Britain “a nation of readers,” and though literacy and readership were not universal, radical transformations in the political and social fabric prompted change in which members of society had the leisure and means to read for self-edification and for pleasure. Education was not compulsory in Britain until 1870, but literacy rates were on the rise in the eighteenth century, as was the accessibility of novels in bookshops and subscription-based circulating libraries. The expanding middle class multiplied the number of readers with pocket money, and additional leisure time also emerged, particularly for women, with modern advances in household labor. The accessibility and popularity of this enticing new narrative form met with strong resistance from cultural skeptics. Puritan-style qualms about fiction were common, and there was frequent public complaint that the nation and its traditional social hierarchies were under attack by working class members who “aspir[ed] to the leisure pursuits of their betters” (Watt 1957, p. 45). The novel thereby early gained a reputation as lesser literature, and was “widely regarded as a typical example of the debased kind of writing by which booksellers pandered to the reading public” (p. 54). Novelist Daniel Defoe countered this disdain for fiction by insisting that his fictional works were actually recovered autobiographies; the Preface to Crusoe names Defoe the “editor,” who declares the novel that follows “a just history of fact; neither is there any appearance of fiction in it” (Defoe 1985, p. 25). Nonfiction, Defoe demonstrates, was widely understood to be the most acceptable literature for public consumption.
Nonetheless, fanciful books for children multiplied in the second half of the eighteenth century in Britain as Lockean approaches took hold. However, works like Newbery’s The Renowned History of Giles Gingerbread faced backlash from some in the wake of the French Revolution. Giles Gingerbread and similar protagonists modeled social mobility, and many public commentators read these tales as revolutionary and worried that the upwardly mobile spirit embodied in these fictional works might infiltrate children’s social education. In response to such fanciful and thus potentially revolutionary tales, nonfiction and didactic fiction surged in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. Late Enlightenment authors Sarah Trimmer and Hannah More were at the forefront of this movement to create books that “were part of a campaign to reanimate love of Church and State” (Jackson 1989, p. 175). It became posh to sneer at fairy tales and fanciful stories not as untruthful, but as unproductive. Fiction remained less endorsed than nonfiction until mid-nineteenth century, and loud voices warning against the dangers of fiction were a prominent part of the nineteenth-century conversation about what children ought to read.
In the United States, fiction fears had been quelled somewhat by the mid-1800s, but novels and stories still met with disdain, as skeptics like the prolific antebellum author Lydia Maria Child continued to view such works as “literary confectionary,” texts to indulge in only sparingly (Child 1972, p. 87). As a result, nonfiction works remained more widely read and recommended to child readers until the brink of the American Civil War. Discussing antebellum attitudes toward fiction, Barbara Hochman observes, “Nineteenth-century ministers, educators, and benevolent reformers celebrated the moral significance of sympathy but they cautioned against the confusion that the reading of fiction might produce through identification” (Hochman 2011, p. 109). Instead, American readers as far apart as Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln were celebrated for youths spent devouring nonfiction writings instead of novels or Newberys, and were held up as exemplars of studiousness and well-rounded intellect. Until mid-century, juvenile nonfiction remained the respected cultural gateway through which children were expected to pass in order to learn about the world and chart their futures.
Types of Nonfiction and Where They Came From
The advent of a children’s literature publishing industry coincided with a larger eighteenth-century publishing boom. Through the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, English publishers were increasingly attentive to young readers, but it took a few decades before children were recognized as a separate audience. James Janeway’s Token for Children (1671 and 1672), for example, featured child protagonists, yet his introductions for adult and child readers make clear that he imagined it as a text for the whole family’s edification. Enterprising mid-century printers, however, recognized children’s books could be an industry in its own right. Mary Cooper and Thomas Boreman put out fewer works than Newbery, but they were also at the forefront of children’s publishing. By the turn of the century, texts for children were a standard commodity in the vibrant bookselling district of St. Paul’s Churchyard, London, where bookseller Benjamin Talbert delighted young consumers with a shop stocked with a collection of titles just for them (Paul 2011, p. 19).
English youth benefited from an established trade infrastructure ready to produce once children’s literature became an established entity. American audiences were less fortunate. Though Puritans were quick to establish the printing press in Massachusetts, publishing in the New World was expensive and unwieldy. For most of the eighteenth century, even after the Revolution, the English import trade flourished, “propelled by early legal constraint, American material shortages, and the economic advantages of a London trade dominance and organization which for most of the century outweighed even the obstacles of transatlantic time and distance” (Raven 2007, p. 195). Prominent printers like Massachusetts’s Isaiah Thomas and Pennsylvania’s Matthew Carey did produce books for children, but the ubiquity of English imports and weak copyright laws meant that many were pirated versions of successful English works. Arduous or nonexistent trade routes within the colonies, along with the intellectual force of the Puritan legacy, also meant that northeastern printers and ideologies dominated within the colonies. The American publishing industry was not firmly established until the early nineteenth century; for this reason there is much crossover in what English and colonial children read. It is only in the nineteenth century that American authorship took off and the cross-pollination went the other way. English texts continued to be shipped to their former colonies, but the most successful American works, like Samuel Goodrich’s Peter Parley series, also made a splash with British audiences.
The types of children’s nonfiction these printers produced defy clean categorization. In an era of remarkable social, political, and religious transformation, not to mention the experimental beginnings of children’s literature as a genre, texts rarely stuck to a single objective: primers included secular biographies and verse devotional poetry, hagiographies taught local history, and biographies addressed contemporary political debates. Authors and printers borrowed techniques and themes from adult works, from fiction, from classical themes, and from the political present. This chapter sorts the nonfiction of this era into three broad categories of religious, instructional, and informational texts, yet it is important to remember that these labels are insufficient characterizations of how they presented an increasingly complex world to their readers.
Religion
If we define children’s literature as books read by children, religious texts are amongst the oldest, and certainly were the most recommended reading material for English and colonial children. Puritan reformers who believed in individual faith and the necessity of literacy to facilitate it encouraged readers of all ages to examine the Bible as the core of their practice, and to supplement their studies with works that would guide them through the challenges and temptations of living in the post-lapsarian terrestrial world. Sermons, diaries, and other writings by successful ministers were common (Cotton Mather wrote nearly 450 such works) (Monaghan 2005, p. 123), and hagiographies of Protestant martyrs made for heroic tales to inspire the devout and to reinforce their own conviction. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, first published in English in 1563, remained popular with readers a hundred years later, who were likely compelled both by the fervent faith on display and by the salacious details of torment described in Foxe’s scenes of suffering. John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) was also enormously popular; many generations of readers, like Louisa May Alcott’s March sisters, viewed the journey of Christian, the protagonist, to the Celestial City as a useful guide toward virtue second only to the Bible itself.
The first to place children at the center of an account of Protestant
