Andrea Immel

When people ask me to name my favorite book in the collection, there’s never have a good answer on the tip of the tongue. But If a heartless desperado were holding my cat for ransom and the conditions for her release were to name to a favorite book, I might be able to do it as long as I stuck to alphabet books.

One of my favorite alphabets is L’alphabet personnife ou Les lettres rendues sensibles par les figures de 25 enfants in action et portant le nom des 25 lettres elles-memes [The Personified Alphabet or the Letters Animated by the Figures of 25 Children in Action Bearing the Names of the Letters]. Cotsen just purchased the first edition of 1801, where it joins a copy of the 1809 third edition.

Its author, the teacher Anne-Francois-Joachim de Freville, is a rather interesting person, even if he is not an immortal of French children’s literature. Freville’s most famous works were two collections of anecdotes about extraordinary real children. Vies des enfans celebres (1798) included the story of Irish youngster Volney Becker, who saved his father from a shark and was bitten in half while being lifted to safety on a boat. Vies circulated in English translation under the title The Juvenile Plutarch between 1801 and 1820. The second collection, Beaux traits du jeune age (1813), closes with an ambitious proposal for a pantheon to be built to honor the memory of notable children. He was arrested for Jacobin sympathies during the French Revolution but acquitted by the tribunal and kept his head. During the Directory, he continued to produce books that incorporated a range of educational games like the one below designed to turn children into active participants in their education.

A.-F.-J. Freville, Jeu d’alphabet, chiffres, et symbols.

L’Alphabet personnifie is perhaps the most ingenious and charming of them all and its design suggests that Freville was no ordinary teacher. Like many enlightened educators who came after John Locke, Freville tried to invent ways to reduce the drudgery associated with learning to read. Of course, he recommended using illustrated texts for that purpose, but on a different and more ambitious plan. While it was true that children enjoyed illustrated alphabets of animals in their primers, he observed, they usually retained more information about the animals’ appearance and characteristics than they did of the letters of the alphabet, the real object of the exercise.

A better approach, Freville argued, was to anthropomorphize the letters, because children would take greater interest in the symbols if they resembled children the same age as themselves engaged in enjoyable activities (the different costumes and hats were also supposed to be a source of amusement). The skillful use of alliteration increased the fun of learning, as well as an way of organizing the visual material so that it was more likely to impress associations on children’s minds. Verbs are the heart of Freville’s method, which is somewhat unusual, as alphabets are more likely to focus on substantives or nouns rather than actions.

Here is the letter “A,” impersonated by a boy watering [arrose]. When the children turn to the description of the plate, they will discover that it contains other objects beginning with the letter A: “Le petit Arlequin, arrose un Artichaut, fleuri dans son jardin” [Little Harlequin waters an artichoke blooming in his garden]. But if they look at the picture again, they will find even more objects whose names begin with “A” the description omits–“abeille” [bee] and “arraignee” [spider] to mention just two. The engraver signed his name below the greenery in the lower right and I think it says “J. Le Roy.”

This being a French alphabet, the pleasures of the table must be shown. Here is “B” for “boit” [drink] and “M” for “mange” [eat].

And the noblest of the fruits also makes an appearance in “V” for “vendange” [grape harvest]. More French fruits can be seen in a previous post on a new acquisition.

Plenty of ways to work off the food and drink are also illustrated, such as “H” for “hache” [chop] and “N” for “nage” [swim].

The boy is also shown practicing his handwriting in “E” for “ecrit” and playing in “J” for “joue.”The two editions are not identical. A careful comparison established that the reading exercises had been revised, but the differences are to complicated to describe here. A more amusing change was made to the plate for the letter Z. In the 1801 edition, “Z” pursued the zebra through the woods completely naked, whereas in the 3rd edition, he is draped in a diaphanous robe for the hunt, still with no shoes.

Perhaps the revised plate is having a little fun at the expense of the merveilleuses, the fashion victims of their times, who fancied dresses so sheer that they left very little to the imagination….

1799-Cruikshank-Paris-ladies-full-winter-dress-caricature

An English satirist like Isaac Cruikshank was probably not the most objective observer of French fashion…

In January I followed the controversy that erupted shortly after the publication of Ramin Ganeshram’s A Birthday Cake for George Washington, prompting Scholastic Press to recall it. Illustrated by Vanessa Brantley-Newton, the picture book is a tribute to the slave Hercules, a highly skilled chef belonging to Washington, whom Ganeshram imagines happily baking a cake for his master’s birthday dinner. When it became obvious that Cotsen was not going to be able to acquire a copy of the book through the usual channels, Freeman Ng, author and children’s book blogger, was kind enough to donate his copy to the collection.

After reading A Birthday Cake, I went looking in children’s books of the 1790s for Black characters who were servants in private families (that’s the period when Hercules was working in Philadelphia). If any Black domestic slaves did appear in children’s books, I was curious to see how were their circumstances, both physical and mental, were depicted. Were they presented in sufficient detail for us to see if they were aware of their condition? And how were their relationships with their masters portrayed?

Some quick and clever searching turned up a handful of interesting stories. Perhaps I should not have been surprised at my success. Didn’t Lucy Aikin, the niece of Mrs. Barbauld, boycott sugar as a girl out of anti-slavery sentiment? The lawyer Thomas Day pointedly attacked the institution of slavery in his famous novel for children, The History of Sandford and Merton (1784-1789), whose narrative focuses on the reclamation of the spoiled son of a Jamaica plantation owner. During the same period, one of the first slave narratives, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1772) went through nine editions and was translated into Dutch, German, and Russian.

One unknown writer who tried to argue children out of their lack of respect for the victims of the transatlantic business of slavery, was a Miss Mitchell. Her story “Goodness not confined to Complexion or Form,” was published in Tales of Instruction and Amusement (London: E. Newbery, 1795). Miss Mitchell published another three children’s books under her married name, Mrs. Ives Mitchell Hurry. In the Guardian of Education‘s review of Tales, Mrs. Trimmer noted that Mitchell probably wrote it for her pupils, a Miss Harrison and her younger sister A. B. Harrison. The dedication, which is signed from Copford Hall, the beautiful country manor of the Fiske-Harrison family in Essex, suggests that Mitchell might have been governess to the two daughters of John Haynes Harrison and his wife Sarah Fiske Thomas.

The most interesting character in Hurry Mitchell’s “Goodness not confined to Complexion or Form” is the father Mr. Murray, who owns a plantation in Jamaica. At the beginning of the story, the family has just begun living in England so the children can receive a better education than was possible in the Caribbean. He has also brought over several black servants, including a little girl named Janet, whose parents had been in his service for years. On their deathbeds, Mr. Murray promised them that Janet would have a friend in him for as long as he lived.

Janet is supposed to be more companion than servant, but the children Dorothy, Arnold, and Sophia frequently tease and bully her without provocation. As the children of a Caribbean plantation owner (albeit an “enlightened” one), they regard Janet as nothing more than a house slave. After observing his children’s cruelty to Janet, Mr. Murray decides to punish them for making Janet’s unhappy situation more unbearable. First he asks them to explain how they can justify treating the generous and affectionate Janet so cruelly and then picks holes in their logic. Next he reveals that Janet is of much higher rank than the children as the granddaughter of a king, who lost a war against a neighbor and was sold to European traders (a scenario with a basis in historical fact). Mr. Murray makes Dorothy, Arnold, and Sophia apologize to Janet one by one, before announcing that they must participate in a week-long educational experiment designed to show them a thing or two about about their supposed superiority to Janet..

From our standpoint, many critical issues have been left unaddressed in “Goodness.” Perhaps the most glaring contradiction is Mr. Murray himself, held up as a “moral” Jamaica planter, who champions the interests of slaves when nobly born, but never questions the institution. Then there is Janet herself, more a cipher than a fully realized character. On the one hand, she has been given a girl’s name instead of one for a dog (many Black boys in children’s fiction are named Caesar or Pompey), Hurry Mitchell never lets Janet speak for herself. Everything the reader knows about her comes from Mr. Murray. Janet is easily frightened, reacting more like startled animal than the granddaughter of a king. Yet Ives Hurry Mitchell insists that the reader, like the Murray children, acknowledge Janet’s humanity: there is no question that it is right for Dorothy, Arnold, and Sophia to be made to suffer for their treatment of Janet and that by suffering, they will change for the better. So here is the story…