Word: pollyannaism
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Nine years ago, when Pollyanna and its sequel Pollyanna Grows Up had newly burst upon the view, one reviewer, more prophetically than he knew, remarked : "Pollyanna retires from her second book at the age of 20 and she is 'glad, glad, glad for - everything,' for she and Jimmy love each other. . . . Two other incidental romances and some mysteries still remain unsolved ; so [he added apprehensively] it may be necessary for more 'glad' books to follow...
...Story. Pollyanna Whittier, inventor of the famed "glad game" (which consists of picking out silver linings for all the blackest clouds), marries Jimmy Pendleton in Chapter One and becomes forthwith "just the entrancing, glad little bride you would expect her (from the previous Pollyanna books**) to be." It rains on her wedding-day, Jimmy hasn't much money, their apartment looks out on fire-escapes, Jimmy eats up the chicken-salad she was saving for dinner, just because he happens to find it alone and unprotected in the icebox - but things of this sort are, to Pollyanna, merely added...
Then she goes back to her old home in Beldingsville, Vt., lives with her Aunt Polly. Here it was that she had arrived some years before (in Pollyanna), a forlorn little orphan determined to play the "glad game." This was the same little corner she had brightened before, and naturally it falls on its neck to make her welcome, it has not forgotten the wistful little minister's daughter who even found something to be "glad" about when a pair of crutches was all that came for her in the missionary barrel...
...Significance. When Eleanor H. Porter, author of the first two Pollyanna books, died four years ago, Pollyanna ostensibly died with...
...manipulated that lone porker, that he had at length attained unto dizzying financial plenitude and a mansion on Chicago's Gold Coast. He had, moreover, a passion for cleanliness. In public life, he stood for: "Clean Water Supply (Prohibition!), Clean Education (Paul Revere's Ride!), Clean Literature (Pollyanna!), Clean Minds (belief in the stork...