Charlotte's Web by EB White illustrated by Garth Williams

“Attention, please!” he said in a loud, firm voice. “Will the party who addressed me at bedtime last night kindly make himself or herself known by giving an appropriate sign or signal!”

Wilbur has been wishing, out loud, for a friend. Charlotte quietly says she will be his friend, and she tells Wilbur she will meet him the morning. The lines above are from Wilbur - and yes it is the next morning. He wants to find the owner of the voice from last night. Wilbur is about to meet the most special friend - a spider named Charlotte. 

You are sure to remember the classic opening lines of Charlotte's Web:

Where's Papa going with that ax?” said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast. “Out to the hoghouse,” replied Mrs. Arable. “Some pigs were born last night.” “I don’t see why he needs an ax,” continued Fern, who was only eight. “Well,” said her mother, “one of the pigs is a runt. It’s very small and weak, and it will never amount to anything. So your father has decided to do away with it.” “Do away with it?” shrieked Fern. “You mean kill it? Just because it’s smaller than the others?”

Think about the fact that Fern is eight years old. When she confronts her father about the new baby pig she sure does use some sophisticated and persuasive language:

“But it’s unfair,” cried Fern. “The pig couldn’t help being born small, could it? If I had been very small at birth, would you have killed me?” Mr. Arable smiled. “Certainly not,” he said, looking down at his daughter with love. “But this is different. A little girl is one thing, a little runty pig is another.” “I see no difference,” replied Fern, still hanging on to the ax. “This is the most terrible case of injustice I ever heard of.”

Fern is also a farm kid. She goes inside and mum has breakfast ready and one of the offerings is bacon! I guess only adults will see this as a little ironic.

EB White is a master of sensory descriptions - take a look at this example:

It smelled of hay and it smelled of manure. It smelled of the perspiration of tired horses and the wonderful sweet breath of patient cows. It often had a sort of peaceful smell—as though nothing bad could happen ever again in the world. It smelled of grain and of harness dressing and of axle grease and of rubber boots and of new rope. And whenever the cat was given a fish-head to eat, the barn would smell of fish. But mostly it smelled of hay, for there was always hay in the great loft up overhead.

You could also talk to your writing group about the way EB White makes use of lists in this story:

it was full of all sorts of things that you find in barns: ladders, grindstones, pitch forks, monkey wrenches, scythes, lawn mowers, snow shovels, ax handles, milk pails, water buckets, empty grain sacks, and rusty rat traps.

Flies, bugs, grasshoppers, choice beetles, moths, butterflies, tasty cockroaches, gnats, midges, daddy longlegs, centipedes, mosquitoes, crickets—anything that is careless enough to get caught in my web. I have to live, don’t I?

It was a delicious meal—skim milk, wheat middlings, leftover pancakes, half a doughnut, the rind of a summer squash, two pieces of stale toast, a third of a gingersnap, a fish tail, one orange peel, several noodles from a noodle soup, the scum off a cup of cocoa, an ancient jelly roll, a strip of paper from the lining of the garbage pail, and a spoonful of raspberry jello.

Here, in a small clearing hidden by young alders and wild raspberry bushes, was an astonishing pile of old bottles and empty tin cans and dirty rags and bits of metal and broken bottles and broken hinges and broken springs and dead batteries and last month’s magazines and old discarded dishmops and tattered overalls and rusty spikes and leaky pails and forgotten stoppers and useless junk of all kinds, including a wrong-size crank for a broken ice-cream freezer.

I participate in a children's book club on Facebook and the book for June was Charlotte's Web. I'm fairly sure I didn't read this 1952 book as a child - I think I probably first read it in the 1980s. Today, in preparation for participating in the discussion I re-read Charlotte's Web on my bus trip into the city and then finished the final half this afternoon.

I was very surprised about the parts of the story that I had forgotten, and I was also surprised that I didn't have my expected emotional reaction to the death of beautiful Charlotte. This might be my third reading of this classic book. I did talk about Charlotte's Web here on this blog back in 2012. In that past post I shared some text quotes. Today I read this book on my Kindle so I was easily able to highlight passages that resonated with me - and they are quite different from the ones in my previous post. 

There are some rich words used in this book such as these examples: endure, objectionable, meekly, salutations, a jubilee time, sincere, scruples, compunctions, gullible, forsake, and untenable.

And also some words that are sure to be unfamiliar to young Australian children - wheat middlings, popover, midway, hominy, provender, timothy (it's a type of grass used for hay), and Crackerjack.

I had also forgotten the maths references - money given to the children at the fair and the exact number of eggs in Charlotte's egg sack.

Here is another quote that resonated with me:

Wilbur was modest; fame did not spoil him. He still worried some about the future, as he could hardly believe that a mere spider would be able to save his life. Sometimes at night he would have a bad dream. He would dream that men were coming to get him with knives and guns. But that was only a dream. In the daytime, Wilbur usually felt happy and confident. No pig ever had truer friends, and he realized that friendship is one of the most satisfying things in the world.

Companion books:

Aranea

Some Writer

Here are the famous Charlotte's Web quotes that you are sure to recognise:

“You have been my friend,” replied Charlotte. “That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die. A spider’s life can’t help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.”

It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.