and each biography follows a predictable plot ending with the Protestant Pieta: a child
contracts some terminal illness, readies himself or herself for the afterlife through secret
prayer and fasting, then (from its deathbed) offers pithy counsel to the living about how
they might also reform their lives, and then—depending upon the reader’s taste—this
juvenile exemplar either dies commendably or commendably dies.
Mather’s work is an example of genre we might call ‘juvenile martyrology’. The product
of a religious refugee community, the Puritans, this book drew its inspiration from a
long tradition of earlier adult works which featured the persecutions of righteous
Protestants (for example, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs). In the case of these books, however,
colonial children were brought down by dreaded illnesses, not by dreaded Papists. Other
religious refugee communities, however, were not ready to cede the moral high ground to
the Puritans, who otherwise seemed to have a monopoly on youthful saints blessed in
the tubercular virtues. Others, too, insisted that they, too, had their juvenile saints—their
woebegone but prescient minors. In Philadelphia in 1717, for example, the Quakers
published A Legacy for Children: Last Words and Dyeing Expressions of Hannah Hill,
aged 11 years and near three months.
Hannah was a Good Girl and, for all that, a little boring. On the other hand, evil
females (Eve’s daughters) had already been featured in adult circles and were found to
be more entertaining: in 1692, for example, colonists in Salem, Massachusetts, took to
burning witches; and in 1722, Defoe introduced the world to the enterprising Moll
Flanders. Interestingly enough, The Prodigal Daughter (Boston: c.1737) showed that
children’s stories needn’t lag behind. While this short work contains the familiar
scenario of deathbed pronunciamentos, The Prodigal Daughter differed—as its
introductory summary makes clear—in its focus on a Bad Girl, its Faustian melodrama,
and its Edgar-Allan-Poe-like special effects: ‘showing, how a Gentleman of a Vast Estate...
had a proud and disobedient Daughter, who because her parents would not support her
in all her extravagance, bargained with the Devil to poison them. How an Angel informed
her parents of her design. How she lay in a trance four days; and when she was put in
the grave, she came to life again, and related the wonderful things she saw in the other
World.’
The era of The Prodigal Daughter marked a change, and the blame can be put on John
Locke. In 1690, Locke published his Essay on Human Understanding. Confident at
having tackled that subject, the bachelor philosopher turned three years later to the
subject of child-raising and offered his experience and sage advice in Thoughts
Concerning Education. Locke’s views gained currency in succeeding years. He became, in
fact, the ‘Dr Spock’ for the parents who raised the generation of American
revolutionaries born in the 1730’s: among them, John Adams, Paul Revere, Patrick
Henry, John Hancock, Thomas Paine et al.—bad boys all, or prodigal sons, at least as
far as Britain’s paternal and civil authorities were concerned.
Among other things, Locke’s ideas turned prior Protestant child-raising practices on
their head: instead of original sin, Locke stressed the vision of the child as tabula rasa;
instead of Cotton Mather’s sickrooms, Locke championed the outdoors; instead of prayer
and secret fasting, Locke advocated fresh air and exercise; and instead of exemplary
biographies with tearful accounts of youthful martyrs, Locke endorsed a stiff upper-lip
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