He's bound for the north and New England. 256)Īfter borrowing a toy car from a dentist, he drives up and around Central Park to the Henry Hudson Parkway and then on to the Saw Mill River Parkway. He avoids a useless argument by not telling anyone his plans." (p. He doesn't run away from home with a child's desperation or desire to hurt his family. As Elledge puts it, "He simply leaves home. What's troubling to some parents and to others in need of a happy movie ending is a perception that the final chapters lack closure.Īfter Margalo flies the coup, so to speak, Stuart packs up a little hobo stick and walks out the door. Readers may remember subsequent scenes from the book such as Stuart's love for Margalo the bird, the intrigue with Snowball and the cat's scheming feline friends, and Margalo's rescue of Stuart from a garbage truck in the East River. As a storm gathers, Stuart successfully cuts the boat away from a paper bag that has blown over it and pulls away from the rival boat that has plowed into the rigging. Stuart dresses up like a sailor, "saunters" toward Fifth Avenue, hitches a ride on an uptown bus to 72nd Street, and arrives at the pond where he meets the owner of a "big, black schooner flying the American flag." He takes on a rival boat belonging to an obnoxious boy. 262) One memorable episode in the book - it's also in the movie - recounts Stuart's triumph in a sailboat race in Central Park's Conservatory Pond. His list includes "Stuart's love of boats, cars, canoes, skating, and travel the call of the north and the love of morning and summertime." (Scott Elledge, E. White, points out many parallels between Stuart and the author, as well as some similarities between the mouse and White's father. Scott Elledge, the foremost biographer of E. Anyway, a story about a talking mouse boy who likes to sail boats does not require such geographical realism. The houses themselves are not exact matches to ones we’d find there today, but they command the same scale and general aesthetic. The tower would not come into perspective from this particular view of the park, but perhaps the artist was inspired to substitute the graceful ornamentation of the Metropolitan Life Tower for another less beautiful building. In the illustration (on page 74, if you have the book handy), Williams has sketched in a tall building with a spire that closely resembles the real-life Met Life Tower building. The ivy-covered houses could fit in several New York neighborhoods, but the gate to the park looks just like the one around Gramercy Park's famously private space. One illustration in particular shows a streetscape with individual townhouses on the left and a park to the right. 11th Street in Greenwich Village, describes the location of Stuart's house, as follows: "The home of the Little family was a pleasant place near a park in New York City." While this imprecise location could be fulfilled by many different neighborhoods with parks, the charming adept illustrations by Garth Williams (also the illustrator for White's Charlotte's Web) suggest Gramercy Park (see related feature). White, who finished writing the book while living on W. Concerned with his potential identity problems, his sensitive parents shield him from widespread derogatory references to mice, going so far as to change one word of a line of Clement Clark Moore's Christmas poem (another made-in-New York classic) to read " Not a creature was stirring, not even a louse." (E. The largest problem is that he's so small that his family could lose him, but another issue arises with the presence of Mrs. In modern parlance we might describe Stuart as "a special needs child." He requires necessary adjustments in his domestic arrangement so he can climb up to the bathroom sink to brush his teeth. He looks like a mouse, can walk within weeks after he's born, and he never gets taller than a fraction over two inches. For starters, in White's book, unlike in the movie where the Littles find him in an orphanage, Stuart is the Little's biological child (!), albeit an unusual one.
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