Notes from a Dark Side of the Nursery: Negative Images in Alphabet Books

Notes from a Dark Side of the Nursery: Negative Images in Alphabet Books Probably no one genre in the field of children's literature can claim a greater number of published titles than alphabet books. And probably, with perhaps the exception of Mother Goose rhymes, alphabet books are the first books to which infants are exposed. Thus, since the imprint of these early exposures can be expected to leave lasting impressions, choosing and understanding these books is of enormous importance. That endeavor is also of enormous proportions. Although Ruth Baldwin's studies of alphabet books, by her own admission, are far from exhaustive, they are, nevertheless, one of the most inclusive single explorations currently available. Therefore, a review of her 100 Nineteenth-Century Rhyming Alphabets in English serves as an instructive starting point in understanding the range and the numbers of these books. Baldwin's collection of children's books, now estimated to contain some 35,000 or more different titles and editions, started with a birthday gift from her parents while they were in England. She refers to the gifts as a "handful of chapbooks . " In spite of the scope of her subsequent collections, she tells her readers, "As the years have gone by I have never ceased to be amazed at the endless quantity and the variety of children's books which one [the nineteenth] century produced" (ix) . In 1968 she bought from Ben Tighe of Athol, Massachusetts, some 250 alphabets. About half of the examples in her alphabet book come from this collection. She cautions that her book "is by no means a definitive collection. In fact, it may contain only a small portion of all the rhyming alphabets produced for children in the nineteenth century" (ix) . So prodigious was the field that, according to Baldwin, "A simple bibliography of all of the nineteenth century rhyming alphabets would be a book in itself" (ix) . Because exact dates, and often artists and writers, were lost, the great bulk of these pieces was published anonymously. "Most remarkable perhaps, " says Baldwin, "is the fact that neither the alphabets nor their illustrations were commonly reprinted from one book to another as the stories so frequently were" (ix) . That fact makes two reissues which appeared respectively in 1978 and 1966 of special interest. A Coon Alphabet by Edward Windsor Kemble in 1898 was reprinted in 1978 by Andante Publications, and the 1859 manuscript of An Illustrated Comic Alphabet by Amelia Frances Howard-Gibbon was published by the Toronto Public Library 'in 1966. But before we analyze these two books, let us go back to Baldwin to survey the 287 pictures of black and white children in grotesque or demeaning roles in the one hundred alphabets . Because of the difficulty with chronological or alphabetical arrangements, Baldwin grouped her alphabets by theme. Appropriately , the book opens with an invitation in rhyme titled "The Invited Alphabet." "A said to B. Come here to me,/ And we will go call on C" (1) . This bit of civility is followed by seven other categories: (1) variations on "A was an apple pie"; (2) single names; (3) nature which includes animals, birds, farm life, gardening, and flowers; (4) trades or professions built largely around the Tom Thumb alphabet; (5) goodness and scriptures; (6) travel; and finally miscellaneous alphabets with a single thought. Baldwin explains that "if there is an imbalance in this selection, it reflects the imbalance in my library" (x) . Obviously, she has made an honest effort to be as representative as possible. Therefore, with a reasonable assurance that we are dealing with what was typical of the times, we can look to her examples to find pictures of black children to compare with those illustrations in A Coon Alphabet . Since all alphabet rhymes have slightly more or slightly fewer than twenty-six frames, it is safe to say that we can expect to find some twenty-six hundred frames in the collection at hand. Of these two thousand plus frames, only ten single frames in ten different poems feature Afro-Americans. The obvious choice of N for Negro is used in five poems (46, 208, 220, 242, and 335) . S. specifically for Slave occurs only once...