A Mid-Century Child and Her Books

New York: The Macmillan Company (1st Edition, November 1926). Lilac cloth boards with faded spine, 136 pages. Dust jacket missing. Pages age toned; creasing along bottom fore edge of front endpaper and first few pages appears to be a production flaw (see our photos); text clean and unmarked; binding square and tight. Hand-colored frontispiece and other illustrations. Protected by clear plastic jacket.

About the Book: A MID-CENTURY CHILD AND HER BOOKS by Caroline M. Hewins (1926). Carolyn M. Hewins (1846-1929) was an influential figure in the movement to create children's libraries, whose memories of her mid-nineteenth-century childhood entertained and enlightened acquaintances in Hartford, Connecticut. Luckily for scholars of works for nineteenth-century American children, she left a record of the books she read as a child as part of her memoirs. Hewins' memoirs of growing up in Roxbury, Massachusetts, accentuates the charming: the family cow named for the glamorous wife of a presidential candidate; rituals of May Day and Christmas; the musical names of pears and apples; the quiet games that could be played in the house at a children's party. The book is a good companion piece to Catherine Havens' Diary of a Little Girl in Old New York. The real focus is the books: big books, small books, classic books, forgotten books. All her life, Hewins read and collected and read and memorized and read. She read works by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Samuel Goodrich. She read Parley's Magazine and Memoirs of a London Doll. She learned Peter Piper's Alphabet. It's one of the most complete memoirs of reading available. Though Hewins doesn't mention it, in 1872 she wrote a handful of pieces for Robert Merry's Museum. Soon after, she became a librarian at a subscription library in Hartford, Connecticut. Concerned by the choices available for children, she published lists of recommended works and made the chldren's section of the library inviting to its young patrons.