The Child’s Instructer
I am not the first reader to love this book for its pictures. It falls open to a pair of bucolic woodcuts of spring and summer.
Some illustrations closely follow the text: a boy chasing a butterfly with a flower held in his fist, a girl milking a cow, a couple planting a garden. But others may be stock woodcuts, borrowed from prior publications.
They seem to tell their own stories, which are sometimes at odds with the text: a family admiring a large beehive, two couples pointing at songbirds in a leafy tree, or a boy running from a toppled beehive.
Pictures were uncommon, both in books and in daily life, for many Americans in the early nineteenth century. Around 1800, appraisers found paintings or prints in less than one house out of ten. In the frontispiece, the presence of a framed artwork on the wall marks the house as a well-to-do one.
Except for illustrated newspaper mastheads or frontispieces, which sometimes featured stock author portraits, woodcuts were most often found in books for children. Although the author of The Child’s Instructer explains the importance of accessible language and engaging stories in books for children, he makes no mention of the illustrations. They are expected.
One of the best known printers of the early Republic, Isaiah Thomas, also wrote a history of printing in early America. He described favorably the work of rival printer Thomas Fleet, who published the Boston Evening-Post, as well as small books and illustrated song sheets. Thomas recalled that Fleet’s illustrations were created by an enslaved Black man called Peter or his young son, called Pompey, less than fourteen years old. Thomas recalled Peter’s skill at woodcut, describing him as an “ingenious man” and attributing Fleet’s illustrations to him.
Thomas would later become known for the skill of his own woodcuts in children’s books, including A Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1787) and Vice in its Proper Shape (1789). However, these weren’t original images; they were painstakingly pirated from British illustrations published by John Newbery.
The cover and frontispiece show The Child’s Instructer in action: two young boys are reading in a well-appointed parlor while their mother supervises, as was customary. Early childhood education, from learning the alphabet to basic reading, was a mother’s responsibility.
She’s wearing a classical dress, inspired by ancient statuary, that was fashionable in the early Republic, which suggests that this illustration predates the book’s publication in 1840. She takes a break from her sewing to look over the boy’s shoulder at the illustrated book he holds in his hand. The boy’s sister sits on a stool, reading near the window, as was necessary for most Americans without a plentiful supply of artificial light. In the early part of the century, most households had only one or two tallow candles, which according to a reminiscence by Harriet Beecher Stowe, cast a “feeble circle of light” around which the whole family gathered.
The book bears the shaky signature in brown ink of a Master Freddie from Fairfield, Connecticut. He was probably Frederick Knapp, born in 1826, but census records leave no clue as to why this book ended up in the Eames’ library 150 miles away in Ashland, Massachusetts.
Maybe the trunk full of books was already a collection, not just the place where old schoolbooks from the Eames family were stored after they’d outlived their use. The frontispiece bears the mark of a blade, cutting around two sides of the illustration, perhaps in a bid to add artwork to the otherwise bare walls of the reader’s home. Many of the artworks we admire in museums today originated in similar contexts. Prints were torn out of bound volumes; paintings were sawed out of walls and wooden furniture; photographs in thick albums and cases, meant to be displayed on sideboards or end tables, have been separated from their containers. Most of the objects that we now call art were removed from their original sites to be kept in climate controlled vaults, away from light and moisture and insects, far from oily fingers, errant knives, and ink. The Child’s Instructer, intact if a little foxed and stained, dog-eared and broken, is its own museum.
