Hidden Literacies

Childhood Literary Practices

The Nelson brothers clearly took great pleasure in amassing and preserving varied and detailed depictions of their family, their town, and their play. The Nelson brothers' archive is unusual because the children who created all these materials come from the sort of ordinary working rural household that tends to leave little individual mark in the historical record—but the sorts of cultural production evident in the Nelson’s bookmaking were actually fairly usual childhood literary practices in kind if not in scope. Many nineteenth-century children played at being newsmen and publishers, and many played at exploring unknown lands, leading triumphant armies, and killing enemies.

Ida and Hial Nelson had four boys. The first three sons were born in fairly swift succession—Elmer (in 1878), Arthur (in 1880), and Walter (in 1882)—and then nearly a decade later (in 1891) came Ernest, “the pet and plaything of us all,” as his mother wrote. In 1897, when the older boys were in their teens, they compiled a volume they called “Sketches of Our Home Life” and pressed Ida to write an introductory piece describing the boys’ own childhoods. If she wrote this short memoir at her sons’ prodding, her account makes it clear that her own literary interests did much to foster her sons’ bookmaking bent.  “Elmer loved to have me comb his hair,” Ida recalled of her first baby, “I always let him have his picture books to look at, and I would make up little stories about them.” Soon the boys themselves became story-tellers and book-makers. When Elmer was around ten, Arthur eight, and Walter six years old, the family lived in a rented house in the center of Goshen. Ida wrote of those years:

This place was close to a brook which furnished much pleasure to the boys making a fine place in which to paddle barefoot, or sail boats. These last it was Walter's great delight to go across the road into papa's [Cooper] shop and make. The pastures furnished delightful places for playing Indian. Mr. Sholes very often hired the boys to help him pull weeds, or rake hay, or pick cabbage worms.... The great indoor amusement of Elmer and Arthur here was writing story books, these they covered & kept in a box, till they really had quite a little library.

Sixty-three volumes of this homemade library survive.  

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