Reading: How to Teach It

by Sarah Louise Arnold

A clear light is thrown upon our common problem by the charming description of one child’s experience. Hugh Miller, in his “Schools and Schoolmasters,” tells us how he learned to read, or, rather, learned to love reading. We quote at length:—

I had been sent, previous to my father’s death, to a dame’s school, where I was taught to pronounce my letters to such effect in the old Scottish mode, that still, when I attempt spelling a word aloud, which is not often,—for I find the process a perilous one,—the aa’s, and ee’s, and uh’s, and rau’s, return upon me, and I have to translate them, with no little hesitation, as I go along, into the more modish sounds. A knowledge of the letters themselves I had already acquired by studying the signposts of the place,—rare works of art, that excited my utmost admiration, with jugs, and glasses, and bottles, and ships, and loaves of bread upon them; all of which could, as the artist intended, be actually recognized. During my sixth year, I spelt my way, under the dame, through the Shorter Catechism, the Proverbs, and the New Testament, and then entered upon her highest form, as a member of the Bible Class; but all the while, the process of acquiring learning had been a dark one, which I slowly mastered, in humble confidence in the awful wisdom of the schoolmistress, not knowing whither it tended,—when at once my mind awoke to the meaning of that most delightful of all narratives, the story of Joseph. Was there ever such a discovery made before! I actually found out for myself, that the art of reading is the art of finding stories in books, and from that moment reading became one of the most delightful of my amusements. I began by getting into a corner at the dismissal of the school, and there conning over to myself the new-found story of Joseph; nor did one perusal serve; the other Scripture stories followed,—in especial, the story of Samson and the Philistines, of David and Goliath, of the prophets Elijah and Elisha; and after that came the New Testament stories and parables. Assisted by my uncles, I began to collect a library in a box of birch-bark about nine inches square, which I found quite large enough to contain a great many immortal works,—“Jack the Giant-Killer,” and “Jack and the Bean-Stalk,” and the “Yellow Dwarf,” and “Blue Beard,” and “Sindbad the Sailor,” and “Beauty and the Beast,” and “Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp,” with several others of resembling character.

Those intolerable nuisances, the useful-knowledge books, had not yet arisen, like tenebrious stars, on the educational horizon, to darken the world, and shed their blighting influence on the opening intellect of the “youthhood”; and so, from my rudimental books—books that made themselves truly such by their thorough assimilation with the rudimental mind—I passed on, without being conscious of break or line of division, to books on which the learned are content to write commentaries and dissertations, but which I found to be quite as nice children’s books as any of the others. Old Homer wrote admirably for little folk, especially in the “Odyssey”; a copy of which, in the only true translation extant,—for, judging from its surpassing interest and the wrath of critics, such I hold that of Pope to be,—I found in the house of a neighbor. Next came the “Iliad”; not, however, in a complete copy, but represented by four of the six volumes of Bernard Lintot. With what power, and at how early an age, true genius impresses! I saw, even at this immature period, that no writer could cast a javelin with half the force of Homer. The missiles went whizzing athwart his pages; and I could see the momentary gleam of the steel, ere it buried itself deep in brass and bull-hide. I next succeeded in discovering for myself a child’s book, of not less interest than even the “Iliad,” which might, I was told, be read on Sabbaths, in a magnificent old edition of “Pilgrim’s Progress,” printed on coarse, whity-brown paper, and charged with numerous woodcuts, each of which occupied an entire page, that, on principles of economy, bore letterpress on the other side. And such delightful prints as these were! It must have been some such volume that sat for its portrait to Wordsworth, and which he so exquisitely describes as

“Profuse in garniture of wooden cuts,

Strange and uncouth; dire faces, figures dire,

Sharp-kneed, sharp-elbowed, and lean-ankled, too,

With long and ghastly shanks,—forms which, once seen,

Could never be forgotten.”

In process of time I had devoured, besides these genial works, “Robinson Crusoe,” “Gulliver’s Travels,” “Ambrose on Angels,” the judgment chapter in Howie’s “Scotch Worthies,” Byron’s “Narrative,” and the “Adventures of Philip Quarll,” with a good many other adventures and voyages, real and fictitious, part of a very miscellaneous collection of books made by my father. It was a melancholy little library to which I had fallen heir. Most of the missing volumes had been with the master aboard the vessel when he perished. Of an early edition of Cook’s “Voyages,” all the volumes were now absent save the first; and a very tantalizing romance in four volumes, Mrs. Ratcliff’s “Mysteries of Udolpho,” was represented by only the earlier two. Small as the collection was, it contained some rare books,—among the rest, a curious little volume entitled, “The Miracles of Nature and Art,” to which we find Dr. Johnson referring, in one of the dialogues chronicled by Boswell, as scarce even in his day, and which had been published, he said, some time in the seventeenth century by a bookseller whose shop hung perched on Old London Bridge, between sky and water. It contained, too, the only copy I ever saw of the “Memoirs of a Protestant condemned to the Galleys of France for his Religion,”—a work interesting from the circumstance that, though it bore another name on its title-page, it had been translated from the French for a few guineas by poor Goldsmith in his days of obscure literary drudgery, and exhibited the peculiar excellences of his style. The collection boasted, beside, of a very curious old book, illustrated by very uncouth plates, that detailed the perils and sufferings of an English sailor who had spent his best years of life as a slave in Morocco. It had its volumes of sound theology, too, and of stiff controversy,—Flavel’s “Works,” and Henry’s “Commentary,” and Hutchinson on the “Lesser Prophets,” and a very old treatise on the “Revelation,” with the title-page away, and blind Jameson’s volume on the “Hierarchy,” with first editions of “Naphthali,” “The Cloud of Witnesses,” and “The Hind let Loose.” But with these solid authors I did not venture to grapple until long after this time. Of the works of fact and incident which it contained, those of the voyagers were my especial favorites. I perused with avidity the voyages of Anson, Drake, Raleigh, Dampier, and Captain Woods Rogers, and my mind became so filled with conceptions of what was to be seen and done in foreign parts, that I wished myself big enough to be a sailor, that I might go and see coral islands and burning mountains, and hunt wild beasts and fight battles.