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