Helen's Babies (novel)

Helen's Babies is a humorous novel by American journalist and author John Habberton, first published in 1876.

1908 edition cover

The book's full title is: Helen's Babies: With Some Account of Their Ways Innocent, Crafty, Angelic, Impish, Witching, and Repulsive, Also, a Partial Record of Their Actions During Ten Days of Their Existence.

In its early editions the author was noted anonymously as "By Their Latest Victim".

Criticism

G. K. Chesterton included an essay on Helen's Babies in his collection Generally Speaking.[1]

The book is cited in George Orwell's 1945 essay "Good Bad Books" as an example of "the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished." It is also discussed by Orwell in his 1946 essay "Riding Down from Bangor".

Adaptations

The book was adapted for the stage, and played at the Broadway Theatre in New York in 1878, and elsewhere.[2][3][4]

Helen's Babies was also adapted into a film of the same name in 1924, directed by William A. Seiter.[5]

gollark: Interestingly enough, here in the UK™, COVID-19 means general GCSE exams were cancelled, but they still want to give everyone grades without having to have summer/aütumn exæms, so they're basically just going to be guessing the grade you might have gotten.
gollark: And how well everyone else did, and stuff like the total marks on the exam.
gollark: In that case % is betttererrer.
gollark: Grades let you distance, well, grades, from actual % results on stuff.
gollark: Of course, *that* means that how good you're considered depends on how well everyone else does. Although that probably would have been the case to some extent anyway.

References

  1. Chesterton, Gilbert Keith (1928). Generally Speaking: A Book of Essays. London: Methuen.
  2. (5 February 1878). The Broadway Theatre - Helen's Babies, New York Herald, p. 6, col. 5
  3. (26 March 1878). Amusements, Morning Herald (Wilmington, Delaware)
  4. Pickles, Katie & Catharine Coleborne, eds. New Zealand's Empire, p. 110 (play performed in Melbourne, Australia in 1877)
  5. Helen's Babies on IMDb


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