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c h a p t e r 4 Reading for Social Profit economic Citizenship as Children’s Citizenship every father . . . should provide himself with a library of entertaining and instructive books, taking care to add to it from day to day according to his means, such new productions as are really of value. A few dollars thus laid out . . . will bring him a better interest , if he can look for it in the advancement of his offspring, than if invested in the most gainful of stocks. Common school Assistant,  Imagination was bestowed upon us by the Great Giver of all things, and unquestionably was intended to be cultivated in a fair proportion to the other powers of the mind. excess of imagination has, I know, done incalculable mischief; but that is no argument against a moderate cultivation of it. Lydia Maria Child, the Mother’s Book,  In The Exhibition of Tom Thumb (1775, first American edition 1787), the proprietor of an imaginary collection of curiosities describes a “conjuring box” that transforms any object into “the very thing that it ought to have been.”1 the first object put into the box is a children’s book, probably The Exhibition itself, as the American editions of both of the books are published by “Mr. [Isaiah] thomas.” on opening the box, the book has been “changed into a swinging folio, very magnificently gilt and lettered; and at the bottom of the title page [is] printed in large capitals, ‘PrICe tHree GuIneAs.’”2 With its shrewd emphasis on economics, The Exhibition contrasts with other eighteenth-century books that encouraged children to sacrifice their interests for the good of the commonwealth. the fact that thomas, a canny businessman, decided to adapt this newbery book “for the instruction and amusement of American youth” in the same year that the Constitution was being adopted reminds us that self-interested motives also influenced citizens in  Imaginary Citizens the young nation.3 Beyond wanting to protect their property, many of the nation’s early inhabitants were seeking a way that they might actively profit from the social compact. For thomas, this meant pirating english books and insisting that truly American youngsters needed to buy his new, minimally altered versions. Passing on this economic worldview to readers, the thought experiment represented by the magic box encourages children to think of reading in terms of how they might profit from it. though the desire for profit in America dates from the early days of transatlantic trade, profit became associated even more with ideas of citizenship and nationhood as the new country expanded its national trade networks in the beginning of the nineteenth century. David Paul nord describes this “market revolution” this way: “Propelled by both westward expansion and eastern urbanization, trade, agriculture, and small-scale manufacturing flowed everywhere and drew ordinary Americans— artisans and farmers—to regional markets and commercial relationships.”4 thus, although profit had long been a metaphor used to describe the end result of education —for instance, in seventeenth-century Protestant religious language—profit as a motivation for reading gained new life as the u.s. book market grew and transformed as the result of innovations in manufacturing, transportation, and distribution .5 By teaching children to consider the economic value of their books, The Exhibition of Tom Thumb acted as a precursor to the nineteenth-century children’s books that I discuss in this chapter, many of which take the form of miscellanies. these compilations of various genres represent the proliferation of reading materials on the nineteenth-century book market. they frequently incorporated economic language, presenting themselves as “budgets” (another word for miscellany), “premium” books, and “lottery books.” As miniature markets of ideas, miscellanies provided young readers with an occasion for thinking about the economy of reading : how to determine which materials are the most worthy and how to maximize their moral and monetary profit by circulating, saving, and gambling with bits of knowledge. the economic orientation of these nineteenth-century children’s books might seem surprising for several reasons. For many years, the scholarly paradigm regarding the nineteenth century suggested that the sphere of childhood was becoming separated from both the political sphere and the world of exchange. Anne scott Macleod suggests that “to enter the juvenile fiction of antebellum America is to enter a twilight world, a world that seems at first almost wholly sheltered from the robust life around it.”6 Although scholars have long criticized this paradigm as overly simplistic, since children were...

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