The literary Keary family had a home (homes?) somewhere around Trent Vale / Penkhull, Stoke-on-Trent, and Annie Keary’s children’s novel Sidney Grey: A Tale of School Life (1857) was said to have… “dealt with their [north] Staffordshire region and its brick-kilns” in the 1850s. This fact is also mentioned in a childhood memoir, Memoir of Annie Keary…

“On the other side a shady road [at Trent Vale], a church almost opposite the gate; beyond the church the village, and beyond the village, to give the needful inferno element, one or two brick kilns, whose ministers (the ‘ultimi Britanni’ [ancient Britons] of our [childhood] world) were evil-looking, dark-faced boys, terrible to speech or thought. These brick-kilns were introduced into one of the stories Aunt Annie wrote for us, which was afterwards published under the title of Sidney Grey.”

This is the novel Sidney Grey: A Tale of School Life (1857). Still no sign of this novel online, but there is now her novel Sidney Grey: A Year from Home (1876). This is mostly set in “Dunstall, Staffordshire”, after the first few chapters, but with no mention of the brick yards. There is a short melodramatic episode of a rescue of some stray tots from a Hanley bottle-kiln, but that is clearly a ceramics factory. For this reason I suspect Sidney Grey: A Year from Home is a sequel.

No local colour in Sidney Grey: A Year from Home, apart from the brief rescue from a pottery kiln. But half way through we do get an interlude in which there is something better than brick kilns… a long imaginative children’s fairy-tale from Annie Keary, “Through the Wood”. Here it is, extracted in PDF and OCR’d…

Download: keary-through-the-wood-ocr.pdf

This is not the same “Through the Wood” as the story in her collection Little Wanderlin, and other fairy tales.