This paper views The New-England Primer—an extremely popular North American artifact, with editions regularly appearing from the 1690s to the early nineteenth century—afresh by considering the lessons it aims to inculcate about numbers and quantities, especially in relation to ideas about time, death, size, and economics. It far extends literary critic Elisa New’s earlier argument about the Primer’s representation of “adult proportion and divine scale” beyond her emphasis on the illustrations and adulthood, contending that the Primer, although a document usually associated with literacy, also includes major metaphorical quantitative logics usually overlooked by scholars.
The Primer has commanded attention from bibliographical historians, literary historians, religious historians, and literary critics, but these scholars have not often paid close attention to the multi-generic Primer’s various components. Instead of using the Primer as part of a larger story about American alphabets or as an index to changes in Americans’ attitudes toward filial piety—as Patricia Crain and Jay Fliegelman, respectively, have already done well—this paper closely analyzes the Primer for its own sake. I take Stephanie Schnorbus’s and Tracy Fessenden’s detailed discussions of the Primer as models for my own, though I am less interested in change over time than they are, choosing instead to focus on the Primer’s largely unchanging features.
I examine the Primer’s perennial elements from the earliest extant edition (1727) to later ones—the illustrated alphabet section, the non-illustrated advice alphabet, the martyrdom poem, John Cotton’s catechism, and other sections—to elucidate the mathematically-inflected lessons on continuous display. I supplement my close reading of texts and images with discussions of the scriptural bases of various ideas, as well as additional eighteenth-century primary sources, including sermons.
About the presenterTom Nunan
I am a fourth-year PhD candidate in American & New England Studies at Boston University, studying Christianity and literature in the U.S. from the colonial period to the early twentieth century. Particular interests include nineteenth-century women writers’ negotiation with Christianity, Calvinism’s legacies in American culture, and the history of reading.