Free The Mansion of Happiness by Jill Lepore

became a pint-sized paradise, with its pots of pansies and pussy willows and oak tables and candlelit corners and much-coveted window seats, so low to the floor that even the shortest legs didn’t dangle. 4
    All this depended on the so-calleddiscovery of childhood.Stages of life are artifacts, ideas with histories: the unborn, as a stage of life anyonecould picture, dates only to the 1960s;adolescence is a useful contrivance; midlife is a moving target; senior citizens are an interest group; and tweenhood is just plain made up. There have always been children, of course, but in other times
     and places, people have thought about them differently. The idea that children are born innocent and need protection from the world of adults is a product of theEnlightenment. You can trace it, as a matter of child-rearing advice (in English, anyway), toJohn Locke’s 1693 treatise
Some Thoughts Concerning Education.
Locke thought children needed to learn through play. “The chief Art,” he argued, “is to
     make all that they have to do, Sport and Play, too.” Even reading could be taught to children, he thought, without them ever “perceiving it to be anything but a Sport.” Locke is why, beginning in 1744, the London printerJohn Newbery published books aimed to amuse and entertain children, including Mother Goose stories, Perrault’s tales,
Aesop’s Fables
,
The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes
, and a serial, the
Lilliputian Magazine.
WhenJohn Wallis printed the New Game of Human Life in 1790, he was following Locke’s advice and Newbery’s footsteps: teaching children about the journey of life by making it a game. 5
    A century later, whenAnne Carroll Moore was a little Goody Two-Shoes herself, the amusing and precious and Lilliputian world of children had become a mainstay of Victorian middle-class culture: there were children’s books, children’s clothes, children’s toys, and children’s furniture. Annie Moore was sixteen, in 1887, whenMilton Bradley published
The Paradise of Childhood.
In the age ofprogress, with all itsmachines, the world of adults was thought to be ruthless: cold, industrial, and grinding. Reformers wanted childhood, a world of little women and little men, to be a place apart, a paradise: the last mansion of happiness.
    Most of what Moore did in the Children’s Room at the New York Public Library had never been done before. She hired storytellers and, in her first year alone, organized two hundred story hours—and ten times as many two years later. She compiled a list of twenty-five hundred standard titles in children’s literature. She fought for, and won, the right to grant borrowing privileges to children. (By 1913, children’s books accounted for one-third
     of all the volumes borrowed from New York’s public libraries.) She invited authors to come and talk about their work. Much against the prevailingsentiment of her day, she was convinced that her job was to give “to the child of foreign parentage a feeling of pride in the beautiful things of the country his parents have left in place of the sense of shame with which he too often regards it.” 6 She celebrated the holidays of immigrants (reading Irish poetry aloud, for instance, on St. Patrick’s Day) and stocked the shelves with books in French, German, Russian, and Swedish. In 1924, she hired the African-American writerNella Larsen to head the Children’s Room in Harlem, at the 135th Street branch (in her first year, Larsen bought over six
     hundred new books). In every one of the library’s branches, Moore abolished age restrictions. Down came the silence signs; up went framed prints of the work of children’s book illustrators. “Do not expect or demand perfect quiet,” she instructed her staff. “The education of children begins at the open shelves” was her watchword. In place of locked cabinets, she provided every library with a big black ledger; if you could sign your name in it,
     you could borrow a book. Moore