★★★★★ That a man can stand up

Johnny Tremain

Esther Forbes

** spoiler alert **

I was an elementary schoolkid when I read Esther Forbes's Johnny Tremain for the first time. It quickly became one of my favorite books. It was one of many books I read about American Revolutionary War history, but this one was special. It was special because of Johnny's personal story. For most of the book, Johnny is not an admirable character. As the book begins Johnny is an apprentice silversmith. He is a skilled artist, the chief of Mr Lapham's apprentices. He is not generous to his inferiors -- this is surely how he thinks of the other, less skilled apprentices, and even perhaps Mr Lapham himself.

He falls from his lofty position -- an accident injures his hand. From being the lord of Lapham's apprentices he now falls to become the drudge, since his deformed hand allows him no finer work. The other apprentices, whom he treated with hauteur, are now not generous to him. Johnny reacts to his fall by going into what can only be described as an Epic Pout.

From this he is rescued by a friendship. His new friend, an older boy called Rab, tries to convince him that his injury is something he can live with. Rab is also involved with Sam Adams's Sons of Liberty, and thus Johnny becomes involved with the rebels. And the rest is history, literally.

One would like to imagine that the heroes of the Revolution fought not just "that a man can stand up", but that any person -- man, woman, black or white -- can stand up. One could say that, in the end, they did, though that was not the end they saw.

This 1998 edition has an Introduction by Gary D. Schmidt that I found quite interesting. Before she wrote Johnny Tremain, Forbes was not a novelist, but a historian. She had won a Pulitzer Prize for a nonfiction work, Paul Revere and the World He Lived In. She was, Schmidt tells us, dyslexic. She couldn't spell, she couldn't punctuate. (I sort of wish I knew the names of the editors who managed to bring these extraordinary works to publication.) Johnny Tremain was published in 1943, when the world was in the middle of the second World War, and it was still far from clear who would win. It was an affirmation that the war was worth fighting.

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