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Crain, Patricia. Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth–Century America, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 54, Issue 3, July 2018, Pages 372–373, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqx047
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This work explores the history of child readers in nineteenth-century America. The chapters in this wide-ranging volume follow a loose chronological pattern and cover a wealth of evidence of childhood reading practice, including literary and artistic representations, pedagogical practice, and material evidence left by child readers.
The first two chapters begin with a discussion of two key texts: ‘Babes in the Wood’, a sixteenth-century ballad which informed later attitudes towards childhood and which ‘had a long afterlife in the United States as a staple of the nineteenth-century juvenile market’ (p.11), and The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, one of the first books written specifically with a young readership in mind. These chapters discuss the beginnings of children’s literature and the idealized image of childhood which was perpetuated alongside it. Chapter three focuses on pedagogical practice, specifically the Lancastrian system, to explore the impact it had on schooling in the United States in relation to ‘civilizing’ projects and Cherokee children, and the part played by children in new communication technology. Chapter four deals with the period between 1830 and the Civil War and investigates narratives of childhood reading primarily in the works of Jacob Abbott. Chapter five moves on to the material object of the book, with a reading of the physical traces left by child readers in the form of marginalia and inscriptions, suggesting a desire of children to claim books as their personal property. Finally, chapter six explores Henry James’s literature of childhood to argue that this reveals ‘new configurations of childhood and children’s literacy by the end of the century’ (p. 15).
