Four Little Mischiefs by Rosa Mulholland, M. A. Donohue, c. 1901–1920

The Piece

Four Little Mischiefs, by Rosa Mulholland, published by M. A. Donohue and Company, Chicago and New York. Oatmeal linen over boards, printed in black and green.

The cover is a girl mid-swing. She wears a green pinafore over a white dress, striped stockings and black boots, and she is holding a battledore racquet in a green mesh up over her shoulder. Behind her a mass of heavy black foliage breaks against a green upright. The title runs down the upper left in black block capitals. It is a flat, confident piece of turn of the century poster drawing, and it is the whole visual argument for the book.

The title page gives the author as Rosa Mulholland and lists her other work: Giannetta, The Late Miss Hollingford, Hetty Gray. Below it, the word Illustrated, the Donohue wreathed device, and the two city imprint. The spine carries the title and the author's name.

Bound in at the front, before the story starts, is a full page advertisement for the Murine Eye Remedy Company of Michigan Avenue and Randolph Street, Chicago. A woman sits at a dressing table applying the drops. The copy promises relief for eyes enfeebled by exposure to strong winds, dust and reflected sunlight, and declares it safe even for the eyes of a nursing infant. A price list runs underneath, from twenty five cents for the remedy to a dollar fifty for Granuline. Publishers of cheap reprints sold the space, and this one survived with the book.

The story itself is four children at large in the country. At page 113 one of them has gone into a haycock and come out convinced he will be drowned in it, and the men building the rick are laughing at him and then defending him.

History & Provenance

Two hands wrote in this book, years apart, and they belong to the same person.

The first is on the front free endpaper, in pencil, in a careful adult hand: Mary Ellen Wood, From Papa, Christmas of 1920, A Merry Merry Christmas. A father wrote out his daughter's full name and gave her a book.

The second is at the back, also in pencil: three lines of shorthand, the light even strokes of the Gregg system that American business schools were teaching by the hundred thousand, and beneath them, in longhand, a signature. Not Mary Ellen Wood. Just Mary Wood. The girl who got a storybook for Christmas practiced her shorthand in the back of it and signed it the way a working woman signs things.

Rosa Mulholland was born in Belfast on 19 March 1841 and died in Dublin on 21 April 1921, four months after this copy was handed over on a Christmas morning in America. She is buried at Glasnevin. Charles Dickens thought highly enough of her to encourage her and to take her work for All the Year Round, and she published her first novel in 1864 under the name Ruth Murray. In 1891 she married John Thomas Gilbert, the Dublin antiquary and historian, and when he was knighted in 1897 she became Lady Gilbert. She wrote his life in 1905. Four Little Mischiefs first appeared in 1883, part of the long run of books for girls that occupied her later career.

M. A. Donohue and Company is the other half of the date. The firm goes back to an 1861 Chicago bookbindery that burned out in the fire of 1871 and rebuilt on Clark Street. It traded as Donohue and Henneberry until the partnership came apart at the end of the 1890s, and the imprint on this title page, M. A. Donohue and Company, dates from 1901, when Michael A. Donohue bought Henneberry out. The firm made its money on cheap children's reprints sold in bulk to general and department stores, two hundred books for twelve dollars fifty at one point, to be retailed at a dime or fifteen cents. Donohue died in October 1915 and his sons ran the business into the 1960s.

So the date brackets itself without guesswork. The imprint cannot predate 1901. The inscription proves the book was in a family's hands by December 1920. Both ends are documented.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

This one is bought face out, not spine out. The board is the object: a girl with a racquet in black and green on oatmeal, drawn flat and hard the way posters were drawn in 1905, and it holds a wall shelf or an easel at three feet the way a small framed print does. Propped in a bookcase, on a mantel, in a child's room or a shop vignette, it earns its place on the picture alone.

The paper inside is the second argument. A Chicago patent medicine advertisement bound into a children's book, a father's pencil inscription from Christmas 1920, and the same girl's shorthand drill at the back signed with her grown name. Ephemera collectors pay for any one of those. This has all three in one object, and it costs what it costs because the binding is finished.

Be clear about what this is. The spine is gone, the front board is hanging on, and the text block is in pieces. Nobody is reading it. It is a thing to look at and a small, complete record of one household, and on those terms it is honestly priced.