I have on several occasions experienced something that I think of as positive paranoia: this is when people believe that the universe favours them and looks after their interests, often by ensuring that they are in the right place at the right time and giving them things that they need.
The universe has often helped me to get a lot of good-quality reading material and to find specific books that I wanted for producing articles for this blog. Useful books that I didn't even know existed have also been put in a good position to attract my attention.
As a child I always lived close to a good public library, and one librarian told me that I could go down to the stockroom and take whatever I liked; then there was the occasion when I felt a sudden inner prompting to visit a small town in Kent, where I found a fantasy book by Sheri S. Tepper that I had long been searching for without success; there were also the books that had been put in the right place and at just the right height to ensure that I would see them as I walked past, including one by L. M. Boston.
Finding the right books 'by chance' and people who were helpful without even being asked are experiences of particular interest and significance to me. I found some examples of other people who were favoured by fate in this way in A Nursery in the Nineties (1935), an autobiographical work by the writer, poet and playwright Eleanor Farjeon.
Eleanor Farjeon tells us about something that happened to her father, Benjamin Farjeon, when he was a boy of 14 and working in the printing trade:
“On his way to the office, Ben had to pass a second-hand bookshop. Books were his passion, and he possessed none. In the shop-window one stood open, with two pages of reading exposed. One day Ben rose a few minutes earlier, so that he might read the pages, without being late at work, and, entranced, entered the world of Fouqué's Undine. The following day, he found the leaf had been turned; the next two pages were exposed, and he devoured them. The third day the same thing happened. While he was glued to the window, the old man who kept the shop came to the door.
“You're fond of books, my boy?”
“Yes, sir.”
"Come inside whenever you like, and read what you please from the shelves."
This was just the beginning for Benjamin Farjeon. A second benefactor stepped forward:
“The old man's bookshop became Ben's library; he spent the precious dinner-hour browsing, and with his first savings bought a book of legends...he had some teaching from a schoolmaster in the neighbourhood, one Mr, Hands, who, like the old bookseller, fed him with what he needed.“
All this happened in the 1850s. Benjamin Farjeon later became a writer. He produced many stories and a large number of novels between 1865 and 1900.
The Farjeons were a united and devoted family. When Charlie, one of Eleanor Farjeon's brothers, died at the age of only 16 months, Eleanor's father Benjamin wrote a story called A Christmas Angel in his memory. In it he imagined what Charlie's life might have been if he had lived to be a young man. He dedicated the story to the children's mother: although published, it was written mainly for her comfort. Soon after publication, it was hardly ever sold or seen.
Eleanor Farjeon has a tale to tell about this story that involves an amazing 'coincidence':
“Fifty-two years after Charlie's death, thirty years after my Father's, and less than a month before my Mother's...an accident led me to go through a Hampstead street I never have occasion to pass through. In the window of a second-hand bookshop I saw a book I had long been looking for.
While the shop-keeper took it out of the window I examined his shelves. To my surprise, I saw there a copy of A Christmas Angel. I took it down, opened it, and a note from my Father fell out into my hands, fresh as the day it was written, in the year of the publication of the tale. I carried it home to my Mother; she looked at it, and at that half-a-century-old, fresh letter of my Father's, with her unforgettable smile. Once during the following week I heard her murmur, 'I am so glad about that book.' This was the real end of Little Charlie's tale.”
Eleanor Farjeon's maternal grandfather was the American actor Joseph Jefferson. He published his autobiography in 1890; it was a great success. Eleanor's mother wrote in and distributed copies to a large number of people of their acquaintance.
Over 40 years later, Eleanor Farjeon found one of these copies in a bookshop in Charing Cross Road. Just as in the above case, this happened shortly before her mother's death.
A Nursery in the Nineties is well worth reading just for its own sake, but these anecdotes make it of special interest. They raise the question of whether or not there is more to such incidents than just chance.
Eleanor Farjeon just describes the incidents as they happened, without any speculation or mention of interventions; after all my experiences, I find it difficult to believe that these things are just pure coincidence.
I remember the time when I wanted a book by Linwood Sleigh but gave up all hope of getting it because it was only occasionally available and then only at a very high price. One day I felt a prompting to look online just one more time, and found it at a very reasonable cost. It was signed by the author too!
There is also the small matter of the very inexpensive flat I found against all the odds that was close to the famous bookshops of Charing Cross Road!
Reading about the Farjeons and their books in A Nursery in the Nineties has strengthened my belief that unseen influences are sometimes at work in some people's lives.
