Child Life in Colonial Days

Even the "new Clementi with glittering keys" gave but a tinny sound. Girls "raised a tune," however, to these far from resonant accompaniments, and sung their ballads and sentimental ditties, unhampered by thoughts of technique and methods and schools. Many of these old musical instruments are still in existence. The harpsichord bought for "little Miss Custis" is in its rightful home at Mount Vernon.

By Revolutionary times, girls' boarding schools had sprung into existence in large towns, and certainly filled a great want. One New England school, haloed with romance, was kept by Mrs. Susanna Rawson, who was an actress, the daughter of an English officer, and married to a musician. She was also a play-writer and wrote one novel of great popularity, Charlotte Temple. Eliza Southgate Bowne gives some glimpses of the life at this school in her letters. She was fourteen years when she thus wrote to her father:—

"Hon. Father:

"I am again placed at school under the tuition of an amiable lady, so mild, so good, no one can help loving her; she treats all her scholars with such tenderness as would win the affection of the most savage brute. I learn Embroiderey and Geography at present, and wish your permission to learn Musick.... I have described one of the blessings of creation in Mrs. Rawson, and now I will describe Mrs. Lyman as the reverse: she is the worst woman I ever knew of or that I ever saw, nobody knows what I suffered from the treatment of that woman."

This Mrs. Lyman kept a boarding school at Medford; eight girls slept in one room, the fare was meagre, and the education kept close company with the fare.

The Moravian schools at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, were widely popular. President John Adams wrote to his daughter of the girls' school that one hundred and twenty girls lived in one house and slept in one garret in single beds in two long rows. He says, "How should you like to live in such a nunnery?" Eliza Southgate Bowne wrote a pretty account of this school:—

"The first was merely a sewing school, little children and a pretty single sister about 30, with her white skirt, white short tight waistcoat, nice handkerchief pinned outside, a muslin apron and a close cap, of the most singular form you can imagine. I can't describe it. The hair is all put out of sight, turned back, and no border to the cap, very unbecoming and very singular, tied under the chin with a pink ribbon—blue for the married, white for the widows. Here was a Piano forte and another sister teaching a little girl music. We went thro' all the different school rooms, some misses of sixteen, their teachers were very agreeable and easy, and in every room was a Piano."

She also tells of the great dormitory; the beds of singular shape, high and covered; a single hanging-lamp lighted at night, with one sister walking patrol.

Though the education given to girls in these boarding schools was not very profound, they had at the close of the school year a grand opportunity of "showing-off" in a school exhibition. Mary Grafton Dulany wrote when thirteen years old to her father, from a Philadelphia school:—

"I went to Madame B.s exhibition. There were five Crowns, two principal for Eminence in Lessons, and Virtue. They were crowned in great style in the Assembly Rooms in the presence of 500 Spectators."

Mrs. Quincy wrote of a school which she attended in 1784, of what she termed "the breaking up":—

"A stage was erected at the end of the room, covered with a carpet, ornamented with evergreens and lighted by candles in gilt branches. Two window curtains were drawn aside from the centre before it and the audience were seated on the benches of the schoolroom. The 'Search after Happiness,' by Mrs. More, 'The Milliner,' and 'The Dove,' by Madame Genlis were performed. In the first I acted Euphelia, one of the court ladies, and also sung a song intended in the play for one of the daughters of Urania, but as I had the best voice it was given to me. My dress was a pink and green striped silk, feathers and flowers decorated my head; and with bracelets on my arms and paste buckles on my shoes I thought I made a splendid appearance. The only time I ever rode in a sedan chair was on this occasion, when after being dressed at home, I was conveyed in one to Miss Ledyard's residence. Hackney coaches were then unknown in New York. In the second piece I acted the milliner and by some strange notion of Miss Ledyard's or my own was dressed in a gown, cap, handkerchief and apron of my mother's, with a pair of spectacles to look like an elderly woman—a proof how little we understood the character of a French milliner. When the curtain was drawn, many of the audience declared it must be Mrs. Morton herself on the stage. How my mother with her strict notions and prejudices against the theatre ever consented to such proceedings is still a surprise to me."

All parents did not approve of those exhibitions. Major Dulany wrote with decision to his daughter that he lamented the boldness and over-assurance which accompanied any success in such performances, and which proceeded, he deemed, from callous feeling.

These plays were merely a revival of an old fashion when English school children took part in miracle plays or mysteries. In the seventeenth century schoolmasters took great pride in writing exhibition plays for their pupils. Dreary enough these acts or interludes are. One forced all the characters to act "anomalies of all the chiefest parts of grammar"—oh! the poor lads that therein played their parts!

CHAPTER V

HORNBOOK AND PRIMER

The English philosopher, John Locke, in his Thoughts concerning Education, written in 1690, says the method of teaching children to read in England at that time was always "the ordinary road of Horn-book, Primer, Psalter, Testament, and Bible." These, he said, "engage the liking of children and tempt them to read." The road was the same in New England, but it would hardly be called a tempting method.

The first book from which the children of the colonists learned their letters and to spell, was not really a book at all, in our sense of the word. It was what was called a hornbook. A thin piece of wood, usually about four or five inches long and two inches wide, had placed upon it a sheet of paper a trifle smaller, printed at the top with the alphabet in large and small letters; below were simple syllables such as ab, eb, ib, ob, etc.; then came the Lord's Prayer. This printed page was covered with a thin sheet of yellowish horn, which was not as transparent as glass, yet permitted the letters to be read through it; and both the paper and the horn were fastened around the edges to the wood by a narrow strip of metal, usually brass, which was tacked down by fine tacks or nails. It was, therefore, a book of a single page. At the two upper corners of the page were crosses, hence to read the hornbook was often called "reading a criss-cross row." At the lower end of the wooden back was usually a little handle which often was pierced with a hole; thus the hornbook could be carried by a string, which could be placed around the neck or hung by the side.

When, five years ago, was published my book entitled Customs and Fashions in Old New England, I wrote that I did not know of the preservation of a single hornbook in America; though for many years eager and patient antiquaries, of English and of American blood, had vainly sought in American historical collections, in American libraries, in American rural homes, for a true American hornbook; that is, one studied by American children of colonial times. The publication of my statement has made known to me three American hornbooks. The first is the shabby little treasure owned by Mrs. Anne Robinson Minturn of Shoreham, Vermont, found hidden under the dusty eaves of a Vermont garret. The illustration shows its exact size. On the back is a paper coarsely stamped in red with a portrait of Charles II., king of England, on horseback. This may indicate its age, but not its exact date. The young colonist who owned it was by this print taught loyalty to the Crown, though in a far land.

The second hornbook is owned by Miss Grace L. Gordon of Flushing, Long Island. It is a family heirloom, having come to its present owner through a great-uncle who was born in 1782, and stated that it was used by his father, who was born in 1736. The tablet is of oak, and the back is covered with a red paper stamped with the design of a double-headed eagle. The third, owned by Mrs. John W. Norton of Guildford, Connecticut, is almost precisely like Miss Gordon's, and is equally well preserved.

From these shabby little relics and from thousands of their ill-printed, but useful kinsfolk, childish lips in America first read aloud the letters, pointed firmly out by a knitting needle in some dame's hand. Undisturbed by kindergarten inductions and suggestions, unbewildered by baleful processes and diagrams, unthreatened by scientific principles of instruction, did the young colonists stoutly shout their a-b abs, did they spell out their prayer, did they read in triumphal chorus their criss-cross row. Isn't it strange that these three lonely little ghosts of old-time schooling should be the only representatives of their regiments of classmates? Wouldn't it seem that tender association, or miserly hoarding, or even forgetful neglect would have made some greater salvage from the vast number of hornbooks sent to this country in the century after its settlement; that by intent or accident many scores would have survived? But these are all; three little battered oaken backs and stubby handles, three faded paper slips, a splintered sheet or two of horn, a few strips of brass tape, a score of tiny hand-wrought nails—all poor things enough, but shaping themselves into precious and treasured relics. Another of their kindred, a penny hornbook, proved its present value at a sale in London in 1893, by fetching the far from ignoble sum of sixty-five pounds.

One of these little hornbooks filled in its single self what has become a vast item in public school expenses. As Mr. Martin wittily expresses it, "it was in embryo all that the Massachusetts statutes now designate by the formal phrase 'text-books and supplies.'"

The knitting needle of the schooldame could be dignified by the pompous name of fescue, a pointer; and something of that nature, a straw, a pin, a quill, a skewer of wood, was always used to direct children's eyes to letter or word.

There certainly were plenty of these humble little engines of instruction in America; old Judge Sewall had them for his fourteen children at the end of the seventeenth century, as we know from his diary; he wrote in 1691 of his son Joseph going to school "his cousin Jane accompanying him, carrying his horn-book." Waitstill Winthrop sent them to his little Connecticut Plantation nieces in 1716. It is told of one zealous Puritan minister that hating the symbolism of the cross he blotted it out of the criss-cross row of a number of hornbooks imported to Boston.

"Gilt horns" were sold in Philadelphia with Bibles and Primers, as we learn from the Pennsylvania Gazette of December 4, 1760, and in New York in 1753, so says the New York Gazette of May 14, of that year. Pretty little lesson-toys, these gilded horns must have proved, but not so fine as the hornbooks of silver and ivory used by young misses of quality in England. Scores of pictures by seventeenth-century artists—on canvas and glass—show demure little maids and masters with hanging hornbooks. Even the pictures of the Holy Family show the infant Christ, hornbook in hand, tenderly taught by the Virgin Mother.

The hornbook was called by other names, horn-gig, horn-bat, battledore-book, absey-book, etc.; and in Dutch it was the a-b-boordje. They were worked in needlework, and written in ink, and stamped on tin and carved in wood, as well as printed, and Prior tells in rhyme of a hornbook, common enough in England, which must have proved eminently satisfactory to the student.

To this day in England, at certain Fairs and in Kensington bake-shops, these gingerbread hornbooks are made and sold in spite of the solemn warning of British moralists—"No liquorish learning to thy babes extend." Still

I have seen in New England what were called "cookey-moulds," which were of heavy wood incised with the alphabet, were of ancient Dutch manufacture, and had been used for making those "koeckje" hornbooks.

The sight of an old hornbook must always be of interest to any one of any power of imagination or of thoughtful mind, who can read between the irregular lines, the ill-shapen letters, its true significance as the emblem, the well-spring of English education and literature. This thought of the symbolism of the hornbook is expressed in quaint words on the back of a shabby battered specimen of questionable age in the British Museum:—

"What more could be wished for even by a literary Gourmand under the Tudors than to be able to Read and Spell; to repeat that holy Charm before which fled all unholy Ghosts, Goblins, or even the Old Gentleman himself, to the very bottom of the Red Sea; to say that immortal Prayer which seems Heaven to all who ex animo use it; and to have those mathematical powers by knowing units, from which spring countless myriads."

For a fuller account of the hornbook, readers should go to the History of the Hornbook, by Andrew W. Tuer, two splendid volumes forming one of the most interesting and exhaustive accounts of any special educational topic that has ever been written.

The printed cardboard battledore was a successor of the hornbook. This was often printed on a double fold of stiff card with a third fold or flap lapping over like an old pocket-book. These battledores were issued in such vast numbers that it is futile to attempt even to allude to the myriad of publishers. An affine of the hornbook is seen in the wooden "reading-boards" which were used a hundred years ago in Erasmus Hall, the famous old academy built in 1786 in Flatbush, Long Island. It is still standing and still used for educational purposes. These "reading-boards" are tablets of wood, fifteen inches long, covered on either side with time-yellowed paper printed in large letters with some simple reading-lesson. The old fashioned long s in the type proves their age. Through a pierced hole a loop of string suspended these boards before a class of little scholars, who doubtless all read in chorus. Similar ones bearing the alphabet are still used in Cornish Sunday-schools. They were certainly used in Dutch schools, two centuries ago, as the illustrations of old Dutch books prove.

A prymer or primer was specifically and ecclesiastically before and after the Reformation in England a book of private devotions. As authorized by the Church, and written or printed partially or wholly in the vernacular, it contained devotions for the hours, the Creed, Lord's Prayer, Ten Commandments, some psalms and certain instructions as to the elements of Christian knowledge. These little books often opened with the criss-cross row or alphabet arranged hornbook fashion, hence the term primer naturally came to be applied to all elementary books for children's use. A, B, C, the Middle-English name for the alphabet in the forms apsey, abce, absie, etc., was also given to what we now call a primer. Shakespeare called it absey-book. The list in Dyves Pragmaticus runs:—

It is a poorly printed little book about five inches long and three wide, of about eighty pages. It contains the alphabet, and a short table of easy syllables, such as a-b ab, e-b eb, and words up to those of six syllables. This was called a syllabarium. There were twelve five-syllable words; of these five were abomination, edification, humiliation, mortification, and purification. There were a morning and evening prayer for children, and a grace to be said before meat. Then followed a set of little rhymes which have become known everywhere, and are frequently quoted. Each letter of the alphabet is illustrated with a blurred little picture. Of these, two-thirds represent Biblical incidents. They begin:—

and end with Z:—

In the early days of the Primer, all the colonies were true to the English king, and the rhyme for the letter K reads:—

But by Revolutionary years the verse for K was changed to:—

Later verses tell the praise of George Washington. Then comes a series of Bible questions and answers; then an "alphabet of lessons for youth," consisting of verses of the Bible beginning successively with A, B, C, and so on. X was a difficult initial letter, and had to be contented with "Xhort one another daily, etc." After the Lord's Prayer and Apostle's Creed appeared sometimes a list of names for men and women, to teach children to spell their own names. The largest and most interesting picture was that of the burning at the stake of John Rogers; and after this a six page set of pious rhymes which the martyr left at his death for his family of small children.

The Shorter Catechism was the special delight of all New Englanders. Cotton Mather called it a "little watering pot" to shed good lessons. He begged writing masters to set sentences from it to be copied by their pupils; and he advised mothers to "continually drop something of the Catechism on their children, as Honey from the Rock." Learning the catechism was enforced by law in New England, and the deacons and ministers visited and examined families to see that the law was obeyed. Thus it may plainly be seen that this primer truly filled the requisites of what the Roxbury school trustees called "scholastical, theological, and moral discipline."

CHAPTER VI

SCHOOL-BOOKS

The most worthless book of a bygone day is a record worthy of preservation. Like a telescopic star, its obscurity may render it unavailable for most purposes, but it serves in hands which know how to use it to determine the places of more important bodies.

—A. de Morgan, 1847.

When any scholar could advance beyond hornbook and primer he was ready for grammar. This was not English grammar, but Latin, and the boy usually began to study it long before he had any book to con. A bulky and wretched grammar called Lilly's was most popular in England. Locke said the study of it was a religious observance without which no scholar was orthodox. It named twenty-five different kinds of nouns and devoted twenty-two pages of solid print to declensions of nouns; it gave seven genders, with fifteen pages of rules for genders and exceptions. Under such a régime we can sympathize with Nash's outburst, "Syntaxis and prosodia! you are tormentors of wit and good for nothing but to get schoolmasters twopence a week."

It was said of Ezekiel Cheever, the old Boston schoolmaster, who taught for over seventy years, "He taught us Lilly and he Gospel taught." But he also wrote a Latin grammar of his own, Cheever's Accidence, which had unvarying popularity for over a century. Cheever was a thorough grammarian. Cotton Mather thus eulogized him:—

There was brought forth at his death a broadside entitled The Grammarian's Funeral. A fac-simile of it is here given. Josiah Quincy, later in life the president of Harvard College, wrote an account of his dismal school life at Andover. He entered the school when he was six years old, and on the form by his side sat a man of thirty. Both began Cheever's Accidence, and committed to memory pages of a book which the younger child certainly could not understand, and no advance was permitted till the first book was conquered. He studied through the book twenty times before mastering it. The hours of study were long—eight hours a day—and this upon lessons absolutely meaningless.

The custom was in Boston—until this century—to study through the grammar three times before any application to parsing.

Far better wit than any found in an old-time jest book was the sub-title of a very turgid Latin grammar, "A delysious Syrupe newly Claryfied for Yonge Scholars yt thurste for the Swete Lycore of Latin Speche."

The first English Grammar used in Boston public schools and retained in use till this century, was The Young Lady's Accidence, or a Short and Easy Introduction to English Grammar, design'd principally for the use of Young Learners, more especially for those of the Fair Sex, though Proper for Either. It is said that a hundred thousand copies of it were sold. It was a very little grammar about four or five inches long and two or three wide, and had only fifty-seven pages, but it was a very good little grammar when compared with its fellows, being simple and clearly worded.

The fashion of the day was to set everything in rhyme as an aid to memory; and even so unpoetical a subject as English Grammar did not escape the rhyming writer. In the Grammar of the English Tongue, a large and formidable book in fine type, all the rules and lists of exceptions and definitions were in verse. A single specimen, the definition of a letter, will show the best style of composition, which, when it struggled with moods and tenses, was absolutely meaningless.

The spelling of that day was wildly varied. Dilworth's Speller was one of the earliest used, and the spelling in it differed much from that of the British Instructor. A third edition of The Child's New Spelling Book was published in 1744. Famous English lesson-books known among common folk as "Readamadeasies," and book traders as "Reading Easies"—really Reading made easy—belied their name. Some had alphabets on two pages because "One Alphabet is commonly worn out before the Scholar is perfect in his Letters." It is interesting to find "Poor Richard's" sayings in these English books, but it is natural, too, when we consider Franklin's popularity abroad, and know that broadsides printed with his pithy and worldly-wise maxims were found hanging on the wall of many an English cottage.

Not until the days of Noah Webster and his famous Spelling Book and Dictionary was there any decided uniformity of spelling. Professor Earle says the process of compelling a uniform spelling is a strife against nature. Certainly it took a long struggle against nature to make spelling uniform in America. In the same letter, men of high education would spell the same word several different ways. There was no better usage in England. The edition of Milton's Paradise Lost printed in 1688 shows some very grotesque spelling. Therefore it is not strange to find a New York teacher advertising to teach "writeing and spilling."

To show that a fetich was made of spelling seventy-five years ago, I give this extract from a Danbury school notice:—

"The advantages that small children obtain at this school may be easily imagined when the public are informed that those who spell go through the whole of Webster's spelling book twice a fortnight."

The teaching of spelling in many schools was peculiar. The master gave out the word, with a blow of his strap on the desk as a signal for all to start together, and the whole class spelled out the word in syllables in chorus. The teacher's ear was so trained and acute that he at once detected any misspelling. If this happened, he demanded the name of the scholar who made the mistake. If there was any hesitancy or refusal in acknowledgment, he kept the whole class until, by repeated trials of long words, accuracy was obtained. The roar of the many voices of the large school, all pitched in different keys, could be heard on summer days for a long distance. In many country schools the scholars not only spelled aloud but studied all their lessons aloud, as children in Oriental countries do to-day: and the teacher was quick to detect any lowering of the volume of sound and would reprove any child who was studying silently. Sometimes the combined roar of voices became offensive to the neighbors of the school, and restraining votes were passed at town-meetings.

The colonial school and schoolmaster took a firm stand on "cyphering." "The Bible and figgers is all I want my boys to know," said an old farmer. Arithmetic was usually taught without text-books. Teachers had manuscript "sum-books," from which they gave out rules and problems in arithmetic to their scholars. Abraham Lincoln learned arithmetic from a "sum-book" of which he made a neat copy. A page from this sum-book is here given in reduced size. Too often these sums were copied by the pupil without any explanation of the process being offered or rendered by the master. The artist Trumbull recalled that he spent three weeks, unaided in any way, over a single sum in long division.

A manuscript sum-book in my possession is marked, "Sarah Keeler her Book, May ye 1st, A.D. 1773, Ridgbury." There are multiplication examples of fifteen figures multiplied by fifteen, and long division examples of a dividend of quintillions, chiefly in sevens and nines, divided by a mixed divisor of billions in eights and fives—a thing to make poor Sarah turn in her grave. There are Reductions Ascending and Reductions Descending and Reductions both Ascending and Descending at the same time, as complicated as the computations of the revolutions of the celestial spheres. There are miserable catch-examples about people's ages and others about collections of excises, with "Proofs," and still others about I know not what, for there are within their borders mysterious abbreviations and signs, like some black magic. Sainted Sarah Keeler! a melancholy sympathy settles on me as I regard this book and all the extended sums you knew, and think of the paths of pleasantness of the present pupils of kindergartens; and wonder what kind of a mathematical song or game or allegory could be invented to disguise these very "plain figures."

Sometimes a zealous teacher would write out tables of measures and a few blind rules for his scholars. This amateur arithmetic would be copied and recopied until it was punctuated with mistakes.

Many scholars never saw a printed arithmetic; and when the master had one for circulation it was scarcely more helpful than the sum-book. One of the most ancient arithmetics was written by the mathematician Record, who lived from the year 1500 to 1558. He is said to have invented the sign of equality =, but there is nothing in his book to indicate this fact. The terms "arsemetrick" and "augrime" are used in it, instead of arithmetic. Many curious and obsolete rules are given, among them, "The Golden Rule," "Rule of Falsehood," "The Redeeming of Pawnes of Geams," "The Backer Rule of Thirds." Here is a simple problem under the latter:—

"I did lend my friend ³⁄₄ of a Porteguise 7 months upon promise that he should do as much for me again, and when I should borrow of him, he could lend me but ⁵⁄₁₂ of a Porteguese, now I demand how long time I must keep his money in just Recompence of my loan, accounting 13 months in the year."

Rhyme is used in this book, in dialogues between the master and scholar. Copies of Cocker's Arithmetick are said to be very rare in England, but I have seen several in America. An edition was published in Philadelphia in 1779. The frontispiece of English and American editions shows the picture of the mathematician surrounded by a wreath of laurel with the droll apostrophe:—