It is beyond question that the keen relish induced by the scarcity of juvenile reading, together with the sound digestion it promoted, overbalanced in mental gain the novelties of a later day.
The Sedgwick library was probably typical of the average choice in reading-matter of the contemporary American child. Half a dozen little story-books, Berquin’s “Children’s Friend” (the very form and shade of color of its binding with its green edges were never forgotten by any member of the Sedgwick family), and the “Looking Glass for the Mind” were shelved side by side with a large volume entitled “Elegant Extracts,” full of ballads, fables, and tales delightful to children whose imagination was already excited by the solemn mystery of Rowe’s “Letters from the Dead to the Living.” Since none of these books except those containing an infusion of religion were allowed to be read on Sunday, the Sedgwick children extended the bounds by turning over the pages of a book, and if the word “God” or “Lord” appeared, it was pounced upon as sanctified and therefore permissible.
Where families were too poor to buy story-books, the children found what amusement they could in the parents’ small library. In ministers’ families sermons were more plentiful than books. Mrs. H. B. Stowe, when a girl, found barrels of sermons in the garret of her father, the Rev. Dr. Beecher, in Litchfield, Connecticut. Through these sermons his daughter searched hungrily for mental food. It seemed as if there were thousands of the most unintelligible things. “An appeal on the unlawfulness of a man’s marrying his wife’s sister” turned up in every barrel by the dozens, until she despaired of finding an end of it. At last an ancient volume of “Arabian Nights” was unearthed. Here was the one inexhaustible source of delight to a child so eager for books that at ten years of age she had pored over the two volumes of the “Magnalia.”
The library advantages of a more fortunately placed old-fashioned child we know from Dr. Holmes’s frequent reference to incidents of his boyhood. He frankly confessed that he read in and not through many of the two thousand books in his father’s library; but he found much to interest him in the volumes of periodicals, especially in the “Annual Register” and Rees’s “Encyclopedia.” Although apparently allowed to choose from the book-shelves, there were frequent evidences of a parent’s careful supervision. “I remember,” he once wrote to a friend, “many leaves were torn out of a copy of Dryden’s Poems, with the comment ‘Hiatus haud diflendus,’ but I had like all children a kind of Indian sagacity in the discovery of contraband reading, such as a boy carries to a corner for perusal. Sermons I had enough from the pulpit. I don’t know that I ever read one sermon of my own accord during my childhood. The ‘Life of David,’ by Samuel Chandler, had adventures enough, to say nothing of gallantry, in it to stimulate and gratify curiosity.” “Biographies of Pious Children,” wrote Dr. Holmes at another time, “were not to my taste. Those young persons were generally sickly, melancholy, and buzzed around by ghostly comforters or discomforters in a way that made me sick to contemplate.” Again, Dr. Holmes, writing of the revolt from the commonly accepted religious doctrines he experienced upon reading the Rev. Thomas Scott’s Family Bible, contrasted the gruesome doctrines it set forth with the story of Christian told in “Pilgrim’s Progress,” a book which captivated his imagination.
As to story-books, Dr. Holmes once referred to Mrs. Barbauld and Dr. Aikin’s joint production, “Evenings at Home,” with an accuracy bearing testimony to his early love for natural science. He also paid a graceful tribute to Lady Bountiful of “Little King Pippin” in comparing her in a conversation “At the Breakfast Table” with the appearance of three maiden ladies “rustling through the aisles of the old meeting-house, in silk and satin, not gay but more than decent.”
Although Dr. Holmes was not sufficiently impressed with the contents of Miss Edgeworth’s tales to mention them, at least one of her books contained much of the sort of information he found attractive in “Evenings at Home.” “Harry and Lucy,” besides pointing a moral on every page, foreshadowed that taste for natural science which turned every writer’s thought toward printing geographical walks, botanical observations, natural history conversations, and geological dissertations in the guise of toy-books of amusement. A batch of books issued in America during the first two decades of the nineteenth century is illustrative of this new fashion. These books, belonging to the Labor-in-Play school, may best be described in their American editions.
One hundred years ago the American publishers of toy works were devoting their attention to the make-up rather than to the contents of their wares. The steady progress of the industrial arts enabled a greater number of printers to issue juvenile books, whose attractiveness was increased by better illustrations; and also with the improved facilities for printing and publishing, the issues of the various firms became more individual. At the beginning of the century the cheaper books entirely lost their charming gilt, flowery Dutch, and silver wrappers, as home products came into use. Size and illustrations also underwent a change.
In Philadelphia, Benjamin and Jacob Johnson, and later Johnson and Warner, issued both tiny books two inches square, and somewhat larger volumes containing illustrations as well as text. These firms used for binding gray and blue marbled paper, gold-powdered yellow cardboard, or salmon pink, blue, and olive-green papers, usually without ornamentation. In eighteen hundred J. and J. Crukshank, of the same town, began to decorate with copper-plate cuts the outside of the white or blue paper covers of their imprints for children. Other printers followed their example, especially after wood-engraving became more generally used.