Description
Long before the laptop—and long before the typewriter became commonplace—there was the copy book. This wonderfully preserved 19th-century schoolbook belonged to Mabel Easton, whose name appears repeatedly inside, and contains pages of her carefully handwritten compositions. Subjects include “Newspapers” and “Think Before You Speak,” with Easton filling page after page in the elegant cursive that students were expected not merely to master, but to use while organizing their thoughts into proper essays. The “Newspapers” composition is especially charming, beginning with the observation that few people read the newspaper “who ever think about when, where and by whom they were first published.”
The wrappers are nearly as interesting as the student work. The front advertises Martin and Nelly Copy Books, illustrated with a scene from the publishers’ Martin and Nelly Stories, while the rear is devoted to Atwater’s School Government, “The Teacher’s Friend”—a classroom discipline system employing merits and demerits represented by tickets resembling money. It’s a terrific little artifact of Victorian American education: handwriting, composition, moral instruction and classroom discipline all contained in one fragile survivor. Unlike an unused schoolbook, this one still preserves the thing it was actually made for—the handwriting and thoughts of the student who owned it.
A wonderful piece of 19th-century American schoolroom history, made considerably better by the fact that Mabel actually filled the thing up.
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