Children's Book Collection

In the not so distant past, the coltish energy of children was seen as a thing to be bridled, their playful spirits crushed. As a result of this style of thinking, books printed for children had a didactic, moralist tone, usually with overt Christian motives. The primary function of these books was to use child protagonists to instruct children’s ethical behavior, not to entertain. However, this does not mean that children did not find the books entertaining, or that authors did not make use of frequently rhyming stories which appealed to children. Poetry was very widely employed. As the 18th century progressed, these moralist tales became longer, eventually evolving into a flood of tracts, novels, and Sunday School periodicals. Authors in this genre like Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Mary Martha Sherwood wrote works intended for children and low-level readers, and they enjoyed huge popularity in their day.

The popularity of works of fictionalized literature with a "beneficial tendency" contained within them their own undoing. The promotion and reliance on reading for moral improvement could only succeed if the literature itself was pleasurable, but the growing boom in reading for amusement was also a cause for considerable alarm among the highly principled propagandists of propriety.  Reading for "fun" signified, in their eyes, a wicked influence on the juvenile character, and a symptom of wider societal degeneracy. This severe view on reading and childhood gradually gave ground, and yet the ideal of reading as a path to learning and self-improvement survived throughout the 19th century, and is very characteristic of the aims of authors such as Lydia M. Sigourney, Jacob Abbott, Sarah Josepha Hale, Lydia Maria Child, Louisa May Alcott, and on to Lucy Maud Montgomery.

The early history of school books can therefore be traced to early hornbooks, battledores, and primers used in religiously motivated education. These live on today in modern abecedaries. Other books such as psalters, catechisms, and collections of Bible stories were developed to help children learn their Bible from a young age. Before the advent of Common Schools and educational reform in the mid-19th century it is difficult to find any distinction between a free, informed citizenry and a Protestant Christian one.

Early efforts to publish books in the United States had a further incentive to educate, one that stemmed from something like a parochial "arms race" between Protestant denominations, accompanied by a considerable amount of anti-Catholic anxiety associated with immigration. Christian denominations and evangelical publishing societies still take it upon themselves to produce books to teach children about their religion in the hopes of promoting a strong faith life. Eventually these kinds of books and periodicals would become a staple of Sunday School programs. Much like secular books for children, religiously orientated books made use of advances in early 19th-century industrial scale printing technology--and frequently constituted a main driving force of those advances--to reproduce inexpensive tracts and religious imagery for children’s consumption.

These suggestions were a radical departure from the prevailing contemporary theories about children, childhood, and education, which advocated rote learning, strictness and harsh discipline from a young age (a system little changed since the classical world).

The Lockean theory of education proved to be incredibly influential with printer John Newbery, who began to produce books intended to be both didactic and entertaining. Newbery, who is often credited with inventing the category of children's books, was certainly a leading producer of them. He also changed the format of children’s books: previous children’s books had mirrored the formats of books for adults. Newbery, however, introduced brightly colored covers and endpapers to dazzle little eyes, and smaller chapbook sizes to make his books easier for little fingers to hold. These changes made Newbery’s books extremely popular and commercially successful. Soon, other children’s publishers started to follow suit, and more and more little books with big pictures, amusing stories, and bright colors found their way onto the market. So influential were Newbery’s children’s books, in fact, that the American Library Association created a prize medal for children’s literature in his name: "The Newbery Award."

However, early collections of fables and maxims ("Emblem Books") should not be associated with children specifically; these can be more properly thought of as part an inherited culture shared by adults and children alike. There are 18th and early 19th-century books of fables by Aesop, Jean de la Fontaine, John Gay and others in our holdings which have therefore been excluded from the Children's Collection. Stories with pictures intended for children do appear in the later 18th century when unbound, abbreviated texts with crude woodcuts (chapbooks) circulated popular stories and rhymes such as "Mother Goose." It is not really until the 19th century that we see the surge of interest in comic "fairy tales" and their subsequent proliferation in print, often with whimsical illustrations by a new generation of caricaturists such as George Cruikshank. That process was fraught in the face of Church resistance in the early 19th century; an era that is still much better defined--textually speaking--by cloying religious poetry and religious tracts. Indeed, most of the original content of these myths and fairy stories had to be heavily edited in order to conform to the easily offended middle-class mores that had become the order of the day.

Nevertheless, children's book authors and publishers, whatever their intention, increasingly exploited and imitated the popular folklore style. On the other hand, Edward Lear's "A Book of Nonsense [1846]," Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland [1865], succeeded without overt reference to the inherited tradition. These avant-guard texts were followed by more original works by Carlo Collodi, Rudyard Kipling, L. Frank Baum and J.M. Barrie that appeared around the turn of the 20th century. Collectively, these inventive stories are indicative of a new, more permissive creative spirit that revels in silliness, fantasy, adventure, anthropomorphized animal characters, and magic-filled strangeness that is still very much alive.

The early history of school books shows off marked differences in approaches to schooling, if children went to school at all, and they could have remarkably dissimilar experiences aside from the widespread use of the New England Primer in America. Spellers, readers, such as those by American Noah Webster and made their appearance in sellers’ catalogs already at the end of the 18th century. But very few school-going children would have any classroom time beyond the onset of puberty. It was much more likely that children were an integral part of both the rural and industrial work forces. What school books that did exist were often sold to directly to families, ministers, and itinerant school masters off of the back of a cart. Authors and booksellers were quick to ascertain the huge sales potential of books marketed particularly for organized schools.

Throughout the 19th century, a change had come over the public in terms of its perspective on the role of literature in a child's life. As more children attended formal classroom instruction and schools began to be regulated, there rose a demand for approved, standard textbooks such as those by Lyman Cobb and William Woodridge. The popularity of the readers (commenced in 1836) by brothers Alexander and William McGuffey, experienced sales in the millions, and reached something of a crescendo in post-Civil War Reconstruction period. This lucrative trade in readers spawned many competitors and imitators and Special Collections has gathered a selection of these antebellum books into its Children's Collection, such as those by Joseph Ray, Richard Edwards, Emma Willard, Charles Sanders and Jesse Olney to name only a few.

It is perhaps no surprise that in Ohio, the home State of William H. McGuffey (who often used the pseudonym "Peter Parley"), Oberlin College should have a preponderance of McGuffey products, many of them from the library of William Downs Henkle (1828-1881), himself a teacher, textbook author, and onetime Commissioner of Common Schools for Salem, Ohio. Henkle is the biggest reason our library is so rich in these materials.

Gardens and nature were also used frequently as setting for books by the likes of Beatrix Potter, A.A. Milne, Edith Nesbit, Kenneth Grahame, Frances Hodgson Burnett and Thornton Burgess. It may be possible that the twentieth-century conservation movement owes something to these authors.

We may wonder at the lofty aspirations that this more serious content carried, but in a world without television and movies, doubtless many of them transfixed young minds as intended. And this category of ambitious literature has not been given up by any means; closer to our time many will remember the "Wonder Book" series or DK Publishing's "Eyewitness" series. As the public's priority shifted to television we had Sesame Street, The Magic School Bus, and Bill Nye the Science Guy to name just a few examples.

The 19th-century public was shamed by high levels of child mortality, child labor in the mines and factories, pervasive child poverty and charitable "ragged schools" in Great Britain. Reforms began to slowly improve conditions for working children, introduced free--and later compulsory--education. Public sentiment favored these reforms partially due to a new-found respect for domesticity, the primacy of the family, and a burgeoning concept of childhood as a time of innocence. Not surprisingly, the contents of children's books can be postured as saccharine, but they did much to deflect the puritanical attitudes of the past. By unabashedly seeking to entertain and exploit a child's natural affinity for pictures, pets, make-believe and rhymes, publishers, printers, many talented artists were instinctively drawn to the new children's book market, likely with the best of motives. Many of the children's "classics" that we still read come out of this prolific era of children's publishing.

The late-18th and first half of the 19th centuries had already witnessed advances in engineering and chemistry led to higher speed presses, lithography and wood engraving, as well as wood pulp paper were able to dramatically lowered production costs for illustrated texts. With the addition of color, children's book illustrations took on a new prominence in the form of painterly portraits, and thickets of foliage, especially on patterned end sheets reminiscent of Victorian wallpaper. The Victorian fervor for novelty also piled on ornate typography, and vivid color printing, often by Ernest Nister, that lends a recognizable florid quality to the color palette regardless of publisher. All of these innovations collectively shifted the design of books permanently, even if the books often treated with the same classic rhymes and fairy tales. The industrial acceleration in both craft and unit output was embraced by the public's matching demand. This demand was fueled by a rise in literacy, and an aspiring middle-class with disposable income to spend on things like inexpensive books, postcards, colorful holiday cards, and other printed novelties.

We particularly celebrate the children's books of the period of roughly 1880 to 1940, because they unleashed the full power of art onto the book page. Not only were publishers taking advantage of experiments in printing technology, they were also pursuing acclaimed artists who were featured very prominently on covers and title pages. Full page background settings and vignettes for the illustrations were often dispensed with entirely. The familiar line engravings, loud colors and "china-doll" faces of the Victorian Age gave way to conspicuous style; less serious and more "cartoonish" forms that exhibit much more wit and character personality. These illustrations will later become a bridge to animated movies.

At this stage in the history of children's books, artists were not content having their images merely accompany a text. These artists vaulted their illustrations into the foreground, made them integral to the story, and increasingly allowed them to to dominate the simpler text. Legions of talented artists upset the relationship of over 400 years in the balance of importance of text vs. image on the page, and in that respect they have much in common with the rise of commercial graphic design in the late-19th century that had begun to (re)discover the power of "looking" vs. reading. By so doing they heightened children's engagement in the reading process.

Even if the books were given away for free, it was hoped that the publication process would result future gains in the form of a familiarity with a product, or warm associations with a trademark or organization.

Children's books at the turn of the 20th century still resembled their Victorian predecessors in overt ways; familiar subjects and aesthetics were reprised, and popular artists still abound. Printing companies who were already experts in specialty printing, adapted to the use of new photomechanical processes for the color process and used it to further stimulate the growing popularity of the children's genre.

Detail taken from the title page of "Charming Children of Dickens' Stories" [1906]

What we can also notice is a drop in production quality related to the more patchy application and careless registration of color, inferior paper, book size and layout standardization, side-stapling, and other factors which signal to us that the motives and function that attach to these types of books are now cost-driven. The frequent reissue of children's classics (for which no royalties would be owed), or ghost written books in numbered series are other indicators. The content, whether literary and/or artistic, had become secondary from the commercial perspective. Publishing had become a capitalist "big business" like any other.

The 20th century media landscape continued the long shift towards visual communication; the dominance of print media was challenged by, and became intertwined with, new media in the form of radio, cinema, television, and now digital media. Children's content was--and is--bundled in a syndicated manner to diverse manufacturers to sell cereal, action figures, lunch pails, pajamas, theme parks, movies, cartoons, and computer games. Publishers and creators were and are able to monetize the interest around favorite characters or collectible series and seamlessly push a success in one area into all of the others. With some notable exceptions, children's books in the 20th century were not the storehouse of the collective imagination as they once were.

This function of children's books--with the power of scale and marketing behind them--though we may decry it, has arguably achieved higher historic popularity and sales than any other previous attempts. Large sections of the public have clearly formed incredible attachment to these stories, characters, and the vast array of products that derive from them. Books featuring favorite cartoon characters are frequently collected by a public who find them as endearing and handsome as children's books have ever been. On the other hand, some argue that this franchise condition homogenizes and is "dumbing down" our cultural capital by its very success. Others may believe that there is nothing to worry about; that muppets and moppets are as dynamic a combination as there ever was.

Most people would find the problematic content highly offensive from the perspective of the ideals and etiquette of today, and so many of our children's books have been moved out of categories where they might otherwise have lived to form their own category. While not completely excluded, we don't want to divert conversations away from other themes with insensitive distractions. However, we recognize that there is value in having these available for class instruction or individual research. We invite those with serious academic motives and credibility to access these books, but we reserve the right to refuse access to idle sensation seekers.