The New England Primer, first published in 1690, was the most popular schoolbook in the British American colonies. Combining an introduction to reading with religious instruction, it contained the first published appearance of many familiar religious expressions, including the axiom “In Adam’s fall/ We sinned all.”
The Primer was created by a bookseller and newspaperman named Benjamin Harris, who emigrated from London to Boston in 1686. Four years later, he produced the first edition of the Primer, apparently basing it upon his own previous children’s book, The Protestant Tutor. The Primer combined alphabet lessons and catechism in a format that certainly had precedent, but was, at the time, still relatively recent.
The Primer reveals a great deal about the people who produced it. Above all, its genesis and its spectacular success reflect the paramount importance of literacy to Congregationalists in New England. As a people who spurned clerical authority, Puritans held that individual mastery of scripture was the key conduit of relationships to, and understanding of, God. The Primer thus situated the value of reading within a thoroughly religious framework.
The Primer endured as an introduction to literacy and to morality for generations of colonial American children, not only those in New England. Benjamin Franklin’s print shop in Philadelphia produced more than 37,000 copies in the years between 1749 and 1766. The text was adapted to changing mores, removing references to monarchy after the American Revolution, for example, but the format remained stable for decades. Well through independence, the New England Primer remained the most influential children’s book in North America.
Further Reading: Patricia Crain, The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000).
—Simon Finger
World History
