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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 glory was James Janeway with his Token for Children, published in two volumes (1671 and 1672), 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

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