Description:
1850 reprint published by Ira Webster of "The / New-England / PRIMER / Improved / For the more easy attaining the true / reading of English. / TO WHICH IS ADDED / The Assembly of Divines, and / Mr. Cotton's Catachism. / BOSTON / Printed by Edward Draper, at / his Printing-Office, in Newbury- / Street, and Sold by John Boyle / in Marlborough-Street. 1777." "The New-England Primer" was first published in Boston about 1690 by Benjamin Harris, a London printer who had published a similar book for children, "The Protestant Tutor," in London in 1679. Harris moved to Boston in 1686 to avoid the brief reign (1685-1688) of the Roman Catholic king, James II; the Primer was an immediate success, with a second edition announced in 1691. Harris returned to London in 1695, where he issued other editions of the Primer under various titles. Along with the psalter, Testament, Bible, and hornbook (earliest form of children's primer, common in both England and America from the late 16th to the late 18th century, consisting of a sheet with the letters of the alphabet, simple words, and a Bible verse, mounted on a wooden frame and protected with thin, transparent plates of horn), the "New England Primer" was the standard reading textbook in New England and in other English settlements in North America in the 18th and 19th centuries, with over five million copies sold. In 1642, Massachusetts passed a literacy law in the belief that an inability to read was Satan's attempt to keep people from the Scriptures; New England schools were strongly influenced by religion, and the colonists intended that all children should learn to read. The Primer introduced each alphabet letter in a rhyming religious couplet and then illustrated this text with a woodcut. The primer also contained a catechism of religious questions and answers, moral lesson, religious maxims, acronyms, etc. "Mr. Cotton's Catachism", also known as "Milk for Babes," was a beginning catechism for children and young Christians by John Cotton (1584–1652), the preeminent minister and theologian of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The oldest surviving copy of "Milk for Babes" was published in London in 1646. It was reprinted many times on both sides of the Atlantic, and at least 8 editions from the 17th century are known. Between 1690 and 1701, it was first incorporated into "The New-England Primer," where it remained an essential component of that work and an integral part of American religious education for the next 150 years.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+2002.73 |
