but it had less success in the American colonies, where the alphabet that held sway for generations of burgeoning readers was The New England Primer, which sold an astounding six million copies by the mid-nineteenth century (p. 15). The earliest remaining copy of the Primer dates to 1727, yet historians agree that the book was likely printed in the 1690s. The book’s famous opening rhyme “In Adam’s Fall/We sinned all” identifies the Puritan ideology that governs the text. Language and letters in The New England Primer are associated with the post-lapsarian world (p. 39), and the text’s engaging images and rhymes, such as “My Book and Heart/Shall never part,” use the technique of like sounds to create memories in the new reader’s mind that inextricably link, in this case, reading to virtue, and to prompt readers to internalize the Puritan reasons for language learning: Bible study and the pursuit of faith. The Primer is frequently cited as the product of Puritan ideology, but Crain claims we can also see echoes of mercantile culture in the work’s illustrations, which stylistically echo drawings on tavern and shop signs in London and Boston (p. 45). Images like the cat, whale, and eagle signified commerce to late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century readers, especially for the pre-literate who relied on images to navigate commercial spaces; by pairing these pictures with the language of Christian devotion, The New England Primer proves itself to be oriented toward both heaven and earth and invested in pointing its readers in both directions. By the mid-eighteenth century, Crain suggests, the alphabet was even closer aligned with material culture. In the many later texts, like The Child’s New Play Thing (1750) where A stands for “apple pye” and the alphabet tells a story of items being devoured either by or via the letters (“A Apple pye, B bit it, C cut it …” [quoted in Crain 2000, p. 65]), “the alphabet was dressed up and decked out, animated, ornamented, narrated, and consumed” (p. 64). Letters became a means for pursuing earthly desires, and the alphabet itself became a commodity.
Beyond the alphabet, other varieties of instructional text in this era were similarly preoccupied with depicting the reader’s environment and teaching the child how to navigate the modern world, especially those male children who had the most opportunities to travel and participate in industry and politics. After the American Revolution, Noah Webster’s famous Spelling Book (1784) sought to standardize American spelling and usage of the English language. The Columbian Orator (1797), another homegrown American schoolbook, targeted older readers, providing them with patriotic essays, and advice on travel, trade, and citizenship (Avery 1994, p. 51). Writing manuals like London author George Bickham’s Universal Penman (1743) were printed in England and America and sold to new generations of tradesmen who needed writing skills as well as reading, in order to compose the contracts, correspondence, and advertisements demanded by the transatlantic economy (Monaghan 2005, p. 319). These worldly schoolbooks, though restricted to the middle-class audiences who could afford them, depict an expanding secular world the child hoping to succeed in the Atlantic economy and culture needed to understand. These works demonstrate that the reasons for learning to read had changed. While religious scholarship remained an important personal endeavor, much supported by the culture at large, the instructional texts of the pre-Golden Age increasingly point the child toward the public work of the secular world, that of commerce, travel, and civic engagement.
Information
Nowhere are the changing values of the Anglo-American child reader’s world more plain than in the evolution of their biographical subjects. Biography, particularly when written for children, articulates cultural standards of virtue and issues cautions against vice; in this form one can track the social values of a particular community, a key point of access for understanding the tumultuous changes of the Anglo-American world in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Biographies of the virtuous were among the most common and most approved texts for child readers, beginning with the Puritan-era enthusiasm for Foxe’s martyrs and Janeway’s expiring youth. Accounts of admirable lives could be found as stand-alone texts or embedded in miscellanies, primers, and, later, juvenile periodicals. New publications took on Lockean qualities, like The History of the Holy Jesus (1746), a Boston-produced biography of Christ distinguished by its 16 original illustrations at a time when textual embellishments were expensive, and colonial printers primarily used stock images. Most of these illustrations depict the events of Jesus’s life and other parts of the Bible as written; however, a few of Holy Jesus’s illustrations figure Christ and his followers as eighteenth-century contemporaries to the child reader. The image of the Magi, for example, is not the three wise men in opulent robes that appear in familiar Christian images. Instead, the illustration figures a crowd of men in long coats and wigs, looking at the stars through telescopes. Colonial readers likely did not have many artistic renderings of religious scenes to compare these to, so it may not have seemed an unusual sight to the book’s audience (Avery 1994, p. 44). However, the symbolism of placing Jesus into the environment of the child reader meaningfully validates the child’s world and visually associates the behaviors and images of that community with the deeds of the Christian savior.
After the American Revolution, cultural exemplars changed. Book-peddler-turned-author Mason Locke Weems, as interested in defining American culture as Webster was with his American speller, crafted four biographies of American heroes to provide the new nation with a roster of cultural narratives that could serve as the foundations of a national mythology. His Life of Washington (1800) introduces the famous cherry tree story and dedicates his biography to “his young countrymen,” urging them to imitate the honesty, patriotism, and modesty Weems proclaimed in his stories of Washington. Weems declared Washington a paragon of piety, too, inventing a scene of Washington praying at Valley Forge that proved nearly as unforgettable as the cherry tree. Yet Washington is primarily a secular icon, and the urgency with which Weems put forth his account (just months after Washington’s death) indicates that the early nineteenth-century American virtues needed most were civic virtue and patriotic obedience from the nation’s young citizens to their new government. This shift in biographical subjects, from emblems of Christian piety to political figures, E. Jennifer Monaghan writes, proves that, by the late eighteenth century, “man and God are put on an equal footing as objects of admiration and emulation” (Monaghan 2005, p. 317). In addition to rendering secular mankind as worthy of study as God, these new biographies also challenged prior determinations of which categories of individuals and characteristics were most worthy of study. Biographies expanded the national definition of virtue by presenting increasingly diverse identities and experiences as model American lives. By the mid-nineteenth century, biographical exemplars included Mary Washington, Phillis Wheatley, and other women, while Abigail Field Mott’s abridged Life of Olaudah Equiano (1829) inserted this stalwart former slave into the roster of national heroes, just as Ann Plato and Susan Paul did with their joyful death variations, all while providing child readers with direct discussion of the horrors of slavery. Mott included chilling illustrations and writings on slave life and the slave trade, defying political boundaries that enclosed much of children’s literature.
Natural and political history, geography, and philosophy all had a place in pre-Golden Age children’s reading material as well. Newbery himself had great success with the Newtonian System of Philosophy (1761) and Little Tommy Trip’s History of Beasts and Birds (1752), though most of the informational works of this variety were published around or after the turn of the nineteenth century. In the new century, other aspects of children’s culture oriented the child toward the study of the wider world; board games like The New Royal Geographical Pastime for England and Wales (1787) taught children regional history, while A Tour Through the British Colonies and Foreign Possessions (1850) drilled them in the imperial gains of the British Empire. Samuel Goodrich’s Peter Parley books, an early nineteenth-century American series introducing readers to the history and geography of Europe, Africa, and Asia, gained favor on both sides of the Atlantic. The need to understand these distant parts of the world reflected the fact that greater numbers of the citizens of both nations would interact with these more distant parts of the world, in the ambitious and dangerous trade, war, and politics of the nineteenth century. Children’s texts of the Empire and the new nation alike imagined their readers at the nexus of immense political and cultural change and on the precipice of participation
