Hannah More’s allegories and religious dramas, written to cooeperate with the teachings of the first Sabbath Day schools, are, of course, outside the literature of amusement.  Yet they affected its type in America as they undoubtedly gave direction to the efforts of the early writers for children.

Miss More, born in seventeen hundred and fifty-four, was a woman of already established literary reputation when her attention was attracted by Robert Raikes’s successful experiment of opening a Sunday-school, in seventeen hundred and eighty-one.  During the religious revival that attended the preaching of George Whitefield, Raikes, already interested in the hardships and social condition of the working-classes, was further aroused by his intimate knowledge of the manner of life of some children in a pin factory.  To provide instruction for these child laborers, who, without work or restrictions on Sundays, sought occupation far from elevating, Raikes founded the first “Sabbath Day school.”

The movement spread rapidly in England, and ten years later, in seventeen hundred and ninety-one, under the inspiration of Bishop White, the pioneer First Day school in America was opened in Philadelphia.  The good Bishop was disturbed mentally by the religious and moral degeneracy of the poor children in his diocese, and annoyed during church services by their clamor outside the churches—­a noise often sufficient to drown the prayers of his flock and the sermons of his clergy.  To occupy these restless children for a part of the day, two sessions of the school were held each Sunday:  one before the morning service, from eight until half-past ten o’clock, and the other in the afternoon for an hour and a half.  The Bible was used as a reader, and the teaching was done regularly by paid instructors.

The first Sunday-school library owed its origin to a wish to further the instruction given in the school, and hence contained books thought admirably adapted to Sunday reading.  Among the somewhat meagre stock provided for this purpose were Doddridge’s “Power of Religion,” Miss More’s tracts and the writings of her imitators, together with “The Fairchild Family,” by Mrs. Sherwood, “The Two Lambs,” by Mrs. Cameron, “The Economy of Human Life,” and a little volume made up of selections from Mrs. Barbauld’s works for children.  “The Economy of Human Life,” said Miss Sedgwick (who herself afterwards wrote several good books for girls), “was quite above my comprehension, and I thought it unmeaning and tedious.”  Testimony of this kind about a book which for years appeared regularly upon booksellers’ lists enables us to realize that the average intelligent child of the year eighteen hundred was beginning to be as bored by some of the literature placed in his hands as a child would be one hundred years later.