Meet Samantha: An American Girl (1986)

Nine-year-old Samantha Parkington is enjoying a charmed, luxurious childhood in a Victorian mansion in Mount Bedford, New York. Despite her wealth, she's lonely and isolated, desperate to feel that she has a family to call her own. We learn that Samantha's parents died in a boating accident when she was five. She's being raised by her prim and proper grandmother, Grandmary (Mary Edwards), who cares for Samantha but is too strict and emotionally distant to fill the void left by Samantha's late mother (Lydia Edwards). For maternal comfort, Samantha is more likely to turn to the household staff, especially Jessie, the seamstress who maintains her adorable wardrobe.

Nellie O'Malley, a girl just Samantha's age, is hired as a maid for Samantha's neighbors. She knows she shouldn't talk to a young lady like Samantha, but Sam decides the two of them will be friends anyway. The two girls meet in the lilac hedge between the two houses and realize they have something in common: they both miss their parents. Nellie's are alive, but they live back in the city.

When Jessie resigns her position and leaves abruptly, Samantha is devastated. Nellie knows where Jessie lives and reluctantly agrees to lead Samantha through the "bad part of town" to find her. It turns out that Jessie has had a baby— that's why she left. If that isn't enough, Nellie leaves too. She develops a bad cough, and her employers send her back home, afraid she will become too sickly to work. Samantha says goodbye and sends Nellie off with a basket of food and a special gift: the beautiful doll that Samantha had begged Grandmary for, named Lydia.

This book has a quintessential Samantha ending. In just a few pages, all problems have been abruptly and totally solved. Grandmary is initially upset that Samantha "lost" the expensive doll, but after she learns the full story, she agrees that Samantha's sense of value is just fine. She promises to help Nellie and agrees to hire Jessie back and allow her to bring her infant to work. (We are left to assume that this arrangement works fine for Jessie?)

In the classic American Girl canon, the Meet book situates the Girl in her family and community and forces her to grapple with her place in a bigger world. In Meet Samantha, our Samantha is often confused or frustrated with "the way grownups do things." She encounters injustices of classism and racism, though she doesn't have the language for what she's experiencing. She begins to feel tension between Grandmary's old-fashioned view of the world and the experiences of Nellie, Jessie, and even other members of her family, like her beloved Uncle Gard and his "special friend," Cornelia Pitt. Samantha clearly has a lot to learn, but we can already see her fearless and determined problem-solving at work. To Samantha, any problem can be solved by her attention and intervention. Her privilege, which often blinds her to the reality of the world, also arms her with tools to improve that same world.

Early editions of the books and catalogs call Samantha "Victorian," but later printings and descriptions stop using the term to describe her collection. By the strictest definitions, the Victorian era ended in 1901 with Queen Victoria's death, so the setting of the Samantha books would technically be Edwardian… if we still want to use British periodization for this American story. It would be more appropriate to refer to Samantha's time as the Progressive Era or simply the turn of the century.

Personally, I don't mind calling Samantha's world Victorian, especially in the early books. She is being raised by Grandmary, a true lady of the American "Gilded Age" counterpart to the late Victorian era. The house she lives in, the clothes she wears, the manners she's taught, and the expectations set before her are all deeply Victorian. She's not aware that much of the country would consider her style and culture "old-fashioned." In later books, Samantha will be exposed to the rapid changes happening outside her door, and the reader will see that she is caught between two eras.

The "Peek Into the Past" covers daily life for proper young ladies like Samantha, how different it was from the lives of servants like Nellie and Jessie, and how ideas about what was "proper" for women were changing at the turn of the century.