previous next

[396]

Chapter 7: books for children

The titles of the earliest American books for children sufficiently indicate their sole intention. John Cotton's Milk for Babes, drawn out of the breast of both Testaments, published in London in 1646, was reprinted in Massachusetts ten years later as Spiritual milk for Boston Babes in either England. Cotton Mather in 1700 revised an English book and issued it with the title A Token for the Children of New-England. Or Some Examples of Children to whom the Fear of God was Remarkably Budding, before they Dyed. In these books and the few others of early times the child was not recognized to have any individual needs or even an undeveloped mentality. The famous and very widely read New England Primer (c. 1690) was the first book to add elementary teaching, but its character still remained entirely religious. It sought, however, to be more attractive than earlier school books and employed illustrations; and it no doubt succeeded in exhilarating children whose sole portion had been drowsy sermons.

About midway in the eighteenth century, the desire to furnish amusement together with instruction, religious or mundane, ventured to show its head in reckless juveniles which came chiefly from the London shop of John Newbery. But it required half a century to convince parents that the combination was not pernicious—even parents who were allowing their children to read abridged editions of Clarissa and Tom Jones as well as Moll Flanders. As for the meagre American product, even The children's magazine (Hartford, 1789) made almost no attempt to approach the child's level. In Noah Webster's Spelling Book (1783), eight short illustrated fables formed the only concession to childish interest. The solitary instance

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
New England (United States) (2)
Massachusetts (Massachusetts, United States) (1)
Hartford (Connecticut, United States) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
Noah Webster (1)
John Newbery (1)
Cotton Mather (1)
Tom Jones (1)
Moll Flanders (1)
Spelling Book (1)
hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
1789 AD (1)
1783 AD (1)
1700 AD (1)
1690 AD (1)
1646 AD (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: