Sunday School Books
If 19th Sunday School books are remembered today, the memory is usually a bad one. What we remember comes from authors such as Mark Twain, who found them boring, moralizing, and at odds with the nature of children.
For almost a century, however, this literature was regularly employed to inculcate into children values that many in society saw as fundamental. This was no trivial task and the Sunday school literature, for all its shortcomings, was widely read and so well known that Mark Twain never actually quoted from the books, he simply assumed his readers would have read what he was poking fun at. This is unsurprising. In 1830 alone the Sunday-School Union printed approximately six million publications, primarily for children.
Sunday school books brought children's literature to America. Their authors sought to Americanize the mainly British publications that had previously been printed for Sunday schools and therefore wrestled with the difficult problem of whether Americans had unique religious or cultural values and if so, how those values should be taught. The books also brought the art of illustration to America's children.
For all these reasons the books are important. A large collection of them are preserved in the Lucile Clarke Memorial Children's Library.