A Girl’s Silence Is Golden; or An Old Take on “Lock Her Up!”
Children’s books can contain surprising survivals and one of the strangest I’ve seen recently is the woman’s mouth closed with a padlock, a symbol of female self-control that is at least as old as the...
View ArticleThe “Fanaticism” Frederick Douglass Found in the Columbian Orator
The thirteen-year-old Frederick Douglas put down fifty cents for a copy of Caleb Bingham’s The Columbian Orator, which had been first published in 1797. He described the anthology both as “a rich...
View ArticleBooks Tell Stories… Perhaps More than One?
Books — especially children’s books — tell stories. The “stories” they tell can be in a wide variety of formats: short stories, verse tales, moral tales, narratives in the form of dialogues, or...
View ArticleAn Old Bachelor Visits an Old Friend and His 14 Children: a Humorous Essay on...
Young characters in eighteenth-century children’s books have a reputation for being preternaturally well-behaved goody-goodies. That stereotype probably contains some truth, but we don’t have to dig...
View ArticleBanned Books of the Past: Robert Dodsley’s Chronicles of the Kings (1740)...
Eighteenth-century children helped themselves to fictional travellers’ tales such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1729) or Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) that were not intended...
View ArticleLooking at an Icon: A Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744)
John Newbery’s first children’s book, The Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744) has long been famous for uniting amusement and instruction in a new, more modern way and its status has been taken for granted...
View ArticleHow a Young Woman Writer Got Her First Book Published: Lucy Peacock and The...
Very few classic eighteenth-century children’s books have an origin myth, or story about how an adult came to write for a real child because the book he or she imagined didn’t exist and decided the...
View ArticleMarks in Books 14: A Botched Book Curse
A bound volume of eighteenth-century almanacs does not seem like a logical addition to Cotsen’s collection of illustrated children’s books. I can’t explain why the third volume of the Diaria...
View ArticleWhittington and His Cat: The Encounter Between Cultures Illustrated
There’s no magic in the rags-to-riches story of Dick Whittington, thrice Lord Mayor of London, shown at the left at the height of his fame from a chapbook ca. 1808 published by T. Sabine and son...
View ArticleMore Pretty Little Pocket Books for Children
The word “pocket book” was a term for a wallet or small purse for money and personal objects in the eighteenth century. That wasn’t its only meaning, however. It also referred to books– especially...
View ArticleBefore Viral Animal Videos: Andrew Lang’s Animal Story Book (1896)
Any old family vacation house by the sea should have a neglected cache of old books somewhere and I discovered one in the second story bedroom, where I picked out The Animal Story Book edited by...
View ArticlePicture Book Herstories of Great American Women Cookbook Writers
Count on Deborah Hopkinson, a distinguished author of children’s non-fiction, to take on the challenge of introducing two giants of American culinary herstory in picture book biographies. Her...
View ArticleLearning to Make Invisible Inks and Other Projects from The Young Gentleman’s...
If you are interested in learning more about how adults have tried to keep children from being bored by dreaming up interesting projects, this post about a pioneering magazine for children may be of...
View ArticleBenjamin Harris’s Protestant Tutor (1679): Teaching Religion, Reading, and...
Late seventeenth century journalist Benjamin Harris probably would have gotten his bearings pretty quickly in our toxic media environment. Familiar with bad actors, feverish conspiracy theories,...
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View ArticleThe HMS Victory Goes Down: A Famous Naval Disaster Illustrated in The Pretty...
The Pretty Book of Pictures for Little Masters and Misses is the best known natural history book John Newbery issued–not because its illustrations were so fine, but because the majority were copied...
View ArticleCoronations for Children: Pomp versus Precedence
The coronation of King Charles III—the first since his mother’s in 1953—has caused a lot of ink to be spilled on both sides of the Atlantic. Much of the commentary has revolved around the question,...
View ArticleCharacters from the Popular Stage in a Deck of Handmade Cards
Strange things are shelved in the Cotsen manuscripts section. It’s unclear what exactly they are, why they were made, and who made them. When the object has no obvious clues that might set off a...
View ArticleStudents, Teachers, and Classrooms Illustrated in the Catalogue of the Cotsen...
The last two volumes of the Catalogue of the Cotsen Children’s Library, a comprehensive index, have just been published, bringing this huge project to completion. This post will offer a survey of the...
View ArticleThe History of Christmasses Past: A Christmas Tree Made of Yew Boughs
Queen Charlotte, consort of George III, is now believed to have introduced the custom of displaying indoors decorated yew branches at Christmas from her native Mecklenberg-Strelitz in northern Germany,...
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