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

In 1830, Sarah Josepha Hale published Poems for Our Children. Alongside her now iconic "Mary's Lamb" is the patriotic ditty "My Country," a poem that contains a remarkable asterisk after the refrain in the second stanza, "And all are free.*" "All," that is, "but two millions," a note at the bottom of the page explains. As Deborah C. De Rosa shows, unlike the abolitionist women writers who altered the ideologies of republican motherhood for antislavery ends in their writings for children, Hale equivocates. This moment of editorial evasion highlights the challenges posed by juvenile antislavery writings to the rhetoric of American nation-formation, a confrontation that De Rosa illuminates in her study of women writers who wrote abolitionist children's literature in the decades leading up to the Civil War.

In this slender volume, De Rosa focuses on the "separate sphere[]" of "women activists" who wrote antislavery children's literature (7, 1). De Rosa concentrates almost entirely on "recovered archival texts" by women (1), a fascinating selection of printed materials documented in her bibliography and analyzed throughout her book. Her bibliography alone is a rich resource that offers a significant contribution to the study of antebellum women writers and nineteenth-century American children's literature. In four chapters, De Rosa recovers the work of such writers as Margaret Elizabeth Chandler, Eliza Cabot Follen, Louisa Tuthill, and many others, including pseudonymous writers.

De Rosa's first chapter discusses the publishers of juvenile antislavery literature, including the timid American Sunday School Union, the American Anti-Slavery Society, the American Reform Tract and Book Society, and commercial publishers, most prominently John P. Jewett. Her second chapter, "Sentimentalized Victims and Abolitionist Tears," presents ample evidence of sentimentality deployed for political ends in the materials she recovers. De Rosa's analysis of "The Abolitionist Mother-Historian" in her third chapter is an intriguing study of antislavery historical revisionism for children, while her fourth chapter, "The Juvenile Abolitionists," briefly highlights juvenile abolitionist societies before turning to the fictional figure of the child-liberator, modeled upon Harriet Beecher Stowe's little Eva.

De Rosa brings to light many exciting yet understudied works by antebellum women writers who wrote abolitionist fiction for children, despite taboos against women's political activism in the public sphere. Yet some of the claims this book makes may be overstated. Although "twentieth- and twenty-first-century critics" are faulted for ignoring the work that De Rosa recovers (9), this charge can be made only by omitting Holly Keller's 1996 essay, "Juvenile Antislavery Narrative and Notions of Childhood," in which Keller discusses a number of the same works that De Rosa recovers; critics John C. Crandall and Gail Schmunk Murray are also slighted. The set of recovered texts that De Rosa explores is rich but not definitive; Hannah Flagg Gould's antislavery writings for children, for example, are mentioned nowhere in her study. The first chapter also flatly states that "[c]hildren's book reviewing did not begin until after the Civil War" (31), yet a quick search of even the extremely limited resources of the Making of America website reveals a plethora of reviews of children's literature. More seriously, De Rosa's treatment of sentimentality rehashes the old Ann Douglas/Jane Tompkins debate (Tompkins wins) without much attention to recent scholarship; similarly, her discussion of Uncle Tom's Cabin is theoretically thin, while Topsy is unaccountably neglected. Finally, the number of errors, typos, clichés, and misspellings, especially in the introduction and the first chapter, suggest work that has been rushed to print. Some of these mistakes are merely annoying: Glenn Estes is referred to as a "she" (4); Sara Jane Clarke Lippincott's name is misspelled (13), as is the Schomburg Collection and Harvard's Widener Library (149 n1); the Declaration of Independence is italicized (37, 44); this, alas, is a partial list. Other typos risk inhibiting comprehension; a sentence dissolves in the ether in the middle of...