and Aesop’s Fables. The result of this last endorsement was a shift from sanctimonious,
deathbed reading to a new kind of vigorous, ethical, Aesopian literature.
This shift is evident in the anonymous A New Gift for Children (1750), perhaps
America’s first secular storybook, and its tales of children who are good and merit
rewards, and tales of children who are otherwise and receive their comeuppances. In
other words, while adult readers—busy with Candide and Werther and Tom Jones—
were viewed as consumers to be diverted or titillated, their juvenile counterparts were
regarded as empty-vessels-into-which-lessons-should-be-poured. This vision of the-
child-as-learner is implicit in the didactic stories of A New Gift: when Miss Polly aids a
stranger, for example, he later rescues her from a mad dog; when Master Billy parades
about town to show off his fine clothes, robbers strip him and he comes home naked;
and so forth.
One noticeable difference between these tales and their religious antecedents is the
fact that justice does not wait for the afterlife but is immediate and Aesopian. When, for
example, George snubs a poor boy in the morning in The Grateful Return (1796), he
cannot share in the gift the boy brings that very afternoon. ‘You should have recollected,’
his priggish brother instructs him, ‘the Fable you read this morning of the Mouse that
released the Lion from the net.’
Well, the mouse roared in 1776—the year Gibbon published The Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire—when Americans declared their independence from England. That
and two other events can be said to mark the end of the eighteenth century, vis-à-vis
children’s literature. In 1798, in England, William Wordsworth published Lyrical
Ballads, and children were romanticised and forever afterwards had to trail ‘clouds of
glory’. The following year Bronson Alcott was born; he would later father four little
women, one of them Louisa who would write.
A National and Secular Literature (1800–1865)Parson Weems’s famous biography The Life of Washington the Great (1806) is most
remembered for its celebrated incident where, in a fit of patriotism, the young George
chops down his father’s favourite English cherry tree: ‘I cannot tell a lie,’ America’s
future leader says, when he confesses to the crime. Strangely, his father forgives him
because of this candour; such honesty, it would seem, is a rare and exculpatory virtue
in future American presidents.
In any event, Weems’s book can serve as a touchstone and representative example of
American children’s books of the first half of the nineteenth century. We can begin by
noting the honorific of its title. That’s not surprising. Heroes were in the air. That same
year Beethoven finished the ‘Eroica’. It was, after all, the Napoleonic era.
Weems’s hagiography, then, is not surprising. What is remarkable is his substitution
of a civil saint into the role heretofore reserved for a pious Protestant ephebe. Even more
remarkable was its implicit assertion: not even a generation after the founding of the
USA, the country’s history had already become the stuff of legends.
Consider the dilemma American writers faced in the early part of the nineteenth
century: how could such a young country (no more than a generation old) present its own
mythology or offer any sense of historicity? While the Romantic Movement was all the
862 THE WORLD OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE