Ivanhoe was written in 1819 and I loved it almost 160 years later.
The Hobbit was already 40 when I read it.
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court was from 1889. So almost 90 when I read it.
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was 1970 so over 100 when I read it.
It is weird to realize the Heinlein books I devoured at the time were only 11-25 years old. Not really that old at all.
My Grandfather was an iceman before he was a cab driver. So he kept the icebox into the 40s, but they were apparently among the last in NYC.
I would guess more rural areas kept them longer though.
Same here. Loved the classics. I remember being amused by the obsolete technology and terminology.
(Nowadays, I’d recognize it as “intrigued by steampunk”, especially The Nautilus!)
I read some of those to my kids, and my youngest and I had to read well past bedtime one night, when Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher were lost in the pitch dark cave… we were scared.
Funnily enough, the opposite was true to an extent in Israel; my mom’s Kibbutz had refrigerators long before they were common in households in the city.
Of course, the Kibbutzniks didn’t have fridges in their own homes yet, either.
They did get internet early - my grandparents were the first people in my family to have Internet at home. My grandpa was the person who introduced me to Google, haha.
I was in elementary school in the 1970s and the Jewish kids went to Hebrew school while the Catholic kids went to catechism. I was jealous that I didn’t get to leave school for something else, though I suspect both of those were boring.
In the 1993 movie Shadowlands, the character of C. S. Lewis is quoted as saying “We read to know that we are not alone”. In reality, he never said this precisely, but in the book An Experiment in Criticism, he wrote “My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others”. What children do in reading many sorts of books is not just learn new vocabulary and grammatical forms in English but learn older kinds of technologies and social forms.
I had no problem in giving my grandnephews and grandnieces for Christmas presents things like Stratemeyer Syndicate books (Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, Bobbsey Twins, etc.), Tom’s Midnight Garden, Five Children and It, The Story of Doctor Dolittle, Black Beauty, The Black Stallion, and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. They become better readers, of course. They also become aware of other technologies, other times, other parts of the world, other social classes, and other societies.
Kids who have experienced an appropriate level of education and socialization can get their minds around a story set in a different environment but where the message is on point for them.
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Re: unfamiliar things in an environment, I sometimes see an opposite phenomenon online in “reaction” videos where (nominally adult) people go “Wait, was there THAT back THEN?” …um, they just showed you, yes.
That’s a tough read for a 15 year old, I only read it when I was an adult, but I read similar stuff before that age like “Papillon” by Henri Charriére, at 12 or 13. Kids can take it.
ETA: I just read the synopsis of “Are You There God? it’s Me, Margaret” on wiki, and those are timeless themes for kids in incipient puberty, notwithstanding the time and place. Although I am male, I remember having similar troubles and questions about my body and sexuality and also about religion and my (fading) relationship with God. No wonder the book still relates to today’s kids.
I thought I remembered seeing some news-ish item a couple of weeks ago about some update to Tales if a 4th Grade Nothing (possibly just the cover art) but I can’t find it again. But I did see these two lists. It is interesting about how many of the recommended books in the first list are at least as old as the 1970s. And how little the second list overlaps with it.
When I was a kid I just thought “ice box” was a slang term for a refrigerator (I’m in my mid 40s). I’m not sure at what point I realized people used to have literal ice boxes to keep their food cool. (In fairness, lots of people did call fridges that long after actual ice boxes fell out of use).
Getting back to the OP, when I was in middle school in the early 1990s I read lots of early Beverly Cleary books, stuff she wrote in the 1950s. I’m sure I noticed some things like different customs of the time, but I still was able to identify with the characters.
I just recently watched the film adatation of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margret. It’s currently available on Netflix in the US. They just set the film in 1970 rather than trying to modernize it, which was probably the right move.
For some people it was, my mom occasionally called it the fridge the ice box. I knew people that called it the Frigidaire also. When she got sick at one point and I did the shopping for her, I had to ask an older lady in the supermarket what Oleo was as that is what my Mom wrote for margarine. That was the first big name brand of margarine apparently.
For Judy Blume fans there is a service area dedicated to her on the Garden State Parkway. It was recently revamped and has a nice display about her and other New Jersey authors. And there is a Shake Shack.
