Anecdotes for Girls...

...Entertaining narratives and anecdotes, illustrative of principles and character.

Blind embossed cloth 18mo, 144pp + (24)page publisher's catalog at rear. Stated third thousand, original copyright 1847. Very Good+ with rubbing to extremities, boards exposed at corners with cover soil toward the heel and two small nibble punctures to the rear joint cloth. Very attractive with gilt-stamped spine, frontispiece and two in-text woodcut illustrations and ornamental initials throughout. Mild intermittent foxing and contemporary inscriptions to the ffep, else unmarked.

Newcomb includes a chapter on "Death-bed scenes," tells about the death of 10-year-old Ruth Maria Robbins and how important it is to always be prepared. "Let no one say, 'I will have my pleasure now, and attend to religion when I am a woman.' Perhaps you will not live to be a woman." (9) Seemingly aware, but not dismissive of the piety-through-death trope, he says, "Neither let any one get the impression, that all pious children die when they are young…children are no more likely to die because they are pious..."

Grotesque scene of a girl who dies on the ballroom floor: "With the smile upon her lip, and eyes beaming with excitement, death had seized her." In another warning about causation, he writes, "I do not pretend to say that God sends death into the ball-room to show his disapprobation of such scenes... though open and presumptuous scenes are often visibly punished." (110-111)

Other topics include gossiping, the moral threat of reading novels and the physical threat of reading them in bed by candlelight. "Learning to Work" advises a woman should know how to bake bread and play piano; "Female Influence" should be used to make men behave better. And, as always, obey your parents.