Taking an integral place within the “children's turn” in American studies (17), Patricia Crain's Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America will prove indispensable to students and scholars in the material history of literacy, children's literature, and childhood. As part of the University of Pennsylvania Press series on Material Texts, the book is rich in material archives and visual reproductions. Incorporating forty-four figures and thirty-five color plates, it is a gorgeous material product in itself, making it all the more of a lure into the very act of reading that is the subject of Crain's analysis and argument.

Following a “loose chronology from the middle of the eighteenth century (with a short detour to the seventeenth century) to the end of the nineteenth” (9), Crain argues that “literacy practices in the early national and antebellum periods function as both constituting and signifying ownership of the self” (7), a necessary precursor to self-possession and “future property rights” (115). Throughout her argument, Crain foregrounds the emerging child's role as both object and subject of new literacy practices, at once “the site and the material prompt for the abstractions of literacy” (8). As such, the work contributes as much to histories of childhood as to histories of child reading, ultimately revealing “childhood as a privileged time and space that's been lost, that's died, and that yet remains infinitely accessible to adult memory and imagination, through the medium of literature and practices of literacy” (53). In this effort, Crain never fails to keep as much of the reader's attention on the child outside the book as she does on “the medial child” inside it (8).

Beginning with two chapters containing materially contextualized close readings of the “Babes in the Wood” ballad and John Newbery's The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes (1765) that highlight emerging pedagogies for literacy, Crain then shifts to investigating the institutionalization and architectural mechanization of these processes (chapter 3), in which “stolen children” are implored toward class mobility by becoming cogs in the machinery of a literacy they do not own (chapter 4). Within this complicated historical context, chapter 5 presents a fantastic collection and treatment of archival material demonstrating how middle- and upper-class white child literacy “enacted and enabled practices of ownership” that would eventually characterize the young, modern book owner and reader “as one who performs the rites of ownership” (109). Her next chapter returns to childhood as “literary property” in an analysis of the fiction, letters, and marginalia of Henry James, which “offer an account of mediation” (170, emphasis in original), and “also should be read as an artifact of mediation by which the distant are brought near, or materialized, while the near are distanced or made invisible and dematerialized” (163, emphasis in original). Far from distancing her reader in such theorizing, Crain concludes by inviting us more intimately into the private bedtime spaces of young readers to consider the “newly sequestered” dynamic that would become culturally produced as “the space–time of childhood” in our public imaginations and literacy propaganda (173).

An Americanist by training, Patricia Crain combines rigorous literary breadth with historical depth, constantly forcing simultaneous awareness of children inside, outside, and in relation to books (4). Appropriate to her specific aims, Crain models a method with great potential for broader applications as well. In keeping with the positing of ownership as a “social situation in which the child and the book meet” (113), Crain's attentive stewardship playfully and comprehensively includes “inscriptions, annotations, graffiti, ink blots, pen testing, shreds of leaves and flowers, crumbs of food, mash notes, and unidentifiable stains” (110). The careful collecting, inclusion, reproduction, and treatment of these archival gems should invite active consideration (I found myself pulling used books off my shelves looking for inscriptions with new interest). While literary criticism can remain passively interpretive and isolated by a strict focus within texts, Crain jolts the reader back into the material conditions in which such texts were read, even in her offhand reminders of these conditions. For example, “Adults have been reading in bed – and occasionally going up in flames – for centuries” (170). If that one doesn't get you reading the footnotes and hopefully buying the book, then I am barely doing it justice.

Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America is beautifully written with remarkable precision and wit (see 47, 60). Crain's work will effortlessly educate students and fellow researchers – a rare pleasure in such sophisticated scholarship. And I hope that her audience will take up the practice suggested by her example: “If scholars turn to children's literature to find out what the early culture industry made of children, children answer back from the archive, making space for themselves in the margins of their books” (15). It's time for us to listen to these answers, tucked into the preserved but hidden spaces of academic pursuit.