The (Unexpected) Adventures of Ulysses: Charles Lamb and American Literary Culture in the Nineteenth-Century American Classroom

Abstract

A NAME not typically associated with the consolidation of the relationship between the American literary canon and the American high school classroom is that of British essayist and children’s author, Charles Lamb. Nevertheless, in 1886, David Henry Montgomery co-opted Lamb’s children’s adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey for such a task, submitting an edited version of The Adventures of Ulysses. By Charles Lamb. Edited, with notes, for schools at the Office of the Librarian of Congress in Washington, DC.1 Published as part of the ‘Classics for Children’ list for school children between the ages of nine and fifteen, The Adventures of Ulysses is the earliest recorded usage of Lamb’s adaptation of Homer’s epic within the classroom, rendering the omission of this book from histories of bowdlerized classical classroom-edition texts a curious quirk of history. Produced by the highly prolific and popularly used school-text publishing house Ginn & Company,2 Montgomery’s sanitized and carefully framed edition of The Adventures of Ulysses participates in the canonization of American poets Walt Whitman and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow while confirming the cultural veracity of the American high school, yielding insight into the relationship between the creation of American literary culture and the establishment of the American high school classroom.