Hitty: Her First Hunudred Years by Rachel Field, illustrated by Dorothy P. Lathrop 206pp RL4


First published in 1929, Hitty: Her First Hundred Years won the Newbery Award in 1930. Narrated in the first person by Mehitabel, or Hitty, herself, she tells how she went from a sturdy piece of Mountain Ash Wood in Maine in the early 1800s to a carved doll and playmate to Phoebe Preble. Hitty's adventure begins when she and Phoebe join Captain Preble aboard his whaling ship. From there, she finds her way from a tropical island, to India, to Philadelphia then to New York. She travels with a snake charmer, attends the opera, meets Charles Dickens, has her daguerreotype taken, becomes a doll of fashion and sits as an artist's model. Sometimes she is a child's plaything. Sometimes she is loved, sometimes she is ignored and sometimes she is treated badly. And, for long periods of time, she is lost to the world whether it is underwater or in a hayloft. As children's book author and illustrator Rosemary Wells says of Hitty, a childhood favorite of hers, she loved Hitty's "indomitable spirit and the time carried her from owner to owner like a river. Hitty didn't mind being stuck in a hayloft for twenty years. Hitty also made American history come alive for me."

Hitty's first owner is Phoebe Preble, the daughter of a sea Captain living in Maine. In her first few months with Phoebe, Hitty is left behind at church, cold and alone except for some bats roosting under the pew. She is also bounced out of a berry picking basket and scooped up by a mother crow who tries to feed Hitty to her chicks. Unhappy with their meal, the chicks toss her out of the nest, which just happens to be in a pine tree in the Preble's yard. Hitty crashes through the pine needles but snags on a branch before hitting the ground. Hitty thinks of her predicament, "Suppose I have to hang here till my clothes fall into tatters. Suppose they never find me till Phoebe is grown up and too old for dolls." It is this stoic outlook that sees Hitty through many difficult times, including being left behind on Captain Preble's whaling ship as it is consumed by flames. Chapter V of the book is titled, "In Which I Join the Fishes and Rejoin the Prebles." Flipped over by a wave, Hitty recalls that it was, "rather less pleasant, but I was still in no mood to be critical when I remembered my narrow escape from the flames." Fortunately for everyone, Hitty finds herself washed up on the same island that the Prebles and crew take refuge on.
There is also a Hitty paper doll and outfits can be printed out to dress her!
For those of you who like these kinds of connections, it is rumored that the nameless doll in the antique shop who befriends the wayward rabbit at the end of the book The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo, is actually Hitty herself.

