Young Americans Abroad: Jacob Abbott’s Rollo on the Grand Tour and Nineteenth-Century Travel Series Books

Abstract

When Jacob Abbott published his series of juvenile European travel books in the 1850s, he was already one of the most popular, prolific, and well-paid authors in the United States. Over his lifetime, Abbott authored or co-authored over two hundred books, most of them for juveniles, but including titles on history, science, education, religion, and child-rearing. Early in his career Abbott was a teacher, school headmaster, and briefly a Congregational minister. Like many writers at this time, he saw authorship more as public service or avocation until he found that he could support himself solely as a writer. After only a year, Abbott left the pulpit to become a professional author of children’s books, his only occupation during the last 35 years of his life (Mott 98). Abbott’s books stood out from other American children’s literature at the time, with realistically drawn characters and situations rather than allegorical or representative lessons in moral behavior. In them, Abbott presented useful information along with the story, narrated in a plain, unornamented style with rich, vivid details. His most famous literary creation was his series of Rollo Books, which chronicled the intellectual and moral development of Rollo Holiday, who along the way became the first truly popular child character in American fiction (Jordan 74). Abbott inaugurated the series in 1835 with The Little Scholar Learning to Talk: A Picture Book for Rollo, re titled in subsequent editions as Rollo Learning to Talk.