Episode One: Tip
L. Frank Baum published The Marvelous Land of Oz in 1904. His publisher wanted a new Oz book for Christmas and he obliged. Because Baum was so pleased with the success of the stage play based on The Wizard of Oz, he wrote the new book with an eye to adapting it to the theater.
It shows. The comedy team of David Montgomery and Frank Stone playing the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow were the stars of the Wizard of Oz stage play, and Baum basically wrote The Land of Oz for them. It's even dedicated to them:
To those excellent good fellows and comedians David C. Montgomery
and Frank A. Stone whose clever personations
of the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow have delighted
thousands of children throughout the land, this book is
gratefully dedicated by THE AUTHOR
The Land of Oz is also one of the few Oz books which don't involve any interlopers from the "real world" inhabited by Baum and his readers. All the characters are natives of Oz. Personally, I really liked this aspect of the story. Even as a kid I had the vague sense that there was artifice behind the idea of the "portal fantasy" in which a person from our world enters a fantasy setting. I always liked stories which were immersive. To me, Oz is more real without Dorothy wandering through it.
Apparently Baum's readers and publishers didn't share my view, because the next several books all put Dorothy front and center again. Don't get me wrong -- I've got no complaints about Dorothy. She's pure awesomeness in a calico dress. But it is nice to see the people of Oz through their own eyes.
Now, because fewer readers are as familiar with Land of Oz (or any of the later volumes) as they are with Wizard, I'm going to spend a bit more time summarizing the plot as I go. I'll try to keep it brief.
The story begins with a real rarity: a male protagonist in an Oz book. Tip (short for Tippetarius) is a boy who lives with an old witch called Mombi. Neither one of them is happy with the arrangement. Mombi terrorizes the boy, who fights back by slacking off as much as he can manage.
It's very tempting to speculate about how much autobiography Baum put into his depiction of Tip. Obviously he didn't grow up in the home of an evil witch -- his parents were well-off and (except for a stint at military school) his childhood seems to have been a happy one. But something tells me there's a bit of young Lyman in this passage:
"But you must not suppose he worked all the time, for he felt that would be bad for him. When sent to the forest Tip often climbed trees for birds' eggs or amused himself chasing the fleet white rabbits or fishing in the brooks with bent pins. Then he would hastily gather his armful of wood and carry it home. And when he was supposed to be working in the corn-fields, and the tall stalks hid him from Mombi's view, Tip would often dig in the gopher holes, or if the mood seized him—lie upon his back between the rows of corn and take a nap. So, by taking care not to exhaust his strength, he grew as strong and rugged as a boy may be."
When Mombi goes off for a couple of days to buy groceries, Tip is left idle and comes up with the idea of making a pumpkinhead dummy as a joke to scare Mombi. (Let us all for a moment consider the refreshingly non-paranoid mindset of 1904, when it was apparently unremarkable to leave a boy of about ten alone for a few days.)
Tip devotes pretty much a full day of hard work to his little joke -- which any parent will recognize as absolutely true to life. Get a kid interested in a task and it's amazing how long they can keep at it. Finally he gets the pumpkinhead man finished and set up where Mombi will see it when she returns.
Her reaction is a little different from what Tip expected. She's too hard-nosed to be really scared, and she decides the pumpkinhead man is an ideal test subject for one of the things she purchased on her outing: the magical Powder of Life. So she scatters some of the powder over the dummy, utters the appropriate magic words, and brings it to life! Tip's dummy is now Jack Pumpkinhead.
But the Powder of Life isn't the only magical marvel Mombi acquired on her trip. She also picked up the recipe for a Potion of Petrification, and has decided that Tip would be more useful as a marble statue to decorate the garden.
Tip is understandably less than keen on this project, and while the potion cools overnight he escapes the house with Jack Pumpkinhead and sets out on the road to nowhere in particular.
There's a nice inversion here of the plot of Wizard of Oz -- so complete that I can only conclude Baum was doing it on purpose. Dorothy was a little girl from our world who got sent to Oz and wanted only to get home. Tip is a little boy from Oz whose chief desire is to get the hell away from home.
Since he's clearing out for good, Tip takes along a few items which may be useful on his trip, including the Powder of Life and some cheese to eat. I find it amusing that L. Frank Baum never bothers to engage in any justification for this kind of casual theft, which seems to be epidemic in Oz. His characters all behave like roleplaying gamers: "get the STUFF!"
In this case it's perhaps justifiable. Certainly the fact that Mombi intends to make Tip into a marble statue can be seen as removing any sense of obligation he might feel toward her.
Anyway, by Chapter Three Tip and his creation are on The Road to Adventure.
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