THERE IS DEATH IN THE POT - The University of Texas at Arlington

about slavery. 55 As one the earliest and most widely distributed American authors of
children’s abolitionist literature, Chandler was influential in encouraging children to
abstain from the products of slave labor.
Chandler most likely found inspiration in the work of early British abolitionist
writers for children. Eighteenth-century abolitionist writers exploited the expanding
market for juvenile fiction. 56 English Quaker Priscilla Wakefield, for example, authored
children’s books on natural history as well as travelogues and moral tales often blending
popular science writing with juvenile and didactic literature. Many of her works were
published by the Quaker publishing firm Harvey and Darton, a leading publisher of
children’s books. In her travelogue Excursions in North America (1806), Wakefield
recounted the adventures of two English travelers touring the eastern seaboard. While in
Charleston, South Carolina, the two men purchased the slave Sancho at auction and then
set him free. Sancho became their servant, quickly revealing himself an expert guide and
authority on local flora and fauna. 57 Wakefield’s Mental Improvement appeared in three
volumes between 1794 and 1797. In a series of conversations among Mr. and Mrs.
Harcourt and their four children, the father selects the subjects while the mother provides
moral and spiritual commentary on a variety of subjects. The tenth conversation focuses
55 Deborah De Rosa, Domestic Abolitionism and Juvenile Literature, 1830-1865 (New York:
Statute University of New York Press, Albany, 2003), 1. According to De Rosa, women took advantage of
the developing market for children’s literature and the cult of domesticity to discuss political issues such as
slavery. In turn women and children were politicized: “Through their publications, these authors politicize
women and children, transcend the ideology of separate spheres, and enter into the public discourse about
slavery to which they had limited access.”
148.
56 Ferguson, Subject Others, 133-134; Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery, 142-
57 Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery, 145-146.
115