Forgotten Books of the American Nursery / A History of the Development of the American Story-Book

by Rosalie Vrylina Halsey

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.