What Books Shall Young Folks Read?
The greatest problem presented to the consideration of parents and
teachers now-a-days is how properly to regulate and direct the reading
of the children. There is no scarcity of reading-matter. The poorest
child may have free access to books and papers, more than he can read.
The publication of periodicals and cheap books especially designed
to meet the tastes of young people has developed into an enterprise
of vast proportions. Every day, millions of pages of reading matter
designed for children are printed and scattered broadcast over the
land. But unlimited opportunities often prove to be a damage and a
detriment; and over-abundance, rather than scarcity, is to be deplored.
As a general rule, the books read by young people are not such as lead
to studious habits, or induce correct ideas of right living. They are
intended simply to amuse; there are no elements of strength in them,
leading up to a noble manhood. I doubt if in the future it can be said
of any great statesman or scholar that his tastes had been formed, and
his energies directed and sustained, through the influence of his early
reading; but rather that he had attained success, and whatever of true
nobility there is in him, in spite of such influence.
This was not always so. The experience of a few well-known scholars
will illustrate. “From my infancy,” says Benjamin Franklin, “I was
passionately fond of reading, and all the money that came into my hands
was laid out in the purchasing of books. I was very fond of voyages.
My first acquisition was Bunyan’s works in separate little volumes.
I afterwards sold them to enable me to buy R. Burton’s Historical
Collections. They were small chapmen’s books, and cheap; forty volumes
in all. My father’s little library consisted chiefly of books in
polemic divinity, most of which I read. I have often regretted that
at a time when I had such a thirst for knowledge more proper books
had not fallen in my way, since it was resolved I should not be bred
to divinity. There was among them Plutarch’s Lives, which I read
abundantly, and I still think the time spent to great advantage. There
was also a book of Defoe’s called ‘An Essay on Projects,’ and another
of Dr. Mather’s, called ‘An Essay to Do Good,’ which perhaps gave me a
turn of thinking that had an influence on some of the principal future
events of my life. This bookish inclination at length determined my
father to make me a printer.... I stood out some time, but at last
was persuaded, and signed the indenture when I was yet but twelve
years old.... I now had access to better books. An acquaintance with
the apprentices of booksellers enabled me sometimes to borrow a small
one, which I was careful to return soon, and clean. Often I sat up in
my chamber the greatest part of the night, when the book was borrowed
in the evening and to be returned in the morning, lest it should be
found missing.... About this time I met with an odd volume of the
‘Spectator.’ I had never before seen any of them. I bought it, read it
over and over, and was much delighted with it. I thought the writing
excellent, and wished if possible to imitate it. With that view I
took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the sentiments
in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without looking
at the book, tried to complete the papers again, by expressing each
hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed
before, in any suitable words that should occur to me. Then I compared
my ‘Spectator’ with the original, discovered some of my faults, and
corrected them....
“Now it was, that, being on some occasions made ashamed of my ignorance
in figures, which I had twice failed learning when at school, I took
Cocker’s book on Arithmetic, and went through the whole by myself
with the greatest ease. I also read Seller’s and Sturny’s book on
Navigation, which made me acquainted with the little geometry it
contains; but I never proceeded far in that science. I read about this
time ‘Locke on the Human Understanding,’ and the ‘Art of Thinking,’ by
Messrs. de Port Royal.
“While I was intent on improving my language, I met with an English
Grammar (I think it was Greenwood’s), having at the end of it two
little sketches on the ‘Arts of Rhetoric and Logic,’ the latter
finishing with a dispute in the Socratic method. And soon after, I
procured Xenophon’s ‘Memorable Things of Socrates,’ wherein there are
many examples of the same method. I was charmed with it, adopted it,
dropped my abrupt contradiction and positive argumentation, and put on
the humble inquirer.”[19]
Hugh Miller, that most admirable Scotchman and self-made man, relates
a similar experience: “During my sixth year I spelled my way through
the Shorter Catechism, the Proverbs, and the New Testament, and then
entered upon the highest form in the dame’s school as a member of
the Bible class. But all the while the process of learning had been
a dark one, which I slowly mastered, in humble confidence in the
awful wisdom of the schoolmistress, not knowing whither it tended;
when at once my mind awoke to the meaning of the most delightful of
all narratives,—the story of Joseph. Was there ever such a discovery
made before! I actually found out for myself that the art of reading
is the art of finding stories in books; and from that moment reading
became one of the most delightful of my amusements. I began by
getting into a corner on the dismissal of the school, and there
conning over to myself the new-found story of Joseph; nor did one
perusal serve;—the other Scripture stories followed,—in especial, the
story of Samson and the Philistines, of David and Goliath, of the
prophets Elijah and Elisha; and after these came the New Testament
stories and parables. Assisted by my uncles, too, I began to collect
a library in a box of birch bark about nine inches square, which I
found quite large enough to contain a great many immortal works: Jack
the Giant-Killer, and Jack and the Bean-Stalk, and the Yellow Dwarf,
and Blue Beard, and Sinbad the Sailor, and Beauty and the Beast, and
Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, with several others of resembling
character. Those intolerable nuisances, the useful-knowledge books,
had not yet arisen, like tenebrious stars on the educational horizon,
to darken the world, and shed their blighting influence on the opening
intellect of the ‘youthhood;’ and so, from my rudimental books—books
that made themselves truly such by their thorough assimilation with
the rudimental mind—I passed on, without being conscious of break or
line of division, to books on which the learned are content to write
commentaries and dissertations, but which I found to be quite as nice
children’s books as any of the others. Old Homer wrote admirably for
little folk, especially in the Odyssey; a copy of which, in the only
true translation extant,—for, judging from its surpassing interest, and
the wrath of critics, such I hold that of Pope to be,—I found in the
house of a neighbor. Next came the Iliad; not, however, in a complete
copy, but represented by four of the six volumes of Bernard Lintot.
With what power and at how early an age true genius impresses! I saw,
even at this immature period, that no other writer could cast a javelin
with half the force of Homer. The missiles went whizzing athwart his
pages; and I could see the momentary gleam of the steel, ere it buried
itself deep in brass and bull-hide. I next succeeded in discovering for
myself a child’s book, of not less interest than even the Iliad, which
might, I was told, be read on Sabbaths, in a magnificent old edition
of the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ printed on coarse whity-brown paper, and
charged with numerous wood-cuts, each of which occupied an entire
page, which, on principles of economy, bore letter-press on the other
side....
“In process of time, I devoured, besides these genial works, Robinson
Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Ambrose on Angels, the ‘judgment chapter’
in Howie’s Scotch Worthies, Byron’s Narrative, and the Adventures of
Philip Quarll, with a good many other adventures and voyages, real and
fictitious, part of a very miscellaneous collection of books made by my
father. It was a melancholy library to which I had fallen heir. Most
of the missing volumes had been with the master aboard his vessel when
he perished. Of an early edition of Cook’s Voyages, all the volumes
were now absent, save the first; and a very tantalizing romance, in
four volumes,—Mrs. Radcliffe’s ‘Mysteries of Udolpho,’—was represented
by only the earlier two. Small as the collection was, it contained
some rare books,—among the rest, a curious little volume entitled ‘The
Miracles of Nature and Art,’ to which we find Dr. Johnson referring, in
one of the dialogues chronicled by Boswell, as scarce even in his day,
and which had been published, he said, some time in the seventeenth
century by a bookseller whose shop hung perched on Old London Bridge,
between sky and water. It contained, too, the only copy I ever saw of
the ‘Memoirs of a Protestant condemned to the Galleys of France for
his Religion,’—a work interesting from the circumstance that, though
it bore another name on its titlepage, it had been translated from the
French for a few guineas by poor Goldsmith, in his days of obscure
literary drudgery, and exhibited the peculiar excellences of his style.
The collection boasted, besides, of a curious old book, illustrated
by very uncouth plates, that detailed the perils and sufferings of an
English sailor who had spent the best years of his life as a slave
in Morocco. It had its volumes of sound theology, too, and of stiff
controversy,—Flavel’s Works, and Henry’s Commentary, and Hutchinson on
the Lesser Prophets, and a very old treatise on the Revelations, with
the titlepage away, and blind Jameson’s volume on the Hierarchy, with
first editions of Naphtali, The Cloud of Witnesses, and the Hind Let
Loose.... Of the works of fact and incident which it contained, those
of the voyages were my special favorites. I perused with avidity the
Voyages of Anson, Drake, Raleigh, Dampier, and Captain Woods Rogers;
and my mind became so filled with conceptions of what was to be seen
and done in foreign parts, that I wished myself big enough to be a
sailor, that I might go and see coral islands and burning mountains,
and hunt wild beasts, and fight battles.”[20]
William and Robert Chambers, the founders of the great publishing-house
of W. & R. Chambers, Edinburgh, were self-educated men. “At little
above fourteen years of age,” writes William, “I was thrown on my own
resources. From necessity, not less than from choice, I resolved at
all hazards to make the weekly four shillings serve for everything.
I cannot remember entertaining the slightest despondency on the
subject.... I made such attempts as were at all practicable, while an
apprentice, to remedy the defects of my education at school. Nothing in
that way could be done in the shop, for there reading was proscribed.
But, allowed to take home a book for study, I gladly availed myself of
the privilege. The mornings in summer, when light cost nothing, were
my chief reliance. Fatigued with trudging about, I was not naturally
inclined to rise; but on this and some other points I overruled the
will, and forced myself to rise at five o’clock, and have a spell at
reading until it was time to think of moving off,—my brother, when
he was with me, doing the same. In this way I made some progress in
French, with the pronunciation of which I was already familiar from the
speech of the French prisoners of war at Peebles. I likewise dipped
into several books of solid worth,—such as Smith’s ‘Wealth of Nations,’
Locke’s ‘Human Understanding,’ Paley’s ‘Moral Philosophy,’ and Blair’s
‘Belles-Lettres,’—fixing the leading facts and theories in my memory
by a note-book for the purpose. In another book I kept for years an
accurate account of my expenses, not allowing a single halfpenny to
escape record.”
And Robert, the younger brother, confirms the story, with even more
accurate attention to details. “My brother William and I,” he says,
“lived in lodgings together. Our room and bed cost three shillings
a week.... I used to be in great distress for want of fire. I could
not afford either that or a candle myself; so I have often sat by my
landlady’s kitchen fire,—if fire it could be called, which was only a
little heap of embers,—reading Horace and conning my dictionary by a
light which required me to hold the books almost close to the grate.
What a miserable winter that was! Yet I cannot help feeling proud
of my trials at that time. My brother and I—he then between fifteen
and sixteen, I between thirteen and fourteen—had made a resolution
together that we would exercise the last degree of self-denial. My
brother actually saved money out of his income. I remember seeing
him take five-and-twenty shillings out of a closed box which he
kept to receive his savings; and that was the spare money of only a
twelvemonth.”[21]
Rev. Robert Collyer, whose name is known and honored by every American
scholar, says: “Do you want to know how I manage to talk to you in this
simple Saxon? I will tell you. I read Bunyan, Crusoe, and Goldsmith
when I was a boy, morning, noon, and night. All the rest was task
work; these were my delight, with the stories in the Bible, and with
Shakspeare when at last the mighty master came within our doors.... I
took to these as I took to milk, and, without the least idea what I was
doing, got the taste for simple words into the very fibre of my nature.
There was day-school for me until I was thirteen years old, and then I
had to turn in and work thirteen hours a day.... I could not go home
for the Christmas of 1839, and was feeling very sad about it all, for
I was only a boy; and, sitting by the fire, an old farmer came in and
said, ‘I notice thou’s fond o’ reading, so I brought thee summat to
read.’ It was Irving’s ‘Sketch Book.’ I had never heard of the work. I
went at it, and was ‘as them that dream.’ No such delight had touched
me since the old days of Crusoe. I saw the Hudson and the Catskills,
took poor Rip at once into my heart, as everybody has, pitied Ichabod
while I laughed at him, thought the old Dutch feast a most admirable
thing; and long before I was through, all regret at my lost Christmas
had gone down the wind, and I had found out there are books and books.
That vast hunger to read never left me. If there was no candle, I poked
my head down to the fire; read while I was eating, blowing the bellows,
or walking from one place to another. I could read and walk four miles
an hour. I remember while I was yet a lad reading Macaulay’s great
essay on Bacon, and I could grasp its wonderful beauty.... Now, give a
boy a passion like this for anything, books or business, painting or
farming, mechanism or music, and you give him thereby a lever to lift
his world, and a patent of nobility, if the thing he does is noble.”
It may be questioned whether, in these days of opportunities, it
would be possible to find boys of thirteen and sixteen who would be
able to read understandingly, much less appreciate and enjoy, those
masterpieces of English literature so eagerly studied by Franklin and
Hugh Miller and the Chambers brothers. Their mental appetites have
been treated to a different kind of diet. If their minds have not
been dwarfed and stunted by indulgence in what has been aptly termed
“pen-poison,” their tastes have been perverted and the growth of their
reasoning powers checked by being fed upon the milk-and-water stuff
recommended as harmless literature. They are inveterate devourers of
stories, and novels, and the worthless material which is recommended
as good reading, but which, in reality, is nothing but a “discipline
of debasement.” Better that children should not read at all, than read
much of that which passes current now-a-days for entertaining reading.
All children like to read stories. The love of “the story,” in some
form or other, is indeed a characteristic of the human mind, and exists
everywhere, in all conditions of life. But stories are the sweets of
our mental existence, and only a few of the best and greatest have in
them the elements which will lead to a strong and vigorous mind-growth.
Constant feeding upon light literature—however good that literature may
be in itself—will debilitate and corrupt the mental appetite of the
child, much the same as an unrestrained indulgence in jam and preserves
will undermine and destroy his physical health. In either case, if no
result more serious occurs, the worst forms of dyspepsia will follow.
Literary dyspepsia is the most common form of mental disease among us,
and there is no knowing what may be the extent of its influence upon
American civilization. Fifty per cent of the readers who patronize
our great public libraries have weak literary stomachs; they cannot
digest anything stronger than that insipid solution, the last society
novel, or anything purer than the muddy decoctions poured out by the
periodical press. When, of all the reading done in a public library,
eighty per cent is of books in the different departments of fiction,
I doubt whether, after all, that library is a public benefit. Yet
this is but the natural result of the loose habits of reading which
we encourage among our children, and cultivate in ourselves,—the
habit of reading anything that comes to hand, provided only that it is
entertaining.
How then shall we so order the child’s reading as to avoid the
formation of desultory and aimless habits?
Naturally, the earliest reading is the story,—simple, short,
straightforward recitals of matters of daily occurrence, of the doings
of children and their parents, their friends or their pets. “The
Nursery,” a little magazine published in Boston, contains an excellent
variety of such stories. Now and then we may pick up a good book, too,
for this class of readers; but there are many worthless books here,
as elsewhere, and careful parents will look well into that which they
buy. The illuminated covers are often the only recommendation of books
of this kind. Numbers of them are made only for the holiday trade;
the illustrations of many are from second-hand cuts; and the text is
frequently written to fit the illustrations. A pure, fresh book for a
little child is a treasure to be sought for and appreciated.
Very early in child-life comes the period of a belief in fairies;
and the reading of fairy-stories is, to children, a very proper,
nay, a very necessary thing. I pity the boy or girl who must grow up
without having made intimate acquaintance with “Mother Goose,” and the
wonderful stories of “Jack the Giant-Killer,” and “Blue Beard,” and
“Cinderella,” and those other strange tales as old as the race itself,
and yet new to every succeeding generation. They are a part of the
inheritance of the English-speaking people, and belong, as a kind of
birthright, to every intelligent child.
As your little reader advances in knowledge and reading-ability, he
should be treated to stronger food. Grimm’s “Household Stories” and
the delightful “Wonder Stories” of Hans Christian Andersen, should
form a part of the library of every child as he passes through the
“fairy-story period” of his life; nor can we well omit to give
him Charles Kingsley’s “Water Babies,” and “Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland.” And now, or later, as circumstances shall dictate, we may
introduce him to that prince of all wonder-books, “The Arabian Nights’
Entertainment,” in an edition carefully adapted to children’s reading.
The tales related in this book “are not ours by birth, but they have
nevertheless taken their place amongst the similar things of our own
which constitute the national literary inheritance. Altogether, it is a
glorious book, and one to which we cannot well show enough of respect.”
And while your reader lingers in the great world of poetic fancy and
child-wonder, let him revel for a while in those enchanting idyls and
myths which delighted mankind when the race was young and this earth
was indeed a wonder-world. These he may find, apparelled in a dress
adapted to our modern notions of propriety, in Hawthorne’s “Wonder
Book” and “Tanglewood Tales,” in Kingsley’s “Greek Heroes,” and, in
a more prosaic form, in Cox’s “Tales of Ancient Greece;” and in “The
Story of Siegfried,” and, later, in Morris’s “Sigurd the Volsung,” he
may read the no less charming myths of our own northern ancestors, and
the world-famous legend of the Nibelungen heroes. Then, by a natural
transition, you advance into the border-land which lies between
the world of pure fancy and the domains of sober-hued reality. You
introduce your reader to some wholesome adaptations of those Mediæval
Romances, which, with their one grain of fact to a thousand of fable,
gave such noble delight to lords and ladies in the days of chivalry.
These you will find in Sidney Lanier’s “Boy’s King Arthur” and “Boy’s
Mabinogion;” in “The Story of Roland,” by the author of the present
volume; and in Bulfinch’s “Legends of Charlemagne” and “The Age of
Chivalry.”
Do you understand now to what point you have led your young reader? You
have simply followed the order of nature and of human development, and
you have gradually—almost imperceptibly even to yourself—brought him
out of the world of child-wonder and fairy-land, through the middle
ground of chivalric romance, to the very borders of the domains of
history. He is ready and eager to enter into the realms of sober-hued
truth; but I would not advise undue haste in this matter. The mediæval
romances have inspired him with a desire to know more of those days
when knights-errant rode over sea and land to do battle in the name
of God and for the honor of their king, the Church, and the ladies;
he wants to know something more nearly the truth than that which the
minstrels and story-tellers of the Middle Ages can tell him. And yet
he is not prepared for a sudden transition from romance to history.
Let him read “Ivanhoe;” then give him Howard Pyle’s “Story of Robin
Hood” and Lanier’s “Boy’s Percy;” and if you care to allow him so much
more fiction, let him read Madame Colomb’s “Franchise” as translated
and adapted by Davenport Adams in his “Page, Squire, and Knight.” Can
you withhold history longer from your reader? I think not. He will
demand some authentic knowledge of Richard the Lion-hearted, and of
King John, and of the Saxons and Normans, and of the Crusades, and
of the Saracens, and of Charlemagne and his peers. Lose not your
opportunity, but pass over with your pupil into the promised land. The
transition is easy,—imperceptible, in fact,—and, leaving fiction and
“the story” behind you, you enter the fields of truth and history. As
for books, it is difficult now to advise; but there are Abbott’s little
histories,—give him the “History of Richard I.” to begin with, then
get the whole set for him. Yonge’s “Young Folks’ History of England,”
or Dickens’s “Child’s History” will also be in demand. The way is easy
now, the road is open, you need no further guidance—only, keep straight
ahead.
There are other books, of course, which the young reader will find in
his way, and which it is altogether proper and necessary that he should
read. For instance, there is “Robinson Crusoe,” without a knowledge
of which the boy loses one of his dearest enjoyments. “How youth
passed long ago, when there was no Crusoe to waft it away in fancy
to the Pacific and fix it upon the lonely doings of the shipwrecked
mariner, is inconceivable; but we can readily suppose that it must
have been different,” says Robert Chambers. And no substitute for the
original Robinson will answer. Not one of the ten thousand tales of
adventure recently published for boys will fill the niche which this
book fills, or atone in the least for any neglect of its merits. “The
Swiss Family Robinson” approaches nearest in excellence to Defoe’s
immortal creation, and may very profitably form a part of every boy’s
or girl’s library. Then, among the really unexceptionable books, of
the healthful, hopeful, truthful sort, I may name “Tom Brown’s School
Days at Rugby,” Lamb’s “Tales from Shakspeare,” Mitchell’s “About Old
Story-Tellers;” the inimitable “Bodley Books,” Bayard Taylor’s “Boys of
Other Countries,” Abbott’s “Franconia Stories,” and a few others in the
line of History or Travels, to be mentioned in future chapters. These I
believe to be, in every sense, proper, wholesome books, free from all
kinds of mannerisms, free from improper language, free from sickly
sentiment and “gush;” and these, if not the most instructive books, are
the sort of books which the child or youth should read as a kind of
relish or supplement to the more methodical course of reading which I
have elsewhere indicated.
In this careful direction of the child’s reading, and in the
cultivation of his literary taste, if you have succeeded in bringing
him to the point which we have indicated, you have done much towards
forming his character for life. There is little danger that bad books
will ever possess any attractions for him; he will henceforth be apt to
go right of his own accord, preferring the wholesome and the true to
any of the flashy allurements of the “literary slums and grog-shops,”
which so abound and flourish in these days.
But perhaps the fundamental error in determining what books children
shall read lies in the very popular notion that to read much, and to
derive pleasure and profit from our reading, many books are necessary.
And the greatest obstacle in the way of forming and directing a
proper taste for good reading is to be found, not in the scarcity,
but in the superabundance of reading matter. The great flood of
periodical literature for young people is the worst hindrance to the
formation of right habits in reading. Some of these periodicals are
simply unadulterated “pen poison,” designed not only to enrich their
projectors, but to deprave the minds of those who read. Others are
published, doubtless, from pure motives and with the best intentions;
but, being managed by inexperienced or incapable editors, they are, at
the best, but thin dilutions of milk-and-water literature, leading to
mental imbecility and starvation. The periodicals fit to be placed in
the hands of reading children may be numbered on half your fingers; and
even these should not be read without due discrimination.
Too great a variety of books or papers placed at the disposal of
inexperienced readers offers a premium to desultoriness, and fosters
and encourages the habit of devouring every species of literary food
that comes to hand. Hence we should beware not only of the bad, but of
too great plenty of the good. “The benefit of a right good book,” says
Mr. Hudson, “all depends upon this, that its virtue just _soak_ into
the mind, and there become a living, generative force. To be running
and rambling over a great many books, tasting a little here, a little
there, and tying up with none, is good for nothing; nay, worse than
nothing. Such a process of unceasing change is also a discipline of
perpetual emptiness. The right method in the culture of the mind is to
take a few choice books, and weave about them
‘The fixed delights of house and home,
Friendship that will not break, and love that cannot roam.’”
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