What Middletown Read: Print Culture in an American Small City by Frank Felsenstein & James J. Connolly

Author:Frank Felsenstein & James J. Connolly [Felsenstein, Frank & Connolly, James J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT007000 Literary Criticism / Books & Reading
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press

FIGURE 9. The Anthony Building, 1897. The building was home to the Muncie Business College, as well as the Star Drug Store, owned by G. H. Andrews’s drugstore (see chapter 2). From Muncie Illustrated (Muncie: Commercial Publishing Co., 1897). Courtesy Ball State University Archives and Special Collections.

The Muncie High School course of study, which is summarized in the 1894 edition of the Zetetic, a student-sponsored annual, included four years of Latin, with one-term alternatives such as English grammar or bookkeeping. The pure sciences and different branches of mathematics were covered during the first three years. Despite their enthusiasm for their teachers, however, the scarceness of facilities for science education led the student editors of the Zetetic to plead that extra cash “be appropriated for new laboratories” to replace the inadequate resources that were then available: “the remnants of an old electric outfit, and a few worn-out apparatus.” It may have come as a relief that the senior year was devoted primarily to the higher study of literature and the humanities.37 It was here that the curriculum reached its apex. At the end of the twelfth grade, a graduate of the Muncie High School would be lauded in true classical style with the Latin dictum Palmam qui meruit ferat (loosely translated, “The reward belongs to him who has earned it”), and acknowledged as having “satisfactorily completed the English [or Latin] course of study . . . [and] sustained a good character and made such attainments in Science and Literature as entitles him [or her] to this Diploma.”38

Apart from Latin, foreign languages were not taught in the high school until 1899, when German was introduced as an option, one or the other being a requisite for graduation. As many midwesterners could trace their ancestry to Germany, this was to become a popular alternative. The Muncie Public Library, however, made no attempt to stock Latin or German texts. The Latin holdings consisted merely of an edition of Horace and a couple of preparatory readers, all of which were donations. Books in German were also very few in number and again were gifts. None of these donated books had anything beyond a minimal circulation. Some German classics were available in English translations, though only Goethe’s Faust attracted borrowers.

Far more popular, as we have seen, were translations of German fiction, in particular the romances of E. Marlitt and Ossip Schubin (Aloisia Kirschner), which had a significant readership. Demand for these now almost forgotten women authors vied with that for their better-known American and English contemporaries. Their readers were usually adults rather than children, whose exposure to German authors was limited to English translations of the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. In children’s fiction, however, the German-speaking world (in its loosest sense) was invoked for Muncie’s younger readers in such works as Oliver Optic’s Down the Rhine; or, Young America in Germany and Johann David Wyss’s classic Swiss Family Robinson, of which the library possessed several copies.

If the holdings of the Muncie Public Library were

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