The Lord bless and keep reader Polly Faust, who just sent me this email:
Hi Mallory,
A girl dies in the first chapter of the first Bobbsey Twins book, which was in my great aunt’s house and may have belonged to my grandma, who was born in 1911. Note that Nan nearly dies and has to lean on her brother when attempting to merely talk about jump roping.
“Grace, don’t jump so much. You’ll get sick.” Beautiful in its simplicity. Sick of what? Sick how? Jumping too much. Don’t worry about it.
“…for he had heard of more than one little girl dying from too much jumping.”
You girls are crazy to jump rope so much, and it is worse than football.
Tags: advice, books, don’t jump too much, literary deaths
Related Posts
“The Spinster’s Almanac”: Poetic Advice for Finding Your Way in the World
Ayn Rand’s If You Give A Mouse A Cookie
What To Expect When You’re Expecting, By Shirley Jackson
Can We Guess What You Would Have Died Of In The Early Modern Period Based On Your Zodiac Sign?
Aunt Acid: Advice for Owning Up to Racism
Dear Businesslady: How Do I Do Right By My Coworker?
Poor lass, all that jumping must have made her uterus fall out. Her body, knowing that it now could never fulfill its sole function in life, simply couldn’t go on.
” Uterine Displacement- Know The Facts”
Caused by
– jump rope
– lady footballing
– indelicate thoughts
– insufficient corseting
– unbleached facial hairs
– masculine dispositions
Not to mention chastity. You really can’t win.
For real though I am pregnant and went to water aerobics a week ago and the instructor pulled me aside and cautioned me not to jump too hard. Also not to twist or do anything that would engage my abs. I think she was worried about my uterus falling out.
My cousin, born in 1987, was not permitted to do long-jump as a young girl: shakes the uterus.
ROPE JUMPING, AND WHAT FOLLOWED
Ashamed to admit I read many of the Bobbsey Twins books as a child…turned me weird, it did.
So did I!
Wait, didn’t the Bobbsey Twins solve mysteries? Does it turn out that Grace was being slowly poisoned or something this whole time? Or did they seriously kill a little girl by turning the rope too much?
POISON ON THE JUMPROPE HANDLES
They didn’t always solve mysteries. The first few books are mostly about them playing baseball and putting on talent shows and stuff, so it’s entirely possible that Grace really died from jumping rope too much.
Grace could have won the talent show with an act like that! Mr Bobbsey tries to be nonchalant about it, but being able to die from jumping rope is a skill that most children just don’t have.
If only she’d waited.
It’s a great story!
The books were early serials for children, but then Nancy Drew, &c. got popular so the Bobbsey Twins books shifted to mystery solving AND THEN the early books were rewritten to involve mysteries (and also the early mysteries were updated to 1950s from the 1910s).
There were a ton of these kinds of serials, and it’s kind of fun to look up series collector websites and then go to Archive.org to see what they’ve got available. I really like the Patty books from Caroline…I forget her last name, but she was also known for satirical detective stories (!) and the first Outdoor Girls book is kind of fun.
I…I actually did a lot of research into the Bobbsey Twins because I had the first 3 in the original, seriously outdated and racist versions, and helped put the series list information together on LibraryThing several years ago, when I realized mine were different from the books I saw in the store as a kid (and also that Laura Lee Hope wasn’t a real person).
ETA I came back to reply to someone else and scrolled past my comment and was like “WTF am I talking about ‘great story’??? Bobbsey Twins early books are kind of awful???” then I realized I meant the way the serial book market developed is kind of fascinating. Sorry for anyone else who was like “wtf are you talking about Keri”
This is the greatest gift that a Friday has ever bestowed upon me!
I had thought your list the other day was a humorous exaggeration. Now I realize it was documentary fact.
Fiction: Stranger than Fiction
This is the opposite of one of my favorite stories as a kid http://www.amazon.com/Elsie-Piddock-Skips-Her-Sle… about a great jump-roper who defeats tyranny as a very old lady though her mad skillz. I pretended to be her while jumping rope (and, surprisingly, not dying) all the time.
Elsie Piddock is the BEST.
Reading Elsie Piddock as a small child is why I’m a huge commie.
Oh my goodness, I had that in a book of short stories when I was a kid! I was thinking about it just the other day, with her jump rope handles made of candy.
Was it in Martin Pippin in the Daisy Field? It’s a collection of short stories within a larger framing story, and I love it. My mum has had her copy so long it’s falling to bits.
That is where I found that story! My copy is also read to bits….
Andy Spandy, sugardy candy,
French. Almond. Rock.
Breadandbutterforyoursupper’sallyourmother’sgot!
(I always wanted to know what French Almond Rock was.)
It probably refers to a Rocher, which is a confection made of chocolate covered candied almonds. Rocher means Rock in french, and is a french treat.
Recipe: http://www.laweekly.com/restaurants/cookbook-of-t…
The famous Ferrero Rocher are an hazelnut rocher made by the Italian company Ferrero (they also make Nutella!)
mmmmmmmmmmmmm…..
Elsie Piddock Skips in Her Sleep is without a doubt the most perfect story ever written.
Girls and women are so fragile that any kind of exercise can kill us. I not only knew several little girls that died of too much jumping, I knew one who died of running too fast.
If only Grace had stopped at 96! That is the maximum number of times a little girl can jump over a rope before her body just shakes itself apart.
I also knew a woman who once moved her arm quickly… she got a brain fever and languished for a week before she expired. If only she had moved with a proper feminine langour!
The warranty runs out at 96 jumps.
*dons sunglasses, begins playing wicked organ riff*
Too many rope-jumps
For one heart to survive
Too many rope-jumps
For one heart to carry on
You’re way on top now
Since you jumped there
You’re always laughin
Way down at me
But watch out now
You’re gonna get there
You’ll be in midair
For just a little while
Then gravity will put you
Way down there
And you won’t live past
96 jumps
OMG another item for the list of things that women in literature have died from! Also, another point for me – I have personally survived almost everything on that list, PLUS jumping rope at least 100 times. Go me! There is **so much strength** in being not fictional… I guess that’s the real lesson here, ladies.
Also, I am astonished that in the eight zillion times I read that book as a child, it never once occurred to me that this was strange. I mean, jumping rope was what cured Mary Secret Garden, not only of being sort of weak and sickly but of being an insufferable snobby little imperialist. Clearly rope-jumping has enormous power over the mind and body.
This has all reminded me of a book I had as a kid (The Little Ballerina, I think?) where the girl protagonist is diagnosed with a mysterious “weakness in her legs,” and she is not allowed to go outside and play with the other children. She ends up taking ballet classes and gaining strength and lives happily ever after, but I was always mystified by that. Don’t run around with the other children, you have the weakness!!!
This sounds like it may be about polio. My mom had it before the vaccine was developed, so I know a bit about the history. Polio is very contagious, so kids that were infected were basically quarantined. And it does cause muscle weakness (or even paralysis). My mom’s illness affected one of her legs, and the damage has been a big part of her story ever since.
Wait, I don’t understand how an author included “he had heard of more than one little girl dying from too much jumping” and “It’s no worse than playing football” within two pages of each other. How can these utterly conflicting ideas exist within the same book???
Unless…I guess our only hope is that the next few pages are devoted to the “big girl” (read: unfeminine hag) getting a thorough lesson via mansplaination.
well it was a girl who said that, so obviously she was wrong.
She says it’s *no worse* than football, which is the same as saying that it’s no worse for a lady’s delicate constitution than getting shot right in the uterus, which is definitely very bad.
Jumping rope: exactly as bad and no worse than the worst things a lady can do.
child mortality rates in the high ninety percents were just the expected thing in ye olden dayes, what with unfettered access to sunshine and fresh air
I think by “big girl” it is meant that she’s older.
If it’s American football, maybe there’s a bunch of little boys with traumatic brain injuries and knee replacements?
Good news, apparently Grace is not dead, just unconscious from too much jump roping. She’ll be OK, so long as she never jumps rope again. It could addle her HEART. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Bobbsey_Twins/…
A life without jumping isn’t a life worth living!
OMG, this is even better than Wilkie Collins’s rants in Man and Wife about young men who run races FOR FUN dying and ruining themselves and the British empire.
The Bobsie Twins were some messed up shit, man.
(I did like the one where they went up in a hot air balloon)(ignoring the thread of casual racism that ran through it)
Ignoring threads of casual racism pretty much describes all of both my research and for pleasure reading.
Now that you mention it, Grace Lavine does sound suspiciously Semitic for someone the WASPy twins are associating with. Probably for the best she dies early so young readers can avoid a fun casual racism subplot? Not to mention teaching us all this powerful lesson about the dangers of exercise to the female body. *rolls eyes*
…those are some racist books, y’all. Am I just imagining this in my fevered female brain, or is there one where Sam and Dinah (the jolly, stereotyped help) give the one little girl a Black baby doll? And she doesn’t know what to do with this doll because it clearly can’t hang out with all her white baby dolls, so she comes up with a separate segregated doll storage solution? Anybody remember this?
YES that’s in the first book also!
It’s really kind of disturbing. It’s from 1903ish, also, if anyone else wants that context (I mentioned it down below, but in case folks haven’t scrolled that far).
I…hate that that’s actually a real thing, but relieved that it wasn’t a figment of my imagination, because that would be some seriously jacked up imagination right there.
I read these books at my grandma and grandpa’s house. It grew up in a very conservative, overwhelmingly white environment, and still Little Me read that and was like, “WTF?”
I don’t think my parents knew what I was getting into when I read them, to be honest. They just knew I was really interested in Old Timey books, so always asked friends/relatives for any old books they were getting rid of. I had some weird books, but the ones I remember best are the Bobbsey Twins.
Did you read Honey Bunch? When I was little, my mom gave me some of her old childhood books and Honey Bunch, Bobbsey Twins, and an old Nancy Drew were among them. As a kid I liked all of them but I remember thinking how racist and sexist the Bobbsey Twins was.
The fifth doll was Jujube, a colored boy, dressed in a fiery suit of red, with a blue cap and real rubber boots. This doll had come from Sam and Dinah and had been much admired at first, but was now taken out only when all the others went too.
“He doesn’t really belong to the family, you know,” Flossie would explain to her friends. “But I have to keep him, for mamma says there is no colored orphan asylum for dolls. Besides, I don’t think Sam and Dinah would like to see their doll child in an asylum.” The dolls were all kept in a row in a big bureau drawer at the top of the house, but Flossie always took pains to separate Jujube from the rest by placing the cover of a pasteboard box between them.
I never read the Bobbsey Twins books. Is Flossie meant to be an appalling monster?
WTF. Wtf wtf wtf! I read the 1950s Bobbsey Twins books when I was a kid and they were definitely racist, but not on this level.
D:
So does anyone remember The Bobbsey Twins on the Deep Blue Sea, in which the premise is that their uncle has gone off on a sailing trip with a fifteen-year-old boy he is not related to, who is referred to throughout as his “boy friend,” and now they have disappeared? And so the Bobbsey Twins’s parents decide the logical solution is to take their kids on a sailing trip to look for them?
I had next to no context for these books as a small child with an advanced reason level and could never figure out why my friends didn’t throw parties with ice cream molds/we didn’t have giant winter storms where all the boys built a huge snow fort in the middle of town/people walked home for lunch/the first book had either a carriage or a car causing an accident, depending which printing you got. I still read them all anyway.
Imma bring this up whenever anyone tells me to do double-unders.
SHE WAS A HEADSTRONG GIRL AND ALWAYS WANTED HER OWN WAY.
So ominous.
Sounds like she got what she deserved!
you’re missing the point here, guys!
what she really died of was being HEADSTRONG and IGNORING HER MOTHER.
How is “running as fast as your feet can carry you” not at least as dangerous as skipping rope? Mr. Bobbsey is being reckless to a criminal degree in ordering Nan to rush to the doctor’s house like that!
So here’s how good my memory is – The Bobbsey Twins had parents?!?
The boxcar children were the orphans!
This book was originally from 1903 or some shit like that. REALLY early. So these girls were wearing little baby corsets under their dresses (remember that they’re upper middle class) and even if not, lots of layers and it’s hot out. At least, that’s what I told myself when I read it when I was 11 years old.
But part of the reason they wore that stuff was so that they’d be constricted – literally and figuratively – by the patriarchy, right? So it boils down to the same thing.
11-year-old you was doing some really insightful reasoning!
Anyone read/remember What Katie Did, where what Katie did was swing too high and fall off the swing and break her leg? Swinging is dangerous business too. Ladies better stay inside, yo.
I loved that book as a kid for some reason. The best friend was named Imogen and I thought that was the best name ever and I wanted to name my girl child that. Then I turned into a feminist tween and decided I was never changing my last name, and any child of mine would have my last name, so Imogen was out because it rhymes with my last name. Then I became a teen who decided never to have children, in large part because I find pregnancy freaky. Then I became a queermo and fell in love with a woman who has a uterus of her own, so now I have a child I didn’t give birth to – and who does not have my last name. But I’m also over Imogen.
Yes! And not just her leg but also damaged her spine or something, so she had to become one of those totally virtuous sickly heroines who can’t leave her bed for two years, but draws everyone around her with her goodness. Lessons from the “School of Pain!”
Louisa May Alcott’s Jack and Jill, too–sledding is also dangerous business.
I. . .still kind of like Imogen but more in a Cymbeline way.
Yes, and she had the virtuous sickly cousin as a role model and then she grew up to be a homemaker instead of an adventurer because that is what is proper. It’s too bad I never fell out of a tree as a kid (I was an avid tree climber), perhaps the experience of suffering would have turned me into a respectable homemaker. *looks around disaster of an apartment. shrugs*
To be fair, Katy didn’t fall off the swing, the swing pulled out of the ceiling because the staple was broken, and the adults already knew it was broken but instead of explaining this just told the kids not to use their brand-new swing.
I loved What Katie Did! So many fairy rituals in the forest.
I do not remember fairy rituals, so I wanted to look up a plot summary and plugged What Katy Did into the internet and it’s a VINTAGE LINGERIE SHOP. As a childhood fan of the book I’m disturbed, as a former-burlesque dancer femme I want all the beautiful lacy things.
See, this is why I like these posts– everyone else has read the same weird old books that I’ve read.
I also read What Katy Did In School, and was totally bemused by the hygienic details– communal washrooms, until Katy’s father insists on a washstand in her own room, public baths to which you walked carrying your sponge and towel…. very odd.
Lately, I’ve discovered Charlotte Mary Yonge. So far, in three our of three books, there’s a woman who leads a “sofa life” — carriage accident, American swamp fever, or just general maternal saintly debility. And oh yes, in one of them, a ten-year-old girl dies apparently of malaria or something, but really because no one would talk to her about her brother in prison. She brooded, you see, and wore herself out.
My favorite Amazon review: someone gave Yonge’s The Trial no stars, because what he thought he was getting was Kafka’s The Trial.
Oh my God, do they actually say “sofa life”? What a beautiful phrase.
Yep.
A young doctor has just married the woman he loves, even though he and she are convinced that she’s dying of the after-effects of living near an American swamp. But his father, also a doctor, has a different opinion:
‘You may have much to undergo, and must submit to a sofa life and much nursing, but I think you will not leave him so soon.’
Sometimes the family invalid is a man, like in The Heir of Redclyffe. But seriously, I love The Trial except that the end infuriates me because I just want to explain to everyone about physical therapy and how it works.
Yeah, sometimes. But it seems to me that in general, while Yonge’s men are just as vulnerable as the women to carriage accidents and malaria and cholera and all the rest of it– it’s a hard life for everyone in her novels– the men either die or get better. It’s the women who lie down on the sofa and stay there.
Have you read The Pillars of the House? What the heck was wrong with Geraldine’s “diseased foot”?
American Swamp Fever was malaria…
I can corroborate. I broke my arm jumping off a swing. Stay indoors, ladies.
I’m wondering if it’s code for a polio scare, with cause and effect reversed. That is, jumping doesn’t cause polio, but polio could make a child collapse, I guess.
I am not surprised. I recently reread the Five Little Peppers books, and Phronsie nearly dies from having been shut in an attic room (note: there was never any mention of it being hard for her to breathe, or anything–I assume there was air) for, like, an afternoon. It starts out all logical (she’s in there, she gets shut in, she gets bored and goes to sleep) and then she’s near death when they find her a few hours later.
And then she sprained her ankle, and they found her and everyone said how brave she’d been, and how beautiful, there in the attic, and they were wrong to criticize her, and everyone who criticized her is dead now.
Hah, I remember reading the Five Little Peppers books, but I don’t remember any details.
That one is potentially realistic. Small children are very vulnerable to heat stroke, and attics can reach 120 to 130 degrees easily.
This one could actually be true. Attics were not insulated in those days and in summer they could get really hot, just like a car with the windows closed. She was probably sick from the heat.
I LOVED The Five Little Peppers. I remember them being a really kind group of children who are really sweet and there was a lot of compassion throughout the book – drastically different than the Bobbsey Twins.
All this proves is that jumping rope is an Extreme Sport. Everyone who jumped rope as a kid was RISKING INSTANT DEATH. Jumping Double Dutch was like leaping into a fire tornado. Our parents, they simply did not care. It was a different time. These days if your child even gets near a piece of yarn, they had better be wearing a helmet and lacrosse armor or you will be sent to jail.
it gets even better. Apparently, jump roping is bad for your heart, showing a fundamental misconception about the need for cardio.
![]()
limp and helpless
danny is such a dick.
DR. BRISKETT. sorry, is that a real surname?!! I guess I shouldn’t laugh.
When I was six, I participated in jump rope for heart. I did 100 jumps. I have been languishing ever since.
I had thought your list the other day was a humorous exaggeration. Now I realize it was documentary fact.
I was always confused as a child when I read the Boxcar Children and Violet got sick and almost died from laughing. At least that’s how I remember it. It was a very sudden illness as I recall.
If I remember correctly she had been kind of “off” before that but she’s so quiet no one noticed, and then they all laughed until they cried but then Violet could not stop crying and that’s how Jessie knew she was sick. Which honestly actually sounds a lot like how I got sick as a kid – good, good, good, a little eh, SUDDENLY DYING. I mean, I actually remember a day where I spent all of recess lying on the blacktop because it was warm and I had some serious chills and ended up in bed with a 104 fever, but I hadn’t felt sick that morning (obviously, or I wouldn’t have been at school).
Ahhh that helps. Thanks.
The fifth doll was Jujube, a colored boy, dressed in a fiery suit of red, with a blue cap and real rubber boots. This doll had come from Sam and Dinah and had been much admired at first, but was now taken out only when all the others went too.
"He doesn't really belong to the family, you know," Flossie would explain to her friends. "But I have to keep him, for mamma says there is no colored orphan asylum for dolls. Besides, I don't think Sam and Dinah would like to see their doll child in an asylum." The dolls were all kept in a row in a big bureau drawer at the top of the house, but Flossie always took pains to separate Jujube from the rest by placing the cover of a pasteboard box between them.
Ooh! Ooh! Do Elsie Dinsmore next!
Oh yes! That’s the one where Elsie nearly dies from being threatened with a Catholic school!
Didn’t she also faint on a piano stool because she wouldn’t play music on the Sabbath after her father told her to? And she maybe hit her head when she fell and …almost died?
It’s a little unclear with all the swoony Victorian medical-speak but after her Sabbath-strike she does indeed *die* and then her tearful father relents, becomes a true Christian, and then she is suddenly brought back TO LIFE.
I had an unhealthy fixation with that book when I was younger. whoof.
I agree
I loved the Bobbsey twins when I was little. I was most entranced with the idea that kids came home for lunch every day during school, and mail was delivered twice a day!!!
I read the Bobbsey twins, but I don’t remember anything about them, except Freddie and Flossie and their blond, curly hair. Thank goodness I didn’t internalize the anti-jumping propaganda, because jump roping was the only athletic like activity that I was any good at (besides climbing trees).
It’s honestly amazing that we all turned out as well as we did, reading all this crazy shit.
Fast forward about 100 years to 2005. The president of the International Ski Federation on why women shouldn’t be ski jumping:
“Don’t forget, it’s like jumping down from, let’s say, about two meters on the ground about a thousand times a year, which seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view,” Gian Franco Kasper, president of the International Ski Federation, told NPR in 2005.
http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/…
IT’S NO WORSE THAN PLAYING FOOTBALL. “big girl” at the end of the page is my HERO.
As a kid, I picked up a book called Two Little Women, published circa 1910. I confused it with the REAL “Little Women” but read the whole thing anyway. Very interesting depiction of what 15-year-old girls did back in those days–they were little children! (I recognized that even at age 10). While roller-skating, the two crashed into each other, one broke a leg, the other broke an arm. They were bedridden for months. The leaps forward in health care in 100 years!
I should have mentioned that, like the Bobbsey Twins, two little women were upper middle class. Working class 15-year-old girls would certainly not have had the privilege of being coddled little children.
Everything everyone has said. Yes.
Yeah, I read these versions when I was in my single digits (they had come down from much older relative, though I don’t know who). The Skipping rope incident (called jump rope in the book) and the segregation of Flossie’s black doll have always stuck with me. And true, she only fainted, as has been mentioned above, so naughty, willful little Grace lived on to obey her parents forever more.
Like Extrayarn, I too felt hard done by at not living the life of the Bobbsey twins, though I knew they were about 50 years earlier in time) I recall having a sad meltdown one day because WE didn’t go on lovely trip like they did, to the seashore or the country. (Actually, we did go on nice trips, so I don’t know what I was bitching about).
But for sure, we never got to sail an iceboat across the lake all by ourselves at the age of eight and get lost in a snow storm (Bobbsey Twins at Snow Lodge).
That is where I found that story! My copy is also read to bits….
American Swamp Fever was malaria…
There's a great book on the serial book market called "Girl Sleuth" about the (female) ghost writers who wrote Nancy Drew, and the syndicate that they were part of (which owned Nancy Drew, Bobbsey Twins, Hardy Boys & others.) The two main "Carolyn Keenes" were college-educated writers back in the '20's when that sort of thing seriously wasn't done by women. Anyway!