Benjamin Harris. Until the nineteenth century, the majority of American children’s
religious books, including children’s Bibles, originated in England and appeared on the
western side of the Atlantic with a lag of one or two generations. For example, John
Taylor’s 1614 Verbum Sempiternum was printed in Boston in 1693; and Newbery’s 1757
Holy Bible Abridged appeared in Boston in 1782 and in Worcester (Massachusetts) in
- The printing of American children’s religious books differed from English ones,
however, in one important respect. Whereas in England such printing centred almost
exclusively in London, in the USA it was scattered among small provincial presses like
those in Leicester in Massachusetts, Bridgeport, New London, and New Haven in
Connecticut, Sag Harbor, Cooperstown, and Buffalo in New York State, as well as in
regional printing centres like Boston, Worcester, New York and Philadelphia.
Devotional literature before 1800John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, which soon came to be known as Foxe’s Book of
Martyrs was first published in England in 1563, and soon made its way into abridged
editions for children, its horrifying reports of martyrdoms affirming Protestant identity,
in part by vilifying Catholics. (It remained in print in illustrated editions well into the
twentieth century.)
James Janeway, one of the first writers to recognise that a message can be most
effectively communicated by exploiting children’s love of story, published A Token for
Children (1671–1672), which contained accounts of the ‘Conversion, holy and exemplary
lives and joyful Deaths of several young Children’. The children, some of them of very
tender years, set an example to their families by their piety and, as it approaches,
welcome death as the way to everlasting bliss, while their sorrowing families look on,
full of awe and admiration. Similar books were published throughout the eighteenth
century and provided a model for some of the nineteenth-century evangelical writing for
children.
John Bunyan offered doctrinal doggerel in A Book for Boys and Girls: or, Country
Rhimes for Children (1686), using the already established pattern of illustrating divine
truths and moral ideas through everyday and familiar objects. However, children appear
to have been much more attracted to the earlier Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), which not
only told a good story, but used familiar figures and images from popular traditional
tales. Pilgrim’s Progress has been published in countless editions for children.
The Divine Songs of Isaac Watts (1715), verses in which he emphasised moral virtues
in order to ‘beautify [children’s] Souls’, also enjoyed a long-lasting popularity and were
still widely known when Lewis Carroll parodied some of them in Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland (1865). Although much devotional literature was didactically grim, some
used a toy book format. For example, a rotating dial in Nathaniel Crouch’s Delights for
the Ingenious (1684) guided readers to appropriate moral verse. At home and in school
children encountered verse and prose with religious and devotional intent. Rhyming ABC
books taught that ‘A is our Advocate, Jesus his name;/B is a Babe, in weakness who
came’. In the mid-eighteenth century Jeanne Marie Leprince de Beaumont mixed Bible
stories with fairy tales and interleaved both with edifying conversations in her Magasin
des Enfans (1756).
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