Part 11

REV. ABIJAH RICHARDSON BAKER. Mass. 1805–1876. Congregationalist. Graduate of Amherst; a teacher. With his wife, Mrs. H. N. W. Baker, edited _The Mother’s Assistant_ and _The Happy Home_. Author: School History of the U. S.; Westminster Shorter Catechism--Graduated Question Book. Reference: Appleton.

J. S. C. ABBOTT. Me. 1805–1877. Brother of Jacob Abbott. Congregational minister. Author: The Mother at Home; histories with brother. Reference: _Cong. Q._, 20:1; Appleton.

SARAH TOWNE (SMITH) MARTYN. 1805–1879. Wife of a minister. Wrote Sunday-school books and semi-historical stories. Published through American Tract Society. Established _Ladies’ Wreath_, and edited it, 1846–1851. Author: Huguenots of France; Lady Alice Lisle. Reference: Appleton.

MRS. ELIZABETH OAKES (PRINCE) SMITH. Me. 1806–1893. One of the first women lecturers in America. Moved later to South Carolina. By her book, The Newsboy, public attention was drawn to that class of child. Supervised, _circa_ 1840, annual issuance of the _Mayflower_ (Boston). Author: The Sinless Child; Stories for Children; Hints on Dress and Beauty. Reference: Hart; Nat. Cyclo. Am. Biog.

MARY STANLEY BUNCE (PALMER) (DANA) SHINDLER. S. C. 1810–1883. Wife of a clergyman, Episcopal. Author: Charles Morton; or, The Young Patriot; The Young Sailor. Reference: Appleton.

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. Ct. 1811–1896. Author: Dred; Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Reference: Life work of,--McCray; E. F. Parker in Parton’s Eminent Women; Life compiled from letters and journals by C. E. Stowe; Life and Letters, ed. Annie Fields.

ELIJAH KELLOGG. Me. 1813-. Congregational minister. Famed for “The Address of Spartacus to the Gladiators.” Author: Elm Island series; Forest Glen series; Good Old Times series; Pleasant Cove series. Reference: Bibliog. Me.; Appleton.

MARY ELIZABETH LEE. S. C. 1813–1849. Not a distinctive juvenile writer, but contributed many juvenile tales to _The Rosebud_. (_Vide_ Gilman.) Reference: Hart.

REV. ZACHARIAH ATWELL MUDGE. Mass. 1813–1888. Methodist-Episcopal minister; teacher. Fiction for Sunday-schools. Author: Arctic Heroes; Fur Clad Adventurers. Reference: Appleton.

MRS. HARRIET V. CHENEY. Mass. _Circa_ 1815. Daughter of Hannah Foster, an early American novelist. Her sister, Mrs. Cushing, wrote Esther, a dramatic poem, and “works” for the young. Author: A Peep at the Pilgrims; The Sunday-school; or, Village Sketches. Reference: Appleton.

MRS. HARRIETTE NEWELL (WOODS) BAKER. Mass. 1815–1893. Pseud. Madeline Leslie. Wife of Rev. A. R. B. Author: About two hundred moral tales, among them Tim, the Scissors Grinder. Reference: Appleton.

LYDIA ANN EMERSON (PORTER). Mass. 1816-. Second cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Contributed mostly to the Sunday-school type of book. Author: Uncle Jerry’s Letters to Young Mothers; The Lost Will. Reference: Appleton.

CATHERINE MARIA TROWBRIDGE. Ct. 1818-. Author: Christian Heroism; Victory at Last; Will and Will Not; Snares and Safeguards.

SUSAN WARNER. N. Y. 1818–1885. Pseud. Elizabeth Wetherell. Books noted for strained religious sentimentality. With her, the school of Hannah More came to an end. Author: The Wide, Wide World (1851); Queechy (1852); Say and Seal (in collaboration with her sister). Reference: Appleton.

REV. WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THAYER. Mass. 1820–1898. Congregational minister; member of legislature. Author: Youth’s History of the Rebellion; The Bobbin Boy; The Pioneer Boy; The Printer Boy; Men Who Win; Women Who Win. Edited _The Home Monthly_ and _The Mother’s Assistant_. Reference: Appleton.

WILLIAM TAYLOR ADAMS. Mass. 1822–1897. Pseud. Oliver Optic. In early life ed. _Student and School-Mate_. In 1881, ed. _Our Little Ones_. Then ed. _Oliver Optic’s Magazine_. Author: About one hundred volumes; first one published 1853, Hatchie, the Guardian Slave. Reference: Appleton.

CHARLES CARLETON COFFIN. N. H. 1823–1896. Self-educated. Varied career as a war correspondent during the Civil War. Author: The Boys of ’76. Reference: Life by Griffis; Appleton.

WILLIAM HENRY THOMAS. 1824–1895. Belonged to the school of dime novelists. Boys in the 60’s eagerly devoured the Beadle and (later) Munro books. Author: The Belle of Australia; Ocean Rover; A Whaleman’s Adventure. Reference: Appleton.

MRS. ALICE (BRADLEY) (NEAL) HAVEN. N. Y. 1828–1863. Pseud. Alice G. Lee. Wrote for Sunday-schools. Author: No such Word as Fail; Contentment Better Than Wealth. Reference: Memoir in _Harper’s Magazine_, Oct., 1863; Appleton.

JANE ANDREWS. Mass. 1833–1887. Author: Seven Little Sisters who live on the Round Ball that Floats in the Air; The Stories Mother Nature Told.

CHARLES A. FOSDICK. N. Y. 1842-. Pseud. Harry Castlemon. Went through the Civil War. Author: Gunboat series; Rocky Mountains series; Roughing It series; Frank series; Archie series.

MRS. ANNIE M. MITCHELL. Mass. 1847-. Religious books for children. Author: Martha’s Gift; Freed Boy in Alabama.

MRS. MARY L. CLARK. Fairford, Me. 1831-. Religious juveniles. Author: The Mayflower series; Daisy’s Mission.

MRS. CAROLINE E. DAVIS. Northwood, N. H. 1831-. Sunday-school tales, about fifty or more. Author: No Cross, No Crown; Little Conqueror Series; Miss Wealthy’s Hope; That Boy; Child’s Bible Stories. Reference: Appleton.

SARA H. BROWNE. Author: Book for the Eldest Daughter (1849).

MARIA J. BROWNE. Author: The Youth’s Sketch Book (1850). Reference for both: Hart (Bibl.).

III. THE PRESENT SITUATION.

The essential difference between the past and the present is not so much a difference, after all; in both instances the same mistaken emphasis is placed upon two separate phases of the child’s make-up. The moral tale took no cognisance of those spiritual laws which are above teaching, which act of themselves; it did not recognise the existence of the child’s personality. But when the impetus toward the study, scientific and intensive, of adolescence was begun, the teacher lost sight of the free will by which that growth advanced; anxious to prove the child’s development to be but a series of stages marked by educational gradings, he reserved no place for the self-development through which the personality finds expression. In both cases an unconscious injustice was done juvenile nature. The moral questioning warped the spirit, the educational questioning chokes the imagination and fancy, starving the spirit altogether. How many will agree with Emerson’s assertion that “what we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so”? The pessimist who challenges children’s books for children has reasons to doubt, after all.

Time changes not, ’tis we who change in time. Emerson speaks in terms of evolution; by this very change from generation to generation, the vitality of a book is tested. Again, in terms of our mentality, Emerson says that when a thought of Plato becomes a thought to us, Time is no more. Truth is thus an annihilator of the fleeting moment. The survival of the fittest means the falling away of the mediocre. The Sunday-school book was no permanent type; its content was no classic expression. It filled a timely demand--that was its excuse for being. Once this demand became modified, the book’s service was at an end; hence Mr. Welsh’s indication of the decline of the Sunday-school story through secularisation,--from sectarianism to broad religious principles, thence to “example rather than direct teaching.”[46]

We still have the religious tract and the church story-paper; yet the books of advice deal with the social and ethical spirit, rather than with the denominational stricture. “The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues, the better we like him,” wrote Emerson, while Stevenson, in his “Lay Sermons,” placed the stress thus: “It is the business of life to make excuses for others but not for ourselves.”

To-morrow new topics may be introduced into our juvenile literature, but change takes longer than a day to become apparent. The student who attempts to reach any scientific estimate of the present trend will be disappointed; the mass is too conglomerate, and there are too many authors writing children’s books for money rather than for children. I have followed the course as carefully as I could, noting the slight alterations in concepts to accord with the varying conditions. But there is no principle that can be deduced, other than the educational one. The changes are confined to points of external interest, not of spiritual or mental significance. For instance, there was a time when girls’ literature and boys’ literature were more clearly differentiated, one from the other; their near approach has been due to a common interest in outdoor exercises. Again, things practical, things literal have crowded out the benignant figure of Santa Claus; and in the stead, the comic supplement of the Sunday newspaper furnishes pictures that well-nigh stifle the true domain once occupied by “Mother Goose.”

What would a parent do, asked suddenly to deal with a promiscuous collection of juvenile books? Would she unerringly reach forth for the volume most likely to please her son’s or her daughter’s taste? If she were to claim little difference between the one college story she had read, and the several hundred she had not read, she would not be far from wrong. But we cannot tell how deep an impression the present activity among writers for children will have on the future. Our temptation is to make the general statement that the energy is a surface one, that no great writing is being done for children because it has become an accessory rather than an end in itself. Education saved us from the moral pose; it must not deny us the realm of imagination and fancy.

FOOTNOTES:

[41] In education, the influence of Froebel, in direct descent from Rousseau, is to be considered.

[42] D. N. B.--Dictionary of National Biography.

[43] The student who desires to investigate the history of American school-books will find much valuable material in the Watkinson Library of Hartford, Conn., to which institution Dr. Henry Barnard’s entire collection of school-books was left. _Vide_ Bibliotheca Americana, Catalogue of American Publications, including reprints and original works, from 1820 to 1852, inclusive, together with a list of periodicals published in the United States, compiled and arranged by Orville A. Roorbach, N. Y., Oct., 1852. Includes Supplement to 1849 ed., published in 1850.

_Vide_ also Early English School-books. Educational Library, South Kensington Museum.

[44] _Vide_ Recollections of a Life-time; or, Men and Things I have Seen: in a series of familiar Letters to a Friend. Historical, Biographical, Anecdotal, and Descriptive. S. G. Goodrich. (2 vols.) New York, 1857. [Contains a valuable list of the real Parley books; also the names of the spurious Parleys. The volumes describe many small characteristics of American life during the early years of the nineteenth century.]

[45] Cyclopædia.

[46] Mr. Welsh states that between 1706–1718, 550 books were published in America, of which 84 were _not_ religious, and of these 84, 49 were almanacs!

V. THE LIBRARY AND THE BOOK

_THE LAND OF STORY-BOOKS_

_At evening when the lamp is lit, Around the fire my parents sit; They sit at home and talk and sing, And do not play at anything._

_Now, with my little gun, I crawl All in the dark along the wall, And follow round the forest track Away behind the sofa back._

_There, in the night, where none can spy, All in my hunter’s camp I lie, And play at books that I have read Till it is time to go to bed._

_These are the hills, these are the woods, These are my starry solitudes; And there the river by whose brink The roaring lions come to drink._

_I see the others far away As if in firelit camp they lay, And I, like to an Indian scout, Around their party prowled about._

_So, when my nurse comes in for me, Home I return across the sea, And go to bed with backward looks At my dear land of Story-books._ --_Robert Louis Stevenson, in_ “A Child’s Garden of Verses.”

I. CHILDREN’S BOOKS: THEIR CLASSIFICATION; THEIR CHARACTERISTICS.

There is nothing more variegated in its colour than a large assemblage of children’s books; the cover-designers revel in their rainbow conceits, sprinkling gold across the cloth as generously as fairies scatter star-dust; the artists fill their brushes with delicate tints of red and blue and orange, and sketch the progress of a story in spiral traceries of imagination. The mechanical perfection of book-making is genuinely pleasing; the form, like that of the glass-blown vase with its slender outlines, is fitted for the worthiest content. The excellence of binding, the distinctness of type, the spirit of the drawing--these points strike our senses, these are the subterfuges of the publishing trade, these the artistic features that hide the shallowness beneath. You may arrange your blue books together, and your red, your brown, your white or green in rows; you may mix them all up again, and marshal them in regiments of equal sizes; the persistent query stares you in the face,--the stinging fact of ignorance--what of the story you are about to buy?

In the public library, the shelves are empty; you are told, as the librarian, to fill them. Not for yourself alone is the choice to be made, or even for your own children, whom you are supposed to know; but for every one who wishes to read. You have little right to assume much homogeneity of taste or desire among young folks; you must balance your dreams with facts, your ideals with human accomplishment. We are all as grains of sand in the general scheme of the universe; we are all supposed to have equal chances before the law; but what we are is the measure of what we read. You are the custodian of a public trust, not of your private book-case. A row of children--the poor by the side of the rich, the newsboy by the side of the patrician--you are to supply them every one. Have you then the privilege of assuming an autocratic policy of exclusion? Can you say to yourself, The newsboy must read Homer!--and refrain from buying him his penny-dreadful?

Each man’s standard of excellence differs from his neighbour’s. Matthew Arnold’s idea of the best ignored your opinion and mine. The world has put a face value on certain books; they live because the universal in them and the universal in us is constant and persistent. And though we each stand upon a different pivot of existence, though the wind blows with less fury around you than around me, on calm nights we may each see the same star, however different the angle of vision.

So, are you not here furnished a starting-point in your purchases? Where you are concerned with children, your opportunity is richer by far than you first imagined. They have no preconceived notions; they stand in a general mystery of dawning experience; they know not how or why; all truth is a fable before them. Common things are apparelled in celestial light; nature is governed by omnipotence; creation is the first meeting with Aladdin’s lamp. The common law of growth tells us this; our knowledge of men is carved from such general mystery; our method of gaining this experience is higher than we wot of; the father is judged in terms of King Arthur before he is reckoned with as a man.

Therefore, it is your bounden duty to satisfy these several stages. You must have pictures for the little ones that will cater to a familiarity with common things, and will satisfy a tendency in them to make all nature animate.[47] You must find an artist capable of seeing the significance, the humour of the dish running after the spoon. There must be picture-books that will treat of these things with all the purity they deserve; high-mindedness is an essential part of elemental fun. The nursery claims a part in your plan. Place, then, first upon your list, the best picture-books and jingles. Let true art supplant the comic supplement sheet.

We will banish the use of baffling terms in speaking of the classes of juvenile books. Our Fiction will become Stories; our Myths and Folk-lore and Fables simply Fairy Tales and Legends. Our arrangement now assumes a definite perspective, from the limitless past to ourselves as the fixed point. Our standard is one of interest; we will apply the test of excellence, not to books generally, but to each channel in which individual interest has a right to seek its own development. By a psychological consideration, we are able to hitch our wagon to a star, to span the distance separating the Present and the Past, the Real and the Ideal. Myth flows imperceptibly into legend; and, with all the massive proportions of the heroic, legend enters and becomes part of history. And history is vitalised only when we present it to children in the form of biography. Is it not Carlyle who defines history as the biography of great men?

Thus, we add still more to the positive factors in our book selecting. We will not disguise for the child the true character of a volume by a nomenclature which is indefinite. Better the terms “How We Are Governed” than “Civics”; and “How to Make Things” than “Manual Training.” We will satisfy all tastes by the best to be had, and that rule shall be proverbial. The boy, deprived of his dime novel,[48] must be given something just as daring, just as redolent with sensationalism; but we will transfer his den of thieves from the areaway to the broad green forest, and his profession of robbery shall grow into outlawry; his Jesse James become Robin Hood. Some of the best literature contains the quality of sensationalism; it is the form that the dime novel has taken, and the cheap exploitation of filthy detail, that have obscured many of the most beneficial elements in melodrama. The Adventures of Ulysses, the Twelve Labours of Hercules, Daniel in the Lion’s Den, Jonathan and David--the green lights are not far away.

Have you ever watched the breathlessness of a messenger boy with his “Ragged Dick Series”; the intent, eager faces in the gallery of the theatre during a melodrama? Nine times out of ten, morals are not being perverted; crime is not being glorified, but severely punished; chivalry is acting in shirt-sleeves; the good is winning its just deserts in a large way, and the boy glows. Not that I would have our libraries circulate “Ragged Dick,” but there is more to remember in such stimulation, there is more _effect_ than will ever be drawn from the conventional tale with its customary noble and ignoble heroes. The amount of inane fiction concocted for children is pernicious.

Literature has been made cold to the child, yet there is nothing warmer than a classic, when properly handled. Each man lives in his own age; we are creatures of timeliness, but we see the clearer for being at times on the mountain peak. The traveller from an antique land is part of our experience quite as much as the man around the corner. What I contend is that the attraction, the appeal of a story depends largely on the telling. With a broad sweep of right emotion, we must be taught to soar, and there must be no penalty of arrest for wishing to o’erleap the false horizon of a city skyline. The tenement boy is a dreamer, even though he perforce must lay his cheek against the rough brick of an air-shaft and squint up at the stars. The democracy of a public library system affords him equal opportunities with Keats--even though he may not have the same capacity for enjoyment--to look into Chapman’s Homer; he is entitled to all that vast experience, that same “hoard of goodly states and kingdoms.” But if his author is not deep-browed, if he, too, is not given the same pure serenity of view, if his Chapman does not speak out loud and bold, he will feel himself defrauded of the vitalising meaning of literature, he will have missed being

... like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken.

This, therefore, should make you determine to cry against mediocrity; to purchase for those empty shelves the best of a class, the best of an edition, and the most authentic of texts.

Lady Eastlake once wrote: “The real secret of a child’s book consists not merely in its being less dry and less difficult, but more rich in interest, more true to nature, more exquisite in art, more abundant in every quality that replies to childhood’s keener and fresher perceptions. Such being the case, the best of juvenile reading will be found in libraries belonging to their elders, while the best juvenile writing will not fail to delight those who are no longer children. ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ the standing favourite of above a century, was not originally written for children; and Sir Walter Scott’s ‘Tales of a Grandfather,’ addressed solely to them, are the pleasure and profit of every age, from childhood upward. Our little friends tear Pope’s ‘Odyssey’ from mamma’s hands, while she takes up their ‘Agathos’[49] with an admiration which no child’s can exceed.”

The opinion here quoted somewhat overstates the real case. The experienced librarian of to-day could tell a different tale from the loan desk; it is the average young person she must have in mind, and the average understanding. But this understanding is not commensurate with the reading ability of the child; it is much above it, and this fact also should be considered an asset for the librarian to work with. Despite the theories regarding how a story should be told to a seven-year-old reader, and to one twelve years old, the volumes do not very consistently adapt themselves to such a classification. The buyer must say: Is it to be read _by_ the child? Consider his schooling. Is it to be read _to_ the child? Consider his understanding.

Let us not subject ourselves to the criticism that our ideals will not work. If they are unpractical, they are useless and must be amended. It is recognised that something more is wanted than the “masterpiece,” so guardedly extolled by Mr. Everett T. Tomlinson,[50] a popular author of boys’ books. He separates the boy and the classic by a wide gulf of adolescent requirements; he pleads for something in addition to bone and tendon; he believes the boy demands material to fit his mental estate, which is not equipped for “ready response” to adult literature. In other words, the juvenile book of to-day, which is well typified by his own stories, is to supplement and not to supplant the “masterpiece.”

The situation is a rather delicate and uncertain one; it would be well, as Mr. Tomlinson suggests, if the results, as he thinks, were actually the case. But does the girl, who reads her “series” trilogy, slip from Dinsmore into Dickens; or does the boy, with his Henty books filling shelf after shelf, graduate therefrom into Scott? The theory does not work, and, even if it did, an immense amount of energy is going to waste somewhere. Miss Hewins, from her extensive experience as a worker in the Hartford Public Library, has outlined what you can get from a Henty book [Wisconsin Library Bulletin. Madison, Sept.-Oct., 1906. Vol. 2, No. 5.]; her plan is most interesting, and, were there readers possessing the zeal necessary to make such literature permanently serviceable, we could actually view knowledge growing from more to more. The summary is as follows:

“If a boy reads nothing but Henty for a year or so, he is not likely to care for the great historical novels of the world later, but if he uses him under guidance, reading after each one of his books a better story of the same period, if he look up places on a map, unfamiliar words and references in a dictionary or cyclopædia, and if he reads a life of one of the real characters in every book, he is well on his way to an intelligent interest in general history.”