a text that detailed the heroic lives of pious children who died young and willingly, converted and perfectly convinced of their salvation. These short narratives, which Janeway calls “joyful deaths,” initiate an influential biographical type that would garner legions of readers and inspire imitators over the next two centuries. The combined volumes establish a formula for the narration of all 13 children’s lives included in the work, beginning with their pious early life, their fearless prayers and proclamations of faith upon learning of their impending death (typically due to mysterious illness or unexplained bodily weakness), and their untimely demise, when they depart, beloved and admired by family and friends. These repeated accounts of young people’s suffering and deaths reflected the grim reality of the high seventeenth-century child mortality rates. Nearly three in ten children died in the colonies during this time, and the corresponding rates in England were worse (Monaghan 2005, p. 113). Moreover, over a hundred years before the advent of the Romantic child’s perfect innocence, children were understood to be just as sinful as any adult. They were expected to soberly confront the possibility of their death, and make the same devotional commitment as adults. Janeway makes the stakes of neglecting their piety clear in his Preface for Children, early in the first volume:
Whither do you think those Children go when they die, that will not do what they are bid, but play the Truant, and Lie, and speak naughty Words and break the Sabbath? whither do such Children go, do you think? Why I will tell you; they which Lie, must to their Father the Devil, into everlasting Burning; they which never pray, God will pour out his Wrath upon them; and when they beg and pray in Hell-Fire, God will not forgive them, but there they must lye for ever.
(Janeway 1709, n.p.)
Children who gave in to temptation and did not imitate the behaviors of the Token exemplars were universally understood to be placing themselves in danger of eternal damnation.
On its surface, A Token for Children seems about as far away from modern children’s literature as one can imagine. Yet many have noted the power afforded to children and childhood in these two volumes. First, it is the earliest known text in English to make children the central protagonists (Marcus 2008, p. 4), a fact that solidifies its importance to the development of children’s literature as a distinct genre. Second, and perhaps more significantly, it describes children as “capable beings, worthy of some degree of autonomy and choice” (Weikle-Mills 2013, p. 44), and implies the same of the child readers of the book. This text spotlights young people executing the most significant acts of religious life: conversion and maintenance of faith and the confrontation with one’s own death and final judgment. This is momentous enough, in the context of the Protestant communities where the book flourished (it was printed in both standard and chapbook versions for English audiences [Jackson 1989, p. 13], and regularly reissued for over a hundred years in America). But Janeway’s many imitators, too, reproduced this book’s attention to children as important members of the community, worthy of admiration and imitation. Cotton Mather highlights the virtues and achievements of colonial children in his Token for the Children of New England; Early Piety, Exemplified in Elizabeth Butcher of Boston (1741), and A Legacy for Children, Being Some of the Last Expressions and Dying Sayings of Hannah Hill, Jnr. of the City of Philadelphia (1714) similarly elevates a child as a paragon of the community. Perhaps the most significant adaptors are antebellum authors Ann Plato and Susan Paul, Black female writers who used Janeway’s “joyful death” form to describe the commendable lives and deaths of Black children. Plato’s Essays (1841) and Paul’s Memoir of James Jackson (1853) viewed and deployed Janeway’s form as a technique for spotlighting virtue in culturally and politically unacknowledged members of the community, using children’s nonfiction to participate in the discussion of slavery and racial discrimination, the paramount political issue of the era.
As the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries continued, fire and brimstone warnings in the style of Janeway’s Preface mainly faded from children’s religious literature, yet the insistence on godly reading material remained. Lockean principles of incorporating entertainment into instruction took hold here as well, and religious writers took new approaches to engaging their young readers. The Children’s Bible (1759), for example, promised to speak to the young “in a method never before attempted utilizing … a lively and striking Abstract … so as to take firm Hold of their young Minds and Memories” (quoted in Jackson 1989, p. 13). The mere publication of a separate Bible for children indicates the degree to which young readers were increasingly recognized as a separate literary constituency with different needs than adult readers. Isaac Watts’s Divine Songs, Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children (1715) also promised child readers a more accessible and enjoyable text, with lilting rhymes that made the familiar lessons about the need to read, pray, and obey pleasing and memorable. Evangelical authors produced numerous hymn books for children in the early nineteenth century; notably, Alisa Clapp-Itnyre has recently argued that these works allow more agency for the child reader than the heavily didactic eighteenth-century children’s fiction, in which adult arbiters manipulate the voice of the child in heavy-handed dialogues that deliver clear-cut moral instruction. In singing, she writes, “the child’s mind and body can respond to the theological lessons of repentance, gratitude, and praise, rather than mentally and silently receiving such ideas through reading and recitation” (Clapp-Itnyre 2016, p. 65). On all fronts, the trajectory of religious writings for children in this era moves toward depictions of children participating in their communities in important ways and lived experiences that match.
Instruction
The first tools for teaching children to read were not books at all, but handheld visual aids depicting the letters of the alphabet. Ivory blocks and cookies may have been used to implant the shape of the letters into the minds of young readers, but between the Renaissance and the nineteenth century, hornbooks, or leather-backed paddles affixed with the letters of the English language, a small image of the cross, and the Lord’s Prayer were common (Crain 2000, pp. 19–20). Patricia Crain writes that the letters of the alphabet itself, detached from the language produced by them, “lac[k] meaning,” and represent a “semantic vacuum” (p. 18). Alphabet texts, Crain argues, have long sought to fill this void with coded images and text. The hornbook, with its Christian iconography and prayer printed upon it, offers an important early example of the way the building blocks of literacy can be absorbed into a larger ideological narrative. These paddles, which learners could attach to a belt and wear on their person for easy access and constant intimacy, taught English-language learners to associate the ABCs and the skill of reading with Christian devotion.
Later alphabet books, however, presented more complicated ideologies in their composition. The title of the first children’s picturebook, Bohemian author Johann Amos Comenius’s Orbis Sensualium Pictus (1658), was translated in English editions to “Visible World, Or, a Nomenclature, and Pictures of All the Chief Things that are in the World and of Men’s Employments therein.” Alongside the alphabet, the Orbis Pictus delivers an encyclopedic view of the world in the form of detailed illustrations of nature and the world of mankind. The book’s first illustration portrays a young boy talking to an older man who invites the child in to ogle the magnificent sights: “Come, Boy, learn to be wise… . Before all things, thou oughtest to learn the plain sounds, of which man’s speech consisteth; which living creatures know how to make, and thy Tongue knoweth how to imitate, and thy hand can picture out. Afterwards we will go into the World, and we will view all things” (Comenius 1728, n.p.). For Comenius, language links the reader with a terrestrial world of man and beast, and he suggests that “learning the alphabet must precede perceiving the world” (Crain 2000, p. 33). Small individual images of humans and animals accompany each letter of the alphabet, and the link between word (or letter) and image requires the reader to pair the natural sounds of animal calls and the cultivated noises of human speech. Comenius’s alphabet, Crain argues, evokes an Edenic view of the natural world, in which animal sounds are given names and meaning through human language (p. 37).
The Orbis Pictus went into 244
