Hitty, Her First Hundred Years

First published in 1929 and winner of the 1930 Newbery Medal, “Hitty, Her First Hundred Years” is Rachel Field’s children’s novel concerning an inanimate but conscious wooden doll named Mehitabel, or Hitty. Hitty’s life begins when she is carved from the magical wood of the Mountain Ash tree, in the early nineteenth century by Phineas Black, a peddler, for the daughter of the Preble family, Phoebe. Hitty travels with the Preble family, whose father is the captain of a whaling ship, from their coastal village to the South Seas, where they are waylaid by shipwreck. What follows for Hitty is a journey of one hundred years. Separated from the Preble family, Hitty returns to the United States where she finds herself a prop in a traveling circus act, later in the high society of the New York literary scene, then involved in the world of the theater when she is picked up as a lucky charm by an actress, and finally ending up in an antique shop. A fascinating tale of the progress that occurs over a hundred years through the eyes of a magical doll, “Hitty, Her First Hundred Years” remains a classic of children’s literature.