bookseller, sent Salisbury, Connecticut a collection of texts for youth aged nine to sixteen.
Included with this collection was a note in which Bingham explained that his gift to Salisbury
was in part influenced by his boyhood longing “for the opportunity of reading, but [he] had no access to a library.” Bingham spent his childhood in Salisbury in the 1760s, a decade prior to the establishment of the community’s first Library Association. As a school reformer in the
1780s and 1790s in Boston, Bingham was one of the first Americans in the post-Revolutionary period to produce texts that sought to highlight “productions of American genius.”
Throughout Bingham’s career he sought to encourage the development of literature for young readers that would supply “children with food for their curiosity,” yet would “not vitiate their minds.” As a teacher he was keenly aware of the print culture used in schools and was concerned that older youth were not being properly reached. In one of his later texts, Juvenile Letters, he suggested that the value of libraries, especially those designed specifically for youths, was that they provided young readers with texts that they did not have time and access to within their schools and academies. These libraries would also serve as another way to encourage “young folks [to] love reading,” which was seen as “a mark of sense.” My paper provides an analysis of the Bingham Library for Youth’s collection in the early nineteenth century that considers the ways in which Bingham sought to use the library to establish a reading canon for youth in early America.
bookseller, sent Salisbury, Connecticut a collection of texts for youth aged nine to sixteen.
Included with this collection was a note in which Bingham explained that his gift to Salisbury
was in part influenced by his boyhood longing “for the opportunity of reading, but [he] had no access to a library.” Bingham spent his childhood in Salisbury in the 1760s, a decade prior to the establishment of the community’s first Library Association. As a school reformer in the
1780s and 1790s in Boston, Bingham was one of the first Americans in the post-Revolutionary period to produce texts that sought to highlight “productions of American genius.”
Throughout Bingham’s career he sought to encourage the development of literature for young readers that would supply “children with food for their curiosity,” yet would “not vitiate their minds.” As a teacher he was keenly aware of the print culture used in schools and was concerned that older youth were not being properly reached. In one of his later texts, Juvenile Letters, he suggested that the value of libraries, especially those designed specifically for youths, was that they provided young readers with texts that they did not have time and access to within their schools and academies. These libraries would also serve as another way to encourage “young folks [to] love reading,” which was seen as “a mark of sense.” My paper provides an analysis of the Bingham Library for Youth’s collection in the early nineteenth century that considers the ways in which Bingham sought to use the library to establish a reading canon for youth in early America.
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