The Moffats series by Eleanor Estes

First published:The Moffats, 1941; The Middle Moffat, 1942; Rufus M., 1943; all illustrated

Type of work: Domestic realism

Themes: Family, friendship, and coming-of-age

Time of work: Just before and during World War I

Recommended Ages: 10-13

Locale: The fictional town of Cranbury, Connecticut

Principal Characters:

• Sylvie Moffat, the oldest in the family, who likes to sing, perform in plays, and paint
• Joey Moffat, the oldest son, who earns money doing odd jobs; likes to whittle, whistle, and fiddle with radio equipment; and hates to dance
• Janey Moffat, the imaginative and resourceful middle Moffat, from whose perspective many of the family’s adventures are narrated
• Rufus Moffat, the family’s youngest and most self-reliant member
• Mama, the children’s widowed mother, who must work hard as a dressmaker but still has time to listen to their problems and guide their actions

The Story

When the reader is introduced to this engaging family in the first book of the series, Sylvie is fifteen, Joey twelve, Janey nine, and Rufus five and a half. In the course of the three volumes, about three years pass but with relatively few changes in the Moffats’ circumstances. There is a peaceful, reassuring sameness to their lives in the small town of Cranbury, near New Haven, Connecticut. None of these books builds toward a central moment of crisis; instead, there are many small moments, touching and humorous, strung together on a slender thread of plot. John Rowe Townsend has identified the linking elements for the three books as the threatened sale of their home in The Moffats; Janey’s solicitous attention to Mr. Buckle, Cranbury’s oldest inhabitant, in The Middle Moffat; and the children’s contributions to the war effort in Rufus M. Continuity is also provided by point of view: The first two books are told from Janey’s perspective, the third from Rufus’.

One set of similar episodes has one of the Moffats encountering some new experience, often with hilarious results. Janey proves to be a great shot when she tries basketball, but the buttons, suspenders, and seams that give way every time she makes a basket convince her to give up the sport after this first game. Rufus looks forward for many years to his first day of school, never dreaming that he would spend most of it riding to and from New Haven in a boxcar with truant Hughie Pudge. Rufus’ first time to get his very own library card (which further involves his printing his name for the first time), his first attempts at ventriloquism, and his first encounter with a neighbor’s player piano (he tries to touch and talk to the invisible pianist) are so delightfully amusing as to make readers laugh out loud.

In some of the chapters the Moffats take part in an event that concerns the community at large. Undecided whether they should spend their precious nickels on ice cream cones or a ride on the new Second Avenue trolley line, Joey, Janey, and Rufus decide that they have gotten their money’s worth on the trolley when they—and half of Cranbury—witness two trolley cars brought into head-to-head combat by their dueling motormen. Not content with the bouquets and patriotic songs with which his school sends off a trainload of soldiers, Rufus breaks ranks and slips the washcloth he knitted himself (Janey says that it looks more like a fishnet) into the hand of a waving soldier. The slip of paper pinned to it reads only “Rufus M.,” but one day, to Rufus’ great delight, the postman delivers to his classroom a postcard from a soldier named Al, now stationed in France. It is addressed to “Rufus M., Room Three, School, Cranbury, Conn., U.S.A.”

Some of the most humorous episodes have the children participating in public performances. Joey’s rendition of the sailor’s hornpipe during the dancing-school recital is not going well at all until a neighborhood dog that once belonged to a sailor joins him on the stage and turns it into a successful duet. When the three younger Moffats play the three bears to Sylvie’s Goldilocks in a Town Hall benefit performance, Jane, the middle Moffat, is naturally cast as the middle bear. The problem is that she has to spend most of the play without the head of her bear costume and the rest of it with the head on backward. Janey’s at-home organ concert is equally fraught with amusing problems. As she begins to pick out “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” the only tune she can play, the pedals break, and a cloud of freshly hatched moths fly out to settle on her audience of screaming ladies.

Some of the chapters focus on the relationship between the Moffats and some person outside the family. On Halloween, the children get revenge on the bully Peter Frost by rigging up a ghost in their attic using Madame, Mama’s dressmaking bust. Throughout the second book, Jane develops a friendship with the oldest inhabitant of Cranbury and goes to great lengths—for example, following him down the street to make sure that no dogs frighten him or to offer an umbrella should it rain—to help him reach his one hundredth birthday, which the whole town then joyously celebrates.

Context

As examples of domestic realism, the Moffats books are part of a tradition that began in the nineteenth century with works such as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868-1869) and continued with E. Nesbit’s turn-of-the-century novels about the Bastable children. Estes’ Moffats series, written midcentury, is more contemporary with the fiction of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Elizabeth Enright. Like almost all realistic family stories written for children before the 1960’s, the books about the Moffats look for positive solutions to whatever problems the family faces and present an essentially wholesome view of life. Although some critics consider books such as The Moffats dated and sentimental, most selectors of children’s books find them perennially appealing and believe that they make a healthful balance against examples of the more gritty realism of the 1960’s and after, with its graphic depiction of social problems. The line drawings of Louis Slobodkin, which enliven the pages of all three entries in the Moffats series, emphasize the flesh-and-blood quality of the characters and underscore the humor in each experience.

Like the March family in Little Women and Nesbit’s Bastables, the Moffats are a poor, one-parent household. Being poor provides the Moffat children with character-building situations and makes readers root for them more fervently than if they were financially secure and all their problems were emotional or psychological ones. Readers follow along anxiously as the Moffat children search for the lost coal money or ponder possibilities for spending the coins they get infrequently for treats. Being without one parent makes them simultaneously more independent and more responsible. Because Mama must work hard at her dressmaking business, the children undertake many of their adventures without her. At the same time that they are learning to fend for themselves, however, they feel secure in knowing that they can count on their mother’s love and on the values she has instilled in them.

Some of the appeal for present-day readers may be nostalgia for the bygone era these books depict; children may show great interest in the trolley cars and horse-drawn wagons, watering troughs and hitching posts, gas meters and kerosene lamps, and other paraphernalia of the past. Nevertheless, the most lasting contribution of the Moffats books is their depiction of loving family relations, of children who are not goody-goody but essentially good. The Moffat children learn the joys of sharing and of helping out in the family. They make mistakes, as when Jane guiltily spends a nickel on an ice cream cone for herself alone rather than on penny candies the whole family could enjoy. They learn from their mistakes, and so do the readers—and all have fun in the process.