Domestic Abolitionism and Juvenile Literature, 1830-1865 (review)

Deborah De Rosa's study of antebellum juvenile abolitionist literature unearths and explores a valuable and amazingly overlooked archive, in which nineteenth-century American women authors challenged received views of slavery, childhood, motherhood, and womanhood. By surveying the publishers whom these authors secured as their champions (chapter one), the strategies of sentimental victimization they employed in their writing (chapter two), the range of mother-historian roles they represented and enacted (chapter three), and the ways in which they brought to life the speech and deeds of young abolitionists (chapter four), De Rosa offers a richly detailed account of the activism of northeastern and midwestern women in abolitionist discourse. She not only introduces and contextualizes the work of many known and scores of unknown authors, but also relates their writing to antecedent British publications and to the powerful adult work of contemporaries Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Wilson, and Harriet Jacobs.

De Rosa informs or reminds us of the high costs these authors of apparently nonthreatening juvenile literature paid for their activism. It is worth noting that during the tumultuous thirty-five-year stretch of her study the question of women's public voice was vehemently debated. The harsh criticism received by Lydia Maria Child, leading member of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, for her An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833) forced her to discontinue her Juvenile Miscellany. Sarah Jane Lippincott was fired as an editorial associate at Godey's Lady's Book, which considered politics and economics inappropriate for women, because of her articles for an abolitionist newspaper. Though daughters of wealthy South Carolina slaveholders, the Grimké sisters, Angelina and Sarah, worked for the New York Anti-Slavery Society; their public addresses and published work (Sarah's Epistles to the Clergy of the Southern States [1836] and Letters on the Equality of the Sexes [1838] and Angelina's Appeal to ChristianWomen of the South [1836] and Appeal to Women of the Nominally Free States [1837]) provoked much hectoring and ridicule. Jane Elizabeth Jones, author of The Young Abolitionist, was pelted with eggs during her lectures. Eliza Lee Follen's husband, Charles, lost his teaching position at Harvard because of the couple's shared views; however, Eliza weathered the criticism of her overtly abolitionist publications and "maintained her popularity as a children's author by tactfully scattering her abolitionist juvenile literature throughout her works and embedding her attacks on slavery in these gender-appropriate spaces" (27). De Rosa clarifies the adroitness and determination with which these women extended notions of acceptability, though her repeated reliance on the image of women walking the tightrope (15, 23, 37) is overdone.

Foremost among the supportive publishers De Rosa catalogues are William Lloyd Garrison, the founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society and its Boston-based mouthpiece, the Liberator, who published Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, Lucretia Mott, and Hannah Townsend, and John P. Jewett, the publisher of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who also published two children's versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1853 as part of his "Juvenile Anti-Slavery Toy Books" series. Another feature of the circumambient, material reality which this study delineates is the influential inheritance of British publications, especially until the British abolition of the slave trade in 1833. Although De Rosa glances at the work of Amelia Opie, Maria Edgeworth, and Mary Martha Sherwood, she might have extended her range to include such earlier abolitionists as Anna Barbauld (in her Hymns in Prose [1781]) and Hannah More (in "Slavery: A Poem" [1788] and her spirited contributions to Wilberforce's parliamentary campaigns), and the juvenile stories and family conversations of Mary Wollstonecraft and Priscilla Wakefield, many of which appeared in separate American printings. De Rosa argues compellingly for the vigor of antebellum juvenile literature devoted to abolitionism, which she characterizes accurately as more numerous and varied than its British counterparts. To her credit, too...