"Very capital reading for children": Reading as Play in Hawthorne's A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys

In 1837 Nathaniel Hawthorne was, once again, confronting the realities of earning his living as a writer. The funds from the Manning estate that had supported his decade-long self-imposed literary apprenticeship were drying up (Turner 90). Although he had published more than forty sketches in literary magazines and annuals, he was virtually unknown because his works had appeared anonymously. For the first time, a book, Twice Told Tales, would appear under his own name, but he was not sanguine that its publication would provide enough fame or fortune to support him. In a letter dated June 4, 1837, to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow he admitted that cobbling together freelance work would be necessary in order to make a living: "I see little prospect but that I must scribble for a living. But this troubles me much less than you would suppose. I can turn my pen to all sorts of drudgery, such as children's books, &c" (Turner 89). His characterization of children's books as "drudgery" was not an isolated comment of a disaffected author. In a subsequent letter to Longfellow dated March 21, 1838, he reports two offers to "perpetrate children's histories and other such iniquities," and in a letter to his friend George Hillard he characterizes "concocting school books" as well as translation work and journalism as "drudgery" (Pearce 297 and 296). As far as Hawthorne was concerned, the juvenile market was a necessary evil—it paid the bills.

Hawthorne knew the drudgery of the juvenile market. With his sister Elizabeth he had written the two-volume Peter Parley's Universal History on the Bash of Geography for Samuel Goodrich, a task that reduced him to a hack writer following Goodrich's specific instructions. He had contributed to the juvenile annual Youth's Keepsake in 1835, and he published sketches in juvenile periodicals, such as Boys' and Girls' Magazine and The Child's Friend, in the next decade but subsequently refused to contribute regularly because such sketches were "overdone" and consequently would not pay much (Pearce 301). His eventual sister-in-law, Elizabeth Peabody, was to publish his Grandfather's Chair series (1840-41) and arrange for publication of Biographical Stories, juvenile histories that Peabody hoped would be included in the school libraries Horace Mann was establishing in Massachusetts.

Yet a decade later, in 1851, Hawthorne willingly wrote a book for children, A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys (1852), and in its preface he described the task of writing the book as "one of the most agreeable, of a literary kind" (4). What had happened in the interim to change drudgery into pleasure? Probably a number of factors changed his attitude. As the father of three young children—Una and Julian, ages seven and five, respectively, and infant Rose—he probably had more sympathy for the juvenile reader than he had expressed a decade earlier as a young bachelor. But it is clear that his professional life had also taken a turn for the better, allowing him more freedom to define and execute his projects. The financial and critical success of The Scarlet Letter (1850), the recent completion of The House of the Seven Gables (1851), and a willing publisher in James T. Fields provided the stability for Hawthorne to try a project that he had been contemplating for over ten years—a book for children that might "entirely revolutionize the whole system of juvenile literature" (letter to Longfellow, March 21, 1838; quoted in Pearce 298).¹

A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys, published by Ticknor, Reed and Fields in November 1851 but dated 1852, consists of six retellings of Greek myths, each framed by an introduction and conclusion. The frame narratives are titled to highlight the scenery of the Berkshires and the activities of the storyteller, Eustace Bright, and the children who are his auditors. Wonder Book has, for the most part, passed out of favor in the twentieth century, despite being continuously in print since its initial publication and being illustrated in the twentieth century by...