Hans Brinker or The Silver Skates

Mary Mapes Dodge was an American writer and editor, born in 1831 and died in 1905. She published Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates in 1865, and it quickly became a bestseller. She had never been to Holland when she wrote it, and she relied on reading and on accounts from friends, which gives the book its curious position between invented story and travel guide. She herself wanted it to be partly a book of travels and partly a domestic tale, and that is exactly how it reads.

The first chapters introduce the Brinker family and their daily struggles, and the story soon opens out into descriptions of Dutch customs, history and landscape. A reader of the time met in these pages a country of canals and skating, far removed from American life. Later in her career Dodge became the editor of the children’s magazine St. Nicholas, which took a lasting place in American children’s literature.

This recording has 48 chapters and lasts about ten hours. It is read by a single LibriVox volunteer, Mark F. Smith, whose steady pace suits the leisurely, descriptive style of the original. It is a good choice for family listening on long evenings, or for anyone who wants to hear the kind of storybook that nineteenth-century children kept on their shelves, with its affection for the details of everyday life. Its descriptions of skating on frozen canals, in particular, have kept the book alive for generations of readers. Listening makes it easy to picture the scenes, and the clear, unhurried reading lets the story’s humour and its small moral lessons come through naturally.