Eric, or Little by Little

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Yes, you bumptious young owl, it is, and that too;” and a tolerably smart slap on the face followed—leaving a red mark on a cheek already aflame with anger and indignation,—“should you like a little more?” At last the afternoon wore away, and a soft summer evening filled the sky with its gorgeous calm. Far-off they caught the sound of wheels; a carriage dashed up to the door, and the next moment Eric sprang into his mother’s arms. Although the name was in use in Anglo-Saxon England, its use was reinforced by Scandinavian settlers arriving before the Norman conquest of England. It was an uncommon name in England until the Middle Ages, when it gained popularity, and finally became a common name in the 19th century. This was partly because of the publishing of the novel Eric, or, Little by Little by Frederic Farrar in 1858.

The weaknesses are many. Death and suffering were far more omnipresent to an earlier age; nevertheless Farrar piles it on rather, so much so that it veers into sentimentalism and melodrama. I feel sure the characters were modelled on real people, and are not cardboard cut outs, but in all the events that happen to them one still feels "got at", all the time, by an author with an agenda. That agenda is a pious form of religious evangelicalism which most today would find cloying. This is a book written to persuade teenage boys to be "manly" - honest, upright, god-fearing, loyal, and sexless. When we read it now we should remember that many of them were so caught up by the power of the narrative that they did try to fashion their lives just so. It's easy to laugh at things like the bizarre passage where Farrar imagines the cemeteries filled with the emaciated forms of youths who have driven themselves to insanity and death as a result of indulging in masturbation; but we shouldn't be too ready to laugh at those who honestly tried to fashion their lives according to an ideological vision which had love and selflessness at its core. I don’t want to labour the point, except to say: Eric is at least as much about death and the pain of bereavement as it is about sex and the dangers of masturbation. In this, it is the heir to a long tradition of mournful (or if you prefer: morbid) stories of child death that characterise 18th and 19th-century writing for and about children. The Victorians faced death more straightforwardly than we do today, I think; they were less embarrassed by it, and better equipped with social protocols for handling it. Very well, Williams, you are placed in the lowest form—the fourth. I hope you will work well. At present they are learning their Caesar. Go and sit next to that boy,” pointing towards the lower end of the room; “he will show you the lesson, and let you look over his book. Barker, let Williams look over you!”Farrar carefully recounts these episodes only to denounce each event as immoral — Eric is invariably caught or claims responsibility for each debacle and duly punished while his superior friends pray for his salvation — he nonetheless makes them very entertaining, which probably explains why Eric enjoyed such popularity in the mid nineteenth-century. The pious moral tone underlying every jaunt must have appealed to adults while there remains just enough excitement to satisfy youthful readers.

Worse than that a good deal. They were doing something which, if Eric doesn’t take care, will one day be his ruin.” First-Name Basis: Eric and his best friend Edwin Russell agree to call each other by their first names.The first element, ei- may be derived from the older Proto-Norse * aina(z), meaning "one, alone, unique", [1] as in the form Æ∆inrikr explicitly, but it could also be from * aiwa(z) "everlasting, eternity", [2] as in the Gothic form Euric. [3] The second element - ríkr stems either from Proto-Germanic * ríks "king, ruler" (cf. Gothic reiks) or the therefrom derived * ríkijaz "kingly, powerful, rich, prince"; from the common Proto-Indo-European root * h₃rḗǵs. [4] The name is thus usually taken to mean "sole ruler, autocrat" or "eternal ruler, ever powerful". [5] Eric used in the sense of a proper noun meaning "one ruler" may be the origin of Eriksgata, and if so it would have meant "one ruler's journey". [6] The tour was the medieval Swedish king's journey, when newly elected, to seek the acceptance of peripheral provinces. Eric is one of the most commonly used Germanic names in the United States, along with Robert, William, Edward and others.