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

Deborah C. De Rosa's excellent book offers the first extended look at the historical context, print culture, and rhetoric of American abolitionist literature written for children by women authors in the mid-nineteenth century. The book challenges the thesis of Anne Scott MacLeod (1975) that only a few abolitionist texts were written for children in the antebellum era. The book also calls necessary attention to the lost voices of women abolitionist writers who, because they were female and composed works for children, have not been taken seriously by contemporary scholars either as antislavery activists or as writers of historically and politically significant literature. De Rosa convincingly argues that many women abolitionists of the time—from Isabel Drysdale to Harriet Beecher Stowe—created a form of public discourse within juvenile literature that allowed them to bridge their conventional roles as women, wives, and mothers with their radical political views and activities. Some of these women hid behind pseudonyms to protect themselves from public criticism and even persecution for producing these radical children's texts, while some embraced fame, notoriety, and scandal for their work. Yet all understood the power of using juvenile literature as a venue for educating the younger generation to support the abolitionist cause. De Rosa distinguishes between two broad rhetorical strategies employed by these "domestic abolitionists." First, some authors—such as E. T. C., "A Lady," "Grandmother," "Cousin Ann," Eliza Follen, Julia Colman, Matilda Thompson, Susan Paul, and Kate Barclay—used the tropes of sentimental literature to engage the tearful sympathy of their juvenile audience for the antislavery cause. Second, some authors—such as Kate Barclay, Matilda Thompson, Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, Eliza Follen, Jane Elizabeth Jones, S. C. C., and Harriet Butts—used the figure of the "mother-historian" to convey critical historical narratives about slavery in the United States that might otherwise be unheard by the juvenile audience (80). Both of these rhetorical strategies produced a robust variety of antislavery literature for children and even helped create and sustain antislavery societies governed by children themselves from the late 1830s onward in several American states.

De Rosa's book is at its most compelling when it provides close analysis of the rhetoric of the works by the domestic abolitionists. One of the best examples of De Rosa's ability to perceptively interpret the broader social and political significance of literary texts is found in her discussion of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). De Rosa argues that Stowe's monumental book presents in the character of Eva the first girl or female to articulate and practice clearly defined abolitionist principles (121). Contrary to past scholarship that has emphasized the evangelical character of Eva's arguments, De Rosa persuasively contends that Eva is better understood as the first fictional example of a full-fledged female advocate of abolition. One of the ways that Eva puts her abolitionist principles into practice in the novel is to teach one of the slaves to read. At least two juvenile adaptations of Uncle Tom's Cabin—"Little Eva, Flower of the South" (1853) and Little Eva's First Book for Good Children (1853)—also feature the character teaching slave children the alphabet. De Rosa argues that by creating striking female abolitionist characters such as Eva, the domestic abolitionists of the time validated their own entry into the sphere of antislavery politics and encouraged the next generation of women to take the same nonconformist path (147). Perhaps the only valid complaint about De Rosa's book is that its concise, economical style does not unearth the richness of the texts she often only briefly describes. The book's brevity is a mixed blessing, as the reader is left wishing De Rosa had devoted more time to analyzing the children's texts she so tantalizingly reveals to be a vital part of political discourse in the antebellum era.

De Rosa's book not only...