The cover page is adapted from A Calling, a painting completed in 1896 by William-Adolphe Bouguereau. The cover and title pages feature the League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by The League of Moveable Type. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William-Adolphe_Bouguereauwww.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/
The Young Visiters
Chapitres (13)
- Preface 0:00
- I: Quite a Young Girl 13:39
- II: Starting Gaily 17:09
- III: The First Evening 26:15
- IV: Mr. Salteenas Plan 31:16
- V: The Crystal Palace 35:14
- VI: High Life 49:32
- VII: Bernards Idear 1:04:58
- VIII: A Gay Call 1:09:13
- IX: A Proposale 1:17:47
- X: Preparing for the Fray 1:24:40
- XI: The Wedding 1:27:58
- XII: How It Ended 1:30:44
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Daisy Ashford was just nine years old when she penned (or rather, penciled) The Young Visiters in her notebook. As an adult, she found the manuscript along with other childhood writings and showed them to her literary friends for a laugh. They were so delighted that they passed them around their circle. The unexpected result was a publishing deal, with J. M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan, writing the preface. So clever was the book that some assumed Barrie himself had written the entire thing as an elaborate hoax.
The story’s “hero” is Alfred Salteena, a polite but bumbling man who hopes to learn the ways of the elite. He is in love with a younger woman, Ethel, but a love triangle with his friend Bernard soon emerges. The characters attend “sumshious” balls, stay in lavish “compartments,” and wear elaborate “get ups,” all of it rendered in Ashford’s original childish spelling. The story reads like a pastiche of high society and even a parody of the Victorian novel.
The Young Visiters was published in 1919 and was reprinted eighteen times in that year alone. It has been adapted into a play, a musical, and multiple film versions. Ashford’s other juvenile writings were later published, including The Hangman’s Daughter, a short novel she considered her finest work. As an adult, she did not continue to write.