The Girl's Own Book

Learning to Read : ABC Books

BC books, at their simplest, match each letter with a single image. A is an apple; B is a bird. Most books go well beyond that — each letter spawns three words, or a dozen. There may be an image for each word, or a scene that incorporates them all. Verses are invented, perhaps as mnemonics for the toddler, perhaps to amuse the mother or sibling one imagines pointing to the letters, asking what the illustration shows, and hearing the child practice their lessons.

ABCs were often very cheaply printed, and their use by small children ensured the destruction of many of the small pamphlets. The tiny Tragical Death was saved by being bound together with more than a dozen other little books early on. Even books that were printed by the hundreds or
thousands may exist today in only one or two copies. Papa’s Gift owes its survival to never having been used; the two final pages are not cut apart.

The Letter X presents difficulties, first in finding a word that starts with the letter, and then in depicting the unlikely candidate. A number of ingenious work-arounds appear. In The Infant’s Primer, X is represented by Xanthus (the name of several horses in Greek myths). Other books in this case use Xerxes (king of Persia 486–465 BCE), two fancy capital Xs without an image, and in the large, patriotic, mid-century Mother’s Picture Alphabet, the Ten Commandments.
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The Tragical Death of a Apple-Pye: Who Was Cut in Pieces and Eat by Twenty Five Gentlemen. London: Printed by John Evans, 42 Long Lane, West Smithfield, 1800.

Papa’s Gift for a Good Child. London: Printed and published by W.S. Johnson, c. 1850.

The Infant’s Primer. London: Printed and sold by E. Marshall, 140, Fleet Street. From Aldermary Church Yard, 1807.

The New London Alphabet. London: Printed by W. S. Johnson, St. Martin’s Lane, 1847.

Partridge, S. W. The Mother’s Picture Alphabet. London: Office of the Children’s Friend, No. 9 Paternoster Row, 1862.

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