National Reader
While a bible’s endpapers were often fertile ground for a family tree, school books of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries typically grew only half a family: boys.
Willard Russell Eames (1813–1894) passed his National Reader on to his sons, first John Henry Eames (1844–1918) , then Albert Whiting Eames (1847–1912), but his daughter, Ellen Bemis Eames (1841–1846), never grew old enough to plant its seeds in her mind, nor her name on its cover.
The Eames’ National Reader, printed in Boston in 1834, had been adopted for use in Boston’s public grammar schools in 1829, making it one of the most widely used textbooks of the period and replacing Murray’s Readers, which were published in England, though often reprinted (pirated) in the United States. The National Reader’s author, John Pierpont, declared his intention that the book should be uniquely American: “Our country, both physically and morally, has a character of its own. Should not something of that character be learned by its children while at school?”
But, before you start imagining a whole chorus of New England schoolboys declaiming in unison from the pages of the National Reader, consider this: children in Massachusetts were only required to go to school for three months per year beginning in 1836. It would be another decade before the state limited children’s working hours to ten hours per day. And, there were no minimum age limits for workers at all until 1881.
John Henry might have been bored when he carved his initials into the pasteboard cover with a blade, but at least he was bent over a book and not a plow. He practiced his flourishing penmanship and inscribed a statuesque A for Ashland.
One of the Eames boys carefully inscribed a colophon in pencil:
And, an afterword:
He evidently did not recognize that most of the book was stolen. United States only extended minimal protections to foreign authors beginning in 1891. Prior to this, it was common practice to reprint books written by foreign authors, either in part or whole, and entirely without permission.
There was also little enforcement of domestic copyright prior to the 1820s, despite the protections promised by the Constitution. As every school child knows, textbooks are heavy. Lacking good roads and inexpensive parcel shipping services, textbooks in the nineteenth century were often printed locally and sold straight out of the print shop. Murray’s Reader, which preceded the National Reader, appears in myriad versions, printed by at least 22 different printing shops, leaving students no excuse but to buy the book.
The Eames boys wished they were reading other things. One of them left a book mark, cut out from a local newspaper, at page 33, after Lesson XVIII, “The Fall of Tecumseh.” The paper advertised: “The Most Popular Writer of the Day for Boys and Girls is Walter Aimwell.”
Gould & Lincoln publishers promised: “A new Aimwell Story excites the same lively interest among the young folks that a new novel by Dickens does among the old ones.” (Dickens was also famously peeved over Americans’ copyright chicanery.)
At page 72, one of the boys embedded an engraved portrait bust.
And, finally, between pages 134 and 135, I find Ellen Bemis Eames. It’s a scrap of emerald green plaid silk, faintly iridescent like feathers. My first thought: a daguerreotype come to life. All that color, buried in the green earth of a book.
