Gentle Miss Eliza Leslie received altogether different treatment in this review of American juvenile literature. She was considered “good everywhere, and particularly so for the meridian in which her tales were placed;” and we quite agree with the reviewer who considered it well worth while to quote long paragraphs from her “Tell Tale” to show its character and “truly useful lesson.” “To America,” continued this writer, “we also owe a host of little books, that bring together the literature of childhood and the people; as ‘Home,’ ‘Live and Let Live’ [by Miss Sedgwick], &c., but excellent in intention as they are, we have our doubts, as to the general reception they will meet in this country while so much of more exciting and elegant food is at hand.” Even if the food of amusement in England appeared to the British mind more spiced and more elegant, neither Miss Leslie’s nor Miss Sedgwick’s fictitious children were ever anaemic puppets without wills of their own,—a type made familiar by Miss Edgeworth and persisted in by her admirers and successors,—but vitalized little creatures, who acted to some degree, at least, like the average child who loved their histories and named her dolls after favorite characters.
To-day these English criticisms are only of value as showing that the American story-book was no longer imitating the English tale, but was developing, by reason of the impress of differing social forces, a new type. Its faults do not prevent us from seeing that the spirit expressed in this juvenile literature is that of a new nation feeling its own way, and making known its purpose in its own manner. While we smile at sedulous endeavors of the serious-minded writers to present their convictions, educational, religious, or moral, in palatable form, and to consider children always as a race apart, whose natural actions were invariably sinful, we still read between the lines that these writers were really interested in the welfare of the American child; and that they were working according to the accepted theories of the third decade of the nineteenth century as to the constituents of a juvenile library which, while “judicious and attractive, should also blend instruction with innocent amusement.”
And now as we have reached the point in the history of the American story-book when it is popular at least in both English-speaking countries, if not altogether satisfactory to either, what can be said of the value of this juvenile literature of amusement which has developed on the tiny pages of well-worn volumes? If, of all the books written for children by Americans seventy-five years and more ago, only Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Wonder Book” has survived to the present generation; of all the verse produced, only the simple rhyme, “Mary had a Little Lamb,” and Clement Moore’s “The Night before Christmas” are still quoted, has their history any value to-day?
If we consider that there is nothing more rare in the fiction of any nation than the popular child’s story that endures; nothing more unusual than the successful well-written juvenile tale, we can perhaps find a value not to be reckoned by the survival or literary character of these old-fashioned books, but in their silent testimony to the influence of the progress of social forces at work even upon so small a thing as a child’s toy-book. The successful well-written child’s book has been rare, because it has been too often the object rather than the manner of writing that has been considered of importance; because it has been the aim of all writers either to “improve in goodness” the young reader, as when, two hundred years ago, Cotton Mather penned “Good Lessons” for his infant son to learn at school, or, to quote the editor of “Affection’s Gift” (published a century and a quarter later), it has been for the purpose of “imparting moral precepts and elevated sentiments, of uniting instruction and amusement, through the fascinating mediums of interesting narrative and harmony of numbers.”
The result of both intentions has been a collection of dingy or faded duodecimos containing a series of impressions of what each generation thought good, religiously, morally, and educationally, for little folk. If few of them shed any light upon child nature in those long-ago days, many throw shafts of illumination upon the change and progress in American ideals and thought concerning the welfare of children. As has already been said, the press supplied what the public taste demanded, and if the writers produced for earlier generations of children what may now be considered lumber, the press of more modern date has not progressed so far in this field of literature as to make it in any degree certain that our children’s treasures may not be consigned to an equal oblivion. For these too are but composites made by superimposing the latest fads or theories as to instructive amusement of children upon those of previous generations of toy-books. Most of what was once considered the “perfume of youth and freshness” in a literary way has been discarded as dry and unprofitable, mistaken or deceptive; and yet, after all has been said by way of criticism of methods and subjects, these chap-books, magazines, gift and story books form our best if blurred pictures of the amusements and daily life of the old-time American child.
We are learning also to prize these small “Histories” as part of the progress of the arts of book-making and illustration, and of the growth of the business of publishing in America; and already we are aware of the fulfilment of what was called by one old bookseller, “Tom Thumb’s Maxim in Trade and Politics:” “He who buys this book for Two-pence, and lays it up till it is worth Three-pence, may get an hundred per cent by the bargain.”
[204-*] Election Day, p. 71. American Sunday School Union, 1828.
[216-*] Mr. G. C. Verplanck was probably the editor of this book, published by Harper & Bros.