t
justified the hope that reprinting these tales would be profitable to a
bookseller in whose efforts to introduce a better taste among the
inhabitants she took a keen interest. But Mrs. Quincy need not have sent
to Boston for them. Jacob Johnson in Philadelphia had issued most of the
English author's books by eighteen hundred and five, and New York
publishers probably made good profit by printing them.

Reading aloud was both a pastime and an education to families in those
early days of the Republic. Although Mrs. Quincy made every effort to
procure Miss Edgeworth's stories for her family because, in her opinion,
"they obtained a decided preference to the works of Hannah More, Mrs.
Trimmer and Mrs. Chapone," for reading aloud she chose extracts from
Shakespeare, Milton, Addison, and Goldsmith. Indeed, if it were possible
to ask our great-grandparents what books they remembered reading in
their childhood, I think we should find that beyond somewhat hazy
recollections of Miss Edgeworth's books and Berquin's "The Looking Glass
for the Mind," they would either mention "Robinson Crusoe," Newbery's
tales of "Giles Gingerbread," "Little King Pippin," and "Goody
Two-Shoes" (written fifty years before their own childhood), or
remember only the classic tales and sketches read to them by their
parents.

Certainly this is the case if we may take as trustworthy the
recollections of literary people whose childhood was passed in the first
part of the nineteenth century. Catharine Sedgwick, for instance, has
left a charming picture of American family life in a country town in
eighteen hundred--a life doubtless paralleled by many households in
comfortable circumstances. Among the host of little prigs and prudes in
story-books of the day, it is delightful to find in Catharine Sedgwick
herself an example of a bookish child who was natural. Her reminiscences
include an account of the way the task of sweeping out the schoolhouse
after hours was made bearable by feasts of Malaga wine and raisins.
These she procured from the store where her father kept an open account,
until the bill having been rendered dotted over with such charges "per
daughter Catharine," these treats to favorite schoolmates ceased. Also a
host of intimate details of this large family's life in the country
brings us in touch with the times: fifteen pairs of calfskin shoes
ordered from the village shoemaker, because town-bought morocco slippers
were few and far between;