Pearl, therefore -- so large were the attainments of her three years' lifetime -- could have borne a fair examination in the
New England Primer, or the first column of the Westminster Catechisms, although unacquainted with the outward form of either of those celebrated works.
A school for little children had been often in her thoughts; and, at one time, she had begun a review of her early studies in the
New England Primer, with a view to prepare herself for the office of instructress.
The
New England Primer was the textbook used to teach generations of Americans how to read.
The book which he recalls from his London poorhouse schooling, which must have taken place some time around the late 1650s, presumably had much in common with later extant pedagogical publications by Benjamin Harris: The Protestant Tutor, first printed in London in 1679, and The
New England Primer, which was printed in Boston in numerous editions from the 1680s onward.
Another text was The
New England Primer that contained 88 pages and measured about 3% inches by 4% inches.
Chapters focus in turn on Puritan New England, the
New England Primer, the nineteenth-century Bible "wars," and the American Renaissance.
If the point of the
New England Primer was to teach children that they were sinners and that Jesus died to save them from their sins," Prothero notes, "the point of the later McGuffey readers was to teach children that God wanted them to work hard, save their money, tell the truth, and avoid alcohol.
Perhaps the best-known and most influential seventeenth-century book containing the alphabet was the
New England Primer (14), first published in 1690, though the copy described here is a reprint of the 1777 edition.
The editors included some genuine classics, to be sure, some excerpted and some in full, like The
New England Primer, A Child's Garden of Verses, Peter Pan, Ramona and her Father, chapbook versions of Bunyaffs Pilgrim's Progress and Defoe's Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, and the poetry of Charles Causley and Robert Graves, to name just a few.
The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from The
New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter.
A poem from an old
New England primer, which Robert Frost was fond of quoting, explains it this way:
Driven by sympathy for the "poor little feller", (Trumbull Slosson 1969: 260) the woman -- an exile f rom her native region just as much as Norvle appears an exile from heaven -- starts teaching him catechism, beginning with "In Adam's fall we sinned all" from The
New England Primer.
