Children's Stories in American Literature, 1660-1860 — Reading Companion

Biography as the Primary Mode

The chapter on George Bancroft, for instance, devotes far more space to his role as Secretary of the Navy—establishing the Naval Academy, ordering General Taylor to the Texas border—than to his ten-volume History of the United States. Wright notes that Bancroft "brought to his history a mind fresh to literary labor," but the discussion of the history itself is compressed into a single paragraph praising its "brilliant as well as faithful picture." This pattern recurs: authors are introduced through their lives, their works summarized in broad, admiring terms. The result is a book that tells about literature rather than examining it.

The Catalog Subject Gap

The catalog lists "Children's stories, American -- History and criticism" as a subject, yet the excerpts contain no analysis of children's stories as a genre. Wright does not discuss plot, character, or audience in any sustained way. Instead, she treats her subjects as cultural heroes: Audubon the naturalist, Irving the gentle humorist, Cooper the creator of the American novel. The only children mentioned are the Indian listeners in the opening anecdote. The book's title promises stories for children, but its content is stories about authors, told in a simplified style.

A Vision of National Destiny

Wright's narrative is deeply patriotic. Bancroft's history is praised for making "the picturesque figure of Columbus fronting undismayed the terrors of that unknown sea" into a story "more marvellous than any imaginations of fairy lore." The Mexican-American War is presented as a natural consequence of defending Texas. The book's structure—from early colonial writings to the mid-nineteenth century—traces a line of moral and territorial expansion. Literature is valued for its role in this progress, not for its aesthetic qualities. Readers should expect a work of national celebration rather than literary criticism.

Wright's book is best approached as a period piece: a late-nineteenth-century educator's attempt to make American literary history palatable to young readers. Its value lies less in critical insight than in what it reveals about the era's cultural priorities—heroic biography, moral instruction, and national pride. Readers interested in the actual texts of early American children's literature will need to look elsewhere, but those curious about how literary history was once packaged for the young will find a revealing example.

When I turn the brittle pages of Wright's old survey, I recall how biography forever overtakes analysis—a life, not a text, becomes the story. That patient fondness for the child beneath the author reminds me of another gentle cataloguing of small souls, where every frock and tantrum holds quiet meaning, as in Little Pitchers Flaxie Frizzle Stories — Inside the Classic. Both books simply watch, and remember.