Domestic Abolitionism and Juvenile Literature, 1830-1865

Introduction

his study analyzes the convergence of discourses about women, children, and slavery in juvenile literature between 1830 and 1860. Historical research suggests that nineteenth-century men and women lived under implicit and explicit codes about separate spheres, saw the emergence of the cult of childhood, and faced the dilemma of slavery. However, neither literary critics nor historians have discussed how these three seemingly unrelated factors converge . Perhaps because women comprise a significant number of the authors, critics continue to overlook juvenile antebellum literature as a site of cultural conflict and a genre that gave women activists a voice. The recovered archival texts1 confirm that Harriet Beecher Stowe, Jane Elizabeth Jones, Hannah Townsend, Maria Goodell Frost, Eliza Lee Cabot Follen, Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, Kate Barclay, Julia Colman, Matilda Thompson, Susan Paul, and other women who signed as “M.A.F.,” “S.C.C.,” “Cousin Ann,” “Grandmother,” and “Aunt Lizzie” took advantage of the acceptability of domestic fiction, the rising cult of motherhood and childhood, and the increasing market for juvenile literature as means to create a literary space that would permit them to walk the tightrope between female propriety and political controversy. Through their publications, these authors politicize women and children, transcend the ideology of separate spheres, and enter into the public discourse about slavery to which they had limited access. Thus, recognizing the significance of these nineteenth-century American women’s texts supplements and complicates our understanding of women’s literary production and reveals how women constructed a “political culture ” (Bogin and Yellin 14) by becoming domestic abolitionists, women authors who developed a discourse that permitted them to negotiate personal views and cultural imperatives. Scholars have devoted some attention to abolitionist juvenile literature. The earliest analysis of this genre appears in Anne Scott MacLeod’s A Moral Tale: 1 Introduction T Children’s Fiction and American Culture, 1820–1860 (1975).2 Throughout her analysis of an anonymous woman’s Jemmy and His Mother, Eliza Lee Cabot Follen’s Sequel to the Well-Spent Hour and “May Morning,” as well as Lydia Maria Child’s Evening in New England and “Jumbo and Zairee,” MacLeod argues that except for Child’s short story, “direct assaults upon American slavery were rare” (114). She bases this viewpoint on the belief that [t]he appearance of anti-slavery sentiment in children’s fiction was . . . relatively rare in the general book trade; certainly, compared to temperance, the antislavery cause received sparse treatment. Not surprisingly, some of the strongest antislavery stories for children were published by special presses—The American Reform Tract and Book Society, and the Juvenile Emancipation Society, for instance—most of them in the late 1840s and 1850s. That anti-slavery sentiment which did enter the mainstream of juvenile literature was not only unusual, but with rare exception, was muted and indirect. (111, emphasis added) MacLeod’s repeated qualifying statements implying the existence of only a few juvenile abolitionists texts dismiss a significant number of important authors and publishers. As the subsequent analysis will suggest, a significant body of literature does exist and it was published by well-known commercial presses and “special ” presses with mechanisms in place for widespread distribution. Finally, much of the recovered literature is neither muted nor indirect; rather the domestic abolitionists employ the voices of victimized slave children, resistant slave mothers, rebellious white women, and abolitionist children to critique slavery. Recent scholarship of a broad range of abolitionist juvenile literature further questions MacLeod’s assumptions. The juvenile periodical The Slave’s Friend has attracted increasing attention: Lou W. McCulloch documents its existence in Children’s Books of the Nineteenth Century (1979), Yolanda D. Federici provides important background information in “American Historical Children’s Magazines of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries” [nd], and Shirley Samuels’s “The Identity of Slavery” (1992) discusses how in the 250,000 copies published by 1837, The Slave’s Friend intertwines lessons in reading with antislavery capitalism (164–65). In “The White Supremacy Myth in Juvenile Books about Blacks, 1830–1900” (1988), Donnarae C. MacCann argues that the ideology of white supremacy, firmly established by the 1830s, impacted even the supposedly abolitionist juvenile works by Lydia Maria Child, Eliza Follen, Julia Colman , and Matilda Thompson.3 Susan S. Williams’s study, “‘Promoting an Extensive Sale’: The Production and Reception of The Lamplighter,” recovers one example of this literature in her analysis of the parallels between Gerty and the slave child in the children’s adaptation, The Lamplighter Picture Book; or,The Story of Uncle...