Little Goody Two Shoes -- Oliver Goldsmith

Margery and Tommy are an orphaned brother and sister, so poor that Margery only has one shoe. They are befriended by a gentleman who takes Tommy away to London and orders a pair of shoes for Margery. She is so pleased to own a whole pair of shoes that she points them out to everyone she meets, “See, two shoes”, and thus earns her nickname.

Margery has been living with a local clergyman, but is forced out by the wicked local squire and has to fend for herself. She teaches herself to read by borrowing books from the children at the local school and is soon able to teach the children, using games and songs as her method of instruction.

She grows up to become a schoolteacher and is a model of enlightened teaching. When the school roof falls in, Margery rescues the children. She is later able to offer marriage guidance to a quarrelling couple by advising them to count to twenty before losing their tempers.

Her scientific approach to education is not universally popular, however, and she finds herself arrested as a witch when she uses a barometer to forecast the weather.

Despite the ills that have befallen her she never gives in to despair, neither does she bear any grudges. Indeed, when she hears about a plot to break into the squire’s house and murder him, she tells him about it and saves his life, despite him being the cause of her initial poverty by dispossessing her father and evicting her.

She eventually marries a wealthy baronet and is reunited with her brother Tommy, who has made his own fortune overseas. She uses her wealth to good effect, buying the estate of the squire and handing the land back to the tenants. When she dies, she is mourned by all.

Although this is ostensibly a children’s book, there is much more to it than that. In his introduction as “editor”, Newbery clearly writes for an adult audience (“children of six feet high” in his words) as he points to the evils visited on the populace by grasping landlords and the legal system that favours the rich against the poor. This was written at a time when “enclosures” were forcing tenant farmers off the land and removing the common land on which the poorest rural people depended for a living. It is not surprising that Goldsmith was thought by many to be the author, given the strength of his anger directed at the squirarchy for this trend (as in “The Deserted Village”).

As well as the educational purpose of the book, with methods of teaching spelling as a game explained in great detail, Newbery introduces other enlightened thoughts along the way. For example, at one point Margery thinks she has seen a ghost but realises that it is only a neighbour’s dog. Newbery uses the incident to attack the common belief in ghosts and fairies, thus setting himself on the side of the rationalists and against the craze for fairy stories.

Also this book has been adapted as the screenplay for the Bollywood movie "Bum Bum Bole", a children's flick.