like taking diction from a small child

When Ethel Wilson wrote The Innocent Traveller she was old. She was elderly; so far over the hill that she passed through the valley on the other side and was almost over the next hill. Compared to us 'younguns' she was practically ancient... a dinosaur, a relic, a brittle artifact! Okay, maybe not that old... but much older than her main character Topaz Edgeworth, and yet she wrote through children's eyes with flawless accuracy and believability. This became especially noticeable in "The Dark House and Detested Wife" when Topaz is writing a letter home to her parents. This was probably the only time I was fully engaged in the world of the novel, and it was because I really felt the voice of a little girl in that letter. Wilson's regular writing style contrasts like black and white with Topaz's letter as soon as it begins:

"I hope you are very well. Thank you very much for the 2/6 for me and for Hannah. Hannah's cold is still bad so Mrs. Porter kept her in bed. I like it here. Every afternoon we have a walk. The waves are lovely..." and so on.

It continues like that for the whole letter, but you only need two and a half lines to see he difference: instant grammatical errors, short sentences - sentences that don't seem to have any flow or strong connection, and just a youthful vibe. In other parts of the letter there are jumps from subject to subject, but the entire thing is one giant paragraph.
My favourite part is her cute little spelling mistakes; the kind you read in journal entries or on projects from elementary school and think, 'Was I that ridiculous?' Just enough of these gems show up in Topaz's letter, including 'amewsing'(amusing), 'plannets'(planets), and 'cruley'(curly). Wilson doesn't overdo it - after all, Topaz is a bright young lady, and too many or too few deliberate errors would be an actual error on Wilson's part.


Lastly, some of the best child-like elements of this letter are the run-on sentences. I remember doing that a lot when I was younger, just adding countless 'and's to connect my thoughts rather than commas or periods. That's how we talk when we're young, why not write that way as well? The best example of this is on page 38:

"Eliza Pinder said that Topaz Edgeworth was very fond of the sound of her own voice and I said I was thankful indeed that i hadn't a Yorkshire accent to listen to and she said I was a rude cow with no manners from Staffordshire and I said no one should say such a thing to me unscathed and I slapped Eliza Pinder and Mrs. Porter came in."

I think the most amazing part is that she spells something like 'unscathed' properly but can't get 'curly'...

But I digress! The point is that there is an obvious age gap between Ethel Wilson and her character Topaz. Wilson masterfully fills this gap however, using this letter a metaphorical gap-filling device of some sort.

That last part sounded better in my head.