Here is a Mrs Molesworth novel with the delicacies of Victorian class distinctions at its heart although Celestina Fairchild with ‘her innocent mind’ is too young to understand the precarious position her family occupy. Besides she’s far too concerned with her tiny dolls ‘Eleanor and Amy still reposing on the hearthrug’.

Mr Fairchild, her father, is the proprietor of Seacove’s only bookseller’s and stationer’s in Pier Street, the principal thoroughfare in the little town. Seacove is a seaport ‘though not a very important one.’ Mr Fairchild is not very strong and worries about his enterprise when a new vicar for Seacove is announced and that is the Rev. Bernard Vane. The sea air it is hoped will help Mr Vane grow stronger and he arrives with his wife and three children Rosalys, Randolph and sparky, uncomplicated and tearaway Biddy. They are the rectory children.

In her anxiety Mrs Vane depends on Rosalys and rather despairs of Biddy, ‘as merry and thoughtless as can be.’ Her younger daughter receives more sympathy from Smuttie the family dog. ‘And off she set, her short legs exerting themselves valiantly for Smuttie’s sake. He of course could have run much faster, but he was far too much of a gentleman to do so, and stayed beside her, contenting himself every now and then by stopping short to look up at her, with a quick cheery bark of satisfaction and encouragement.’

Settling into the town the rectory children visit the Parade* and the bazaar and there’s Celestina choosing furniture for the doll’s house she doesn’t yet own: ‘the child stood absorbed, weighing the comparative merits of the blue and pink cotton chair seats, and of dark and light coloured wood.’

Biddy, who needs a friend, warms to Celestina. Is this a friendship that both families can approve? As Mr Fairchild warns his daughter ‘don’t you be getting any nonsense in your head of setting up to be the same as ladies’ children.’ As their acquaintance tentatively increases Mrs Vane rather envies Mrs Fairchild’s Celestina who has a biddable and obedient nature while Biddy seemingly grows wilder.

For any doll’s house fans (I’m looking at you Queen Mary, Princess Marie Louise and Colleen Moore) there is a wonderful reprise of the children’s first encounter in the bazaar when an old doll’s house is done up, despite Walter Crane’s awful illustration of the scene. With a renovated doll’s house being celebrated by all the children Mrs Molesworth closes her final page.

* This novel was first published in 1889. Commenting on the Parade Mrs Molesworth wrote that the southern Vane children had not experienced such shopping before. ‘For London shops were not as magnificent forty years ago as they are now’ implying her novel was set in about 1850. Walter Crane’s illustrations reflect the publication year.