While on a visit to England in 1823—the memorable time he met Miss More—he turned his attention to what was being accomplished there in popular education for children. After investigation, he thus wrote:
“Did not children love truth? If so, was it necessary to feed them on fiction? Could not history, natural history, geography, biography become the elements of juvenile works, in place of fairies and giants, and mere monsters of the imagination? These were the inquiries that from this time filled my mind.”
Under such conditions Peter Parley was born, and reborn, and overborn; battles were waged for and against him, just as they have only recently been waged for and against the Elsie books. But no sooner was Peter Parley identified with a definite person than Mr. Goodrich’s trials began. He became a victim of the imperfect copyright system; he found his tales being pirated in England. And as fast as he would settle one difficulty, another would arise; spurious Parleys came to light, conflicting with his sales. It was the case of Goodrich alias Kettell, alias Mogridge, alias Martin, and many more beside. In fact, a writer, considering the life of William Martin (1801–1867), quotes a statement to the effect that “Messrs. Darton, Martin’s publishers, in especial used to prefix the name [Peter Parley] to all sorts of children’s books, without reference to their actual authorship.”
Isaiah Thomas may be taken as representative of our Revolutionary period, even as the “New England Primer” may typify the chief literary product of our Colonial life. Peter Parley marks for us the war of 1812. It was after this that our country began to expand, that the South and the Southwest unfolded their possibilities, that the East began the Westward move that led to the craze of ’49. The Indian, the scout, the cowboy, the Yankee trader have been the original contributions of America to juvenile literature. A close study will indicate that Cooper was the creator of this genre of story,—more painstaking, more effulgent, more detailed than the Indian story-writer of to-day, but none the less a permanent model. So, too, he will be found, in his accounts of the navy, in his records of common seamen, in his lives of naval officers, to be no mean, no inaccurate, no dry historian; in fact, Cooper, as one of our first naval critics, has yet to be accorded his proper estimate.
American history, American development being of a melodramatic character, it is natural that the opposite to Sunday-school literature should rapidly take root as soon as begun. A period of the ten-cent novel flourished about 1860, when the Beadle Brothers, who were finally to be merged into the publishing house of George Munro, began the publication of their series of cheap volumes—the sensationalism of Cooper raised to the nth power. To-day there are men who glow with remembered enthusiasm over Colonel Prentiss Ingraham and the detective stories of A. W. Aiken—whose record was often one a week—as they do over the name of Hemyng alias Jack Harkaway, or Mayne Reid, with his traditional profanity. Edward S. Ellis (b. 1840) was one of the young members of this group of writers. He became inoculated, but was forced, when the milder process came into vogue, to soften his high lights, and to accord with the times. What such early “wild cat” literature did, however, for present upholders of the “series” books, was to exemplify that, by a given pattern, a tale could be made to “go” to order. There was then, as there is now, a certain type of book, neither moral nor immoral, and not at all educational, but only momentarily diverting; written without motive, without definite object, but whose ground plan and mechanism were workable.
The increase of the public-school system was the chief opponent of the Sunday-school book, as it likewise, by its educational emphasis, fought against the dime-novel vogue. And with the inception of the public school on its present large scale we reach the immediate stage, the era of over-productivity, with its enormous average taste, with its public regard for readers in the libraries, for scholars in the class-rooms, for the poor in settlements, and for the emigrant on the high seas.
After an experience of five years in reviewing juvenile books of the past and in estimating the varied stories of the present, I do not think it sweeping to assert that while education has snatched the child’s book from the moralist and taken away from writing a false standard of right doing, it has not, as yet, added any worthy attribute of itself. It has not taught the child to judge good literature from the bad; it has supplied, in a prescribed course, certain isolated books or stereotyped poems, with which the child is wearied in the class-room, and from which, once outside, the child turns with natural dread. I am judging solely from the standpoint of juvenile taste. And so, with the entrance of a new consideration—the children’s reading-rooms—it may well be queried at the outset: What will this institution add to the creative force? How far will it seek to improve conditions? Will there be an increased demand for the good and for the best books? Will there be a more careful art manifested in the writing of stories? Will the gaps in the field be filled up? For an examination of the past and of the present tells me that children’s literature, generally speaking, has yet to be conquered.
With these remarks in view, the table that follows may, on examination, bear some significance.
AMERICAN TABLE
Noah Webster. Ct. 1758–1843. Cf. Mavor in England. Author: New England Spelling Book; American Dictionary. Reference: Memoir by Goodrich (in Dictionary); Life by H. E. Scudder; Appleton.[45]