Birthday: “And most generally there is something about everything that you can be glad about, if you keep hunting long enough to find it.”

Eleanor Emily Hodgman Porter (1868-1920)

Author

She falls squarely in the tradition that began with Voltaire’s Dr Pangloss, and continues, relentlessly and wholesomely, through Anne of Green Gables, Shirley Temple, Norman Vincent Peale, Emile Coue’ and the film, Amelie. Eleanor Hodgman Porter, as she was known to the public, believed in seeing the best in everything, no matter how hard it was to find.

She was born to a longtime Littleton, New Hampshire family, studied at a conservatory, and had a modest career as a singer and music teacher before marrying John Porter in 1892. Around 1900, she turned to writing. America was mad for stories of plucky children and lost heiresses who triumphed over adversity- as in Inez Irwin Hayes’ endless Maida series (1910-55)- and Hodgman was up to the challenge. In two decades she produced fifteen novels and 21 collections of short stories- over two hundred in all.

Hodgman’s claim to deathless fame was, and remains, her 1913 novel, Pollyanna, a tale of an orphaned minister's daughter boarded with old, stiff, thrawn-faced relatives in a town full of the same. Filtering her every waking moment through what she called “the glad game,” Pollyanna saw the good in everything, eventually transforming the town into an unrelievedly sunny eden.

Early in the book, Pollyanna, poking in the dregs of the barrel of castoffs her missionary father received from home, hoped for a new dress but found only a pair of crutches. From this, she determined to be grateful that she did not need them. By the book's end, she temporarily lost the use of her legs in a car accident; convalescing, she was grateful they didn’t have to be removed; and, later, even more grateful that she got the use of them back. Whether she was over the moon at having saved those crutches- you never know- I could not bear to reread the book to remember.

In a nation of just over ninety million people, Pollyanna sold over a million copies, going through 47 printings by 1920. It remained in the top ten US bestsellers for three years. So popular did Porter become that she stayed in the top ten, with various books, from 1913 to 1918, and generated an equally saccharine sequel, Pollyanna Grows Up, in 1915.

Glad Clubs sprang up across the land; one was still operating in Denver as late as 2008. Helen Hayes took Pollyanna to Broadway in 1916, and Mary Pickford, to film in 1920. Parker Brothers brought out a Glad board game; fourteen more Pollyanna books came out in the years after her death, including two in the 1990s. There were Pollyanna calendars, and almanacs offering daily reasons for gladness.

Walt Disney, who in the 1950s never met a lily that couldn’t bear gilding, cast 14-year-old British actress Hayley Mills in a remake of Pollyanna. She won the last Juvenile Oscar for her role (Annette Funicello accepted it for her) and spent six years under contract with Disney (he pressured her to turn down the title role in Lolita as unwholesome).

Within a decade of Pollyanna’s publication, the name became a household word. Webster’s Dictionary defined it as "an excessively or blindly optimistic person" and one who is cheerful to a fault. After her sequel came out, Porter herself was a bit defensive about the sunny monster she had loosed:

"You know I have been made to suffer from the Pollyanna books. ... People have thought that Pollyanna chirped that she was 'glad' at everything. ... I have never believed that we ought to deny discomfort and pain and evil; I have merely thought that it is far better to 'greet the unknown with a cheer.'

Porter died, childless, in 1920. Littleton, New Hampshire cheerfully clasps her to its civic bosom, celebrating Pollyanna Days annually and having erected a statue to the fictional heroine. 

In the 1960s a psychological mindset, in which people judge everything by how it could have been worse, came to be known as positivity bias, or Pollyannaism. In 2013, Tom Chivers, a writer for The Telegraph, noted that no less a worthy than a Nobel laureate found something in it (before offering a less sanguine take):

Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist, pointed out in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow that we systematically overestimate our chances of success: “risk takers underestimate the odds they face,” he says, confidently – or blithely – leaping into the unknown, with business ventures or marriages or attempts to climb Everest. Entrepreneurs, on average, have about a one in three chance that their business will survive for five years, but they tend to estimate their chances at nearly double that. 

Now, again, were I a negative sort of chap – but again, I’m not – I might think that this is actually bad news for humanity, that we’re a bunch of happy-clappy Pollyannaish idiots who cheerily walk blindfold off a series of metaphorical cliffs, assuming that we’ll metaphorically learn to fly. But I’d be wrong. “When action is needed,” says Kahneman, “optimism – even of the mildly delusional variety – may be a good thing.” 

The writer Tyler Cowen made this point last week. Look at all the great businesses that have sprung up in the last few years, he said, and think about how they would have sounded, if someone had pitched them realistically when they started. Amazon: “we’ll sell books online. Their shipping costs will eat up any money they save. They’ll do it for the convenience, even though they have to wait a week for the book.” Google: “we’ll build the world’s 20th search engine at a time when most of the others are being abandoned as money losers.” These were ridiculous business propositions. They hadn’t a hope. But because we’re all happy-clappy Pollyannaish idiots, someone gave them a try. 

Yes, for every Google there are ten thousand Boo.coms. That’s the point. You’d have to be slightly mad to think that your thrash metal/funk crossover band is going to make it out of your garage and into Wembley Stadium. You’d have to be daft to think your boutique cupcake bakery will ever pay its rent. But everyone who’s ever played in a band or set up a shop thinks exactly that. 

Of course, if I were a negative sort of chap – but I’m not – I might think that the profusion of pointless websites, inedible cupcakes and unlistenable music clogging the internet, high streets and airwaves is not a price worth paying for the occasional success. But I’d be wrong. It takes a special kind of optimism to see the fact that the world is full of deluded grinning fools as good news. But luckily, a special kind of optimism is exactly what we’ve got.

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