from Flushing Cove Bay, which the text explains, “turn out as good, or perhaps better,” than oysters. The introduction of negroes and negro children into the illustrations is altogether a novelty, and together with the scenes drawn from the street life of the town gave to the old-fashioned child its first distinctly American picture-book. Indeed, with the exception of this and an occasional illustration in some otherwise English reproduction, all the American publishers at this time seem to have modelled their wares for small children after those of two large London firms, J. Harris, successor to Newbery, and William Darton.

To Darton, the author of “Little Truths,” the children were indebted for a serious attempt to improve the character of toy-books. A copper-plate engraver by profession, Darton’s attention was drawn to the scarcity of books for children by the discovery that there was not much written for them that was worth illustrating. Like Newbery, he set about to make books himself, and with John Harvey, also an engraver, he set up in Grace Church Street an establishment for printing and publishing, from which he supplied, to a great extent, the juvenile books closely imitated by American printers. Besides his own compositions, he was very alert to encourage promising authors, and through him the famous verses of Jane and Ann Taylor were brought into notice. “Original Poems,” and “Rhymes for the Nursery,” by these sisters, were to the old-time child what Stevenson’s “Child’s Garden of Verses” is to the modern nursery. Darton and Harvey paid ten pounds for the first series of “Original Poems,” and fifteen pounds for the second; while “Rhymes for the Nursery” brought to its authors the unusual sum of twenty pounds. The Taylors were the originators of that long series of verses for infants which “My Sister” and “My Governess” strove to surpass but never in any way equalled, although they apparently met with a fair sale in America.

Enterprising American booksellers also copied the new ways of advertising juvenile books. An instance of this is afforded by Johnson and Warner of Philadelphia, who apparently succeeded Jacob and Benjamin Johnson, and had, by eighteen hundred and ten, branch shops in Richmond, Virginia, and Lexington, Kentucky. They advertised their “neatly executed books of amusement” in book notes in the “Young Gentlemen and Ladies’ Magazine,” by means of digressions from the thread of their stories, and sometimes by inserting as frontispiece a rhyme taken from one used by John Harris of St. Paul’s Churchyard:

Later, when engraving had become more general in use, William Charles cut for an advertisement, as frontispiece to some of his imprints, an interior scene containing a shelf of books labelled “W. Charles’ Library for Little Folks.” About the same time another form of advertisement came into use. This was the publisher’s Recommendation, which frequently accompanied the narrative in place of a preface. The “Story of Little Henry and his Bearer,” by Mrs. Sherwood, a writer of many English Sunday-school tales, contained the announcement that it was “fraught with much useful instruction. It is recommended as an excellent thing to be put in the hands of children; and grown persons will find themselves well paid for the trouble of reading it.”

Little Henry belonged to the Sunday-school type of hero, one whose biography Dr. Holmes doubtless avoided when possible. Yet no history of toy-books printed presumably for children’s amusement as well as instruction should omit this favorite story, which represents all others of its class of Religion-in-Play books. The following incidents are taken from an edition printed by Lincoln and Edmunds of Boston. This firm made a special feature of “Books suitable for Presents in Sunday-School.” They sold wholesale for eight dollars a hundred, such tales as Taylor’s “Hymns for Infant Minds,” “Friendly Instruction,” Fenelon’s “Reflections,” Doddridge’s “Principles of the Christian Religion,” “Pleasures of Piety in Youth,” “Walks of Usefulness,” “Practical Piety,” etc.

The objective point of little Henry’s melancholy history was to prove the “Usefulness of Female Missionaries,” said its editor, Mrs. Cameron, a sister of the author, who at the time was herself living in India. Mrs. Sherwood based the thread of her story upon the life of a household in India, but it winds itself mainly around the conversion of the faithful Indian bearer who served five-year-old Henry. This small orphan was one of those morbidly religious children who “never said a bad word and was vexed when he heard any other person do it.” He also, although himself “saved by grace,” as the phrase then ran in evangelical circles, was chronically anxious lest he should offend the Lord. To quote verbatim from this relic of the former religious life would savor too much of ridiculing those things that were sacred and serious to the people of that day. Yet the main incidents of the story were these: Henry’s conversion took place after a year and a half of hard work on the part of a missionary, who finally had the satisfaction of bringing little Henry “from the state of grossest heathen darkness and ignorance to a competent knowledge of those doctrines necessary to salvation.” This was followed immediately by the offer of Henry to give all his toys for a Bible with a purple morocco cover. Then came the preparations for the teacher’s departure, when she called him to her room and catechized him in a manner worthy of Cotton Mather a century before. After his teacher’s departure the boy, mindful of the lady’s final admonition, sought to make a Christian of his bearer, Boosy. Like so many story-book parents, Henry’s mother was altogether neglectful of her child; and consequently he was left much to the care of Boosy—time which he improved with “arguments with Boosy concerning the great Creator of things.” But it is not necessary to follow Henry through his ardent missionary efforts to the admission of the black boy of his sinful state, nor to the time when the hero was delivered from this evil world. Enough has been said to show that the religious child of fiction was not very different from little Elizabeth Butcher or Hannah Hill of colonial days, whose pious sayings were still read when “Little Henry” was introduced to the American child.

Indeed, when Mrs. Sherwood’s fictitious children were not sufficiently religious to come up to the standard of five-year-old Henry, their parents were invariably as pious as the father of the “Fairchild Family.” This was imported and reprinted for more than one generation as a “best seller.” It was almost a modernized version of Janeway’s “Token for Children,” with Mather’s supplement of “A Token for the Children of New England,” in its frequent production of death-bed scenes, together with painful object lessons upon the sinfulness of every heart. To impress such lessons Mr. Fairchild spared his family no sight of horror or distress. He even took them to see a man on the gallows, “that,” said the ingenuous gentleman, “they may love each other with a perfect and heavenly love.” As the children gazed upon the dreadful object the tender father described in detail its every phase, and ended by kneeling in prayer. The story of Evelyn in the third chapter was written as the result of a present of books from an American Universalist, whose doctrines Mrs. Sherwood thought likely to be pernicious to children and should be controverted as soon as possible. Later, other things emanating from America were considered injurious to children, but this seems to be the first indication that American ideas were noticed in English juvenile literature.

But all this lady’s tales were not so lugubrious, and many were immense favorites. Children were even named for the hero of the “Little Millenium Boy.” Publishers frequently sent her orders for books to be “written to cuts,” and the “Busy Bee,” the “Errand Boy,” and the “Rose” were some of the results of this method of supplying the demand for her work. Naturally, Mrs. Sherwood, like Miss Edgeworth, had many imitators, but if we could believe the incidents related as true to life, parents would seem to have been either very indifferent to their children or forever suspicious of them. In Newbery’s time it had been thought no sin to wear fine buckled shoes, to be genteelly dressed with a wide “ribband;” but now the vain child was one who wore a white frock with pink sash, towards whom the finger of scorn was pointed, and from whom the moral was unfailingly drawn. Vanity was, apparently, an unpardonable sin, as when in a “Moral Tale,”

The constant effort to draw a lesson from every action sometimes led to overstepping the bounds of truth by the parents themselves, as for example in a similar instance of love for a mirror. “What is this I see, Harriet?” asked a mother in “Emulation.” “Is that the way you employ your precious time? I am no longer surprised at the alteration in your looks of late, that you have appeared so sickly, have lost your complexion; in short I have twenty times been on the point of asking you if you are ill. You look shockingly, child.”

“I am very well, Mamma, indeed,” cried Harriet, quite alarmed.

“Impossible, my dear, you can never look well, while you follow such an unwholesome practice. Looking-glasses were never intended for little girls, and very few sensible people use them as there is something really poisonous in their composition. To use them is not only prejudicial to the health but to the disposition.”

Although this conception of the use of looking-glasses as prejudicial to right living seems to hark back to the views expressed in the old story of the “Prodigal Daughter,” who sat before a mirror when the Devil made his second appearance, yet the world of story-book literature, even though its creators were sometimes either careless or ignorant of facts, now also emphasized the value of general knowledge, which it endeavored to pour in increasing quantity into the nursery. Miss More had started the stream of goody-goody books, while Miss Edgeworth, Mrs. Barbauld, and Thomas Day were the originators of the deluge of conversational bores, babies, boys, and teachers that threatened to flood the family book-shelves of America when the American writers for children came upon the scene.

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VII

1825-1840

American Writers and English Critics

It is customary to refer to the early writings of Washington Irving as works that marked the time when literature pure and simple developed in America. Such writing as had hitherto attracted attention concerned itself, not with matters of the imagination, but with facts and theories of current and momentous interest. Religion and the affairs of the separate commonwealths were uppermost in people’s minds in colonial days; political warfare and the defence of the policy of Congress absorbed attention in Revolutionary times; and later the necessity of expounding principles of government and of fostering a national feeling produced a literature of fact rather than of fancy.

Gradually all this had changed. A new generation had grown up with more leisure for writing and more time to devote to the general culture of the public. The English periodical with its purpose of “improving the taste, awakening the attention, and amending the heart,” had once met these requirements. Later on these periodicals had been keenly enjoyed, but at the same time there appeared American magazines, modelled after them, but largely filled by contributions from literary Americans. Early in the nineteenth century such publications were current in most large towns. From the short essays and papers in these periodicals to the tales of Cooper and Irving the step, after all, was not a long one.

The children’s literature of amusement developed, after the end of the eighteenth century, in a somewhat similar way, although as usual tagging along after that of their parents.

With the constantly increasing population the production of children’s books grew more profitable, and in eighteen hundred and two Benjamin Johnson made an attempt to publish a “Juvenile Magazine” in Philadelphia. Its purpose was to be a “Miscellaneous Repository of Useful Information;” but the contents were so largely drawn from English sources that it was probably, like the toy-books, pirated from an English publisher. Indeed, one of the few extant volumes contains only one article of distinctly American composition among essays on Education, the Choice of a Wife, Love, papers on natural history, selections from poems by Coleridge and Cowper; and by anonymous makers of verse about Consumption and Friendship. The American contribution, a discussion of President Washington’s will, has already been mentioned.

In the same year, 1802, the “Juvenile Olio” was started, edited by “Amyntor,” but like Johnson’s “Juvenile Magazine,” was only issued at irregular intervals and was short-lived.

Other ventures in children’s periodicals continued to be made, however. The “Juvenile Magazine,” with “Religious, Moral, and Entertaining Pieces in Prose and Verse,” was compiled by Arthur Donaldson, and sold in eighteen hundred and eleven as a monthly in Philadelphia—then the literary centre—for twelve and a half cents a number. In eighteen hundred and thirteen, in the same city, the “Juvenile Portfolio” made its appearance, possibly in imitation of Joseph Dennie’s “Port Folio;” but it too failed from lack of support and interest.

Boston proved more successful in arousing attention to the possibilities in a well-conducted children’s periodical, although it was not until thirteen years later that Lydia Maria Child established the “Juvenile Miscellany for the Instruction and Amusement of Youth.” Three numbers were issued in 1826, and thereafter it appeared every other month until August, 1834, when it was succeeded by a magazine of the same name conducted by Sarah J. Hale.

This periodical is a landmark in the history of story-writing for the American child. Here at last was an opportunity for the editors to give to their subscribers descriptions of cities in their own land in place of accounts of palaces in Persia; biographies of national heroes instead of incidents in the life of Mahomet; and tales of Indians rather than histories of Arabians and Turks. For its pages Mrs. Sigourney, Miss Eliza Leslie, Mrs. Wells, Miss Sedgwick, and numerous anonymous contributors gladly sent stories of American scenes and incidents which were welcomed by parents as well as by children.

In the year following the first appearance of Mrs. Hale’s “Juvenile Miscellany,” the March number is typical of the amusement and instruction the editor endeavored to provide. This contained a life of Benjamin Franklin (perhaps the earliest child’s life of the philosopher and statesman), a tale of an Indian massacre of an entire settlement in Maine, an essay on memory, a religious episode, and extracts from a traveller’s journal. The traveller, quite evidently a Bostonian, criticised New York in a way not unfamiliar in later days, as a city where “the love of literature was less strong than in some other parts of the United States;” and then in trying to soften the statement, she fell into a comparison with Philadelphia, also made many times since the gentle critic observed the difference. “New York,” she wrote, “has energy, spirit, and bold, lofty enterprise, totally wanting in Philadelphia, ... a place of neat, well regulated plans.” Also, like the English story-book of the previous century, this American “Miscellany” introduced Maxims for a Student, found, it cheerfully explained, “among the manuscripts of a deceased friend.” Puzzles and conundrums made an entertaining feature, and as the literary chef d’œuvre was inserted a poem supposed to be composed by a babe in South Carolina, but of which the author was undoubtedly Mrs. Gilman, whose ideas of a baby’s ability were certainly not drawn from her own nursery.

A rival to the “Juvenile Miscellany” was the “Youth’s Companion,” established at this time in Boston by Nathaniel P. Willis and the Reverend Asa Rand. The various religious societies also began to issue children’s magazines for Sunday perusal: the Massachusetts Sunday School Union beginning in 1828 the “Sabbath School Times,” and other societies soon following its example.

“Parley’s Magazine,” planned by Samuel G. Goodrich and published by Lilly, Wait and Company of Boston, ran a successful course of nine years from eighteen hundred and thirty-three. The prospectus declared the intention of its conductors “to give descriptions of manners, customs, and countries, Travels, Voyages, and Adventures in Various parts of the world, interesting historical notes, Biography, particularly of young persons, original tales, cheerful and pleasing Rhymes, and to issue the magazine every fortnight.” The popularity of the name of Peter Parley insured a goodly number of subscriptions from the beginning, and the life of “Parley’s Magazine” was somewhat longer than any of its predecessors.

In the south the idea of issuing a juvenile magazine was taken up by a firm in Charleston, and the “Rose Bud” was started in eighteen hundred and thirty. The “Rose Bud,” a weekly, was largely the result of the success of the “Juvenile Miscellany,” as the editor of the southern paper, Mrs. Gilman, was a valued contributor to the “Miscellany,” and had been encouraged in her plan of a paper for children of the south by the Boston conductors of the northern periodical.

Mrs. Gilman was born in Boston, and at sixteen years of age had published a poem most favorably criticised at the time. Marrying a clergyman who settled in Charleston, she continued her literary work, but was best known to our grandmothers as the author of “Recollections of a New England Housekeeper.” The “Rose Bud” soon blossomed into the “Southern Rose,” a family paper, but faded away in 1839.

Among other juvenile weeklies of the time may be mentioned the “Juvenile Rambler” and the “Hive,” which are chiefly interesting by reason of the opportunity their columns offered to youthful contributors.

Another series of “miscellaneous repositories” for the instructive enjoyment of little people was furnished by the Annuals of the period. These, of course, were modelled after the adult Annuals revolving in social circles and adorning the marble-topped tables of drawing-rooms in both England and America.

Issued at the Christmas and New Year seasons, these children’s Annuals formed the conventional gift-book for many years, and publishers spared no effort to make them attractive. Indeed, their red morocco, silk, or embossed scarlet cloth bindings form a cheerful contrast to the dreary array of black and drab cloth covering the fiction of both old and young. Better illustrations were also introduced than the ugly cuts “adorning” the other books for juvenile readers. Oliver Pelton, Joseph Andrews (who ranked well as an engraver), Elisha Gallaudet, Joseph G. Kellogg, Joseph I. Pease, and Thomas Illman were among the workers in line-engraving whose early work served to illustrate, often delightfully, these popular collections of children’s stories.

Among the “Annualettes,” “Keepsakes,” “Evening Hours,” and “Infant’s Hours” published at intervals after eighteen hundred and twenty-five the “Token” stands preëminent. Edited by Samuel G. Goodrich (Peter Parley) between the years eighteen hundred and twenty-eight and eighteen hundred and forty-two, its contents and illustrations were almost entirely American. Edward Everett, Bishop Doane, A. H. Everett, John Quincy Adams, Longfellow, Hawthorne, Miss Sedgwick, Eliza Leslie, Dr. Holmes, Horace Greeley, James T. Fields, and Gulian Verplanck—all were called upon to make the “Token” an annual treat to children. Of the many stories written for it, only Hawthorne’s “Twice Told Tales” survive; but the long list of contributors of mark in American literature cannot be surpassed to-day by any child’s book by contemporary authors. The contents, although written in the style of eighty years ago, are undoubtedly good from a literary standpoint, however out of date their story-telling qualities may be. And, moreover, the “Token” assuredly gave pleasure to the public for which its yearly publication was made.

By eighteen hundred and thirty-five the “Annual” was in full swing as a popular publication. Then an international book was issued, “The American Juvenile Keepsake,” edited by Mrs. Hofland, the well-known writer of English stories for children. Mrs. Hofland cried up her wares in a manner quite different from that of the earlier literary ladies. “My table of contents,” she wrote in her introduction, “exhibits a list of names not exceeded in reputation by any preceding Juvenile Annual; for, although got up with a celerity almost distressing in the hurry it imposed, such has been the kindness of my literary friends, that they have left me little more to wish for.” Among the English contributors were Miss Mitford, Miss Jean Roberts, Miss Browne, and Mrs. Hall, the ablest writers for English children, and already familiar to American households.

Mrs. Hofland, herself, wrote one of its stories, noteworthy as an early attempt of an English author to write for an American juvenile public. She found her theme in the movement of emigration strong in England just then among the laboring people. No amount of discouragement and bitter criticism of the United States by the British press was sufficient to stem appreciably the tide of laborers that flowed towards the country whence came information of better wages and more work. Mrs. Hofland, although writing for little Americans, could not wholly resist the customary fling at American life and society. She acknowledged, however, that long residence altered first impressions and brought out the kernel of American character, whose husk only was visible to sojourners. She deplored the fact that “gay English girls used only to the polished society of London were likely to return with the impression that the men were rude and women frivolous.” This impression the author was inclined to believe unjust, yet deemed it wise, because of the incredulous (perhaps even in America!), to back her own opinion by a note saying that this view was also shared by a valued friend who had lived fourteen years in Raleigh, South Carolina.

Having thus done justice, in her own eyes, to conditions in the new country, Mrs. Hofland, launched the laborer’s family upon the sea, and followed their travels from New York to Lexington, Kentucky, at that time a land unknown to the average American child beyond some hazy association with the name of Daniel Boone. It was thus comparatively safe ground on which to place the struggles of the immigrants, who prospered because of their English thrift and were an example to the former residents. Of course the son grew up to prove a blessing to the community, and eventually, like the heroes in old Isaiah Thomas’s adaptations of Newbery’s good boys, was chosen Congressman.

There is another point of interest in connection with this English author’s tale. Whether consciously or not, it is a very good imitation of Peter Parley’s method of travelling with his characters in various lands or over new country. It is, perhaps, the first instance in the history of children’s literature of an American story-writer influencing the English writer of juvenile fiction. And it was not the only time. So popular and profitable did Goodrich’s style of story become that somewhat later the frequent attempts to exploit anonymously and profitably his pseudonymn in England as well as in America were loudly lamented by the originator of the “Tales of Peter Parley.” It is, moreover, suggestive of the gradual change in the relations between the two countries that anything written in America was thought worth imitating. America, indeed, was beginning to supply incidents around which to weave stories for British children and tales altogether made at home for her own little readers.

In the same volume Mrs. S. C. Hall also boldly attempted to place her heroine in American surroundings. Philadelphia was the scene chosen for her tale; but, having flattered her readers by this concession to their sympathies and interest, the author was still sufficiently insular to doubt the existence of a competent local physician in this the earliest medical centre in the United States. An English family had come to make their home in the city, where the mother’s illness necessitated the attendance of a French doctor to make a correct diagnosis of her case. An operation was advised, which the mother, Mrs. Allen, hesitated to undergo in an unknown land. Emily, the fourteen-year-old daughter, urged her not to delay, as she felt quite competent to be in attendance, having had “five teeth drawn without screaming; nursed a brother through the whooping-cough and a sister through the measles.”

“Ma foi, Mademoiselle,” said the French doctor, “you are very heroic; why, let me see, you talk of being present at an operation, which I would not hardly suffer my junior pupils to attend.”

“Put,” said the heroic damsel, “my resolution, sir, to any test you please; draw one, two, three teeth, I will not flinch.” And this courage the writer thought could not be surpassed in a London child. It is needless to say that Emily’s fortitude was sufficient to endure the sight of her mother’s suffering, and to nurse her to complete recovery. Evidently residence in America had not yet sapped the young girl’s moral strength, or reduced her to the frivolous creature an American woman was reputed in England to be.

Among the home contributors to “The American Juvenile Keepsake” were William L. Stone, who wrote a prosy article about animals; and Mrs. Embury, called the Mitford of America (because of her stories of village life), who furnished a religious tale to controvert the infidel doctrines considered at the time subtly undermining to childish faith, with probable reference to the Unitarian movement then gaining many adherents. Mrs. Embury’s stories were so generally gloomy, being strongly tinged with the melancholy religious views of certain church denominations, that one would suppose them to have been eminently successful in turning children away from the faith she sought to encourage. For this “Keepsake” the same lady let her poetical fancy take flight in “The Remembrance of Youth is a Sigh,” a somewhat lugubrious and pessimistic subject for a child’s Christmas Annual. Occasionally a more cheerful mood possessed “Ianthe,” as she chose to call herself, and then we have some of the earliest descriptions of country life in literature for American children. There is one especially charming picture of a walk in New England woods upon a crisp October day, when the children merrily hunt for chestnuts among the dry brown leaves, and the squirrels play above their heads in the many colored boughs.

Dr. Holmes has somewhere remarked upon the total lack of American nature descriptions in the literature of his boyhood. No birds familiar to him were ever mentioned; nor were the flowers such as a New England child could ever gather. Only English larks and linnets, cowslips and hawthorn, were to be found in the toy-books and little histories read to him. “Everything was British: even the robin, a domestic bird,” wrote the doctor, “instead of a great fidgety, jerky, whooping thrush.” But when Peter Parley, Jacob Abbott, Lydia Maria Child, Mrs. Embury, and Eliza Leslie began to write short stories, the Annuals and periodicals abounded in American scenes and local color.

There was also another great incentive for writers to work for children. This was the demand made for stories from the American Sunday School Union, whose influence upon the character of juvenile literature was a force bearing upon the various writers, and whose growth was coincident with the development of the children’s periodical literature.

The American Sunday School Union, an outgrowth of the several religious publication societies, in eighteen hundred and twenty-four began to do more extensive work, and therefore formed a committee to judge and pronounce upon all manuscripts, which American writers were asked to submit.

The sessions of the Sunday-schools were no longer held for illiterate children only. The younger members of each parish or church were found upon its benches each Sunday morning or afternoon. To promote and to impress the religious teaching in these schools, rewards were offered for well-prepared lessons and regular attendance. Also the scholars were encouraged to use the Sunday-school library. For these different purposes many books were needed, but naturally only those stamped with the approval of the clergyman in charge were circulated.

The board of publication appointed by the American Sunday School Union—composed chiefly of clergymen of certain denominations—passed upon the merits of the many manuscripts sent in by piously inclined persons, and edited such of them as proved acceptable. The marginal notes on the pages of the first edition of an old Sunday-school favorite bear witness to the painstaking care of the editors that the leaflets, tracts, and stories poured in from all parts of the country should “shine by reason of the truth contained,” and “avoid the least appearance, the most indirect insinuations, of anything which can militate against the strictest ideas of propriety.” The tales had also to keep absolutely within the bounds of religion. Many were the stories found lacking in direct religious teaching, or returned because religion was not vitally connected with the plot, to be rewritten or sent elsewhere for publication.

The hundreds of stories turned out in what soon became a mechanical fashion were of two patterns: the one of the good child, a constant attendant upon Sabbath School and Divine Worship, but who died young after converting parent or worldly friend during a painful illness; the other of the unregenerate youth, who turned away from the godly admonition of mother and clergyman, refused to attend Sunday-school, and consequently fell into evil ways leading to the thief’s or drunkard’s grave. Often a sick mother was introduced to claim emotional attention, or to use as a lay figure upon which to drape Scripture texts as fearful warnings to the black sheep of the family. Indeed, the little reader no sooner began to enjoy the tale of some sweet and gentle girl, or to delight in the mischievous boy, than he was called upon to reflect that early piety portended an early death, and youthful pranks led to a miserable old age. Neither prospect offered much encouragement to hope for a happy life, and from conversations with those brought up on this form of religious culture, it is certain that if a child escaped without becoming morbid and neurotic, there were dark and secret resolves to risk the unpleasant future in favor of a happy present.

The stories, too, presented a somewhat paradoxical familiarity with the ways of a mysterious Providence. This was exceedingly perplexing to the thoughtful child, whose queries as to justice were too often hushed by parent or teacher. In real life, every child expected, even if he did not receive, a tangible reward for doing the right thing; but Providence, according to these authors, immediately caused a good child to become ill unto death. It is not a matter for surprise that the healthy-minded, vigorous child often turned in disgust from the Sunday-school library to search for Cooper’s tales of adventure on his father’s book-shelves.

The correct and approved child’s story, even if not issued under religious auspices, was thoroughly saturated with religion. Whatever may have been the practice of parents in regard to their own reading, they wished that of the nursery to show not only an educational and moral, but a religious tendency. The books for American children therefore divided themselves into three classes: the denominational story, to set forth the doctrines of one church; the educational tale; and the moral narrative of American life.

The denominational stories produced by the several Sunday-school societies were, as has been said, only a kind of scaffolding upon which to build the teachings of the various churches. But their sale was enormous, and a factor to be reckoned with because of their influence upon the educational and moral tales of their period. By eighteen hundred and twenty-seven, fifty-thousand books and tracts had been sent out by one Sunday-school society alone.204-* There are few things more remarkable in the history of juvenile literature than the growth of the business of the American Sunday School Union. By eighteen hundred and twenty-eight it had issued over seven hundred of these religious trifles, varying from a sixteen-page duodecimo to a small octavo volume; and most of these appear to have been written by Americans trying their inexperienced pens upon a form of literature not then recognized as difficult. The influence of such a flood of tiny books could hardly have been other than morbid, although occasionally there floated down the stream duodecimos which were grasped by little readers with eagerness. Such volumes, one reader of bygone Sunday-school books tells us, glimmered from the dark depths of death and prison scenes, and were passed along with whispered recommendation until their well-worn covers attracted the eye of the teacher, and were quickly found to be missing from library shelves. Others were commended in their stead, such as described the city boy showing the country cousin the town sights, with most edifying conversation as to their history; or, again, amusement of a light and alluring character was presumably to be found in the story of a little maid who sat upon a footstool at her mother’s knee, and while she hemmed the four sides of a handkerchief, listened to the account of missionary enterprises in the dark corners of the earth.

To us of to-day the small illustrations are perhaps the most interesting feature, preserving as they do children’s occupations and costumes. In one book we see quaintly frocked and pantaletted girls and much buttoned boys in Sunday-school. In another, entitled “Election Day,” are pictured two little lads watching, from the square in front of Independence Hall, the handing in of votes for the President through a window of the famous building—a picture that emphasizes the change in methods of casting the ballot since eighteen hundred and twenty-eight.

That engravers were not always successful when called upon to embellish the pages of the Sunday-school books, many of them easily prove. That the designers of woodcuts were sometimes lacking in imagination when obliged to depict Bible verses can have no better example than the favorite vignette on title-pages portraying “My soul doth magnify the Lord” as a man with a magnifying glass held over a blank space. Perhaps equal in lack of imagination was the often repeated frontispiece of “Mercy streaming from the Cross,” illustrated by a large cross with an effulgent rain beating upon the luxuriant tresses of a languishing lady. There were many pictures but little art in the old-fashioned Sunday-school library books.

It was in Philadelphia that one of the first, if not the first children’s library was incorporated in 1827 as the Apprentices’ Library. Eleven years later this library contained more than two thousand books, and had seven hundred children as patrons. The catalogue of that year is indicative of the prevalence of the Sunday-school book. “Adventures of Lot” precedes the “Affectionate Daughter-in-Law,” which is followed by “Anecdotes of Christian Missions” and “An Alarm to Unconverted Sinners.” Turning the yellowed pages, we find “Hannah Swanton, the Casco Captive,” histories of Bible worthies, the “Infidel Class,” “Little Deceiver Reclaimed,” “Letters to Little Children,” “Juvenile Piety,” and “Julianna Oakley.” The bookish child of this decade could not escape from the “Reformed Family” and the consumptive little Christian, except by taking refuge in the parents’ novels, collections of the British poets and essayists, and the constantly increasing American writings for adults. Perhaps in this way the Sunday-school books may be counted among that long list of such things as are commonly called blessings in disguise.

Aside from the strictly religious tale, the contents of the now considerable output of Harper and Brothers, Mahlon Day, Samuel Wood and Sons of New York; Cottons and Barnard, Lincoln and Edmunds, Lilly, Wait and Company, Munroe and Francis of Boston; Matthew Carey, Conrad and Parsons, Morgan and Sons, and Thomas T. Ashe of Philadelphia—to mention but a few of the publishers of juvenile novelties—are convincing proof that booksellers catered to the demand for stories with a strong religious bias. The “New York Weekly,” indeed, called attention to Day’s books as “maintaining an unbroken tendency to virtue and piety.”

When not impossibly pious, these children of anonymous fiction were either insufferable prigs with a steel moral code, or so ill-bred as to be equally impossible and unnatural. The favorite plan of their creators was to follow Miss Edgeworth’s device of contrasting the good and naughty infant. The children, too, were often cousins: one, for example, was the son of a gentleman who in his choice of a wife was influenced by strict religious principles; the other boy inherited his disposition from his mother, a lady of bland manners and fine external appearance, but who failed to establish in her offspring “correct principles of virtue, religion, and morality.” The author paused at this point in the narrative to discuss the frailties of the lady, before resuming its slender thread. Who to-day could wade through with children the good-goody books of that generation?

Happily, many of the writers for little ones chose to be unknown, for it would be ungenerous to disparage by name these ladies who considered their productions edifying, and in their ingenuousness never dreamed that their stories were devoid of every quality that makes a child’s book of value to the child. They were literally unconscious that their tales lacked that simplicity and directness in style, and they themselves that knowledge of human nature, absolutely necessary to construct a pleasing and profitable story. The watchwords of these painstaking ladies were “religion, virtue, and morality,” and heedless of everything else, they found oblivion in most cases before they gained recognition from the public they longed to influence.

The decade following eighteen hundred and thirty brought prominently to the foreground six American authors among the many who occasioned brief notice. Of these writers two were men and four were women. Jacob Abbott and Samuel G. Goodrich wrote the educational tales, Abbott largely for the nursery, while Goodrich devoted his attention mainly to books for the little lads at school. The four women, Mrs. Sarah J. Hale, Miss Eliza Leslie, Miss Catharine Sedgwick, and Mrs. Lydia H. Sigourney, wrote mainly for girls, and took American life as their subject. Mrs. Hale wrote much for adults, but when editor of the “Juvenile Miscellany,” she made various contributions to it. Yet to-day we know her only by one of her “Poems for Children,” published in Boston in eighteen hundred and thirty—“Mary had a Little Lamb.”

Mary’s lamb has travelled much farther than to school, and has even reached that point when its authorship has been disputed. Quite recently in the “Century Magazine” Mrs. Hale’s claim to its composition has been set forth at some length by Mr. Richard W. Hale, who shows clearly her desire when more than ninety years of age to be recognized as the originator of these verses, In fact, “shortly before her death,” wrote Mr. Hale, “she directed her son to write emphatically that every poem in her book of eighteen hundred and thirty was of her own composition.” Although rarely seen in print, “Mary had a Little Lamb” has outlived all other nursery rhymes of its day; perhaps because it had most truly the quality, unusual at the time, of being told directly and simply—a quality, indeed, that appeals to every generation.

Miss Leslie, like Mrs. Hale, did much editing, beginning on adult gift-books and collections of housewife’s receipts, and then giving most of her attention to juvenile literature. As editor Miss Leslie did good work on the “Violet” and the “Pearl,” both gift-books for children. She also abridged, edited, and rewrote “The Wonderful Traveller,” and the adventures of Munchausen, Gulliver, and Sindbad, heroes often disregarded by this period of lack of imagination and over-supply of educational theories. Also, as a writer of stories for little girls and school-maidens, Eliza Leslie met with warm approval on both sides of the Atlantic.

Undoubtedly the success of Eliza Leslie’s “American Girls’ Book,” modelled after the English “Boy’s Own Book,” and published in 1831, added to the popularity attained by her earlier work, although of this she was but the compiler.

The “American Girls’ Book” was intended for little girls, and by dialogue, the prevailing mode of conveying instruction or amusement, numerous games and plays were described. Already many of the pastimes have gone out of fashion. “Lady Queen Anne” and “Robin’s Alive,” “a dangerous game with a lighted stick,” are altogether unknown; “Track the Rabbit” has changed its name to “Fox and Geese;” “Hot Buttered Beans” has found a substitute in “Hunt the Thimble;” and “Stir the Mush” has given place to “Going to Jerusalem.”

But Miss Leslie did more than preserve for us these old-fashioned games. She has left sketches of children’s ways and nature in her various stories for little people. She shared, of course, in the habit of moralizing characteristic of her day, but her children are childish, and her heroines are full of the whims, and have truly the pleasures and natural emotions, of real children.

Miss Leslie began her work for children in eighteen hundred and twenty-seven, when “Atlantic Stories” were published, and as her sketches of child-life appeared one after another, her pen grew more sure in its delineation of characters and her talent was speedily recognized. Even now “Birthday Stories” are worth reading and treasuring because of the pictures of family life eighty years ago. The “Souvenir,” for example, is a Christmas tale of old Philadelphia; the “Cadet’s Sister” sketches life at West Point, where the author’s brother had been a student; while the “Launch of the Frigate” and “Anthony and Clara” tell of customs and amusements quite passed away. The charming description of children shopping for their simple Christmas gifts, the narrative of the boys who paid a poor lad in a bookstore to ornament their “writing-pieces” for more “respectable presents” to parents, the quiet celebration of the day itself, can ill be spared from the history of child life and diversions in America. It is well to be reminded, in these days of complex and expensive amusements, of some of the saner and simpler pleasures enjoyed by children in Miss Leslie’s lifetime.

All of this writer’s books, moreover, have some real interest, whether it be “Althea Vernon,” with the description of summer life and fashions at Far Rockaway (New York’s Manhattan Beach of 1830), or “Henrietta Harrison,” with its sarcastic reference to the fashionable school where the pupils could sing French songs and Italian operas, but could not be sure of the notes of “Hail Columbia.” Or again, the account is worth reading of the heroine’s trip to New York from Philadelphia. “Simply habited in a plaid silk frock and Thibet shawl,” little Henrietta starts, under her uncle’s protection, at five o’clock in the morning to take the boat for Bordentown, New Jersey. There she has her first experience of a railway train, and looks out of the window “at all the velocity of the train will allow her to see.” At Heightstown small children meet the train with fruit and cakes to sell to hungry travellers. And finally comes the wonderful voyage from Amboy to the Battery in New York, which is not reached until night has fallen.

This is the simple explanation as to why Eliza Leslie’s books met with so generous a reception: they were full of the incidents which children love, and unusually free from the affectations of the pious fictitious heroine.

The stories of Miss Catharine Sedgwick also received most favorable criticism, and in point of style were certainly better than Miss Leslie’s. Her reputation as a literary woman was more than national, and “Redwood,” one of her best novels, was attributed in France to Fenimore Cooper, when it appeared anonymously in eighteen hundred and twenty-four. Miss Sedgwick’s novels, however, pass out of nursery comprehension in the first chapters, although these were full of a healthy New England atmosphere, with coasting parties and picnics, Indians and gypsies, nowhere else better described. The same tone pervades her contributions to the “Juvenile Miscellany,” the “Token,” and the “Youth’s Keepsake,” together with her best-known children’s books, “Stories for Children,” “A Well Spent Hour,” and “A Love Token for Children.”

In contrast to Mrs. Sherwood’s still popular “Fairchild Family,” Catharine Sedgwick’s stories breathe a sunny, invigorating atmosphere, abounding in local incidents, and vigorous in delineation of types then plentiful in New England. “She has fallen,” wrote one admirer, most truthfully, in the “North American Review” of 1827,—“she has fallen upon the view, from which the treasures of our future literature are to be wrought. A literature to have real freshness must be moulded by the influences of the society where it had its origin. Letters thrive, when they are at home in the soil. Miss Sedgwick’s imaginations have such vigor and bloom because they are not exotics.” Another reviewer, aroused by English criticism of the social life in America, and full of the much vaunted theory that “all men are equal,” rejoiced in the author’s attitude towards the so-called “help” in New England families in contrast to Miss More’s portrayal of the English child’s condescension towards inferiors, which he thought unsuitable to set before the children in America.

All Miss Sedgwick’s stories were the product of her own keen intelligence and observation, and not written in imitation of Miss More, Miss Edgeworth, or Mrs. Sherwood, as were the anonymous tales of “Little Lucy; or, the Pleasant Day,” or “Little Helen; a Day in the Life of a Naughty Girl.” They preached, indeed, at length, but the preaching could be skipped by interested readers, and unlike the work of many contemporaries, there was always a thread to take up.

Mrs. Lydia H. Sigourney, another favorite contributor to magazines, collected her “Poetry for Children” into a volume bearing this title, in eighteen hundred and thirty-four, and published “Tales and Essays” in the same year. These were followed two years later by “Olive Buds,” and thereafter at intervals she brought out several other books, none of which have now any interest except as examples of juvenile literature that had once a decided vogue and could safely be bought for the Sunday-school library.

The names of Mrs. Anna M. Wells, Mrs. Frances S. Osgood, Mrs. Farrar, Mrs. Eliza L. Follen, and Mrs. Seba Smith were all well beloved by children eighty years ago, and their writings, if long since lost sight of, at least added their quota to the children’s publications which were distinctly American.

If the quantity of books sold is any indication of the popularity of an author’s work, nothing produced by any of these ladies is to be compared with the “Tales of Peter Parley” and the “Rollo Books” of Jacob Abbott.

The tendency to instruct while endeavoring to entertain was remodelled by these men, who in after years had a host of imitators. Great visions of good to children had overtaken dreams of making children good, with the result that William Darton’s conversational method of instruction was compounded with Miss Edgeworth’s educational theories and elaborated after the manner of Hannah More. Samuel Goodrich, at least, confessed that his many tales were the direct result of a conversation with Miss More, whom, because of his admiration for her books, he made an effort to meet when in England in eighteen hundred and twenty-three. While talking with the old lady about her “Shepherd of Salisbury Plain,” the idea came to Mr. Goodrich that he, himself, might write for American children and make good use of her method of introducing much detail in description. As a child he had not found the few toy-books within his reach either amusing or interesting, with the exception of this Englishwoman’s writings. He resolved that the growing generation should be better served, but little dreamed of the unprecedented success, as far as popularity was concerned, that the result of his determination would prove.

After his return to America, the immediate favorable reception of the “Token,” under Goodrich’s direction, led to the publication in the same year (1828) of “Peter Parley’s Tales about America,” followed by “Tales about Europe.” At this date of retrospection the first volume seems in many ways the best of any of the numerous books by the same author. The boy hero, taken as a child companion upon a journey through several states, met with adventures among Indians upon the frontiers, and saw places of historical significance. Every incident is told in imitation of Miss More, with that detailed description which Goodrich had found so fascinating. If a little overdone in this respect, the narrative has certainly a freshness sadly deficient in many later volumes. Even the second tale seems to lack the engaging spontaneity of the first, and already to grow didactic and recitative rather than personal. But both met with an equally generous and appreciative reception. Parley’s educational tales were undoubtedly the American pioneers in what may be readily styled the “travelogue” manner used in later years by Elbridge Brooks and many other writers for little people. These early attempts of Parley’s to educate the young reader were followed by one hundred others, which sold like hot cakes. Of some tales the sales reached a total of fifty thousand in one year, while it is estimated that seven million of Peter Parley’s “Histories” and “Tales” were sold before the admiration of their style and qualities waned.

Peter Parley took his heroes far afield. Jacob Abbott adopted another plan of instruction in the majority of his books. Beginning in eighteen hundred and thirty-four with the “Young Christian Series,” the Reverend Mr. Abbott soon had readers in England, Scotland, Germany, France, Holland, and India, where many of his volumes were translated and republished. In the “Rollo Books” and “Franconia” an attempt was made to answer many of the questions that children of each century pour out to astonish and confound their elders. The child reader saw nothing incongruous in the remarkable wisdom and maturity of Mary Bell and Beechnut, who could give advice and information with equal glibness. The advice, moreover, was often worth following, and the knowledge occasionally worth having; and the little one swallowed chunks of morals and morsels of learning without realizing that he was doing so. Most of both was speedily forgotten, but many adults in after years were unconsciously indebted to Goodrich and Abbott for some familiarity with foreign countries, some interest in natural science.

Notwithstanding the immense demand for American stories, there was fortunately still some doubt as to whether this remodelled form of instructive amusement and moral story-book literature did not lack certain wholesome features characteristic of the days when fairies and folklore, and Newbery’s gilt volumes, had plenty of room on the nursery table. “I cannot very well tell,” wrote the editor of the “Fairy Book”216-* in 1836,—“I cannot very well tell why it is that the good old histories and tales, which used to be given to young people for their amusement and instruction, as soon as they could read, have of late years gone quite out of fashion in this country. In former days there was a worthy English bookseller, one Mr. Newbery, who used to print thousands of nice little volumes of such stories, which, as he solemnly declared in print in the books themselves, he gave away to all little boys and girls, charging them only a sixpenny for the gold covers. These of course no one could be so unreasonable as to wish him to furnish at his own expense.... Yet in the last generation, American boys and girls (the fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers of the present generation) were not wholly dependent upon Mr. Newbery of St. Paul’s church-yard, though they knew him well and loved him much. The great Benjamin Franklin, when a printer in Philadelphia, did not disdain to print divers of Newbery’s books adorned with cuts in the likeness of his, though it must be confessed somewhat inferior.216-† Yet rude as they were, they were probably the first things in the way of pictures that West and Copley ever beheld, and so instilled into those future painters, the rudiments of that art by which they afterwards became so eminent themselves, and conferred such honour upon their native country. In somewhat later time there were the worthy Hugh Gaine, at the Sign of the Bible and Crown in Pearl street, and the patriotic Samuel Loudon, and the genuine and unadulterated New Yorker, Evert Duyckinck, besides others in Boston and Philadelphia, who trod in the steps of Newbery, and supplied the infant mind with its first and sweetest literary food. The munificent Newbery, and the pious and loyal Hugh Gaine, and the patriotic Samuel Loudon are departed. Banks now abound and brokers swarm where Loudon erst printed, and many millions worth of silk and woolen goods are every year sold where Gaine vended his big Bibles and his little story-books. They are all gone; the glittering covers and their more brilliant contents, the tales of wonder and enchantment, the father’s best reward for merit, the good grandmother’s most prized presents. They are gone—the cheap delight of childhood, the unbought grace of boyhood, the dearest, freshest, and most unfading recollections of maturer life. They are gone—and in their stead has succeeded a swarm of geological catechisms, entomological primers, and tales of political economy—dismal trash, all of them; something half-way between stupid story-books and bad school-books; being so ingeniously written as to be unfit for any useful purpose in school and too dull for any entertainment out of it.”

This is practically Charles Lamb’s lament of some thirty years before. Lamb had despised the learned Charles, Mrs. Barbauld’s peg upon which to hang instruction, and now an American Shakespeare lover found the use of toy-books as mechanical guides to knowledge for nursery inmates equally deplorable.

Yet an age so in love with the acquirement of solid facts as to produce a Parley and an Abbott was the period when the most famous of all nursery books was brought out from the dark corner into which it had been swept by the theories of two generations, and presented once again as “The Only True Mother Goose Melodies.”

The origin of Mother Goose as the protecting genius of the various familiar jingles has been an interesting field of speculation and research. The claim for Boston as the birthplace of their sponsor has long ago been proved a poor one, and now seems likely to have been an ingenious form of advertisement. But Boston undoubtedly did once again make popular, at least in America, the lullabies and rhymes repeated for centuries around French or English firesides.

The history of Mother Goose and her brood is a long one. “Mother Goose,” writes Mr. Walter T. Field, “began her existence as the raconteuse of fairy tales, not as the nursery poetess. As La Mère Oye she told stories to French children more than two hundred and fifty years ago.” According to the researches made by Mr. Field in the literature of Mother Goose, “the earliest date at which Mother Goose appears as the author of children’s stories is 1667, when Charles Perrault, a distinguished French littérateur, published in Paris a little book of tales which he had during that and the preceding year contributed to a magazine known as ‘Moejen’s Recueil,’ printed at The Hague. This book is entitled ‘Histoires ou Contes du Tems Passé, avec des Moralitez,’ and has a frontispiece in which an old woman is pictured, telling stories to a family group by the fireside while in the background are the words in large characters, ‘Contes de ma Mère l’Oye.’”

It seems, however, to have been John Newbery’s publishing-house that made Mother Goose sponsor for the ditties in much the form in which we now have them. In Newbery’s collection of “Melodies” there were numerous footnotes burlesquing Dr. Johnson and his dictionary, together with jests upon the moralizing habit prevalent among authors. There is evidence that Goldsmith wrote many of these notes when doing hack-work for the famous publisher in St. Paul’s Churchyard. It is known, for instance, that in January, 1760, Goldsmith celebrated the production of his “Good Natur’d Man” by dining his friends at an inn. During the feast he sang his favorite song, said to be