Monday’s Child

“Monday’s Child” is a birth-day rhyme that frames the novel’s concern with what birth seems to promise and what a child actually receives. Its Sabbath-day verse accompanies the story of Sunday Small, while its Monday line is recalled when Kitty arrives at Treetops. Between those appearances, the rhyme’s cheerful language sits against abandonment, coerced pregnancy, and the struggle to secure a safe home for a child.

The Sabbath-day verse and Sunday’s identity

The novel presents the rhyme’s opening line as: “The child who is born on the Sabbath day is bonnie and blithe and good and gay . . .” The words offer a compact blessing, associating a day of birth with a child’s character and prospects. Their association with Sunday Small is more complicated than the promise of the verse: she was left on the workhouse steps as a newborn and grew up without knowing who her mother was. She later describes imagining that her mother might come for her, before accepting that her mother might be dead or might simply have wanted to leave her.

Sunday’s birth day also becomes part of her attempt to understand her origins. In the attic at Treetops Manor, she recalls that Lady Huntley’s third daughter was born on Sunday’s own birthday. Alongside the matching shawls and the dates of the earlier stillbirths, this memory leads Sunday to suspect that she may be Lady Huntley’s daughter. The rhyme’s Sabbath-day wording therefore touches a question the novel makes consequential: whether the circumstances of a child’s birth determine the place and identity assigned to her, or whether those origins can be recovered and reinterpreted.

Pregnancy, separation, and the limits of a blessing

The cheerful promise of the verse contrasts with the experiences of Cissie and Daisy. Cissie confides to Sunday that she is going to have a baby, but later discovers that the carriage sent for her is from Hatter’s Hall asylum, not the safe countryside destination she had been promised. She pleads to be allowed to care for her baby and identifies Mr Pinnegar as the man who forced her; Miss Frost instead denounces her and permits her removal. When Lady Huntley asks what happened to Cissie’s baby, Mr Crackett says that it apparently died at birth, leaving its fate uncertain.

Daisy later tells Sunday that Pinnegar hurt her and threatened to send her brother, Tommy, to Hatter’s Hall if she reported him. Sunday hides Daisy’s pregnancy while they consider what to do, knowing that exposing it might lead to a repetition of Cissie’s fate. When Daisy says she wants nothing to do with the baby because it will bear a part of Pinnegar, Sunday answers from her own experience of abandonment: she asks Daisy to imagine how the child might feel on learning that its mother had not wanted it. The rhyme’s promise of a blessed child does not protect these girls from coercion, stigma, or separation; the novel places its ideal of birth beside the unequal power that shapes what follows.

The Monday line and Kitty’s welcome

The rhyme returns at the novel’s close in a more intimate scene. Sunday confirms that the newly arrived infant is a girl named Katherine, whom they will call Kitty. Cissie approves of the name and admires the baby; Sunday observes that Kitty was born the previous day and recalls the saying, “Monday’s child is fair of face!” Cissie then takes Kitty back to the nursery, while Sunday calls after her that she will come and help after dinner.

This use turns the rhyme from a general blessing into a small act of welcome. Kitty is not left outside the circle of care: Sunday and Cissie name her, admire her, and carry her into the nursery. The moment also gives the birth-day saying a practical counterpart. Rather than treating a child’s character or future as settled by a rhyme, the scene emphasizes the human acts of receiving, tending, and making room for her.

A recurring contrast

The two uses of “Monday’s Child” gather the novel’s calendar motif around very different childhoods. Sunday’s possible connection to Lady Huntley remains bound up with questions of concealment and abandonment, while Kitty’s arrival is met openly by people prepared to care for her. The rhyme’s optimistic language thus gains its force not as a guarantee that every child will be “bonnie and blithe,” but as a measure against which the characters’ actions can be read. In the closing scene, the blessing becomes most persuasive when it is answered by care.