A One-of-a-Kind Trove Reveals What 19th-Century American Boyhood Was Really Like

In 2013, Pamela Russell was at an auction house in southern New Hampshire when, she writes, she “stumbled across a flimsy, old shoebox filled with tiny, carefully constructed, handwritten books.” Russell, who works as a curator and educator at Amherst College’s Mead Art Museum, didn’t get too close a look at the collection before she had to decide whether to bid on it, but she knew she wanted to own the books, “if only to be able to spend more time with them.” Russell won the auction and stayed up late looking through the collection, counting more than 60 volumes. This was the Nelson Brothers’ “library”: newspapers, seed catalogs, and storybooks, all authored by the boys. The books are illustrated in careful detail, filled with run-on sentences in all caps, and laid out in imitation of the reading material the brothers devoured in front of the kitchen cook-stove.

The Nelson Brothers archive is now kept in the Amherst College Special Collections, which has digitized the books. Last year, a history seminar at Amherst launched a website compiling transcriptions of many of the works, photographs of the Nelsons’ family life (taken by Elmer and Arthur), and Nelson-related material from the Goshen Historical Society. The project makes it easy to read all of the Nelsons’ surviving work, start to finish.

The Nelson archive is a unique artifact of 19th-century American childhood. “I really have not found anything like them, in terms of the fullness of a collection of material produced by not particularly affluent or highly educated kids,” Karen Sánchez-Eppler, a historian at Amherst (and the professor who led that seminar), told me over email. “Archives hold what has been thought worth collecting,” she has written. “On the most practical level, childhood and most especially child-made things have generally not been deemed significant in this way.” Of the juvenilia that does get saved, literary scholar Christine Alexander writes, examples that make it to historians’ eyes tend to have been made by “the upper- or middle-class child who had the privilege of education and whose early attempts at authorship are most likely to have survived.” (Good examples are juvenilia by the Brontës, or Jane Austen.) An existing set of 19th-century juvenilia produced by children like the Nelsons—farmers’ kids, who lived in a rural setting and didn’t go on to become famous authors—is rare. Reading the Nelsons’ books, we get a unique perspective on late-19th-century American childhood, learning how farm kids felt about farm work; how young, rural readers processed and remixed the books and magazines they read; and how boys absorbed the era’s ideas about manhood.