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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 editions in Europe and was published into the twentieth century (2000, p. 27), 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,

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