Children’s Tales of the Early 1800s
Stories and verses were traditionally passed down in oral tradition, which explains why Mulan had so many different endings over time. But with the advance in publishing technology, these stories started to be distributed in books. Early children’s books see children as wicked sinners to be restrained and taught life lessons in the harshest conceivable way.
Dr. A.S.W. Rosenbach, who collected volumes of Puritan children’s literature from the early 1900s, sat for an interview with the Saturday Evening Post in 2019. Rosenbach noted children weren’t “born to live, but born to dye (sic).” Worse, Rosenbach found the stories “provided for them was with the definite purpose of teaching them how they should die in a befitting manner.” Death and religion were persistent themes for young children, but other tales focused on the terrible consequences of disobedience, carelessness, vanity, and other mortal sins Puritans encountered.
