say the Darnedest Things
Like everybody in the nineteenth century except Robert Southey, Fleming was a good versifier, and her naive poems are sometimes genuinely funny.
His nose's cast is of the Roman :
He is a very pretty woman.
I could not get a rhyme for Roman,
So was obliged to call him woman.
This passage is from a letter to her mother: "Isabella Heron was near Death's Door, and one night her father lifted her out of bed, and she fell down as they thought lifeless. Mr. Heron said, 'That lassie's deed noo,' -- 'I'm no deed yet.' She then threw up a big worm nine inches and a half long. I have begun dancing, but am not very fond of it, for the boys strikes and mocks me."
There's a lot of good stuff like that, and while Brown's irritating comments are intrusive, Fleming herself is an irresistible piece of work.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews