For the Good of the Country: Cultural Values in American Juvenile Fiction, 1825-60

Abstract

For the Good of the CountryCultural Values in American Juvenile Fiction, 1825-60* Anne MacLeod (bio) An American fictional literature written for children and meant to cater—however cautiously—to children's tastes was a nineteenth-century creation. Though children's books had been available in America since the earliest settlements, they were almost without exception instructional literature of one kind or another, at least until the latter part of the eighteenth century.1 Even after the Revolution, while there was a growing acceptance of fiction books for children, the American production of such literature was negligible; most non-school juvenile books were imported or pirated from Europe or England. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, however, American preoccupation with the future of the republic and with the children who would shape that future had brought about a fervent interest in all forms of literature for children, including fiction. And it was specifically American books for American children that were suddenly in demand. One author observed in 1825 that "the greater part of the juvenile books in the United States are foreign," and foreign books, however worthy, "give a wrong direction to the minds of the young, modelled as they are on a condition of life, and on prevailing sentiments, civil, moral and social . . . varying from those which American children should early be taught to cherish."2 In the same vein, while paying her respects to such illustrious English authors of children's stories as Mrs. Barbauld and Maria Edgeworth, Lydia Maria Child described their work as "emphatically English." She herself, she promised in her first book for children, intended to portray "American scenes and American Characters."3 So nourished by national feeling, the flow of American juvenile books began about 1820-25, and swelled to a flood by the 1850s. By mid-century, there were hundreds of non-school books available in the United States written by American authors for American children. Samuel Goodrich, for whom the production of children's books had been bread and butter for over three decades, remarked in 1856: [End Page 40] In casting my mind backward over the last thirty years—and comparing the past with the present . . . there is no point in which [advances] are more striking than in the books for children and youth. Let any one who wishes to comprehend this matter, go to . . . a juvenile bookstore . . . and behold the teeming shelves . . . and let him remember that nineteen twentieths of these works have come into existence within the last thirty years.4 Today, these early works of American juvenile fiction are largely forgotten. When noted by historians of children's literature, they have generally been damned as didactic, depressing, authoritarian, and sometimes morbid.5 They have also been classified as literary failures, since not even one has survived to be read by children in the twentieth century.6 Certainly, the literary shortcomings of the juvenile fiction published before 1860 are undeniable. It was didactic, often narrow in scope and stilted in execution; most of all, it was tirelessly moralistic in purpose. Stories were designed, as the authors frankly said, to teach morals by example, much more than to provide children with entertainment. All writers of juvenile books subscribed to the view expressed by Jacob Abbott that the proper aim of fiction for children was "to present models of good conduct for imitation and bad examples to be shunned, to explain and enforce the highest principles of moral duty."7 Yet whatever they may lack as literature, stories written for children in any period provide an interesting, if sometimes oblique, source for the study of cultural history. In this early juvenile fiction, so firmly dedicated to didactic ends, many social and individual values were clearly presented, and very closely tied to contemporary beliefs about the requirements of a democratic nation. "The safety of the republic," wrote Catherine Sedgwick, "depends on the virtue of the people . . . and it is the business of the young, as well as of the old, to help on the cause of goodness."8 Precisely because the juvenile literature of 1825-60 was dedicated to holding up the "highest principles of moral duty" to American...