The Moffats

The Moffats is the first novel in Estes’s book series featuring the Moffat family. This novel introduces five characters: Mama, a hard-working widow who works as a seamstress; Sylvie, the talented eldest daughter; Joe, a kind and shy teen; 10-year-old Jane, the emotional and imaginative younger daughter; and five-year-old Rufus, the family’s eager and playful youngest sibling.

In addition, this book establishes the series’ setting, the quaint fictional town of Cranbury, Connecticut, in the years before World War l. The children’s adventures in The Moffats introduce the neighborhood’s school, church, train yard, and bakery. Writing in the 1940s, the author captures the rhythm of daily life in the early 20th-century small-town United States, describing Cranbury’s hitching posts, horses and wagons, coal barges, and train yards, as well as the family’s everyday chores and errands. Readers also meet some of the Moffat family’s neighbors, from the kind police officer Chief Mulligan and the dance teacher, Miss Chichester, to the bully Peter Frost and the obnoxious Murdock family. While their home, the “yellow house,” is no longer theirs by the end of the book, the Moffats remain in Cranbury. They still live there as the series continues in the three subsequent novels (all by Eleanor Estes): The Middle Moffat (1942), Rufus M. (1943), and The Moffat Museum (1983).

Critics lauded the series when it was first published in the 1940s, and two of the books received Newbery Honors. The author’s focus on children’s everyday adventures, and the ups and downs of childhood, makes her work similar to American author Beverly Cleary’s classics Beezus and Ramona and Henry and Beezus, and Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Chronicles of Avonlea and Anne of Green Gables. Estes’s classic series has been reprinted many times, introducing new generations to the Moffat family.