Читать книгу A Companion to Children's Literature - Группа авторов - Страница 15

The advent of a children’s literature publishing industry coincided with a larger eighteenth-century publishing boom. Through the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, English publishers were increasingly attentive to young readers, but it took a few decades before children were recognized as a separate audience. James Janeway’s Token for Children (1671 and 1672), for example, featured child protagonists, yet his introductions for adult and child readers make clear that he imagined it as a text for the whole family’s edification. Enterprising mid-century printers, however, recognized children’s books could be an industry in its own right. Mary Cooper and Thomas Boreman put out fewer works than Newbery, but they were also at the forefront of children’s publishing. By the turn of the century, texts for children were a standard commodity in the vibrant bookselling district of St. Paul’s Churchyard, London, where bookseller Benjamin Talbert delighted young consumers with a shop stocked with a collection of titles just for them (Paul 2011, p. 19).

English youth benefited from an established trade infrastructure ready to produce once children’s literature became an established entity. American audiences were less fortunate. Though Puritans were quick to establish the printing press in Massachusetts, publishing in the New World was expensive and unwieldy. For most of the eighteenth century, even after the Revolution, the English import trade flourished, “propelled by early legal constraint, American material shortages, and the economic advantages of a London trade dominance and organization which for most of the century outweighed even the obstacles of transatlantic time and distance” (Raven 2007, p. 195). Prominent printers like Massachusetts’s Isaiah Thomas and Pennsylvania’s Matthew Carey did produce books for children, but the ubiquity of English imports and weak copyright laws meant that many were pirated versions of successful English works. Arduous or nonexistent trade routes within the colonies, along with the intellectual force of the Puritan legacy, also meant that northeastern printers and ideologies dominated within the colonies. The American publishing industry was not firmly established until the early nineteenth century; for this reason there is much crossover in what English and colonial children read. It is only in the nineteenth century that American authorship took off and the cross-pollination went the other way. English texts continued to be shipped to their former colonies, but the most successful American works, like Samuel Goodrich’s Peter Parley series, also made a splash with British audiences.

The types of children’s nonfiction these printers produced defy clean categorization. In an era of remarkable social, political, and religious transformation, not to mention the experimental beginnings of children’s literature as a genre, texts rarely stuck to a single objective: primers included secular biographies and verse devotional poetry, hagiographies taught local history, and biographies addressed contemporary political debates. Authors and printers borrowed techniques and themes from adult works, from fiction, from classical themes, and from the political present. This chapter sorts the nonfiction of this era into three broad categories of religious, instructional, and informational texts, yet it is important to remember that these labels are insufficient characterizations of how they presented an increasingly complex world to their readers.