This chapter is an exploration of the nonfiction texts that captivated child readers prior to the mid-nineteenth-century pivot toward fantasy and the ascension of fiction within children’s reading material. To grasp the role of nonfiction, let us begin by picturing the works on the bookshelf of an imaginary pre-Golden Age child reader and consumer (the reader typically imagined by authors and booksellers, of course, was the white middle- or upper-class child with the most means and access to books). Certainly the Bible is on the shelf, in each of the three centuries and in both England and America. By Newbery’s rise in the mid-eighteenth century, The Little Pretty Pocket Book and other short fictional stories appear, and in the mid-nineteenth-century periodicals like the Juvenile Miscellany are stacked on the shelf as well. In the mid-1800s, there may even be a set of novels – Charlotte Temple and Rob Roy, perhaps. Yet far outnumbering these volumes of fiction are scores of nonfiction texts child readers would have been urged to explore – the Orbis Sensualium Pictus, an assortment of Peter Parleys, and Isaac Watts’s Divine Songs, amongst many other instructional, informative, and religious works. Illustrated abecedaries link literacy instruction with the images of a Christian, yet increasingly democratic, industrial, and capitalist world. Modern histories describe a cosmopolitan and colonial Anglo-American landscape and teach young readers how to navigate the dangers and opportunities unimagined by previous generations. Religious texts engage in the fervent theological debates of Protestant communities alternately thriving and threatened by expanding nations and modern commerce. These nonfiction works take up the lion’s share of the bookshelf because readers saw these texts, more than any others save the Bible, as essential to children’s formal and social education. Pre-Golden Age audiences, especially in the latter half of the era, found pleasure and value in fictional works as well, but nonfiction texts were culturally esteemed in a way that fiction was not as the best way to teach children whom and what to admire in their society, what to believe, and how to behave. These works garnered significant political and cultural power and served as the crucial documents where seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century children learned about and began to participate in the world transforming around them.
A Cultural Preference for Nonfiction
The Puritans have long been credited for providing the cultural tailwind that facilitated the birth of Anglo-American children’s literature. They believed reading was key to the knowledge of the Bible that accompanied a strong faith. Such views helped establish communities where childhood literacy became a norm, and where education, especially in America, was formally implemented into the social structure. The Puritan settlers who founded the New England colonies speedily established the first American printing press in 1639 and, a decade or so later, enacted laws that required children, servants, and apprentices to learn to read (Marcus 2008, p. 1). Puritan ideology was also an important driver of juvenile literature in England, despite the group’s status as a minority sect after the Cromwell era. In the second half of the seventeenth century England had seen war, plague, and the most populous part of their capital city burned to the ground, causing much of the reading public to gravitate toward writings that took death and salvation seriously and spoke to young people about the need for sober engagement with religious practice and belief. Mary V. Jackson explains, “To people already convinced that all mortal existence was a snare of the devil to lure the soul from God, such scenes [the Great Fire] acted powerfully to harden their resolve to sue for salvation for themselves and their surviving loved ones” (Jackson 1989, p. 25). But while the Puritans championed childhood literacy, they also had strong misgivings about works that deviated too far afield from the goal of advancing one’s religious understanding, and they believed fiction to be “untrue, therefore a lie, and therefore damnably wicked” (Avery 1994, p. 26). Generations of their descendants in England and New England, as well as inhabitants of the other colonies that would become the United States, urged all readers, but especially children, to remain wary of texts that incorporated fancy or sought primarily to entertain.
Fiction temptations were readily available in early eighteenth-century England, as the novel became common fare. Samuel Johnson famously called eighteenth-century Britain “a nation of readers,” and though literacy and readership were not universal, radical transformations in the political and social fabric prompted change in which members of society had the leisure and means to read for self-edification and for pleasure. Education was not compulsory in Britain until 1870, but literacy rates were on the rise in the eighteenth century, as was the accessibility of novels in bookshops and subscription-based circulating libraries. The expanding middle class multiplied the number of readers with pocket money, and additional leisure time also emerged, particularly for women, with modern advances in household labor. The accessibility and popularity of this enticing new narrative form met with strong resistance from cultural skeptics. Puritan-style qualms about fiction were common, and there was frequent public complaint that the nation and its traditional social hierarchies were under attack by working class members who “aspir[ed] to the leisure pursuits of their betters” (Watt 1957, p. 45). The novel thereby early gained a reputation as lesser literature, and was “widely regarded as a typical example of the debased kind of writing by which booksellers pandered to the reading public” (p. 54). Novelist Daniel Defoe countered this disdain for fiction by insisting that his fictional works were actually recovered autobiographies; the Preface to Crusoe names Defoe the “editor,” who declares the novel that follows “a just history of fact; neither is there any appearance of fiction in it” (Defoe 1985, p. 25). Nonfiction, Defoe demonstrates, was widely understood to be the most acceptable literature for public consumption.
Nonetheless, fanciful books for children multiplied in the second half of the eighteenth century in Britain as Lockean approaches took hold. However, works like Newbery’s The Renowned History of Giles Gingerbread faced backlash from some in the wake of the French Revolution. Giles Gingerbread and similar protagonists modeled social mobility, and many public commentators read these tales as revolutionary and worried that the upwardly mobile spirit embodied in these fictional works might infiltrate children’s social education. In response to such fanciful and thus potentially revolutionary tales, nonfiction and didactic fiction surged in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. Late Enlightenment authors Sarah Trimmer and Hannah More were at the forefront of this movement to create books that “were part of a campaign to reanimate love of Church and State” (Jackson 1989, p. 175). It became posh to sneer at fairy tales and fanciful stories not as untruthful, but as unproductive. Fiction remained less endorsed than nonfiction until mid-nineteenth century, and loud voices warning against the dangers of fiction were a prominent part of the nineteenth-century conversation about what children ought to read.
In the United States, fiction fears had been quelled somewhat by the mid-1800s, but novels and stories still met with disdain, as skeptics like the prolific antebellum author Lydia Maria Child continued to view such works as “literary confectionary,” texts to indulge in only sparingly (Child 1972, p. 87). As a result, nonfiction works remained more widely read and recommended to child readers until the brink of the American Civil War. Discussing antebellum attitudes toward fiction, Barbara Hochman observes, “Nineteenth-century ministers, educators, and benevolent reformers celebrated the moral significance of sympathy but they cautioned against the confusion that the reading of fiction might produce through identification” (Hochman 2011, p. 109). Instead, American readers as far apart as Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln were celebrated for youths spent devouring nonfiction writings instead of novels or Newberys, and were held up as exemplars