seq.) which contained passages from what was slowly being recognised as this country’s
literature—among them: Whittier’s ‘Snow-bound’, Poe’s ‘The Raven’, and Bryant’s
‘Thanatopsis’.
To be honest, this young country had not quite generated enough literature to fill an
anthology. This explains why American authors were also busy co-opting the work of
others. In his Wonder Book (1852) and Tanglewood Tales (1853), Nathaniel Hawthorne
made the Greek myths American by retelling them in a New England setting—keeping
royalties otherwise due Ovid. In The Night Before Christmas (1823), Clement Moore
appropriated Dutch customs (gift-giving, Santa, reindeer) and passed them off as
American (later they would, in fact, become so). And in Mother Goose’s Melodies (1833),
publishers Munro and Francis pirated a British book of nursery rhymes and made it
American by substituting the word ‘Boston’ for every appearance of the word ‘London’—a
bit of nationalistic revisionism which would result in a curious and entirely spurious
claim made at mid-century that Mother Goose had actually been a dame living in
seventeenth-century Boston; indeed, to this day, Boston tour guides—apparently
unaware that ‘Mother Goose’ derives from a French expression for a type of tale (Conte
de la mère oye)—point out Mother Goose’s grave in a Boston churchyard.
Besides schoolrooms, churches were also busy centres in the children’s literature
business. In the first half of the nineteenth century, religious institutions created the
genre known as the ‘Sunday School book’—small tracts offered by the American Sunday
School Union (1824–1860) and similar religious organisations. By means of them,
countless young Americans learned to read and be good—two sometimes unrelated
skills. Unabashedly didactic, Sunday School books were likewise formulaic: boys who
fail to go to church on Sunday morning are invariably struck by lightning in the
afternoon; those who climb trees to steal apples, inevitably fall and break their arms.
We might exaggerate and say that the demise of the Sunday School book can be
associated with the birth in 1835 of Samuel Clemens, who would finally bury the genre
in 1876 with his parody and celebration of the Bad Boy in The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer. In truth, the demise of the Sunday School book was the result of a much slower
process of secularisation. By the mid-1830s, lessons still remained at the centre of
juvenile books but now they concerned history and geography not behaviour. Instead of
ministers, America’s authors for juveniles were now schoolteachers. Jacob Abbott
provides an example. In his Rollo books (1835 et seq.), Abbott—after showing Rollo
Learning to Read and Rollo at School—took his literary lad on journeys around the world
in travelogues that were thinly disguised geography lessons.
The next step in the process of secularisation might be marked by the commercial
success of William Taylor Adams’ Oliver Optic series (1855 et seq.). Inexpensive printing
techniques had given rise to ‘pulp fiction’, and publishers suddenly became more intent
on increasing sales than in imparting lessons to the young. In 1860, Irwin Beadle and
Co. became the first American publisher to offer mass-market fiction in the equivalent of
today’s comic books—in ‘dime novels’ that told of outlaws, pirates, and damsels;
Deadwood Dick, Horatio Alger’s newsboys, and Frank and Jesse James.
As we approach the middle of the century, we can also begin to glimpse the rise of
vague gender distinctions in reading materials for the young. From the dime novels, would
eventually come the ‘boy’s book’—adventure stories set in the Great Outdoors. The ‘girl’s
864 THE WORLD OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE