title: The Madonna of the Tubs
author: Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart
description: "The Madonna of the Tubs" is a singularly pathetic idyl of a Massachusetts fishing town.
   The habit of dropping from the cloudland of the ideal to the bare and pitiless world of reality, which seems to please Miss Phelps, though sometimes surprising, not to say alarming, has a delightful effect of keeping the balance true between the romance of reality and the reality of romance.
   At all events, she wins us to belief in the possibility of thoughts, ambitions, and passions above the every-day circumstance of squalor with which she surrounds her practical work-a-day heroine. Perhaps, for all the sordid detail, Miss Phelps throws a glamour about the facts of her tale which life would not; but Dickens did the same, and we wept with him, and we are not sure that the popular voice would not be found favorable rather to the glamour than to the facts, if one must be subordinated to the other in fiction.
   The heroine, Mary Jane Salt, is the most genuine creation of the story; and her rough husband is strongly outlined, and her crippled son, who might easily have failed to be more than a conventional property of romance, is a vital personage. The illustrations which accompany the text are fortunate in conception and execution.
   -"The Church Review," Volume 49