Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America: Literacy Instruction and Acquisition in a Cultural Context

3. Books Read by Children at Home and at School

81 3 Books Read by Children at Home and at School In a letter to the New England Corporation dated September 1655, the Commissioners of the United Colonies of New England listed the goods they wished to have sent to them for John Eliot’s work among the Indians. Along with their requests for locks and canvas, scythes and nails was one for the least expensive of all the items they were ordering: hornbooks and “old Common primers” worth three pounds.1 The English hornbooks and primers that John Eliot needed in order to introduce the Massachusetts to literacy were, as we have seen, the first two elements of the traditional reading sequence that culminated in the Bible, as children trod “the ordinary Road of the Horn-Book, Primer, Psalter, Testament, and Bible.” It is crucial to examine this sequence in order to understand the content and methodology of seventeenth-century reading instruction. Such instruction was universally believed to transmit much more than a skill: it transmitted the cultural, ethical, and spiritual values of the community. A close look, then, at the texts involved can tell us much about the value system of seventeenth-century and early eighteenthcentury America. The religiously linked texts of the “ordinary Road,” however, were not the only books available to children before 1700—at least in Boston, the most important site in New England for the importation and printing of books in the seventeenth century and the hub for disseminating books to other colonies. The spelling book, already an identifiable genre in England, began to make inroads into the American colonies at the end of the century. Books that targeted children as their audience are also visible in the mid 1680s. And books that were not designed for children but, for a variety of reasons, read widely by them appeared in Boston. These included both “godly” and “ungodly” imprints. The “ordinary Road” of Reading Instruction The first text in the traditional sequence, the hornbook, was a little paddle of wood usually measuring less than three inches wide by four inches high.2 To it was glued a single page that was covered by the transparent sheet of horn that gave the hornbook its name. A thin strip of brass secured both page and horn. The hornbook would be popular not only in the seventeenth but the eighteenth century. In 82 The Ordinary Road 1784, the English poet William Cowper succinctly summarized the form and function of the hornbook: Neatly secured from being soil’d or torn, Beneath a page of thin translucent horn, A book (to please us at a tender Age ’Tis call’d a book, tho’ but a single page) Presents the prayer the Saviour deign’d to teach, Which children use, and parsons—when they preach.3 The hornbook’s “single page” presented the alphabet in lower- and uppercase forms. (These were colloquially known as “little” and “great” letters.) Next came the first three lines of the syllabary, a table of nonsense syllables organized alphabetically not only by their initial consonants but by the immediately following vowel. This was symmetrically placed in parallel columns: The rest of the page was devoted to the invocation (“In the Name of the Father . . .”) and the Lord’s Prayer (which Cowper calls “the prayer the Saviour deign’d to teach”). The only explicitly instructional material in the hornbook, therefore, is the three lines of abs and bas of the syllabary. They suggest a great deal more than appears at first glance. First, they imply the existence of a complete syllabary, extending down the alphabet to az ez iz oz uz and za ze zi zo zu. This two-letter syllabary was very ancient. Quite apart from any evidence in manuscript form, snippets of it had appeared in print early in the sixteenth century. A Latin-English ABC book published in London around 1538 included the syllabary up to the letter G.4 Second, the presumed usefulness of these two-letter nonsense syllables is intelligible only in the context of the methodology they imply: that children learned to read by spelling out syllables and words orally. Children, when told to read ab, eb . . . ba, be, pronounced aloud, “Ay, Bee, ab; Ee Bee, eb . . . Bee, Ay, bay; Bee Ee, bee.”5 Third, the parallel columns emphasize one of the many difficulties of the English graphemic system: there are at least two regular pronunciations for each vowel. The letter e, for instance, is pronounced quite differently in...