Case
I: FOLLOWING
IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF OUR ENGLISH FOREBEARS:
THE ALPHABET METHOD REIGNS SUPREME
(1640-1840)
The books we give children to help them learn to read have always represented our cultural, ethical, and religious values. In 17th century New England, those values were Christian, Protestant, and Puritan. There was a standard sequence of reading texts throughout the colonies. The colonial child began with the hornbook, then moved into a primer, the Psalter, the New Testament, and then the entire Bible.
Really not a book at all, the hornbook usually consisted of a single sheet of paper containing the alphabet, a shortened syllabary, the invocation, and the Lord's Prayer. It was pasted to a board or stiff card and covered with a translucent layer of horn (or varnished) to protect it. It was the child's first literary introduction to Christianity.
a. An alphabet on ivory, ca. 18th century.
b. A leather-covered hornbook containing a paper alphabet from the late 16th century.
c. An alphabet on horn, ca. 17th century.
d. A roman-letter, leather-covered oak hornbook from the 17th century. (Facsimile)
e. A black-letter, uncovered oak hornbook. (Facsimile)
f. A roman-letter, uncovered oak hornbook. (Facsimile)
g. A cardboard hornbook from the early 19th century. (Facsimile)
h. An engraved cardboard hornbook, "The British Battledore," 19th century. (Facsimile)
BATTLEDORES
By the beginning of the 19th
century, the hornbook had evolved into a cardboard structure folded
into three. It is usually referred to as a "battledore," although in
fact the term is better applied to the more substantial hornbook itself
which could be and was used as a bat in a primitive form of badminton.
The word Primer originally meant a book of prayers for the laity and was perhaps related to the monastic service of Prime. It came to mean an introduction to reading and later an introduction to any subject.
Reproduced in Paul Leicester Ford, ed., the New-England Primer (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1909).
Modern reproduction
THE NEW-ENGLAND PRIMER. Boston:
Congregational Sunday-School and Publishing Society, n.d. [1893?]
Common to all these editions of the New-England Primer was the
poem of the Protestant martyr, John Rogers. A few days before he was burned
at the stake by the Catholic Queen Mary in 1554, he wrote this poem for
his family:
whom God hath dearly bought,
Lay up his Laws within your Heart,
and print them in your thought.
These were introduced into the colonies at the turn of the 18th century. Their objective was to teach spelling, reading, religion, and morality. Until the time of the Declaration of Independence, all spellers printed in the colonies had been reprints of imported British works. The war for American independence made British texts much less acceptable. An early speller written by an American, published on an American press, was the work of a young patriot, Noah Webster.
Webster spent his own money to pay for the publication of his speller. He claimed that he would teach the country a uniform system of pronunciation that would unify the new nation.
Criticized for the cumbersome title of the 1783 version, Webster revised and reissued his book in 1787 under its new title, The American Spelling Book. Webster's American Spelling Book was the undisputed best seller of introductory reading textbooks in the United States until the 1820s, when it began to look old-fashioned. Webster, therefore, revised his book in 1829. Now called The Elementary Spelling Book (but soon dubbed the "Blue-back speller" because of its blue covers) the new version became another success. b
NOAH WEBSTER. The Elementary Spelling Book, rev. ed. New York: D. Appleton, 1857.
In 1857, William Webster, Noah's only son, revised his father's speller in order to make its pronunciation key conform to Webster's dictionary.
Spelling books continued their role as introductions to reading for many years, focusing their efforts on what we now call decoding.
Only five years later, Emerson introduced reading selections after his tables. This reprint is stereotyped, a new technique of printing that would be a boon to textbook publishers.
In these early years, it was the speller that introduced a child to reading. A schoolbook called a "reader" was, until the 1830's, a book designed for children who could already read. Readers such as those by Noah Webster (the third part of his Grammatical Institute, published in 1785)or by Caleb Bingham consisted of a compilation of essays originally written for adults on a variety of subjects.
At this time, a form of schoolbook called a "reader" was designed for children who could already read. It consisted of essays written for adults. The owner of this particular book found Webster's lessons so boring he pasted in "The Detective's Story" by Charles Dickens (pp. 12-13).
The most widely-used of these readers in our country was one titled the English Reader, which did not contain a single work by an American author. It did, however, reflect ideas of liberty and equality. Abraham Lincoln called the English Reader "the best schoolbook ever put in the hands of an American youth."
THE VILLAGE READER. Springfield, Mass.:
G. & C. Merriam, 1845.
The stories of The Village Reader
are deeply moralistic or informational.
