LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

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 in the dynamic world unfolding before them.

      Conclusion

      The child’s bookshelf changed after the mid-nineteenth century, as fiction came to further dominate what children read and adults recommended. Fantasy, the ultimate detachment from the troubles of the world, became the narrative type associated with childhood innocence and the worldly ignorance it demanded. In this new reading climate, some of the more popular nonfiction works survived, especially The New England Primer, the Life of Washington, and the “joyful death” biography, all of which remained standard reading material for generations of young audiences. Others, like “Against Idleness and Mischief” in Watts’s Divine Songs, came under attack; Alice famously muddles the words to this poem at the beginning of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, mocking the work’s earnest warnings against idleness and play. Yet, though the prominence of nonfiction waned in late nineteenth century, it remains instructive and revealing to examine the nonfiction that preceded the Golden Age. In these works, we not only see children’s books became more established in the marketplace, but we see the way this early stage of the industry sought largely to widen children’s horizons, rather than contain them, and to prepare young people’s attention to the larger political, cultural, and economic issues of the day. Because these texts were more common and more trusted, they are the central battlegrounds where the era’s ideological battles to further acknowledge and esteem childhood were fought and won.

      REFERENCES

      1 Avery, G. (1994). Behold the Child: American Children and Their Books, 1621–1922. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

      2 Child, L.M. (1972). The Mother’s Book. New York: Arno Press and New York Times (originally published 1831).

      3 Clapp-Itnyre, A. (2016). British Hymn Books for Children, 1800–1900: Re-Tuning the History of Childhood. New York: Ashgate.

      4 Comenius, J.A. (1728). Orbis Sensualium Pictus. London: John and Benjamin Sprint. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28299/28299-h/28299-h.htm (accessed December 14, 2021)

      5 Crain, P. (2000). The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from the New England Primer to the Scarlet Letter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

      6 Defoe, D. (1985). Robinson Crusoe. New York: Penguin (originally published 1719).

      7 Hochman, B. (2011). Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Reading Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood, and Fiction, 1851–1911. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

      8 Jackson, M.V. (1989). Engines of Instruction, Mischief, and Magic: Children’s Literature in England from Its Beginnings to 1839. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

      9 Janeway, J. (1709). A Token for Children: Being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives, and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children. London: T. Norris (originally published 1671/2).

      10 Marcus, L.S. (2008). Minders of Make-Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of American Children’s Literature. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

      11 Monaghan, E.J. (2005). Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

      12 Paul, L. (2011). The Children’s Book Business: Lessons from the Long Eighteenth Century. New York: Routledge.

      13 Raven, J. (2007). The importation of books in the eighteenth century. In The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World (ed. H. Amory and D.D. Hall), vol. 1 of The History of the Book in America, 183–198. Chapel Hill: University

Скачать книгу