December 2002
Uncle William (pseud.). Winter Evenings, or The Snow Man and the Sleigh Ride. Philadelphia: Griffith & Simon, 1848.
Like most examples of nineteenth-century juvenile fiction, Winter Evenings, published in Philadelphia in 1848, was didactic. Authors of children's books very often presented lessons both practical and moral within otherwise light-hearted stories; in the process, they expressed and reinforced the prevalent social order.
This book tells the story of the Linton children who visit their cousins on New Year's day. Looking for something to do, the girls go inside to read new books. The boys stay outside, and with the help of their Uncle Thomas, build a gigantic snowman. The towering frozen figure makes cousin Mary think of idols, "which heathens carve out of wood and stone." Later she asks her father to see a book containing representative images of idols, which he coincidentally has at hand, and this begins a lesson on ancient worship. The children, fresh from building a ten-foot snowman of their own, come to think of the ancients as "silly people" who were "all idolaters." Their father explains that "when the heart has been filled with the love of sinful things, there is no form of worship too silly to find favour with men." Thus, a story about wintertime entertainment is used to tell a larger morality tale about the importance of God.
Similarly, little Frederic Hill's later question to his father about sled dogs becomes an opportunity - for both the story's characters and its readers - to learn about Russian life by way of Siberian huskies and St. Bernards. We find that dogs possess a great deal of endurance, a keen sense of direction, and a deep well of faithfulness. This extended vignette also becomes a way to explain inherent differences between humans and animals. As the father instructs, "Beasts are endowed with instinct, which teaches them a great many things. . , but beasts do not possess reason, and therefore are not rational."
Illustrations, which visually reinforced the textual lessons, were important elements in children's books. Along with numerous woodcuts, two lithographs (found in this slide show) illustrate the key stories in Winter Evenings. They capture the mid nineteenth-century American enthusiasm for lithography, a process which allowed the artist to include a surprising amount of detail, even in small images such as these.
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