4

Literacy, Education, and the Reader

Is it not a little hard [as Swift asked] that not one gentleman’s daughter in a thousand should be brought to read or understand her own natural tongue, or be judge of the easiest books that are written in it?… If there be any of your acquaintance to whom this passage is applicable, I hope you will recommend the study of Mr. Webster’s Grammatical Institute, as the best work in our language to facilitate the knowledge of Grammar. I cannot but think Mr. Webster intended his valuable book for the benefit of his countrywomen: For while he delivers his rules in a pure, precise, and elegant style, he explains his meaning by examples which are calculated to inspire the female mind with a thirst for emulation, and a desire of virtue.

—William Hill Brown, The Power of Sympathy (1789)

I have thought that many a complete letter writer has been produced from the school of the novelist… and hence, probably, it is, that females have acquired so palpable a superiority… in this elegant and useful art.

—Judith Sargent Murray, The Gleaner (1798)

This chapter, like the previous one, can appropriately begin with Updike Underhill’s observation that a new American readership had emerged while he was away:

The worthy farmer no longer fatigued himself with Bunyan’s Pilgrim up the “hill of difficulty” or through the “slough of despond” but quaffed wine with Brydone in the hermitage of Vesuvius, or sported with Bruce in the fairy land of Abyssinia, while Dolly, the dairy maid, and Jonathan, the hired man, threw aside the ballad of the cruel stepmother, over which they had so often wept in concert, and now amused themselves into so agreeable a terror, with the haunted houses and hobgobblins of Mrs. Radcliffe, that they were both afraid to sleep alone.¹

From Bunyan and ballads to Brydone and Mrs. Radcliffe, the readers in the new Republic were obviously embarked on a pilgrimage of their own and, by the turn of the century, were already well on their way.

But could Dolly the dairymaid and Jonathan the hired man really read The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)? That question is basic to the present discussion of early American culture. It was crucial then, too, as is attested to by John Adams’s often quoted claim that America was the most literate nation on earth. “A native American who cannot read and write,” Adams boasted, “is as rare as a comet or an earthquake.”² Numerous travelers of the time, visiting from France or England, concurred with this appraisal, yet Lyle H. Wright estimates that in Adams’s day only some 1.5 million individuals, or somewhat less than half of the population, were literate.³ The discrepancy between the two claims is striking. Nor is it entirely explained away by Kenneth A. Lockridge’s suggestion that Adams’s “universal literacy” did exist but only in John Adams’s America—an America that defined itself as New England, elite, urban, white, male.⁴

The question of literacy (and the concomitant question of the availability and efficacy of early American public education) has recently preoccupied numerous historians.⁵ Despite sustained debate and detailed quantitative studies, no one has yet convincingly answered the basic question of just who could read and write in early America. Postulations range from what David D. Hall aptly terms the “storybook version of New England history” in which “everyone in Puritan times could read, the ministers wrote and spoke for a general audience, and the founding of a press at Cambridge in 1638 helped make books abundant” to a quite different picture, “argued most strenuously by Kenneth Lockridge, [of] illiteracy shackl[ing] half of the adult males and three-fourths of the women.” Yet Hall also maintains that the “statistics” supporting this second version are as suspect as the older “storybook version.”⁶ Of course, both versions are stories—different stories (one positive, one negative) about the Puritans. We can applaud their early decision to tax the populace in order to institute mass schooling or we can emphasize that this schooling was provided only for male children. We can extol the Colonial schools for inculcating traditional values through textbooks such as the New England Primer; which instilled moral truths (“In Adams fall / We sinn’d all”) along with basic literacy, or we can castigate the Puritan public schools for educating a select body of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century men to certain community assumptions about the divine status of class, racial, gender, regional, and social disparities (“Job feels the rod / Yet blesses God”) and thus perpetuating a rigid body of religious and social dogma. In short, it is necessary to ask not only who could read but what they read; not only what they read but in what context.

The debate itself may be as interesting for the historiographie issues it raises as for the historical questions it seeks to answer. To start with, it is significant that even though some of the Founding Fathers—notably Franklin—argued that blacks needed to be educated in anticipation of the role they would play in the Republic after emancipation, few studies of the period address the question of black literacy.⁷ It was, of course, illegal for slaves to learn to read or write and for whites to teach them. But the existence of such laws does not necessarily mean that they were universally obeyed, and we can note that the advertisements for runaway slaves in an eighteenth-century Boston newspaper suggest as many as one seventh of these fugitive slaves may have been able to read.⁸ Yet studies of literacy in New England (where by far and away most of such work has been done, primarily because of the extensive records kept there) rarely mention the African American population. Typically, blacks were poor and thus left behind very few of those records (deeds, wills, estate inventories, etc.) upon which quantitative studies of literacy are usually based—records that also exclude as much as 20 to 30 percent of the white population who owned no property.⁹ One wonders, too, if blacks were not counted in many early records simply because, socially, they did not “count.” Again ideology permeates even the most elementary record keeping.

Ideology and the corresponding accidents of the record enter into other questions of literacy, yet, despite differing statistics, some general conclusions can seemingly be derived from the competing quantitative studies of early American literacy. Virtually all recent studies have asserted a rise in literacy over the course of the eighteenth century. Christopher M. Jedrey, for example, in The World of John Cleaveland, has calculated signing rates for the inhabitants of Chebacco, Massachusetts, and concludes that in 1675 only about 25 percent of householders in the community could sign their names (the evidence for their wives is too fragmentary to offer any conclusions), whereas in 1771 among adult men elementary literacy was virtually universal and nearly 75 percent of adult women could sign (but again calculated for property owners of the village).¹⁰ Studies by Linda Auwers, Ross W. Beales, Jr., Harvey Graff, and Lockridge confirm this striking advance in literacy, although their figures, too, necessarily exclude the poorest (non-property-owning) portion of the population.¹¹ Most historians also agree that education, predictably, suffered in the revolutionary years, with detrimental results to literacy, but that after the war there was renewed attention to education. Finally, the figures for the 1850 census indicate an impressive rate of literacy among whites: an almost identical rate for both white men and women of over 90 percent. Yet, writing in 1983 (and in an emphatically nonquantitative manner), Hall acknowledged that the literacy debate continued unabated and vowed to “cut the Gordian knot that literacy studies pose… by asserting that early and late, the great majority of Americans, men as well as women, could read.”¹²

Hall’s sweeping statement did not, unfortunately, sever the Gordian knot or otherwise resolve the controversy: A flow both of new articles that present figures for additional early communities and of review essays that point out the shortcomings of previous literacy studies still continues. This flow, however, attests not so much to a disagreement over the past but to disagreement in the present. The main issue here is historiographic. Specifically, what are the limitations of quantification as a methodology? How much—and by what principles—can we generalize from, say, a single town in one five-year period to a neighboring town a decade later?

The question is not simply methodological but addresses the underlying assumptions of quantificational history. Just as poststructuralist literary theory has in recent years challenged the premises of New Criticism, so too have the premises of history recently been under scrutiny, with theorists such as Hayden White insisting that all history is story-making akin to what the novelist does and that even seemingly objective, quantified findings can replicate the hegemonies within the society at large. But the metahistorical challenge is not the only one to quantification. In defensive reaction to current developments in the field, some historians have vociferously insisted upon a return to narrative history based on “traditional epistemology”—that is, a good, old-fashioned, un-self-reflexive, nineteenth-century-style positivism rooted in the conviction that “truth is absolute.”¹³ By the lights of this new positivism, metahistory is inimical to “real” history, and so, it must be added, is quantification.

In this historiographie context, quantification (posed between positivism and metahistory) becomes the discipline’s New Criticism. By devaluing public pronouncements and by paying detailed attention to the records of a given town (court records, land transactions, etc.), the quantificational historian seeks to pass beyond broad generalizations about the “Puritan mind” or “main currents” of American thought, much as the New Critic eschews historical overview in favor of detailed readings of specific texts. Inevitably, quantifiers implicitly or explicitly use their findings to support larger generalizations about a period or a movement, but they do so through “careful scrutiny” of selected nonliterary documents. Birth and death records in Dedham, Massachusetts (1789–91), become the “well-wrought urn” of quantification. The shopkeeper’s account book is not to be scanned and reduced to a historical footnote but must be fully and sensitively plumbed, analyzed, and interpreted by a “discerning reader/historian.”

Much of the literacy debate, like controversies over levels of ambiguity in Moby Dick, comes from different ways of reading the record, as can be more clearly shown by focusing on one aspect of that debate—the matter of sign literacy (the frequency with which people signed their names on documents rather than marked with an X). Of what is sign literacy a measure (especially as it relates to women, for whom signing data is problematic)? Lockridge has found that in the early national period women’s signing rate in New England was still only approximately half of what it was for men, and he extrapolates that the female rate of literacy was only half of that for men. Yet Margaret Spufford, in reviewing English documents of the seventeenth century, has found individuals who put a signature on one document and a mark on another. That difference raises some perturbing questions. Were there people who learned to sign only as adults? Or who forgot how to sign after schooling ceased? Or who could no longer sign (especially on wills) because of infirmity?¹⁴ Do we count them, in any case, as literate or illiterate?

There may well have been psychosociological reasons why it was appropriate to sign in one instance (e.g., a husband present or absent) but not in another. Linda Auwers has suggested that such “switchers” may not have been able to either read or write but that, living in a society that prized literacy, they had learned to ape or fake a signature in order to seem literate.¹⁵ Or consider how Linda K. Kerber, in examining twenty-eight divorce petitions filed between 1735 and 1745, discovered only four signed with marks instead of signatures (all four marked by women). But, looking more carefully, Kerber observed that numerous signatures were not those of the petitioners but had been provided by the clerk who drew up the petition. “Whether a transcribed signature means that the clerk was in haste,” she cautions, “or that he did not think that the petitioner could write, or that the petitioner was illiterate, or, finally, that the petitioner was not present while the document was being transcribed, is difficult to know.”¹⁶ What we can suspect, however, is that some studies may have too readily assumed the meaning of evidence to be self-evident and with a semiotic, if not a historical, naiveness read in the sign (whether a signature or mark) proof positive of both the presence and the literateness of the individual whose name that sign signifies. All of these criticisms represent, for the quantificational historian, not so much a Gordian knot as a Pandora’s box, since it is always “difficult to know” precisely the full context of any social act and the implicit rules governing even the simplest transactions.

This historiographie issue is an important one, but there are equally important ideological reasons why controversy persists over this particular topic. Literacy is not simply the ability to decode letters upon a page, the ability to sign a name instead of making a mark. Literacy is a value. In a democracy especially, literacy becomes almost a matter of principle, a test of the moral fiber of a nation. Revolutionary societies often proclaim their validity by boasting of improved literacy levels, and John Adams’s insistence on universal literacy implicitly asserts a vision of a fair and equitable nation. In Benjamin Nelson’s phrase, literacy is the “social basis of cultural belief and value systems.”¹⁷ It is not simply a “rate,” a “measurement,” but a vital aspect of a culture, inseparable from its educational systems and values, its larger goals and aspirations, its meaning and definition of itself. To say that women’s literacy was only 50 percent or even 75 percent of that of men’s is to say something about the principles upon which a new nation was based. Thus a number of recent studies have labored to explain away what seems to be a notable discrepancy in men’s and women’s signing rates and, in effect, to salvage Adams’s boast. Women, these arguments generally run, quit school before they learned to write. Reading, they claim, was taught before writing in the “dame schools” and “summer schools” that most girls attended; consequently, the sign literacy rates argued by Lockridge and others fail to account for a possibly vast number of women who could read perfectly well but who could only make an X whenever a signature was called for. Women, after all, had no legal status, and so, since their signatures proved nothing, there was no real reason for them to learn to sign or, by extension, to write.¹⁸

As the tone of my summary might suggest, I have reservations about this argument on behalf of nonsigning readers (primarily white females, for the sign literacy rate of white men is generally acknowledged to be extraordinarily high). To start with, the argument does not differentiate between signing and writing. There may well have been readers who could not write, but who could sign. In any society that values literacy, there is a psychosociological need to learn at least to sign one’s name and thereby elude the most obvious proof of illiteracy. Certainly, anyone today who has been around children has observed the three-year old’s scribble upon the page and has heard the child’s proud assertion that he or she has written “My Name.” Although it is often dubious to argue backward from contemporary experience, it is significant in this regard that many editions of the New England Primer included a list of “some proper names for Men and Women to teach Children to spell their own.”¹⁹ In short, until more evidence is in, I would suggest that because nonsigning readers are mute—they left behind no historical record—at present they exist as a historiographic construct useful for questioning what data does survive (Is signing a reliable measure of literacy?) or for perpetuating the “storybook version of New England,” but not particularly germane to the question of just who may actually have read the American novel. For even the most dedicated proponent of nonsigning readers, I would think, would have to admit to levels of literacy.²⁰ If someone, with the Bible opened to the proper passage, can make it through a well-known psalm, is that person really literate? Or must the person also be able to make it through, say, Cotton Mather’s commentaries on the Bible as well? It seems highly unlikely that there were many American women of the early national period who could read Locke or Hume or even Monima, or the Beggar Girl, but who had to mark an X on public documents.

The postulation of nonsigning readers and other methods of “padding” the figures on behalf of women readers (or ignoring them for blacks) obscures basic social inequities. Once more, historiographie and ideological questions are intertwined. Since how many people in America were literate (men and women, blacks and whites) depends largely on the definition employed, the definition will always serve the interests of some larger argument. More to the point, what any statistics obscure is that literacy is a process, not a fixed point or a line of demarcation. “Literateness” is a more useful concept for my purposes since it suggests a continuum (and a continuing process of education and self-education) between, say, rudimentary reading and elementary ciphering on the one hand and the sophisticated use of literacy for one’s material, intellectual, and political advantage on the other. Whether we set women’s elementary literacy at 50 percent of men’s or at 75 percent, it is indisputable that literateness (in the fullest sense of the term) was more valued, encouraged, and achieved in early America by men than by women. I argue this point at some length because, as I will show, the early American novel became one of the single most vociferous sources of encouragement for women in their striving for literateness. In this respect, the novel echoed the concern of significant numbers of Americans who perceived a disparity between the literateness of men and women in the new Republic and also a disparity in the educational expectations the new society had for its male and female members.

FIGURE 3. Illustration by Samuel Hill from William Cowper, Poems (Boston: Printed by E. Lincoln for Manning and Loring and E. Lincoln, 1802). Group reading among the common people. The woman works while a child learns to read (possibly her own child or perhaps this is a “dame school”). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

Ironically, while John Adams boasted of universal literacy in America, his wife frequently lamented her unliterateness to her daughters and her women friends.²¹ She decried, for example, the hegemony of the nation’s colleges and their male “puberty rite” (to use Walter J. Ong’s term) of Greek and Latin as the “foundation of all the pretensions of the gentlemen to superiority over the ladies” and an obstacle to “liberty, equality and fraternity between the sexes.” Similarly, she often expressed “regret” over the “trifling narrow contracted Education of the Females of my own country.” “You need not be told,” she wrote to John in 1778, “how much female Education is neglected, nor how fashionable it has been to ridicule Female learning.”²² She understood that the issue was not only inferior levels of learning but the way in which assumptions about gender (or class or race) precluded a better education.

There is a tremendous difference between Dolly the dairymaid who must sign an X on her marriage documents and Abigail Adams. On another level, Abigail and Dolly each suffered under a social apprehension that women’s education was less important (on all social levels) than men’s. Like literacy, education must be viewed as part of larger social and socializing functions. As Raymond Williams has argued, “there are clear and obvious connections between the quality of a culture and the quality of its system of education.… The way in which education is organized can be seen to express, consciously and unconsciously, the wider organization of a culture and a society.… What is thought of as ‘an education’ being in fact a particular selection, a particular set of emphases and omissions.”²³ It should come as no surprise, then, that the historiography of early American education is as polarized as the literacy debate and along much the same ideological lines, even though the facts here are not themselves so much at issue. All scholars agree, for example, that education was important to Puritan America from its very beginnings. The Company of the Massachusetts Bay had made provision for the instruction of the young in America before leaving England. Even before the 1647 passage of the famous “ould deluder Satan” law in Massachusetts (a law requiring public support for education in every town of over fifty families), the more well-to-do inhabitants of the city of Boston had already banded together to fund a school. Throughout New England, other towns soon established schools, too, and, as Stanley K. Schultz notes, “followed essentially the same evolution of financial support from private subscription, tuition, rents, and grants of land to a more formal settlement of town rates.”²⁴

Yet what did this public support of education mean? One reading holds that the Puritan public schools, by insisting on provisions for educating even the children of the poor, facilitated egalitarianism in America. Bernard Bailyn and Lawrence Cremin, to take two examples, have each eloquently argued that the seventeenth-century schools promoted a breakdown of elitism and residual British class barriers and that an American determination to counter the blankness of wilderness with the gifts of education, civilization, culture, optimism, and individualism led to a democratizing of American society. American democracy itself was thereby substantially grounded, according to this view, in the Puritan public school laws.²⁵ In contrast, Lockridge, Michael Zuckerman, and revisionist historians such as Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis, and Michael B. Katz have maintained that Puritan education preserved class and gender divisions, emphasized recitation and dogma rather than reasoning and knowledge, and thus prepared the way for mass public education, which, in the early national period, was largely motivated by the desire of elites to control an increasingly heterogeneous population and to incorporate the late arrivals on these shores into a submissive American workforce, ready to be even more firmly fixed in their place by the advent of wholesale industrialization.²⁶

Questions of who was educated and to what end are complicated by the fact that no message is ever perceived divorced from the context in which it is received. A Protestant-based work ethic and a doctrine of Christian acceptance can have quite different social implications for the slaveholder as opposed to the slave, for the Pilgrim descendant as opposed to the recent immigrant, for the mill owner as opposed to the mill worker, for the husband as opposed to the wife. As Katz has observed, the same American educational system that for nearly two hundred years could be (in principle at least) free, universal, and compulsory could also be racist, sexist, and class biased.²⁷ Certainly, the Colonial New England schools did institutionalize the society’s traditional hierarchies. As E. Jennifer Monaghan has shown, the Puritan public school laws were designed to teach “children to write and reade,” but the word children in such laws almost always meant “boys.”²⁸ When Walter H. Small surveyed nearly two hundred colonial towns, he found only seven that admitted girls into the schools.²⁹ Moreover, the primarily oral/ aural mode of teaching these boys to read did nothing to challenge the status quo. On the contrary, as Edmund S. Morgan points out, the traditional rote method of instruction was well adapted to the “purposes of Puritan education. It was not designed to give play to the development of individual initiative, because individual initiative in religion usually meant heresy.”³⁰

The official educational program proposed for the new nation did nothing to revolutionalize either the traditional Puritan pedagogy or the social hierarchies supported by that procedure. On the contrary, the Founding Fathers repeatedly stressed the need for an educational system that would reinforce political quiescence and social order. Women, of course, were a primary target of a conservative social message. They should be educated at public expense, the typical argument ran, but educated to a certain set of beliefs, primarily to the traditional belief in feminine subordination that, in the past century, had kept them out of the public schools in the first place. This thrust is obvious in Benjamin Rush’s “Thoughts upon Female Education” (1787):

The equal share that every citizen has in the liberty and the possible share he may have in the government of our country make it necessary that our ladies should be qualified to a certain degree, by a peculiar and suitable education, to concur in instructing their sons in principles of liberty and government.³¹

Rush’s ringing insistence on an “equal share” to which “every citizen” is entitled somehow peters out into the “peculiar and suitable education” that he advocates for women. Yet as Nancy F. Cott observes, this was the typical position. In 1795, for example, the American Philosophical Society sponsored a contest on the topic of American educational improvements. Every submission to that essay contest included a proposal for universal free education—universal meaning, in this case, open to all white men and women.³² Every proposal, however, justified female education as an education for potential mothers of men, for the caretakers of future voters and citizens, a position articulated by another eighteenth-century educator, Caleb Bingham, in 1791:

While the sons of our citizens are cultivating their minds and preparing them for the arduous, important, and manly employment which America offers to the industrious, their daughters are gaining that knowledge, which will enable them to become amiable sisters, virtuous children, and, in the event, to assume characters [as mothers] more interesting to the public, and more endearing to themselves.³³

Like Adams’s boast of universal literacy, the call by men such as Rush or Bingham for female education suggests an androcentric ethos innocently unaware of its own prejudices. There was education and then there was female education—a different concept entirely.

The consequence of this educational theory in practice was a second-class education for girls, as Linda K. Kerber and Mary Beth Norton have both amply demonstrated.³⁴ Many girls continued to receive their education only at the dame schools or at the summer schools in which often itinerant teachers or local women taught subjects such as elementary reading and writing but advanced sewing and embroidery. And even though the Boston Act of 1789 stipulated that girls and boys be taught the same subjects in the public schools, girls were required to attend school for fewer hours per day and for fewer months per year.³⁵ Nor was the situation much better for the affluent who might be able and willing to purchase a private education for their daughters. Many of the finest academies excluded female pupils altogether. Others, such as the Leicester Academy in Worcester County, Massachusetts, boasted of their progressive commitment to equal education and taught boys and girls from the same texts. Yet even at Leicester Academy, female pupils studied the classics in translation while boys learned Latin and Greek, and only boys could enter the Upper School, with its college-preparatory curriculum that stressed the classics, advanced mathematics, and philosophy.³⁶ The majority of schools for upper-class girls ignored academic subjects almost entirely in favor of oral recitation, embroidery, painting, piano, map drawing, and other skills suitable to the prospective wife of a successful man.

Many of the same men who recognized that female education could reinforce the status quo also insisted that mass education would be the answer to the widespread social unrest occurring throughout various elements in the population. Dr. Rush, in his widely publicized “Plan for the Establishment of Public Schools” (1786), insisted that mandatory mass education could “convert men into republican machines” that would “produce regularity and unison in government.” General learning, he argued, “is favorable to liberty. A free government can only exist in an equal diffusion of literature. Without learning men become savages or barbarians.”³⁷ Similarly, Noah Webster, perhaps the single most influential educator of the early national period, insisted that mass education was crucial to the survival of a republic. A Yale graduate himself, he frequently expressed his distrust of the unruly populace, especially those in the back country and the coastal cities, whom, he felt, indulged in licentiousness, drunkenness, and, worst of all, “secret corruption and brazen libertinism.” A uniform curriculum in the public schools could instill the ideals of republican duty, patriotism, moderation, piety, and good sense and would thereby solve a range of social ills from private personal laziness to public political dissension. “Every class of people should know and love the laws,” he insisted. “This knowledge should be diffused by means of schools and newspapers, and an attachment to the laws may be formed by early impressions upon the mind.” Like Rush, Webster felt that in monarchies education is “partial and adapted to the rank of each class of citizens” while, in republican countries, even the poorest peasant’s son had to be taught civility—proper manners, proper morals, and proper grammar.³⁸ Notably, each educator saw pubic schooling not just as a way of disseminating knowledge but also as a way of perpetuating the status quo and fostering loyalty to a federal government.³⁹ Perhaps only coincidentally, both Rush and Webster had a lifelong disdain of novels.

Inspired by this nationalistic educational philosophy, most of the new states mandated in their constitutions support for publicly funded education. The Massachusetts Constitution and Bill of Rights, for example, framed by John Adams, particularly stressed the connection between mass education and the principles of “public and private charity,” “industry and frugality,” and “honesty and punctuality.” Adams, suspecting that social divisions were fixed in human nature, did not believe that public education would amalgamate the lower orders into the higher, but that education would bring the unprivileged into a more compliant attitude toward authority and would foster “the Virtues and Talents of the People” and even help quell the “affrays and Riots” that plagued Boston during the postrevolutionary era.⁴⁰ Schooling for the masses was also extended well beyond the already established New England cities, towns, and villages. The Land Ordinance of 1785 mandated that one lot in every new township be set aside for a town school, while the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 pushed westward the New England premise that “religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”⁴¹

There was, however, a substantial discrepancy between the prescriptive statements on the importance of “universal” education and the actual performance of the institutions intended to achieve that goal. First, not all children attended school. According to Schultz, even after passage of the Boston education laws in 1789, only 12 percent of the school-age population (children from four to fifteen years of age) were educated at the public grammar and writing schools; only 7 percent at private institutions (usually wealthier children); and only 2.1 percent at the prestige Latin schools.⁴² Similarly, Carl F. Kaestle and Maris A. Vinovskis have determined that there was an enrollment of only 24.7 percent of all children in New York City schools during 1795–96, although, as they also point out, that rate did rise to between 50 and 60 percent after 1830.⁴³ Furthermore, for those who regularly attended school, the quality of education varied widely from region to region, from school to school. Edward Everett Hale, in A New England Boyhood, contrasted his own education at the prestigious Boston Latin School with the educational opportunities otherwise available in the city: “There was no public school of any lower grade, to which my father would have sent me, any more than he would have sent me to a jail.” Boston’s other schools, for Hale at least, were characterized by the drudgery of rote memorization, by uninspired teaching, perpetual whippings, and “constant conflict with men of a very low type.”⁴⁴ Mr. Hale would not have approved of the North Carolina schoolmaster William A. Chaffin, who, with a certain glee, listed forty-seven offenses in his “Rules of School,” with punishments that ranged from one lashing for “every word you mis In your … Leson without Good Excuse” to ten lashes for “Playing at Cards at School” or “For Misbehaving to Girls.”⁴⁵

Nor did the public schools have much to recommend them when viewed from the other side of the desk. The diarists Ethan Allen Greenwood and Elizabeth Bancroft complained of having as many as sixty pupils in one schoolroom, and Tyler, in The Algerine Captive, gives us a more detailed, albeit fictional, portrait of just such a class:

Excepting three or four overgrown boys of eighteen, the generality of [my students] were under the age of seven years. Perhaps a more ragged, ill bred, ignorant set never were collected for the punishment of a poor pedagogue. To study in school… was impossible.… What with the pouting of the small children, sent to school not to learn but to keep them out of harm’s way, and the gruff surly complaints of the larger ones, I was nearly distracted.⁴⁶

If the foregoing portrait of education in the early Republic seems bleak as well as socially reactionary, it may well have been inevitably so. Formal education was one way—perhaps the best way—to educate the members of a postrevolutionary society to the values esteemed by that society’s leaders and designed to perpetuate their society as they esteemed it. In other words, formal education almost necessarily institutionalizes social hierarchies, with the classroom itself serving as an apt metaphor for social authority and social control. Moreover, educational policy and praxis define who is to be literate within a society and to what degree, and thus they determine what tests for and uses of literacy are appropriate for different social groups. In a fundamental way, the educational program of a society attempts to constitute in advance its potential or projected readership.

But many Americans were not so ready to be simply constituted (in Philadelphia or in the schoolroom). Specifically, a number of Americans found other sources of education outside the established schools, sometimes even in direct contradiction to the methods and morals that were being taught in those schools. Simultaneously with the codification of mass education, there was a vital movement throughout the new nation toward self-education, often inspired by books that could be bought by adults as well as by children, books that were designed to amuse as well as to instruct.

In the last years of the century, with the war over, there was a sense of excitement for many in the new nation, and one emblem of that vitality could be read in the publishing trade. As suggested earlier, the market flourished with unprecedented numbers of books. Publishers were quick to meet a growing demand for self-help books and social guides, textbooks and teacher’s manuals, histories and biographies, children’s books, readers for adults, travelogues, captivity stories, crime narratives, and, of course, novels. Whatever its official or unofficial causes, there was at least a perception on the part of writers, educators, publishers, and booksellers that a new social class of readers wanted to increase their literary skills and to be able to turn those skills to their own amusement and advantage. Informal community reading groups, already prevalent before the war, sprang up in seemingly every county, partly in response to the widespread dicta that education was essential in a democracy—a dicta that takes on a different force entirely when enunciated by (not for) the unprivileged. Lending libraries, too, did an unprecedented business. Finally, books that promised to help readers become more literate were in particular demand. For example, Noah Webster’s The American Spelling Book, popularly referred to as the “blue-back speller,” sold millions of copies, by one estimate 70 million overall.⁴⁷ Perceiving a demand for more than a simple speller, Webster also compiled the third part of his A Grammatical Institute of the English Language… (1785), a collection of fictional or quasi-fictionalized accounts aimed primarily at older readers and drawn from history, Scripture, or the classics. Along with Caleb Bingham’s American Preceptor (1794), The Columbian Reader (1798), and Lindley Murray’s English Reader (1799), Webster’s anthology went on to become a best-seller in the early national period.

The early American novel helped to generate and benefited from this educational excitement. Virtually every American novel written before 1820 (I can think of no exceptions) at some point includes either a discourse on the necessity of improved education (often with special attention to the need for better female education) or a description of then-current education (typically satirical, as in Tyler’s portrait of the schoolroom) or, at the very least, a comment on the educational levels and reading habits of the hero and even more so the heroine. It might be noted, too, that most of the known novelists (including Jeremy Belknap, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Charles Brockden Brown, William Hill Brown, Hannah Webster Foster, Charles Ingersoll, Herman Mann, Isaac Mitchell, Judith Sargent Murray, Susanna Haswell Rowson, Rebecca Rush, Sarah Savage, Benjamin Silliman, Tabitha Tenney, Royall Tyler, and Helena Wells) also wrote, separately, essays and often books on education. These writers’ emphasis was not so much on public as on personal education, and they all encouraged individualistic striving toward self-improvement and self-education, typically on a rationalist model. Perhaps even more than the statements on public education by leaders such as Benjamin Rush and Noah Webster, the comments of these novelists reflect an important trend in American social thought in the new Republic and attest to the individual citizen’s desire to achieve increased literateness, both within and without the existing system of schools.

Most of the novels countered the traditional concept of education as rote memorization and mechanical recitation by advocating, instead, “useful knowledge,” learning through example, associational thinking, and, especially, the conjunction of instruction with amusement—in short, the implicit epistemological program of the genre, as well as the liberal social cause overtly championed by many novels. Learning should be both intellectually stimulating and fun, a radical revision of Puritan praxis. Implicitly and sometimes explicitly, novelists held up Franklin’s experimental method as the model of learning or applauded Jefferson’s concept of a hands-on utilitarian pedagogy. The novelist Sukey Vickery not only advocated a Lockean program in Emily Hamilton but, after marrying Samuel Watson, practiced what she preached in the education of their nine children. After they went to sleep at night, she studied mathematics in order that she might better teach ten-year-old Harriot “the meaning of simple Addition, why to carry the 10.… Wish her perfectly to understand the meaning of terms as she or the study will be found destitute of pleasure.”⁴⁸

FIGURE 4. Illustration by Samuel Hill, “The Old Soldier,” from the Massachusetts Magazine, or Monthly Museum, September 1791. Here group reading takes place across class, gender, and generational lines. The women are fashionably dressed while the old soldier wears homespun, is surrounded by simple implements (bowl, jug), and sits in front of a rude hut while the girl reads. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

The same educational philosophy pervaded a number of texts that set out deliberately to provide an alternative to Webster’s speller, which explicitly stated that “the minds of children may well be employed in learning to spell and pronounce words, whose signification is not within the reach of their capacities.”⁴⁹ Among the first of these was the novelist Susanna Rowson’s Spelling Dictionary (1807), which advocated that children learn to “associate ideas” and that “cheerfulness” be a classroom ideal. Her method and pedagogical philosophy were based on “rational idea[s],” not tedious memory work.⁵⁰ The new century also saw some of the first teachers’ manuals, manuals that acknowledged teaching as a profession and learning as a process. The Juvenile Mirror; and Teacher’s Manual, Comprising a Course of Rudimental Instruction (1812), for example, begins by suggesting that children be taught reading and writing together, before the age of six, and that all instruction be based on rational principles. In contrast to the blue-back speller, this book advised that teachers “ask a child how he would spell [certain] phrases, if he were obliged to write them down, and we introduce the idea that he must learn to spell, before he can make his words and thoughts understood in writing.” Students should also be encouraged to “write down words of their own selection every day” since “children learn to spell more by the eye than by the ear.”⁵¹ Or Francis Joseph Neef, an Owenite, in The Method of Instructing Children Rationally in the Arts of Writing and Reading (1813), argued for a Socratic method of instruction and an associational model of learning, which, he insisted, would enable children to acquire, rapidly and pleasantly, reading and writing skills and would also encourage the kind of probing, analytical thinking necessary for the improvement of society (a goal in keeping with Neef’s socialist-utopian leanings).⁵² Similarly, the social reformer Joshua Leavitt’s Easy Lessons in Reading for the Use of the Younger Classes in Common Schools, published in 1823 and reprinted twenty-two times before 1849, actually parodied the time-honored system of rote memorization and “mechanical reading” to promote an alternative method of “thinking” and “vigorous habits of investigation.”⁵³

These educational reformers insisted not on the value of passively learning to spell and pronounce but on the need both for the active production of meaning in the free play of the mind that comes from reading imaginative literature and for the active production of meaning that arises from writing out one’s own thoughts. Writing became the culmination of reading, and books served as models for the reader’s own writings. The material and political advantages of good writing received special attention. Penmanship books, of course, had been around for a long time, but new ones appeared with remarkable frequency, and old standbys were pirated and reprinted in increasingly greater numbers. A fine hand, the writing masters all insisted, not only proclaimed a fine character but also improved one’s prospects in life, as suggested by the epigram William Baker set his penmanship students to copy over and over again: “A Man’s Manners Commonly Form His Fortune.”⁵⁴ Similarly, the ponderous title of Daniel Hewett’s book advertises its rationale: Self-Taught Penman, in Thirty Lessons; A New System of Running Hand, in which the Art of Writing is displayed, can be acquired without the Assistance of any Teacher. Calculated for those who cannot write at all; and also for those who wish to improve from a Bad Handwriting to a Good One, in the Shortest Time Possible (2nd ed., 1818). Even John Jenkins, one of the most famous penmanship teachers, published in 1791 a self-help manual based on the principles he developed at his school. Writing, according to Jenkins, “is the key to arts and science, the register and recorder of them all; it is the life and soul of commerce and correspondence. It is the inheritance of posterity, whereby they receive whatsoever is left them in law, to live by—in letters, to learn—in evidence, to enjoy. It is the picture of time and the rule of futurity.”⁵⁵

Other self-improvement books went considerably beyond chirography. The Complete Letter Writer was reprinted (and often retitled and retooled) throughout the middle to late eighteenth century; it contained sample missives on a range of topics from poetry to politics. It also encouraged readers to make use of their new writing skills in such public forums as the newspapers, which stood ever ready to publish unsolicited letters and reviews. The Short, Plain, and Cheap Directions for Reading Books to Profit (sold at the J. Seymour Circulating Library, one of New York’s chief purveyors of fiction) advised the reader to read with a “black-lead pencil lying by you,” to mark significant passages and record their location on the blank leaf at the back of the book, to list any new words, and even to copy out particularly felicitous passages as a way of improving one’s own style.⁵⁶ More immediately practical was Every Man His Own Lawyer (originally published in America by Benjamin Franklin), from which one could learn how to write receipts, leases, notices, and wills without incurring the expense of an attorney. Finally, on a lower level on the social and economic scale, an inexpensive pamphlet by the novelist Sarah Savage, titled Advice to a Young Woman at Service (1823), suggested that those same young women “reserve one hour a day for reading and writing.” By writing to parents and siblings, a serving girl could daily make improvements in her “writing, and spelling, and the power of expressing [her] thoughts.” If from the dollar she earned each week, the girl could save enough money to purchase one book a year, she “will in time,” Savage advised, “get a pretty collection.” But the servant girl is also cautioned to choose wisely, “for there are bad books in circulation, such as I should be sorry to have you even look at.”⁵⁷

The very proliferation of these self-improvement books attests to an emerging, broadly based interest in education that encompassed men and women, city and country citizens, and specifically addressed unprivileged readers. The manuals encouraged self-reliance, free thinking, inductive reasoning, and a questioning of principles and authority. Bare literacy and rote memorization can facilitate passive consumption of messages from on high. True literateness, however, ideally entails increased autonomy. With access to the world of books, the reader can choose among different authorities and take them according to the reader’s evaluation of their worth. Whether this ideal is fully accomplished or not in a capitalistic system—where even bookish desire is manipulated to encourage commodity consumption—is an entirely different issue, and one that does not become crucial until the mid-nineteenth century. In the early Republic, the increase in the number of books was a new phenomenon partly necessitated by a new body of readers. For many of these readers, books were still unique and precious, not so much commodities as treasures.

“Being this day seventeen years old and feeling fully my own ignorance and the importance of time I am determined to avail myself of every opportunity of improving my mind and if possible not let a day pass without spending a few hours in reading and writing.” Thus does Susan Heath, an affluent young lady of Boston in 1812, record her dedication to a relatively small world of literature but a world much larger than the tedious round of company and visiting and daily chores that otherwise occupy her. She records, too, her escape into novels or into quasi-novelistic devotional works such as Temper or Practical Piety:

I sat down and read a little in Temper, as I begin to be apprehensive that I shall never finish it unless I make myself more time to read.… [Later] I stole upstairs under the pretense of going to bed—when I sat down and read an hour in Temper—at last I heard Mama coming and jumped under the coverlid with my clothes on and she thinking I was asleep took away my light.⁵⁸

Books were precious in the new Republic. Careful readers, mindful of the fragility of books, carefully cut out and decorated thumb papers that protected a novel’s pages, or pared the corners of textbooks and primers in order to preserve a text that often circulated among a wide community of readers. Sometimes as many as a dozen readers would inscribe a book over the course of a few generations, again suggesting that a book was not just a commodity but a special possession, an inheritance or a gift. Indeed, hundreds of inscriptions in early American readers directly and indirectly attest to how much the unique psychological experience of reading meant to early Americans and particularly to those just freed from proscriptions (or at least impediments) to literateness imposed by facts of gender, class, race, location, or the unavailability of books. As one, Elisabeth Haseltines, wrote in the front flyleaf of a religious narrative, “Those who to learning do incline / A golden treasure soon shall find.”⁵⁹ And certainly Uri Decker’s scribblings in her copy of Lindley Murray’s English Reader, the most widely used reader of the early national period, indicate how much that one book meant to a young woman from a place designated only as Wolf Creek. Her handwriting is often uncertain; there are a few blots and some strokes scratched over; her name is repeated several times in the front flyleaves of the book, sometimes crudely in pencil and then more proficiently in pen. One entry, in pen and dated December 13, 1822, reads: “Uri Decker’s Property. Steal Not this Book/ Fear of the Devil” (a slightly skewed rendition of a warning often found in early books). And on the rear flyleaf, in a notably improved hand, is a similar entry (this one drawn from the New England Primer): “Uri Decker’s Book and Heart Shall Never Part.” The date is now March 10, 1836. For at least fourteen years, Uri Decker has owned, written in, and read her book, apparently with no loss of interest or intensity.⁶⁰

THE NOVEL IN THE NEW Republic was not culturally autonomous but, rather, was contiguous with other literary forms, was intertwined with the social and political concerns of the day, and was part of the activities of the reader’s life. Virtually all early novels were published in a duodecimo format, typically 15 centimeters high, small enough to fit in the reticule carried by an eighteenth-century woman and easily taken along to a quilting bee or an afternoon of embroidery with one’s friends (or, for that matter, easily concealed from censorious parents or neighbors). These volumes were small enough to be held in one hand—while the other rocked the cradle or stirred the pot. Toy books (tiny volumes designed primarily for children) could even be carried in a pocket (very much like the abundant tract literature of the nineteenth century that was designed to be carried out to the fields or into the factory).

For all the censure of fiction, the novel served as a major locus of republican education. As Royall Tyler wrote to his publisher when proposing a book for children: “Sanford and Merton, Rural Walks, & C, are found in the hands of almost all children whose parents wish to teach them something more than to dance, read and write.” Tyler insisted that “a book which will amuse while it instructs children will sell in this country,” and so did hundreds of books that could both amuse and instruct adults, and for much the same reasons.⁶¹ First and foremost, many early novels (both imported and indigenous) operated at a relatively unsophisticated linguistic level. The vocabulary was often commonplace, the syntax simple, the story direct. Many popular novels, such as Robinson Crusoe, were also sold in shortened forms that were designed for children or for new readers.⁶² The advertisements included in early American novels also indicate that they were often targeted specifically for children, women, or a new and relatively untutored readership, not for the intellectual elite.⁶³ Furthermore, the problems of being a new reader, particularly a woman reader, were partly solved in the novels themselves. We regularly encounter in the fiction of the time characters who lament their lack of an education and who strive to overcome that deficiency through study, reading, and literary and philosophical discussion groups incongruously situated among Gothic horrors in the center of sensational romance plots. Such characters serve as role models for marginally educated readers. Appealing to such readers, fiction reached out to a new, wide audience that might not peruse any other kind of books. The novel thus served, of necessity, as a source of education (this is a circular argument, but it was a circular process, too), presenting new subjects, new vocabulary, a new range of experiences, as well as information on topics as diverse as international diplomacy or comparative religion. As will become clear in the later portions of this study, early American novelists seldom passed up the chance to discourse on a variety of intellectual subjects.

FIGURE 5. Cover illustration, Constitution of the American Tract Society (1824). Implicitly, the illustration suggests the material benefits of reading, as seen in the marked class difference between the gentleman offering the tract and the yeoman who receives it. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

Rolf Engelsing, one of the important practitioners of l’histoire du livre, has argued persuasively that by the end of the eighteenth century in Germany (and, by extension, throughout the Western world), reading was no longer largely limited to the Bible and other basic religious books for most people.⁶⁴ Not only was the number of books increasing apace with the increasing number of readers, but, in addition, more readers read more books in the course of a lifetime. Engelsing also argues that this change in quantity also effected a change in the quality and nature of reading. Instead of reading the Book “intensively” (reading the Bible over and over again), books were read “extensively,” one book regularly replacing another, to result in a proto-mass consumption of print. Engelsing sees the novel as both a primary contributing factor to this change and its chief beneficiary. Engelsing’s insight is crucial. The whole mentality of reading was changing by the end of the eighteenth century, at least in America, and, clearly, the Bible and Psalter no longer occupied the singular place they once had in the life of the community or of the individual reader. This is not to say that religion had lost its importance. Rather, other books rivaled the Bible for reading time in early America. Just as clearly, an increased demand for different kinds of books called the novel into being.

Engelsing by no means suggests that the year 1800 marks a crucial turning point and that the Bible was then put aside by most readers who henceforth merely raced through successive books. He is careful to qualify both his time line and his demography, since mass literacy spread at different rates, as did the technology of mass printing and mass distribution of printed matter. Yet Engelsing is much less careful in delineating the psychic costs of extensive reading. He suggests, for example, that extensive reading diluted the process of reading and thereby cheapened it. By his account, the extensive reader becomes a mere consumer of print, passively experiencing the text and finding in that experience mostly a motive for repeating it in a slightly different form.⁶⁵ But I would insist that, at least for the period and place here under study, it is condescending to assume that the people were reading more books but reading them less (less frequently, less carefully). Nor does reading more books necessarily betoken an increasingly passive form of consumption or comprehension. Socially, extensive reading can signify a new relationship of audience to authority (the reader may choose which books to cherish) and different possibilities for political action and social change; personally, it suggests an increased sense of autonomy and an education not necessarily grounded in theocracy but in democracy. Extensive reading—and I emphasize novel reading here—served for many early Americans as the bridge from elementary to advanced literateness, a transition in mentality the importance of which cannot be overstated. Similarly, to assume that the emergence of mass literature lessens the intensity of the reading experience is grossly inaccurate. What do we make, for example, of the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of young men who leapt off bridges or put a pistol to their foreheads with a copy of Werther in their breast pockets? Surely theirs was an intensive reading. Or of the young women who made a grave in New York City for poor Charlotte Temple; who, for two generations, left wreaths, locks of hair, and mementos of lost loves upon that grave; and who, when they discovered that Charlotte was not a “real” person but merely a fictional creation, felt utterly betrayed and enraged, for they had—they said—lost a friend.⁶⁶ In France, also during the late eighteenth century, the “Rousseauistic readers,” in Robert Darnton’s phrase, “fell in love, married, and raised children by steeping themselves in print.”⁶⁷ In short, people then as now read themselves into their fictions and their fictions into their lives. Novel reading could thus provide as much of an emotional or spiritual experience (as well as a guide for living) as did the earlier intensive reading of the Bible.

Novels, then, were not merely light amusements, as we have come to think of them. As discussed in chapter 3, social authorities would not have feared the effects of merely escapist literature. Moreover, increasingly by the end of the eighteenth century, the dichotomy between amusement and instruction was being erased—largely through the instrument of the novel—so that the public craved books designed to “amuse while [they] instruct,” in Royall Tyler’s phrase. The novel, in addition, fostered reading skills (and with copying, writing skills) that might otherwise be forgotten with disuse. It expanded one’s educational horizons well beyond the provinciality or even isolation of one’s community and beyond the restrictions on mobility and self-expression placed on women in eighteenth-century society. Even the “extensive” reading of this fiction could be emotionally intense, psychically fulfilling, imaginatively active, socially liberalizing, and educationally progressive—quite the opposite of the merely consumptive, passive, repetitive act posited by the Leserevolution model.

The early American novel, as a genre, tended to proclaim a socially egalitarian message. It spoke for—often even in the title—orphans, beggar girls, factory girls, or other unfortunates, and it repeatedly advocated the general need for “female education.” While exploiting a sentimental or Gothic plot, the novel also regularly provided a kind of education that could even parallel—admittedly, in a minor key—that which was provided by the men’s colleges. Works of fiction, for example, often included Greek or Latin quotations (in translation or, in footnotes, conveniently translated for those unversed in classical tongues). The books also provided readers with clues for how to improve their vocabulary or writing skills, by using a variety of syntactic structures or sometimes even contextually defining an unusual word. Epistolary novels provided different patterns of discourse whereby the reader could shape her or his own correspondence. Perhaps more important, the female reader was also assured that writing—and writing well—was a virtue; that an unblemished prose style was as proper to a would-be heroine as a spotless reputation or a winsome smile. The characters in numerous early American novels comment, breathlessly, on the beauty of another’s discourse; the fine form of a poem or letter; the grace and strength of a clear hand; the excellence of another’s learning, intelligence, and expression. In contrast to the numerous contemporaneous attacks against intellectual women (witness some of John Trumbull’s verse on the subject), fiction championed these women in a way that was apprehensible—and inspiring—to women whose own education (and educational opportunities) might be severely restricted. In such fashion, the novel effectively valorized the very education that it also allowed.

The education the novel allowed was often, I would insist, distinctly active and not a mere passive perusal of the work. “Copy well!” Hannah More admonished her readers in 1799. Elaborating upon this method of self-education, she observed: “Ladies, though they have never been taught a rule of syntax, yet, by a quick facility in profiting from the best books and the best company, hardly ever violate one; and … often exhibit an elegant and perspicuous arrangement of style, without having studied any of the laws of composition.”⁶⁸ And in women’s diaries from the time we see that poems, sections from favorite essays and novels, and even letters from friends are all recorded. Sometimes admired originals are copied in a second sense, too. Thus in her own copy of Murray’s English Reader, Mary M. Ball wrote poems titled “Forget-Me-Nots” and “Bethlehem’s Stars” modeled on a poem anthologized by Murray, “The Rose.”⁶⁹ Or in a somewhat different vein, Margaret Smith writes to her younger sister, Susan, on June 6, 1797:

Your affectionate letter … gave me pleasure not only from the tenderness of your expressions, but from the propriety and correctness of your style. Never again make any excuses about writing nor do not allow yourself the excuse of “want of practice,” but deprive yourself of it by writing frequently: do not confine yourself to one correspondent, but enlarge your number and be attentive to all. Their [sic] is nothing which practice improves more than letter-writing; ease is its greatest beauty and how otherwise can it be acquiring [sic].

You will not be able to correct yourself… in two or three letters, for the rules of grammar are too confining a particular to be always supplied; but it is by constantly reading elegant writing; whene [sic] our ear becomes accustomed, to well constructed and well divided sentences. I always find I write much better immediately after reading works of an elegant and correct style.⁷⁰

We can note that the educational transaction recorded here takes place between the older sister and the younger one, through personal forms of communication such as the letter, and by the model of “elegant and correct” reading, which is thus quite outside the organized school system.

Or we might notice how, in her diary, Patty Rogers imitates the style of her favorite author, Laurence Sterne:

Read in a sweet novel the D——r brought me.—It affected me so, I could hardly read it, and was often obliged to drop the book to suppress my grief!—Went to Bed, Lay, and thot of the Lovely Woodbridge—Shed a torrent of tears, at the Recollection of past interviews with him! … He [Woodbridge] press’d me to his Bosom with a fondness I thought expressive of approbation, “never never P——y hesitate a moment to Let me know if ‘tis in my power to make you happy! would you would you, no Sir! said I, at the same time kissing his Hand with trembling Lips!”⁷¹

Patty Rogers here models both her prose and her prospects upon the very fiction that inspires them—the “trembling lips” that, in recollection and italics, underscore the kiss bestowed, making it both more moving and more conventional, much as Parson Yorick partly ducked and indulged a similar excess of sentiment.

Patty Rogers’s prose style tells something of what she read by showing how one particular author influenced at least her style. But how did other novel readers—the readers for whom the early novel was written—react to the individual books they individually read? Obviously, there is no possible way to resolve fully this problem, for we can hardly resurrect readers long dead to put to them questions that were not asked in their time. Short of direct testimony, indirect must do, and one reads hundreds of diaries or letters for even a chance reference to fiction. But we do not really obtain what we are after there either. Even then, letters and diaries verged toward what they are now, the public record; as such, they are more likely to indicate how readers thought they should read (also valuable information) than how they actually did. But still there are clues. By surveying the inscriptions, the marginalia, and even the physical condition of surviving copies of early American novels, I have gained at least a fleeting contact with the novel’s first American readers, and I am convinced that, at least for some readers, a novel was a precious possession. In this sense, the full text of the early American novel does not end with its printed word but is extended into the scribblings and the lives of its earliest readers.

We might, for example, note how one reader (Betsey Sweet/Betsey Garbor) accurately sums up the tawdry physical object of the pirated 1802 edition of Charlotte Temple that she read and owned: “The Paper is Very Poor but No matter for that, it Will do Very Well to Scrabble Over when I have Nothing Else to be about.” And scrabble she did. At the front of the book is an elaborate handmade and hand-colored bookplate, with the name “Betsey Sweet” carefully hand-lettered and all framed by blue, yellow, and red borders drawn with unusual care and skill. More elegant penned designs adorn the back cover, which includes the following legend: “If I this Book to you do Lend / and you the Same do Borrow / I Pray you Read it through / today and Send it home tomorrow.” What is singular here, however, is that Betsey kept this notably cheap book (so carelessly manufactured that the title page designates the author as “Mrs. Rawson” [sic] for most of her life, carrying it with her into marriage, and reinscribing it with her married name (which strongly suggests that she reread it at various points in her life), and did not merely throw it away as one might, today, discard a cheap paperback.⁷²

Other readers more obviously valued this same best-seller. “So true a tale,” Sally B[owles?] wrote after the last sentence of her volume of Charlotte Temple. Another reader inscribed a brief poem on the endpapers of another volume: “The rose will fade / the truth withers / But a virtuous mind / will bloom forever.” The verse echoes the “innocent flower” metaphors associated with Charlotte throughout the novel. This same reader also drew a portrait (really, a doodle) of a young girl in a long nineteenth-century dress, presumably a rendition of the heroine. Similarly moved to poetry by Charlotte’s plight, still another reader wrote in still another volume and with more sincerity than clarity: “She was fair and sweet as the Lilly Inosentas [sic] / the young lamb folly misled / her love betrayed her misery / Cros’d the awful final ocean / in the twentieth year of her age—So ended the unfortunate Charlotte.” Or W. M. Green in 1823 apparently saw clear connections between Charlotte’s life and death and some sad event in his (women did not commonly sign with initials) or her own and, with a pagelong poem, filled the back cover of the book with bitter admonitions about the “pang that rends in twain my heart” and friends who “have daggers cold & green” and who “know how to plunge them too.” Most graphically of all, another reader wrote but two words in an otherwise pristine 1809 edition of Charlotte Temple: “My Treasure.”⁷³

A survey of the extant copies of one novel, Charlotte Temple, in the collection of one library, the American Antiquarian Society, reveals a surprising range of reader response and, more important, also begins to suggest the outlines of a contemporaneous interpretive community. We can ascertain, for example, that this novel was an appropriate present for a sister to make to her brother. One volume is inscribed on the front cover: “Denise Babcock her Book given to her brother Paul Babcock.” The brother has written on the inside back cover, “Paul Babcock His Book, 1805,” and he has also signed his name at intervals throughout the text. Another volume is inscribed, simply “James Mott—a present by his sister.” Men, obviously, were not excluded from Rowson’s community of readers, nor were they reluctant to claim membership in that community. Nor were parents necessarily worried about the effect of the book upon their children, as seen in a copy that Sarah Elizabeth Godwin received from her mother.⁷⁴

FIGURE 6. “Scrabblings” by Betsey Garbor on the rear flyleaf of her 1802 copy of Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

What the comments and the gift inscriptions both most clearly suggest is that a personal copy of the novel constituted a prized possession. Writing in Pittsburgh on March 10, 1872, in a copy of Charlotte Temple published in 1824, William T. Dunn noted: “This book was presented to me by my grandmother Dunn, about the year 1830.” The vestige of the boy-reader who received the novel from his grandmother forty years earlier is still there on the endpapers, where an unformed hand does math calculations and records distances between various Ohio towns.⁷⁵ Or sometimes a story is hidden in the inscriptions. Written on the inside front cover of one of the more intriguing copies I have found is “Susan Smith Property Bought October the 9 1806,” but on the back we find, “William Smiths Book Bought October the 4 1806,” along with two signatures of William Smith. Did she buy it from him (sister/brother? wife/husband?) so that it would be her book, or did he use the back inside cover to claim prior purchase and consequent ownership? We cannot answer that question, but in either case the significance is the same; the two dated declarations attest to the importance of the book as property. A more obvious battle over book ownership takes place within the covers of an 1833 edition of Charlotte Temple: “Mrs. Ewell” writes her name in a rather elegant hand on the inside front cover. On the back flyleaf, however, “Joseph Ewell His book” is countermanded by “Sarah Ewell Her Book.” Furthermore, Joseph then signs his name twice, but Sarah three times, her fancy S’s covering the back pages. And she, subversively, also writes her name inside the book, at the blank spaces at the end of a few of the chapters. Or witness the family drama in another edition of that best-seller where Jane, Jacob, and Eileen Drake all proclaim ownership (Jane staking her claim twice)—a small community of readers in contention for possession of the text.⁷⁶

Of course, not all readers were so positive about their books. One copy of Samuel Relf’s Infidelity, or the Victims of Sentiment (1797), for example, is inscribed on the inside back cover: “A book more polluted with destruction and abominable sentiments cannot be put into the hands of anyone—shame to him who wrote it, to her who patronized it, and to the age and country that produced it.” This offended reader signed himself or herself “a friend to the traduced sex” and also commented throughout the text on various passages of questionable morality (“Impious!”), on the plausibility of the plot (“Oh!”), and on the tragedy of the resolution (“Just vengeance!” as one of the heroes lies dying). This same reader apparently knows and annotates biographical references made in the book and, most damning of all, goes through the text with a malicious thoroughness correcting typographical mistakes, grammatical errors, and infelicitous sentences (even changing the occasional “who” to “whom” with all the officious glee of a freshman composition teacher). Although the book emphatically was not prized, nevertheless it elicited a strong reaction.⁷⁷

Relatively few copies of early novels survive. Even fewer of these have responses as extensive, as telling, and as passionate as those just considered from Charlotte Temple or from one particular copy of Relf’s Infidelity. Sometimes, however, even the way a writer writes a name in a book gives clues to the level of literateness of that reader. Often there is only one name, “E. D. Robinson,” or one statement of ownership, “Harriet Wilkins Shaftsbury Her Book,” sometimes in a fine, clear hand, sometimes in an unfinished one. Sometimes there is not a name but a name repeated; three or four times, six or seven times a reader, now forgotten, rewrote her or his name, usually at different times and with an evolving signature. With one name there might be an added flourish on the W, with another a crude little scroll under the family name. On a flyleaf of a sentimental novel, Harriet Shaftsbury aspired to be John Hancock, her declaration more modest but no less independent than his. What I am “reading” here—in the no longer blank spaces that frame these early novels—are the perhaps universal signs of pride that one takes in a literate society in signing one’s name (as much a social identity as a simple skill) as well as in owning one’s own book. E. D. Robinson, for example, writes his name four times, somewhat crudely, and writes “No. 1” after two of the signatures.⁷⁸

In numerous copies of different books, one can, in fact, trace a signature over as many as ten or twenty years, often watching the signature become steadier and more elegant. In many extant textbooks, one also finds interlineations, inventive dialogues based on dialogues within the text, or even doodles and grafitti—all of which appear in Caroline W. Graves’s copy of Susanna Rowson’s A Spelling Dictionary, Divided into Short Lessons, for the Easier Committing to Memory by Children and Young Persons; and Calculated to Assist Youth in Comprehending What They Read. Or a first edition of Hannah Webster Foster’s best-selling novel The Coquette could itself become at least in part a lesson book. The unknown reader who spent $1 to buy this copy of the novel underlined difficult vocabulary words throughout the text and recorded, in a notably shaky hand, a number of these words on the blank pages at the end. This reader not only vicariously participated in Eliza’s cruel betrayal and inevitable death but also picked up the meaning of such words as “volubility,” “satire,” and “misanthrope” along the way. We see here, in short, a novel-reader aspiring after improved literateness—inspired, perhaps, by Foster’s insistence, throughout the novel, on the unparalleled importance of education.⁷⁹

Even such rudimentary scribblings should remind the sophisticated historian that these novels were written for the readers of the time and that they played a vital (if unquantifiable) role in those readers’ lives. Indeed, the pertinent fact is the lost reading, not the surviving book. Nevertheless, by surveying hundreds of copies (especially so-called duplicate copies) of early American novels, we can determine that these texts were cherished; they were shared among friends and relatives, contended over by brother and sister, or bequeathed across generations—rather like a family Bible. Broken boards, turned-down pages, and abounding marginalia do not make for a place of honor in an early Americana book collection, but they do reveal patterns of reading, patterns of use, the surviving traces of an interpretive community long since gone. But through those traces, some of the early readers remain surprisingly vivid even after nearly two centuries. One of my favorite of these readers never even left her name. Intuitively, I would posit that she was a woman, probably a young woman. She read one of the pirated versions of The History of Constantius and Pulchera, an edition issued in paper covers by Edward Gray of Suffield, Connecticut, in 1801. It is hard to imagine a less impressive volume. Some of the pages are printed on blue paper, some on white. Possibly there were two separate printings and the book was made up of signatures from each printing, possibly the printer merely ran out of one cheap paper and substituted another (the blue paper typically used for inexpensive book covers). Typos abound. Yet what is most striking about this book is the contrast between the artifact as published by the printer and the artifact as embellished by the reader. The book has been covered in decorated paper stamped with a geometric design, perhaps a small piece of wallpaper. Inside the back cover is a beautiful little drawing, meticulously rendered, of delicate buds in different stages of blossoming, colored in with black and pale brown (which may have been, originally, sepia) inks. In a few places in the book, the reader has been moved to poetry, some copied, some original. This poetic commentary on tragic events of the plot is rendered in a neat round hand. “So quick the pangs of misery return, we joy by minutes & by years we mourn,” occurs on a page detailing one of the various stormy ocean voyages that separate the book’s lovers. “Hope is the comfort / & the bliss of life, / tis joy in sorrows, / & tis peace in strife,” she writes near the climax of this tale of life’s and love’s vicissitudes. The novel itself—a story of lovers imprisoned, shanghaied, shipwrecked, abandoned, and finally reunited—might move the contemporary reader only to a condescending smile, but it moved one early reader to poetry and art.

“To the Young Ladies of Columbia, This volume, intended to inspire the mind with fortitude under the most unparalleled Misfortunes; and to Represent the happy consequences of Virtue and Fidelity, is Inscribed, with Esteem and Sincerity, By their Friends and Humble Servants, The Publishers.” So reads the dedication of this cheap (it sold for only $.25) and pirated edition of an early best-seller. It may well have been written to exploit an audience of marginally educated readers and republished by Edward Gray to exploit a readership also financially marginal. But it is both patronizing and ahistorical to conclude that our present assessment of the commercializing of literature fully comprehends the place of The History of Constantius and Pulchera in the lives of its actual readers. It was a commodity, of course, but it was also valued and read as something more.⁸⁰

That “something more,” I would emphasize, shows that the first novels did not simply expend themselves through their strained stories as consumable plots, as prepackaged entertainment and escape. On the contrary, these books, even the most unlikely (especially the most unlikely), played a vital role in the early education of readers previously largely excluded from elite literature and culture. Their provocative plots encouraged reading. Differing from (and yet deferring to, through calculated partial imitation and revision) more traditional literary forms such as the biography, the history, the religious or the social or political manifesto, the early novel spoke to those not included in the established power structures of the early Republic and welcomed into the republic of letters citizens who had previously been invited, implicitly and explicitly, to stay out.