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Ivy Linton Stabell

In the narrative history of children’s literature, perhaps the best remembered figure before the Golden Age is John Newbery, the enterprising London printer whose carefully styled and marketed toy books have marked him in histories of the genre as the founding father of children’s literature. The first to successfully build a business centered on publishing for young readers, Newbery pioneered an enterprising cultivation of this relatively new audience as a regular consumer base, establishing a market that not only brought him riches but affirmed texts for children as a profitable and permanent commodity in the Anglo-American world. Moreover, Newbery’s increased attention to the pleasures of reading, embodied in his fanciful stories and rhymes, signaled a more daring interpretation of John Locke’s call for children’s texts to “instruct and entertain” than his predecessors had previously attempted. Secular, fictional works had long been available to child and adult readers alike in the form of chapbooks, cheaply printed versions of everything from fairy tales and fables to abbreviated early novels (though these faced suspicion from a fiction-phobic early eighteenth-century world). Newbery was indeed an innovator in his efforts to incorporate the pleasures of imaginative stories with the moral instruction culturally understood as required by tabula rasa minds. His works’ greater attention to whimsy links them with the fantasy narratives of later children’s classics, as well as the playfulness and pleasure associated with the genre more broadly. Newbery’s fictional Goody Two-Shoes and Giles Gingerbread are easily understood as the literary ancestors of Peter Pan and Alice, so while their stories are perhaps dry and didactic by today’s standards, these two best sellers remain the typically cited examples of the printer’s output for young eighteenth-century readers.

Yet the prominence of Newbery’s fiction tends to overshadow the array of other pre-Golden Age texts children read, especially to modern eyes more accustomed to the dominance of secular fiction. It is a mistake, however, to associate the literary innovation and exploration of this early period solely with fiction, especially because the schoolbooks, histories, and religious works that made up the majority of children’s reading material in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and first half of the nineteenth centuries were themselves sites of fervent ideological and aesthetic transformation. Lissa Paul warns against an understanding of this period’s literature as “a chronological journey from instruction to entertainment,” a construction she argues devalues Enlightenment writings as “clumsy, boring, and merely didactic precursors to the flowering of imaginative freedom in the great fantasies by George MacDonald and Lewis Carroll in what has come to be known as the ‘Golden’ age of children’s literature” (Paul 2011, p. 5). The nonfiction of these centuries, like their fictional counterparts, blend education and delight; beyond adopting this Lockean approach to inculcate young readers in moral dictates, these books investigate transitioning ideas of salvation, citizenship, and commerce in the rapidly metamorphosing Atlantic world, and grapple with the position of childhood in and its importance to each of these essential concepts. Rather than a stagnant pool of proto-literature out of which children’s texts as we now know them emerged, nonfiction in this period is a dynamic set of works that shaped the values, interests, and aims of generations of readers in ways that both were distinct from and paved the way for the ideologies of their literary successors.

This chapter is an exploration of the nonfiction texts that captivated child readers prior to the mid-nineteenth-century pivot toward fantasy and the ascension of fiction within children’s reading material. To grasp the role of nonfiction, let us begin by picturing the works on the bookshelf of an imaginary pre-Golden Age child reader and consumer (the reader typically imagined by authors and booksellers, of course, was the white middle- or upper-class child with the most means and access to books). Certainly the Bible is on the shelf, in each of the three centuries and in both England and America. By Newbery’s rise in the mid-eighteenth century, The Little Pretty Pocket Book and other short fictional stories appear, and in the mid-nineteenth-century periodicals like the Juvenile Miscellany are stacked on the shelf as well. In the mid-1800s, there may even be a set of novels – Charlotte Temple and Rob Roy, perhaps. Yet far outnumbering these volumes of fiction are scores of nonfiction texts child readers would have been urged to explore – the Orbis Sensualium Pictus, an assortment of Peter Parleys, and Isaac Watts’s Divine Songs, amongst many other instructional, informative, and religious works. Illustrated abecedaries link literacy instruction with the images of a Christian, yet increasingly democratic, industrial, and capitalist world. Modern histories describe a cosmopolitan and colonial Anglo-American landscape and teach young readers how to navigate the dangers and opportunities unimagined by previous generations. Religious texts engage in the fervent theological debates of Protestant communities alternately thriving and threatened by expanding nations and modern commerce. These nonfiction works take up the lion’s share of the bookshelf because readers saw these texts, more than any others save the Bible, as essential to children’s formal and social education. Pre-Golden Age audiences, especially in the latter half of the era, found pleasure and value in fictional works as well, but nonfiction texts were culturally esteemed in a way that fiction was not as the best way to teach children whom and what to admire in their society, what to believe, and how to behave. These works garnered significant political and cultural power and served as the crucial documents where seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century children learned about and began to participate in the world transforming around them.