NEWSLETTER

Society for the History of Children and Youth

"At the Crossroads of Children's Studies and American Studies:

Intersections, Possibilities, Challenges"

Scraps, Schoolbooks, and Homemade Books: Childhood Studies in the Archives

Karen Sánchez-Eppler

American Studies has been seriously engaged for many decades now in questioning the boundaries of national belonging. In these discussions the conditions of national belonging have mostly been raised in terms of gender, race, region, and class. Childhood Studies asks that we take seriously children’s roles in national formation. So the question as we think about the crossroads of American Studies and Childhood Studies is what do we add when we add age as a category of analysis, and perhaps as importantly, how do we add it?

For the last few years I have been working to retrieve writing by children, to figure out how I can make children’s voices be part of childhood studies. My first book had been about abolition and feminism where it seemed inconceivable to do serious work without heeding the perspectives of slaves, free blacks, or women. So it still feels stunning to me that I had worked for four or five years on essays that would become part of Dependent States without looking for or thinking about children’s participation in the discourses of childhood I was interrogating. My decision to look for children’s perspectives entailed a move to the archives and primarily to manuscript sources, and that is what I will focus on here.

Children and manuscripts have some things in common. Both are generally regarded as ephemeral sites of cultural production, preparatory stages to be passed through on the way to historical agency and cultural content. In order to enter the public sphere of political discourse and social or cultural exchange children must wait to grow up, manuscripts must find their way into print. In my work I have tried to interrogate both these assumptions, to see what can be learned about the nature of childhood, of books, and of agency itself, from heeding the insights offered by children’s manuscripts. Belonging, Americanness, have largely been understood as issues of the public sphere, and consequently this progress has primarily been measured in the public record. I look at materials literally on the margins of print discourse, in order to suggest some of the ways that children exert their access, claim ownership, and hence belong.

The relation between childhood and manuscript literature is pragmatic and opportunistic: If children’s own voices are far more likely to be found in manuscript sources than in printed ones then anyone interested in learning about what children saw, experienced, thought, felt, or understood, needs to figure out not only how to locate such material in library systems that tend not to recognize age as a category of analysis, but also how to make sense of the scraps and rote exercises found there.

Reading children’s writing is difficult, precisely because the sentences themselves are often so simple. Children tend to write in fairly formulaic ways, constrained by adult supervision. Writing often figures for children as a site of instruction and compliance. Consequently paying attention to childhood entails finding meaning in what can easily seem trivial and formulaic: to learn for example that copying is not a neutral act. I have learned in my reading of children’s diaries, school essays, letters, poetry, fiction, drawings and collage how to look not only for children’s socialization, but also through it to their agency, invention, and play.

From the perspective of American Studies, the materials I will briefly discuss now speak to issues of socialization—childhood is one of the prime sites for inculcating cultural norms and hence the nature of those norms is highly visible in school primers and other didactic texts and activities aimed at the young. They speak too to our notions of “innocence,” a term with a powerful mythos in American Studies. And they speak to questions of power and possession, since age is one of the few places where power imbalances continue to be understood as natural, as how things ought to be.

Writing in the margins of her Practical Spelling-Book beneath the book’s printed question, “Good boys and girls try to behave well at school because it makes their parents happy. Do you do so?” Eliza Wadsworth answers simply “no yes”; she does not behave well at school, but she still makes her parents happy. Thus Eliza splits obedience from the notion of parental pleasure.1 Like Eliza I am interested in the split between prescription and agency. In describing a few specific child manuscripts, I seek to demonstrate the sorts of child-made things one can find in archives and the kinds of questions they might generate.

Many of the traces of childhood expression preserved in archives come in the form of scraps. Sometime in the 1850s Lilly St. Agnan Barrett with round childish hand and a not yet very confident cursive script penciled a pledge on a small piece of torn card.

I will try this day to live a simple sincere serene life; repelling every thought of discordant self-seeking an anxiety; cultivating magninimity self-control and the habit of silence; practicing economy cheerfulness and helpfulness; and as I cannot in my own strength do this, or even with a hope of success attimping it I look to thee O Lord my Father in Jesus Christ my Saviour and ask for the gift of the Holy Spirit.2

Lilly would grow up to become a rector’s wife and the balance of class and gendered expectations embedded in her childhood list of desired virtues seems quite prescient. The very fact that this prayer was preserved, Lilly’s own and her parents’ acts of valuing this assertion of her faith that would be necessary for this shard of paper to make it into the family archives, seems as important here as the particular things she says with her evident adult vocabulary somewhat in advance of her spelling. The many incongruities of this list reflect the process of socialization, Lilly’s manner of learning the codes of a pious New England femininity, and the pride and pleasure she could take in that process however meek and stern its ultimate outcome. For the scholar of childhood seeking children’s voices the task is how to parse the “discordant” “economy” and “sincere” “cheerfulness” of such texts.

Lilly’s pledge is but one scrap within a large compendium of family papers. It is, of course, the affluent and socially important families whose papers are most likely to be preserved in such collections, and within the already silenced and invisible realm of children’s history the differences in archival class, region, race, and ethnicity are particularly marked. I am working at the moment with the archives of childhood materials associated with the Dickinson family, things produced by the poet Emily Dickinson’s nieces and nephews during the 1870s and early 1880s—so very much the product of a rural educated elite, from an exceptionally educated and literary family. The Dickinson children, Ned, Mattie and Gib, used their books hard, creating through their inscriptions, decorations, and torn out pages a record of their relations to reading and writing.

The Dickinson children colored in the letters in their primer, making the alphabet more festive and more their own.3 Mattie Dickinson used her Children’s Almanac to record her school assignments.4 But she also clearly liked the little decorations that introduce each month and she carefully made her own version, drawn on a piece of paper stuck between the pages of this little book. Some are faithfully copied images, even if her blown-out umbrella is hard to decipher unless you compare it to the printed picture for March, but unlike those in the published almanac, her labels for the months don’t quite stay on the same tidy line. Even more whimsically, in “copying” the image for May, Mattie completely rejects the conventional flowers depicted in the album to draw her own lawn tennis court (the family had one at the Evergreens) and the bugs that are part of the fan’s design in the Almanac’s August fly free in Mattie’s drawing. Clearly for Mattie the pleasure of precision in imitation vies with the pleasures of invention.

The Dickinson family papers at Brown University contain all sorts of scraps from the nursery desk, including a large collection of patterned collages, some finished and bound, quite possibly a school assignment, and others in process. The Dickinson collection at Amherst College includes a scrapbook of Christmas cards and other colored prints assembled by the children and a number of their friends—each participant initialing a page.5 Most dramatically of all the Dickinson children pasted drawings collected from books, magazines, and greeting cards, onto the four doors in and around the nursery. The children decorated not only the door to the nursery itself and the door to the closet inside the room, but also the insides of the two hallway doors that delineated the nursery section of the upstairs hall. Like more traditional scrapbooks the Dickinson children’s decorated doors testify to the ways in which public print culture could be put to individual, personal uses, literally cut-up and re-fashioned. Thus it shares much with more general accounts of children as cultural scavengers. But that the Dickinson children felt empowered to paste pictures on these doors, and that the adults in the household allowed those images to remain, points to a broad family acknowledgment of the children’s control over at least this circumscribed space. Moreover quite a number of the images come from illustrated books, suggesting both the children’s love of their books and that such valuing of the literary did not prevent them from tearing books apart, just as it didn’t keep them from scribbling on the alphabet. In pasting colored plates torn from a juvenile edition of Robinson Crusoe on the hallway door, the children cut off the captions, their use and interest not necessarily aligned with the label.6 Of course the inclusion of images from this primal colonial text says much of a different sort about these children’s socialization into particular imperialist structures. Thus if these materials show us children as scavengers on the scrap edges of cultural power, it also demonstrates the processes of incorporation and how deeply those are linked to the sorts of imperialist narratives we have been telling in American Studies all along.

Endnotes

1. T.H. Galludet and Horace Hooker, The Practical Spelling-Book (Hartford: Hamersley, 1861). The copy with Eliza Wadsworth’s marginalia is in the Hewins Collection of the Connecticut Historical Society Library.

2. Lilly St. Agnan Barrett’s childhood note is in the Porter Phelps Huntington Family Papers, Special Collections, Amherst College Library.

3. Favell Lee Mortimer, Reading Without Tears: A Pleasant Mode of Learning to Read (New York: Harper Brothers, 1869). The Dickinson children’s copy is in the Martha Dickinson Bianchi Papers in the Brown University Special Collections.

4. Ella Farman, The Children’s Almanac (Boston: D. Lathrop, 1878). Mattie’s copy has a number of inscriptions dated from 1881-83; it is in the Martha Dickinson Bianchi Papers, Brown University Special Collections.

5. “Scrap Album” The Dickinson Family Papers, Special Collections Amherst College.

6. Mary Godolphin, Robinson Crusoe in Words of One Syllable (New York: George Routledge and Sons, n.d.). The Dickinson’s children’s version with some plates missing is in the Martha Dickinson Bianchi Papers, Brown University Special Collections.

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