known by the common folk in England, belied its name for many years in this country also, and many a copy was doubtless often stained by the tears of New England boys and girls. In 1790 the following books were ordered by the Boston school committee to be used in reading schools: the Bible, Webster’s Spelling Book, “Young Ladies’ Accidence,” Webster’s “American Selection of Lessons in Reading and Speaking,” “The Children’s Friend” (doubtless a translation from Berquin’s “L’ami des Enfans”), Morse’s Geography abridged, and the newspapers occasionally. This last item shows how much more advanced New England educators were than the British; for it was not until about 1860 that the newspaper was used in the national schools, as they were then called, in England, and then not without protests from many against the innovation. George Lunt, in his “Old New England Traits,” tells us that in 1810 they had for schoolbooks Murray’s English Reader and Guthrie’s Grammar of Geography, “a ponderous volume of English manufacture.” What had become of the books by Jeremiah Morse, “the father of American geography,” as he has been called, W. C. Woodbridge and others?
By this time, however, the stream had become very much broader than these meagre lists would indicate; and the extent to which it had swollen and has since been swelling, until the land is literally deluged with schoolbooks, can only be faintly and fearfully hinted at.
“Those were the days,” says Mr. MacMaster in his life of Benjamin Franklin, writing of the beginning of the eighteenth century, “of compulsory education and compulsory thrift, the days when it was the duty of the selectmen to see that every Boston boy could read and write the English tongue, had some knowledge of the capital laws, knew by heart some orthodox catechism, and was brought up to do some honest work ... We gather from the autobiography of Franklin that the collection of books that lay upon the shelves was, with a few exceptions, such as no boy of our time thinks of reading; such as cannot be found even in the libraries of students, uncovered with dust; such as are rarely seen in the catalogues of book auctions, and never come into the hands of bookbinders to be reclothed. There were Mather’s ’Essay to Do Good,’ and Defoe’s ‘Essay on Projects,’ Plutarch’s ‘Lives,’ the only readable book in the collection, and a pile of thumbed and dog-eared pamphlets on polemical theology, such as any true son of the dissenting church might read. ... The first catalogue of the Harvard Library was printed in 1723; yet there is not in it the title of any of the works of Addison, of any of the poems of Pope, of any of the writings of Bolingbroke or Dryden, Steele, Prior or Young. The earliest copy of Shakespeare brought to America was of the edition of 1709; no copy was ever advertised for sale till 1722. Even such books as Harvard did own, it was seriously urged; should, after the manner of the Bodleian Library, be chained to the desk. ... When Franklin began to read, a printing press was a ‘raree show’ ... Between the first of January, 1706, and the first of January, 1718, all the publications known to have been printed in America number at least five hundred and fifty. Of these, but eighty-four are not on religious topics, and of the eighty-four, forty-nine are almanacs. ‘The Origin of the Whalebone Petticoat,’ ‘The Simple Cobbler of Agawam in America,’ John Williams’s –Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion,‘ an Indian story,1 which for a. time was more sought after than Mather’s ‘Treacle Fetched Out of a Viper,’ Mary Rowlandson’s ‘Captivity among the Indians,’ and ‘Entertaining Passages Relating to Philip‘s War‘ were the only approaches made in all
1 This story was retold “for the instruction of the young” in 1834, in so dull and prosy a manner as to make John Williams’s relation of it, overloaded as it is with religious reflections and exhortations, light reading by comparison.
|
