A Glimpse Into Childhood: Review of Susan Paul, The Memoir of James Jackson, the Attentive and Obedient Scholar, Who Died in Boston, October 31, 1833, Aged Six Years and Eleven Months, ed. Lois Brown.

Authors

Constance B. Schulz, University of South CarolinaFollow

Date of this Version

12-2001

Document Type

Article

Citation

Documentary Editing, Volume 23, Number 4, December 2001.

ISSN 2476-1796 (electronic); ISSN 2167-1451 (print)

Comments

2001 © the Association for Documentary Editing. Used by permission.

Abstract

Sources by or about the lives of young children are not widely or easily available; sources offering a glimpse into the life a young African American child are particularly scarce. For that reason alone, Lois Brown's rediscovery of this long-neglected Memoir and Harvard University Press's decision to publish it in a serious scholarly edition (in paper as well as cloth) is an important contribution to the literature. Brown describes the Memoir, originally published in Boston in 1835 by the white antislavery activist bookseller and printer James Loring, as a combination of "two distinctive nineteenth- century literary forms, the didactic spiritual narrative and the juvenile biography"