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Willson, Marcius and N[orman]. A[llison]. Calkins.

School and Family Charts. Accompanied by a Manual of Object Lessons. [Nos. IX and X.]

New York: Harper Brothers, 1862. Two charts, with hand-colored wood engravings and letterpress, mounted on opposite sides of a single sheet of paperboard, 31” x 23”. CONDITION: No. IX: Good, image lightly worn, dampstain at lower left, minor marginal loss at lower right. No. X: Good, edges worn with only small losses to margins; one line of text at upper margin partially obscured by brown paper edging.

Exceptionally rare first editions of two colorful charts by the controversial entrepreneurial pedagogue Marcius Willson, published during the height of America’s common school movement.

The first of these two charts published by Marcius Willson and Norman Allison Calkins shows the new and distinctly American “Spencerian style of letters” (which President Garfield called “the pride of our country”). The second illustrates three techniques of drawing—“elementary, geometrical, and perspective.” Part of an ambitious series of observation-based object lessons, the charts appeared on the heels of Calkins’s hugely successful Primary Object Lessons for a Graduated Course of Development (1861) and were accompanied by Willson’s Manual of Information and Suggestions for Object lessons, in a course of Elementary Instruction. Adapted to the Use of the School and Family Charts, and Other Aids in Teaching (1862). These charts are mounted back to back, as they would have been sold. A complete set of twenty two mounted charts cost nine dollars, and a portfolio set, “admirably adapted…to family use,” cost eleven dollars (Manual, p. 336).

Willson’s discussion of Chart IX in his Manual covers the basic steps of learning to recognize and write letter forms and words, as well as the correct bodily posture and desk arrangement for writing lessons: “the body should be kept erect,” he stresses, with the desk to the right, rather than slumped forward, with the desk in front, since this posture contracts the lungs, weakens the chest, and is “the forerunner of consumption” (Manual, p. 51). The phases of drawing represented by Chart X are, according to Willson, best developed with reference to visuals available on other charts, so that students work across multiple charts in different ways over the course of their education.

Marcius Willson (1813–1905) was a “pedagogue turned entrepreneur” who, after leaving classroom teaching, delved into Pestalozzian object-based pedagogy and supported himself from “a prodigious output of books, inventions, and educational services for almost 60 years” (Knupfer, p. 3). He gained a controversial spotlight early on by conducting an 1840s pamphlet war about history education with Emma Willard, but his career was ultimately rooted in school readers. He promoted the view that the process of learning to read should be more than “the mere calling of words in an elocutionary manner,” but rather should awaken students’ curiosity and develop their thought on a range of subjects (Willson, p. 22). Willson’s methods were condemned as superficial, wrong, and, according to California’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, “radically vicious” (Knupfer, p. 13). Despite heavy resistance, Willson continued not only to produce books, but also to advertise and defend them himself—unusual in a period of increasing publisher-control. His texts were translated in Japan and influenced Meiji educational reform. These charts are the product of Willson and Calkins’s 1861 partnership to create a comprehensive object-oriented plan for the first ten years of elementary education.

Like Willson, Norman Allison Calkins (1822–1895) began as a school teacher, but pursued a much less commercial career. He went on to become a principal and a county superintendent of schools before taking on the editorship of the New York City magazine the Student and organizing teachers’ institutes throughout the mid-Atlantic. Calkins was also inspired by Pestalozzi, believing that education should be based in actual observation and that reading went hand in hand with wider learning. He was elected assistant superintendent of schools in New York City in 1862 and served in the position until his death. He was also an active member of the National Education Association. His Primary Object Lessons was popular throughout Europe and South America, as well as in the United States.

Surviving examples of the Willson and Calkins charts are exceptionally rare. The only examples of any of them recorded in OCLC are at USC, which holds charts number 15 to 22 of the 1862 edition. The Library of Congress has a set of an 1890 edition, most if not all of them evidently submitted for copyright purposes at the time of publication.

REFERENCES: Knupfer, Peter B. “Learning to read while reading to learn: Marcius Willson’s basal readers, science education, and object teaching, 1860–1890,” Paedagogica Historica (2021); Willson, Marcius. A Manual of Information and Suggestions for Object lessons, in a course of Elementary Instruction. Adapted to the Use of the School and Family Charts, and Other Aids in Teaching (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1862).

Item #7420

Price: $1,250.00