Writing an Imaginary World
Each of us owned a small island in the brook on which we built houses and miniture fortifications and had battles which Arthur (the worlds historian) made very stirring with accounts of spirited charges and valiant repulses; he also made maps of the islands which we had named Big, Long and round continent's and peopled them with millions of imaginary inhabitants about which we wrote many stories.
The vast majority of the Nelsons’ books are about—and often purport to have been written and published in—their imaginary “World.” [fig. 1] The particular New Hampshire terrain of the Nelsons’ Goshen house and its neighboring brook and islands comes to anchor the geography of another world with its many continents, diverse nations, complex interrelated economies, and richly elaborated history. The maps the boys make of their world—drawn over many years and differing levels of skill—chart the same recognizable big, long, and round shapes. [fig. 2] They proudly tout among the commodities of their world the mining of “iron,” such farm bounty as “hay” and “fruit,” and the hunter’s market in “furs”; they also locate on their maps the production of “books” and “pictures.” In the brothers’ imaginary “World,” literary practices claim space and location.
Writing is also ordered in time. Periodicals make up about half of the surviving volumes in the Nelsons’ homemade library. They come in a wide range of genres. Farmers, the boys produced a few agricultural papers. The Intellectual Farmer (initially published in the real world of Goshen) asserts pragmatic goals:
Even in this modern time of ours there is still to few papers relating to farming, gardening and fruit growing and besides they are to high priced. There ought to be papers that were lower enough in price. That, however poor the farmer, he could offord [afford] to take one, and by taking, and studying it he might be made a wealthy farmer. Now this is the purpose of our paper.
By its second issue the paper relocated to the imaginary Farmingtown with its fantastically productive farms: “We have 20 or 30 million water melon plants up now who can beat that?” The boys were avid hunters and produced a slew of magazines aimed at outdoorsmen, some drawn by young hands and others with developed skill. When the Nelson family moved out of the town center, the brothers added a new “Forest Continent (FC)” to the places of their imaginary world and published “The Pioneersman” (seven issues survive) from that more wild place [figs. 3 and 4].
Many of the Nelson's periodicals document the violence and tensions of World news, the pride of major construction projects from telescopes to bridges and even in 1893, in parallel with Chicago’s Columbian exhibition, a World Fair [fig. 5]. The issue of Chit Chat included in The Hidden Literacies Project also dates from 1893 and includes among the items advertised on its back pages a souvenir album for the World Fair held in the imaginary city of Allentown on Forest Continent. Chit Chat is the only periodical the Nelson boys produced that presents itself as a family paper intended for a juvenile audience. It appears to be closely modeled on the popular family magazine Youth’s Companion, to which the Nelsons subscribed.