Forgotten Books of the American Nursery by Rosalie Vrylina Halsey

Author:Rosalie Vrylina Halsey [Halsey, Rosalie Vrylina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781721855995
Google: kHEouQEACAAJ
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: 2018-06-28T00:24:22+00:00

Frontispiece. Sr. Walter Raleigh and his man.

Of Samuel Hall’s reprints from the popular English publications, “Little Truths” was in all probability one of the most salable. So few books contained any information about America that one of these two volumes may be regarded as of particular interest to the young generation of his time. The author of “Little Truths,” William Darton, a Quaker publisher in London, does not divulge from what source he gleaned his knowledge. His information concerning Americans is of that misty description that confuses Indians (“native Americans”) with people of Spanish and English descent. The usual “Introduction” states that “The author has chose a method after the manner of conversations between children and their instructor,” and the dialogue is indicated by printing the children’s observations in italics. These volumes were issued for twenty years after they were introduced by Hall, and those of an eighteen hundred Philadelphia edition are bound separately. Number one is in blue paper with copper-plate pictures on both covers. This volume gives information regarding farm produce, live-stock, and about birds quite unfamiliar to American children. But the second volume, in white covers, introduces the story of Sir Walter Raleigh and his pipe-smoking incident, made very realistic in the copper-plate frontispiece. The children’s question, “Did Sir Walter Raleigh find out the virtues of tobacco?” affords an excellent opportunity for a discourse upon smoking and snuff-taking. These remarks conclude with this prosaic statement: “Hundreds of sensible people have fell into these customs from example; and, when they would have left them off, found it a very great difficulty.” Next comes a lesson upon the growth of tobacco leading up to a short account of the slave-trade, already a subject of differing opinion in the United States, as well as in England. Of further interest to small Americans was a short tale of the discovery of this country. Perhaps to most children their first book-knowledge of this event came from the pages of “Little Truths.”

Hall’s books were not all so proper for the amusement of young folks. A perusal of “Capt. Gulliver’s Adventures” leaves one in no doubt as to the reason that so many of the old-fashioned mothers preferred to keep such tales out of children’s hands, and to read over and over again the adventures of the Pilgrim, Christian. Mrs. Eliza Drinker of Philadelphia in seventeen hundred and ninety-six was re-reading for the third time “Pilgrim’s Progress,” which she considered a “generally approved book,” although then “ridiculed by many.” The “Legacy to Children” Mrs. Drinker also read aloud to her grandchildren, having herself “wept over it between fifty and sixty years ago, as did my grandchildren when it was read to them. She, Hannah Hill, died in 1714, and ye book was printed in 1714 by Andrew Bradford.”

But Mrs. Drinker’s grandchildren had another book very different from the pious sayings of the dying Hannah. This contained “64 little stories and as many pictures drawn and written by Nancy Skyrin,” the mother of some of the children.

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