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

11. The New World of Children’s Books

302 11 The New World of Children’s Books A depiction of a penman serves as the frontispiece for a little American book for children titled The History of the Holy Jesus, first published in 1745: it is a woodcut ostensibly depicting the anonymous author. Like the masters of Boston’s three writing schools, he sports a wig, but in other respects his portrayal is as far removed from the formidable appearance of, say, John Tileston as possible. His wig, it is true, ends in a roll of six soft curls, but his demeanor befits one who has written for children a verse account of Jesus’s “Birth, Life, Death, Resurrection and Ascention into Heaven; and his coming again at the great and last Day of Judgment.” He is clad in a Puritan-style jacket and neckcloth; his right hand, extending beyond a white ruff, holds the quill he has used to pen this work, as he pauses momentarily from its composition, lost in thought.1 The History of the Holy Jesus is an exemplar of the shift in reading instruction and the availability of books to children that was occurring, at least in some parts of the American provinces and for some children, during the transitional decades of the 1730s and 1740s. Of the eight genres into which scholars have traditionally divided so-called children’s books (a term used loosely here to indicate not only books designed for children but those read by them despite their intended adult audience), the seventeenth century had seen only two of them: religious works and chapbooks. Now, from the 1730s on, many exemplars of the remaining six genres would appear: fables, courtesy books, schoolbooks, works of advice, a group of related books that includes fairy tales, nursery rhymes, and the Arabian Nights, and, lastly, works designed deliberately to amuse children. One additional source has often been overlooked by scholars: the texts used in penmanship instruction. Books in all of these categories were imported into America in the eighteenth century (at different times and with varying degrees of enthusiasm), and many of them were also reprinted on American presses.2 The availability of a wider variety of reading material for children was related to the increasing number of books printed in, and imported into, America during the eighteenth century. Even as the volume of American book production rose, so did that of importation, which outstripped domestic production for the entire century. After 1750, the rates of increase of both local and imported imprints rose to ever new heights with each succeeding decade until the years of the American Revolution . During the four years from 1771 to 1774 alone, some 60 percent of Britain’s total export of books was being shipped to the American colonies, averaging an The New World of Children’s Books 303 Figure 16. Frontispiece and title page of The History of the Holy Jesus, 5th ed. (Boston: J. Green, 1748). The familiar portrayal of a writer holding his pen depicts the act of authorship here, rather than of penmanship. The author of this popular children’s book is identified only as “a Lover of their precious Souls.” (Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society) estimated 120,000 items (including pamphlets as well as books). The growth was such that from roughly 1750 to 1775 the increase in books was larger than the increase in the American population (see Appendix 4).3 In this chapter I argue, however, that the broadening of children’s reading material was not just a matter of the growing availability of all books: it was, to some extent, the product of an alternative view of children. In England, profound shifts were occurring in cultural perceptions of childhood that affected the content of books for children. In America, the new material would not supplant the old but would run parallel with it or change it. This shift in how children were viewed in the English context can be traced, in part, to the profound and enduring influence of the British philosopher John Locke. As we saw earlier, Locke had advocated a gentler view of childhood. He believed in a tabula rasa, a clean slate, ethically as well as epistemologically. Children were not, in his view, tainted with original sin but morally neutral, although they had a natural tendency to try to 304 New Paths to Literacy Acquisition, 1750 to 1776 dominate. He had recommended...