Here is a great collection I have worked with in the past. It looks at 19th-century sunday school libraries. From 1826 to 1832, the percentage of Sunday
schools with a library exploded from 17% to 75%. By 1830, some of the larger
religious presses were printing over six million tracts a year. Often sold in
pre-packaged libraries of 100 texts costing between five and ten dollars, these
books covered a wide array of topics. I think it really drives home some of the origins of youth service librarianship in new ways that we maybe don't often think enough about. The collision of morality, religion, civics, consumerism, and education have all served in amorphous and varying ways to shape our profession. Some of these progressive ideas had much earlier origins before coalescing in the 1900s. I hope you enjoy this resource and the background I've provided!
Shaping the Values of Youth: Sunday
School Books in 19th Century America
Materials digitized by the Michigan State Libraries Special Collection
Background: The Sunday school books in the
Michigan State Libraries collection cover a wide-array of topics, genres and
materials. Included are song books, story books, instructional pamphlets on
birds and animals, parenting guides, and advice tomes on Christian values for
young adults. The books range over a broad period of time, from 1800
to 1890, though the bulk come from mid-century. They represent the works
produced by eight different publishers, though the American Tract Society and the
American Sunday-School Union do dominate the publications. These books and
periodicals were housed in local church libraries, some of the first libraries
to cater to children. These resources can provide a lot of insight into the
early development of youth service libraries.
The site offers a useful introductory essay by Stephan
Rachman that can provide additional background on the available materials: http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/ssb/?action=introessay
I hope you enjoy checking out this rare source. As the site’s
introductory essay notes, “The combination of fiction and scripture under the
pressure of culture produces many unexpected results.” Below, I provide a few
more thematic guidelines for the collection.
Prevalent Topics and Themes: Though the
topics and themes covered in the collection are far-ranging, certain ones seem
to be oft-repeated:
Citizenship: Interestingly, many of the books are forced to collide
Christian values with the frameworks of American citizenship. Christian moral
lessons were often taught through stories about major American figures like
George Washington or Ben Franklin. Notions of republicanism often intermixed
with the religious virtues as well.
Poverty: Sunday Schools in England began as a way to inculcate poor
orphans. Much of this was carried over to the United States and themes of
Christian charity abound. A number of stories qualify charity, though, by
prescribing it only for the temperate and devout poor. Immigration is also
addressed through much of the poverty literature, usually in developing
characters of pious poor immigrants to assert their acceptance in Christianity.
Disobedience: Many of the books present moralizing tales of the
pitfalls of not obeying one’s parents. These stories often showed tragic
stories of what could happen if a child were to leave home at a young age, or
would fail to support one’s aging parents.
Industriousness: Though seemingly at odds at times with some of the
notions of Christian charity and piety, industriousness is continually
reinforced as a crucial virtue for young children to maintain. We also see some
of the conflicts inherent when imbuing Christianity and citizenship together.
Sometimes single texts seem conflicted over how to address these
inconsistencies
Parental Involvement: Nearly every book on parenting reiterates the
fact that parents must not rely only on the schools but carry the education and
development of their children into the home. Many of the images, as well, seem
to point to the role of the home in the education process. In some ways, these
books may have been the link between the home and the schools. It also insists on the need to set model
examples for those children.
Advice: Many of the publications were advice books, seeking to
provide guidance both to parents and young adults in how best to conduct
themselves. In these works, there is a recurring sense of anxiety for both the
authors and its readership. These books often discuss how young adults can
maintain their piety in a world that increasingly seems devoid of virtue. In
large part, these books attempt to indoctrinate the moral codes of the adults
into their children in hopes of creating a better future.
Gender Roles: There is a clear delineation between the roles of men
and women and boys and girls in these books. In fact, many books are written
solely for young men, and others for young girls. Even in books published for
both, there is a clear distinction between stories designed for boys and those
designed for girls, even if the message is the same.
Educational Methods: It is also interesting
to examine these texts as part of a framework for early education. The Sunday
schools in many ways served to complement the common schools, but the lines of
demarcation were never clear. Hence, in Sunday school books you have sections
describing various birds and animals mixed in with stories designed to teach
morality lessons.
The growth over the course of the
nineteenth century in the amount of fiction, though, does speak to a shift in
the educational methods used in the schools. Increasingly, publishers and
instructors seem to have recognized the utility of fiction to teach their
lessons. Rather than the rote memorization of church prayers and Biblical
passages, Sunday school educators began to turn to means of imparting these
morality lessons in packages that piqued children’s interests. Songs were also
commonly intertwined in these instructional books. The mixture of fiction with
lecture, though, forced the publishers to have to distinguish for children
between what was valuable reading and what was inane, a lesson they taught
through more moralizing stories.
There is also a repeated emphasis
in these works on the fact that children were malleable. Rather than fully
determined beings, or primitive beings shaped only by time and age, children
would develop based on the nurturing they received at home and in the
classroom. The Sunday school books also repeatedly stressed the importance of
avoiding harsh physical punishment as part of a child’s education. They took
child psychology into account to a much greater extent than earlier education.
In many ways, some of their methods hint at aspects of certain later efforts
for curricular reform of progressive education. Their appeal to children’s
desires coincides with ideas later presented by educational developmentalists,
who emphasized shaping student curriculum towards what would appeal to children
at various ages.
Growth of Children’s Literature: It is also
interesting to examine how these books fit in with the rise of American children’s
literature. The introductory essay goes into some detail about this, so I do
recommend it. This period in the nineteenth century is perfect for examining
how these genres, publishing companies, and infrastructure developed. To look
at it through the lens of church books adds a fascinating layer as the church
constantly struggled with the implications of fiction upon their doctrinal
message, though appreciated their ability to convey concepts of morality. Here’s
an excerpt from Stephen Rachman’s introductory essay addressing that dynamic:
“As Anne Boylan has delineated it,
"there was give-and-take between students and Sunday-school workers.
Superintendents and teachers agreed on the inclusion of question books,
catechisms, Bible concordances and dictionaries, Scripture biographies, and
inspiring life stories, but they also recognized that children seldom checked
out these books voluntarily." It was clear to most observers that children
returned time and again to the fictional works and would seldom take out the
books "of more solid religious character." Because teachers saw that
it was most important to cultivate a taste for reading in their young students
they began to rely more and more on "entertaining tales with moral
messages."19 The concern with fiction lay in the sense that not only
could it lead to fantasy or sensationalism but also to kind of license with
scripture itself, unorthodox or personal interpretations, and secular opinion.
This was another reason that the Sunday school unions formed publication
committees to oversee and regulate content.”[1]
I hope you enjoy
checking out these fascinating historical materials. They do help to inform us about
the origins of much of our modern-day children’s literature, and how adults and
publishers began to conceive of children both as a new consumer market, and a
malleable intellectual marketplace that could be shaped through reading, and
education.
[1] Stephe Rachman, “Shaping the Values of Youth: Sunday School Books in 19th
Century America,” Accessed September 4, 2012, http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/ssb/?action=introessay .
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