History of Reading News. Vol.XXV No.2 (2002:Spring)
by Charles Monaghan

The following sketch was prepared to provide a historical context for a forthcoming work on the textbook writer Lyman Cobb. It is based on the sources cited, plus a reading of the American Journal of Education (1826-1828) and books in the Monaghan Collection (now at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas) and the Plimpton Collection at Columbia University. There were many more textbook writers, of course, but this sketch touches on writers who were major forces in the market or influential in other ways. This account and the forthcoming study of Cobb emphasize the influence, in the first half of the 19th century, of European educational reformers on primers and spellers and of the elocutionary movement on reading texts. The author invites comments from interested parties. A bibliography will soon be available on the web.

The first literacy textbook written by an American was a little spelling book composed by the Quaker Anthony Benezet (1713-1784) in 1779. However, it did not sell widely. A vastly greater impact was achieved by the work of Noah Webster (1758-1843), a Yale graduate and ardent patriot. A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, Part I, II and III, consisting of a speller, a grammar and a reader, came off the press between 1783 and 1785. (Spelling books were designed to teach reading through the alphabet method of oral spelling of words, while readers were collections of essays, sermons, speeches and poems designed for children who could already read.) Webster, using numerical superscriptions to indicate vowel pronunciations, claimed his speller would teach the new nation a single system of pronunciation, thus helping unify it.

Webster’s speller, which like all its competitors relied on long lists of syllabified words to be spelled and read aloud, drew criticism because it did not get to actual reading passages until p. 101. Webster countered such caveats with his revision, The American Spelling Book (1787), moving the start of reading lessons up to p. 43. The first lesson began, “NO man may put off the law of God,” which became famous among children as their first experience of real reading. Thanks in part to Webster’s skillful promotion, The American Spelling Book soon became a best seller.

In 1829, a year after he published his famous American Dictionary, Webster issued the final revision of his speller, The Elementary Spelling Book, which eventually earned the nickname “blue-back speller” because of its familiar blue covers. Though overseen by Webster, much of the book was written by a New York teacher named Aaron Ely. The Elementary incorporates changes that distinguish American from British spelling to this day, such as labor instead of labour and center rather than centre. Of all Webster’s books, only the speller (in its various transformations) was to have a long-term presence in the market, dominating the field from 1790 through the Civil War era and selling some 70 million copies into the 20th century₁.

The Rise of Murray

Webster’s grammar and reader succumbed to similar works by Lindley Murray (1745-1826). Murray, the son of a Quaker merchant family that gave its name to the Murray Hill neighborhood in Manhattan, was forced into exile in Britain after the Revolution as a loyalist. There he began to write literacy textbooks. The English Grammar (1795) was the first. Its immediate success encouraged him to produce other literacy texts, most notably the English Reader (1799). Since there was no international copyright convention until 1891, American printers could reproduce Murray’s works without paying a royalty. Among other best-selling Murray titles were English Exercises (1797), an Abridgement of the grammar (1801), Sequel to the English Reader (1800) and Introduction to the English Reader (1801). Murray became the largest-selling author in the world in the first half of the 19th century with some 20 million of his books printed.

Although the English Grammar remains Murray’s best-known book in Britain, his best seller in the United States was the English Reader. It dominated the American market from 1815 to 1840. In its selections, the Reader leans heav- ily on the egalitarian and anti-slavery ideas of the writers of the Scottish Enlightenment, particularly the preacher Hugh Blair. Abraham Lincoln saluted the English Reader as “the best schoolbook ever put in the hands of an American youth.” Through the enormous circulation of his works, some 16 million copies in the United States alone, Murray became the most important popularizer of Scottish Enlightenment ideas in the early Republic₂.

Webster and Murray had numerous rivals. Caleb Bingham (1757-1817), a Boston teacher and proprietor of a school for girls, published in 1785 The Lady’s Accidence, a grammar that outsold Webster’s. He also published two readers, The American Preceptor (1794), which sold 640,000 copies, and The Columbian Orator (1797), which sold another 200,000. Like most such books, they were elocutionary manuals as well as readers, with directions on speaking and selections suitable for declaiming. The Columbian Orator was the first book read by the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, as he recounts in his autobiographies₃.

Ideas from Abroad

With the turn of the 19th century, educators in the United States began to look at the work of European reformers such as Rousseau (1712-1778) and Pestalozzi (1746-1827). Pestalozzi was conducting a school in Switzerland that rejected rote learning and emphasized the individual development of children. This movement was to play a key role in the educational and textbook scene for most of the century. The first wave of Pestalozzianism began early in the century and a second arose after the Civil War.

Daniel Adams (1773-1864), a Massachusetts physician, was an early and important reformer and innovator, spurred by the same ideas that had influenced Pestalozzi. In 1803, Adams published The Understanding Reader; or Knowledge Before Oratory, which opposed the prevailing fashion of having children learn elocution as if by rote from long lists of “passions” (or ways of interpreting emotions, derived from theatrical practices). The book conceives of reading as a private, internal activity, not one connected to the public realm. An innovation in The Understanding Reader was the placement of vocabulary words in the margins next to the excerpt.

The Monitorial Reader (1839) continued Adams’ opposition to oratory as a basis for perfecting a child’s reading. Rather than passages from famous speeches, the book is mostly composed of excerpts from contemporary magazines and poetry; and less than a page is devoted to use of the voice. The title invokes the ideas of the Briton Joseph Lancaster (1778-1838), who advocated a monitorial system in which older students helped teach younger ones. Adams was also a major author of arithmetics, starting with The Scholar’s Arithmetic (1801). In it, Adams left spaces after problems so that children could write in their solutions_4.

Another early reformer was Albert Picket (1771-1850), who had been a pupil of Noah Webster and studied from the manuscript sheets of Webster’s first spelling book. Picket’s Union Spelling Book (1803) and particularly The Juvenile Spelling-Book (1808) offered serious competition to those of his old teacher. From 1818-1820, Picket and his son John published in New York The Academician, the country’s first journal of education. It devoted much space to the ideas of Pestalozzi, Lancaster and Philipp Emanuel von Fellenberg (1771-1844). Fellenberg, in his Swiss school, had mingled social classes and advocated vocational training. Picket invoked Pestalozzi as an influence in his American Class-Books reading series, the first of which appeared in 1818. The series, written by Picket and his son J.W. Picket and encompassing seven books, was intended to “form a systematic gradation from the alphabet to Walker’s dictionary.” The earliest book was a primer, followed by a speller ₅.

The most thoroughgoing Pestalozzian textbook of the early period was The Pestalozzian Primer (1826) by John Keagy, M.D. (1795-1837), emphasizing the importance of the child’s concrete experience and the use of tactile objects as teaching aids. Keagy’s primer was used in conjunction with a device called an “agnostic kaleidoscope,” a wooden frame accompanied by letters on blocks. The blocks were slid into the frame to form syllables and then words. The primer also advocates the child’s handling of objects as an aid to learning to read ₆.

Worcester and His Primer

An important reformist text that exhibited the influence of Pestalozzian ideas was Primer of the English Language by Samuel Worcester (1793-1844), published in the same year, 1826. “It is not, perhaps, very important that a child should know the letters before it begins to read,” said Worcester in the preface. “It may learn first to read words by seeing them, hearing them pronounced, and having their meanings illustrated, and afterwards it may learn to analyze them or name the letters of which they are composed.” This, of course, was a direct attack on the established alphabet method and the first formulation of the word method that would become dominant decades later. Worcester’s book also included instructions to the teacher and introduced pre-reading activities ₇.

Other volumes of the era devoted to the word method included the Bumstead Primary Readers (1840-43) by Josiah Bumstead (b. 1790). The speller in the Bumstead series bore the very Pestalozzian title Spelling and Thinking Combined: The Spelling Book Made a Medium of Thought, once again an attack on the traditional spelling book.

From about 1825 to 1840, Webster’s leading rival among spelling book authors was Lyman Cobb (1800-1864). Cobb began teaching school near Ithaca, N.Y., at the age of sixteen and in 1821 produced a speller titled A Just Standard for Pronouncing the English Language. Once his name became known, Cobb moved to New York City, where he wrote a series of readers (most notably the New Juvenile Readers, first published in 1840) that reflected reform ideas and the necessity of making reading pleasurable to children. They also followed Worcester’s lead by including instructions to the teachers. Cobb sold some six to seven million books during his career. Much of that total came from citywide adoption of Cobb’s books in cities such as Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York and Brooklyn ₈.

Cobb’s speller proclaimed that it was based on the work of the British elocutionist John Walker (1732-1807), although it much more closely resembles Webster’s speller than anything of Walker’s. The great success of Webster’s book, of course, had made it the dominant model for the genre. Since Cobb was so young and inexperienced, the resemblance is not surprising and, in fact, Webster accused Cobb of plagiarism ₉.

Walker was a onetime actor on the London stage who took up a career as a writer on elocution and language. He advocated the practice of elocution based on lists of “passions,” or emotions to be conveyed. His Elements of Elocution, originally published in London in 1781 and first issued in the United States in 1810, became widely used in American schools, academies and colleges. So identified was Walker with the subject that his nickname was “Elocution” Walker.₁₀ Walker’s A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and

Expositor of the English Language (1791), reprinted in America in numerous editions, preserved British spelling and so was in direct competition with the reformed spelling introduced by Noah Webster into his dictionaries and spellers.

Walker was invoked as a model by numerous textbook authors of the period. One such was Benjamin Dudley Emerson (1781-1872), a Boston teacher and principal, author of The National Spelling Book and Pronouncing Tutor (1828).

Another major author of spelling books in this period was Edward Hazen, whose Speller and Definer (1829) was meant to serve both as a spelling book and a dictionary: edit-ions appeared as late as 1856.

Spelling Books Under Attack

Spelling books, with their long lists of sometimes ponderous words, came under attack by reformers, as did the adult-oriented essays in reading texts. Webster and Murray were the main targets. William Russell (1798-1873), editor of the American Journal of Education, the voice of reform, advo-cated in 1826 the replacement of the spelling book and its word lists with the use of a primer followed by reading books. Russell went on to write numerous textbooks, particularly readers and “speakers,” as the final, elocutionary texts in reading series came to be called. Sixteen of Russell’s books involved elocution in one way or another. ₁₁

John Pierpont (1786-1866), a Unitarian minister, educational reformer and grandfather of J. Pierpont Morgan, was also important in the market for reading texts. At the suggestion of William B. Fowle (1795-1865), a Boston bookseller and textbook author himself, Pierpont compiled The American First-Class Book; or Exercises in Reading and Recitation (1823). The book was adopted by the Boston School Committee in 1823. The American First-Class Book hews to reform by pointedly de-emphasizing elocution.

While all the prominent readers of the time (The Columbian Orator, etc.) began their selections with rules for pro-nunciation and oratory, Pierpont puts stress in his preface on the literary value of the pieces, though he says he certainly expects some of his selections to be used for speaking. This was the first American text to include excerpts from Shake-speare, although selections from the Bard were a common-place in British readers. It also devotes about a quarter of its space to American authors, a selling point against the domi-nant text of the time, Murray’s English Reader, which in-cluded no American authors. (The American First-Class Reader was devoted to older learners; its title refers to the procedure in early one-room schoolhouses of dividing pu-pils—the oldest group was known as the first class.) ₁₂

Pierpont had made the mistake of selling his rights to the First-Class Reader early on to Fowle for $500, who went on to make thousands in profit. So Pierpont in 1827 published The National Reader under his own copyright. In his preface, Pierpont puts strong emphasis on the book’s American content, an approach aimed directly at Murray’s English Reader. In 1829, the National Reader was adopted in the Boston schools to replace Murray’s volume. By 1835, Pierpont had compiled a five-book reading series adapted to various grades. The volumes were The Little Learner, The Young Reader, Introduction to the National Reader, The National Reader, and The American First-Class Reader. ₁₃

A book by Dr. James Rush (1786-1869), The Philosophy of the Human Voice (1827), took a more scientific approach to the use of the voice and set elocutionary instruction on a different course, influencing Russell and other authors of readers, such as the Rev. Ebenezer Porter (1772-1834), whose Rhetorical Reader (1835) was a best seller. ₁₄

The McGuffey Eclectic Series

The culmination of the first period of textbook reform in the 19th century was William Holmes McGuffey’s series of graded readers. Grading itself was a reform, enabling children to read materials appropriate to their age. In 1826, Boston had mandated that each school should have four grades. The original Eclectic Readers were prepared by William Holmes McGuffey (1800-1873), a university teacher active in midwestern educational circles. McGuffey’s First Reader and Second Reader were published in 1836, the Third Reader and Fourth Reader of the Eclectic series the following year.

The McGuffey series underlines the transformation of the concept of a school reading text over the first third of the 19th century. Lindley Murray’s English Reader, for example, was aimed at older students who were already competent readers. Later, Murray added an Introduction to the English Reader, a volume still aimed at children who could already read. The McGuffey Eclectic Readers (as they were later titled), however, were designed from the first to gradually introduce reading to students from the early grades on, using short stories about children in familiar settings. Their comprehensibility to children, their numerous illustrations, their strong commitment to grading, McGuffey’s midwestern location and the publishers’ excellent marketing all contributed to the series’ great success. It is said to have sold some 120 million individual copies into the 20th century. The early books did borrow heavily from competitors. McGuffey and his publisher had to settle out of court a suit brought by Samuel Worcester and his publisher. ₁₅

While there had been reading series before 1840, the great success of the McGuffey readers ensured that a reading series of five or six books would become the standard approach of American publishers to introductory reading instruction. In most quarters, the first reader of such series supplanted the speller as a reading instructional text, and the spelling book now assumed the role familiar to us today as the text for teaching spelling. The elocutionary tradition lived on: the last book or two in reading series by such authors as Salem Town (1779-1864), Charles W. Sanders (1805-1879), David B. Tower (1808-1868) and George S. Hillard (1808-1879) were specifically devoted to short selections for speaking, as well as reading.₁₆

NOTES

1. E. Jennifer Monaghan, A Common Heritage: Noah Webster’s Blue-Back Speller (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1983).
2. Charles Monaghan, The Murrays of Murray Hill (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Urban History Press, 1998). In this book, I estimate sales of 12.5 million copies of Lindley Murray’s works in the United States and 3 million in Britain. Subsequent work on counts of Murray in major archives has led me to estimate approximate totals of 16 million for the United States and 4 million for Britain. This figure clearly establishes Murray as the leading author in the world, in terms of sales, for the entire first half of the 19th century.
3. David W. Blight, ed., The Columbian Orator (New York.: NYU Press, 1998), xiii-xvii; Michael V. Belok, Forming the American Minds: Early School-Books & Their Compilers (1783-1837) (Moti Katra, Agra-U.P., India: Satish Book Enterprise, 1973), 147-64.
4. Adams biography in Dictionary of American Biography (DAB).
5. Picket biography in DAB; Rudolph R. Reeder, The Historical Development of School Readers and of Method in Teaching Reading (New York: Macmillan, 1900), 44. Richard Venezky notes, in his important and thorough article on the history of American reading textbooks, that the first books “clearly designated as a connected series” were the three New-York Readers, published by Samuel Wood of New York from 1810-1813. Another set of books specifically published as a series was Oliver Angell’s Union Series of Common School Classics, starting in 1830: Richard L.Venezky, “A History of the American Reading Textbook,” Elementary School Journal 87 (1987): 251.
6. Reeder, School Readers, 42-44.
7. Venezky, “History of the American Reading Textbook,” 252-53.
8. Charles Monaghan, “Noah Webster’s Textbook Rival: Lyman Cobb of New York (1800-1864),” (in preparation); Venezky, “History,” 253; Reeder, School Readers, 49.
9. Monaghan, Common Heritage, 186.
10. Ibid., 135.
11. American Journal of Education (1826): 639-40; for short accounts of Russell’s career, see his DAB entry and the summary in Mary Margaret Robb, “The Elocutionary Movement and Its Chief Figures,” in A History of Speech Education in America, ed. Karl R. Wallace (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1954), 187-89.
12. Venezky, “History,” 251.
13. Reeder, School Readers, 45-47; Pierpont biography in DAB.
14. Lester J. Hale, “Dr. James Rush,” in History of Speech Education, 219-235; Robb, “Elocutionary Movement,” 181-87.
15. Venezky, “History,” 251.
16. Reeder, School Readers, 49; McGuffey’s Sixth Eclectic Reader (New York: American Book Co., original copyright 1879) says in its preface that “free use” has been made of the writings of “standard authors on Elocution,” including Walker (who heads the list). For example, titles by Salem Town include The Grammar School Reader: Containing the Essential Principles of Elocution (Portland, Me: Sanborn & Carter, 1850) and The Progressive Fifth or Elocutionary Reader (Boston: Oliver Ellsworth, 1864). Titles by Charles Sanders include Sanders’ School Speaker (New York: Ivison & Phinney, 1857) and Sanders’ Rhetorical and Union Sixth Reader (New York: Ivison, Blakeman, Taylor, 1875). Both the fifth (1846) and sixth (1848) books of David Tower’s North American First Class Reader series are largely devoted to speaking topics.