You will find early American children’s books difficult to obtain. There are but few left in good condition to-day, but it is great fun tracking them. In the first place, very few were published by our Colonial presses. Such venerable gentlemen as Cotton Mather and Governor Winthrop kept the printers too busily occupied issuing theological works or acts of provincial assemblies; too seriously engaged with statutes, laws, almanacs, prayer books, catechisms, and sermons, to print many books for children. Lost in a theological web of their own weaving, the leaders of the day cared little about the intellectual amusement of their girls and boys.
But most of the young book fanciers, lucky enough to obtain the few books issued, mauled them about or destroyed them entirely. They are generally found with torn and missing leaves—these charming atrocities have made many copies quite worthless to the collector. I have been told that it is but normal for a bouncing bibliophile of twelve months to teethe on the hard board corners of, for instance, a copy of Cinderella. Indeed, a young child’s attitude toward a book is not unlike that of a cannibal toward a missionary. Very young children—this is on record, if you doubt me—have been known to eat their books, literally devouring their contents.
When I was about seven years old another little boy of the same age came from a suburb of Philadelphia to spend the day with me. We quickly struck up a friendship. Although it was raining and we were forced to remain indoors, we played together quite happily. Everything went smoothly until late in the afternoon, when our inventive faculties began to give out. It was then, after we had taken apart most of my toys, that my little friend’s eyes lighted upon my books. I watched him cross the room to the low shelf which held them so neatly, and I remained quiet even as he began to paw them over. But when I saw him take a pencil from his pocket to write crude letters of the alphabet along the margins, I flew at him like a wildcat. Only the immediate intervention of our combined families saved him from annihilation. We have met many times since, and we always laugh at the story of my juvenile wrath.
He still insists, after forty years, that his was a perfectly normal action in a child. I believed in treating a book as something sacred, even at that age. The germ had evidently entered my system with my first vaccination!
In 1902 my uncle gave me his wonderful collection of children’s books.
Among them was his “damn rare” pamphlet, A Legacy for Children, being Some of the Last Expressions and Dying Sayings of Hannah Hill, Junr. Of the City of Philadelphia in the Province of Pennsylvania, in America, Aged Eleven Years and near Three Months, which was printed by Andrew Bradford, at the sign of the Bible, in Philadelphia, in 1717. Little Hannah took several days to die, and she insisted upon having the undivided attention of every member of her family. She gave them moral advice, told them what they should do and what they should not do after she had departed. “The Council which she gave, to her Dear and only Sister and Cousin Loyd Zachary, whom she dearly loved, was very grave and pithy....”
To-day I have nearly eight hundred volumes, which date from 1682 to 1840. They reveal with amazing fidelity the change in juvenile reading matter, the change, too, in the outward character of the American child. They depict the slow but determined growth from the child of Puritan New England to that of our own day. It is a delightful change from Virtuous William the Obedient Prentice, and Patty Primrose, to Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, Penrod, and Winnie-the-pooh. If Robert Louis Stevenson had had the temerity to publish Treasure Island in the good old days of Governor Winthrop he would have been a fit subject for the common hangman! I do not mean to imply that the New England boy of the seventeenth century was the goody-goody thing which his parents tried to make him. If he was choked with the Bible and threatened with the catechism and the prayer book, if the creed and Bunyan were ruthlessly thrust down his innocent young throat, he nevertheless could think of Captain Kidd, Sir Henry Morgan, the Indians, and the whole machinery of the boyhood imagination. Free thought was permitted him because there was no way to suppress it.
The little Puritans! My heart aches for them when I read an example such as The Rule of the New-Creature. To be Practiced every day in all the Particulars of which are Ten. This is the earliest book in my collection. It was published in Boston for Mary Avery, who sold books near the Blue Anchor, 1682. Imagine the weary little child who had to listen throughout a long Sunday afternoon to the contents of a book which started off in this manner:—
“Be sensible of thy Original Corruption daily, how it inclines thee to evil, and indisposeth thee to good; groan under it, and bewail it as Paul did.... Also take special notice of your actual sins, or daily infirmities, in Thought, Word, Deed. Endeavor to make your peace with God for them before you go to bed.”
There is, too, one of the most famous of all juveniles, the equally inspiriting and nourishing Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes. In either England: Drawn out of the breasts of both Testaments for their Souls nourishment. But may be of like use to any Children. Printed at Boston, 1684. My copy is the only one known of this date. John Cotton, the great and influential Puritan minister, had written this many years before, and it was first published in England in 1646, to settle a growing dissension among the Puritans, who could not decide which catechism of the many then in use was best for their children. This volume grew very popular and from it the little ones learned to die with much grace, and, therefore, eternal glory. Yet it was found very difficult to teach the young of New England the proper way to die; of all knowledge it is the most difficult to impart, as there are no really good textbooks.