Child Life in Colonial Days

by Alice Morse Earle

Samuel Torrey, Twelve Years Old, 1770

There are many records of the precocity of children, preserved for us many times, alas! through the sad recounting of early deaths. One of the most pathetic records of a father's blasted hopes may be found in the pages of the diary of John Evelyn. In December, 1658, died his little son, Richard, five years and three days old. He was a prodigy of wit and learning, as beautiful as an angel, and of rare mental endowment. His father's account of his acquirements runs thus:—

"He had learned all his catechism at two years and a half old; he could perfectly read any of the English, Latin, French, or Gothic letters, pronouncing the first three languages exactly. He had, before the fifth year, or in that year, not only skill to read most written hands, but to decline all the nouns, conjugate the verbs regular, and most of the irregular; learned out Puerelis, got by heart almost the entire vocabulary of Latin and French primitives and words, could make congruous syntax, turn English into Latin, and vice versa, construe and prove what he read, and did the government and use of relatives, verbs, substantives, ellipses and many figures and tropes, and made a considerable progress in Comenius' Janua; begun himself to write legibly and had a strong passion for Greek. The number of verses he could recite was prodigious, and what he remembered of the parts of plays which he would also act; and, when seeing a Plautus in one's hand, he asked what book it was, and being told it was comedy and too difficult for him, he wept for sorrow. Strange was his apt and ingenious application of fables and morals, for he had read Æsop; he had a wonderful disposition to mathematics, having by heart divers propositions of Euclid that were read to him in play, and he would make lines and demonstrate them. He had learned by heart divers sentences in Latin and Greek which on occasion he would produce even to wonder. He was all life, all prettiness, far from morose, sullen, or childish in any thing he said or did."

Of course this is not given as an ordinary education of an every-day child. It is an extraordinary record of a very unusual child, but it shows what an intelligent child could be permitted to do. Evelyn was a man of great good sense; not the sort of man who would force a child; indeed he averred that he abhorred precocity. But in truth it was a time in England's history when such a child could easily be overstimulated, when public events, the course of history, was so exciting that every child of keen wit must have felt the effects.

The crowding of young minds did not end with the seventeenth century. A striking example of the desire to press education is found in the letters of Lord Chesterfield to his son, beginning in 1738, when the boy was not six years old. The language and subjects would be deemed to-day suited only to mature minds. In 1741 the father wrote:—

"This is the last letter I shall write to you as a little boy, for to-morrow you will attain your ninth year; so that for the future, I shall treat you as a youth. You must now commence a different course of life, a different course of studies. No more levity. Childish toys and playthings must be thrown aside, and your mind directed to serious objects. What was not unbecoming to a child would be disgraceful to a youth" etc.

Letter after letter continued in this tone. For years was the process carried on. The result was a striking proof of the futility of such methods. The son died when but little past his youth, a failure in everything the father had most fondly desired and striven for. The crowded brain ever stumbled and hesitated when put to any important test.

It was inevitable that New England parents, with their fairly passionate intensity of zeal for the education of their children, should in many cases overstimulate and force the infant minds in their charge. It seems somewhat anomalous with the almost universal distrust and hindrance of female education that one of the most precocious flowers of Puritanism should have been a girl, the "pious and ingenious Mrs. Jane Turell," who was born in Boston in 1708. Before her second year was finished she could speak distinctly, knew her letters, and "could relate many stories out of the Scriptures to the satisfaction and pleasure of the most judicious." Governor Dudley and other "wise and polite" New England gentlemen were among those entitled "judicious," who placed her on a table to show off her acquirements. When she was three years old she could recite the greater part of the Assembly's Catechism, many of the psalms, many lines of poetry, and read distinctly; at the age of four she "asked many astonishing questions about divine mysteries."