The
little ones very naturally find the stilted language of these old stories
unintelligible and the artificial plots bewildering; but to one
interested in the adult literature of the same periods of history an
acquaintance with these amusement books of past generations has a
peculiar charm and value of its own. They then become not merely
curiosities, but the means of tracing the evolution of an American
literature for children.
To the student desiring an intimate acquaintance with any civilized
people, its lighter literature is always a great aid to personal
research; the more trivial, the more detailed, the greater the worth to
the investigator are these pen-pictures as records of the nation he
wishes to know. Something of this value have the story-books of
old-fashioned childhood. Trivial as they undoubtedly are, they
nevertheless often contain our best sketches of child-life in the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,--a life as different from that
of a twentieth century child as was the adult society of those old days
from that of the present time.
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