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  • Mapping the Terrain of American Children’s Literature
  • Bruce A. Ronda (bio)
Gillian Avery. Behold the Child. American Children and Their Books, 1621–1922. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994.

In the “Postscript” to Behold the Child: American Children and Their Books, 1621–1922, Gillian Avery offers a telling anecdote about two competing Oxford anthologies. Their jacket illustrations suggest the differing traditions of English and American writing for children: the Oxford Book of Children’s Verse in America’s cover shows “a picture of purposeful little citizens in a library; they are consulting card indexes, studying texts, and generally addressing themselves to the acquisition of knowledge.” The Oxford Book of Children’s Verse, in contrast, shows children “dancing in an Arcadian summer, absorbed in a game that never ends” (211).

This same theme dominates Avery’s book: the distinction, evident by the 1820s, between American writing for children, with its stress on energy, optimism, self-fulfillment, and this-worldliness, and English writing, with its intense awareness of class distinctions and its fondness for creating realms of imaginative freedom and escape. Within this broad and elastic theme Avery is able to assemble an impressive number of novels, stories, textbooks, histories, and poems to tell a story of change over time. The result is the first synthetic and interpretive history of American writing for children from colonial beginnings through the early twentieth century, a book which will certainly become a standard work for Americans and others interested in the history of children’s literature.

Avery’s narrative begins, as so many histories do, with Puritan New England. Here she tells the familiar tale of Puritan distrust of fiction and fantasy, the omnipresence of death, the need to acculturate children into [End Page 275] the community’s faith and practice. The standard texts are examined: the New England Primer, Janeway’s Token for Children. While English and American Puritan shared a similar outlook, Avery notes distinctive American traits which would eventually translate into literary difference: a marked stress on home, an emphasis on hard work and its likely result in economic prosperity. With her main theme of American practicality so firmly in mind, Avery misses the chance to give a more nuanced reading to seventeenth-century writing by attending to the signs of popular culture. She mentions the importation of Dr. Faustus and other works of legend and folklore to Boston by the late 1600s, but does not develop the possibility that these works helped constitute a layer of popular belief and practice that lay below the officially sanctioned one.

In the eighteenth century, there was more of every kind of writing for children—abridged Bibles, spellers, didactic narratives, poems, hymns. Most of this material came from England or was copied from English sources. There was a “first” in this century, however; The History of the Holy Jesus (1745) “was a wholly American product, deriving from no English original” (4). Enormously popular, this retelling of the gospels portrayed Christ dressed like a New England divine “preaching to ladies in muslin aprons and gentlemen in skirted coats” (42). By the late eighteenth century, textbooks reflected American interests in national identity and independence, for which literacy and education were crucial. In The Child’s Companion, Charlotte reveals that her hunger for learning grew out of embarrassment: when she tried to write “for Sally Chapman” in a giftbook, she wrote instead “For Sale Cheap Mon,” “and was misunderstood” (50–51). The last half of the century also saw a remarkable flowering of many books of a cheerfully “random quality,” including a number of nursery rhyme collections, some remarkable for their scatalogical and ribald humor. In Tommy Thumb’s Song Book (1794), we find:

O rare Harry Parry? When will you marry? When Apples and Pears are ripe; I’ll come to your wedding, Without any Bidding, And lie with your Bride all Night.

In the early nineteenth century, such collections came under new scru-tiny and suspicion, Avery writes, with the growing popularity of the works of Richard and Maria Edgeworth. The Edgeworth’s emphasis on practicality in childrearing and sober common sense in children’s amusement [End Page 276] appealed to an American audience devoted to...

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