The American Juvenile Pictorial Primer. New York: Edward Dunigan, 1843.
Up until about 1820, The New England Primer, with its religiously inspired alphabet, account of John Rogers’s burning at the stake, and religious dialogues, dominated the American primer market. By the 1840s, secular primers like The American Juvenile Primer featuring pictures and large type became quite popular. Many of Dunigan’s cheap picture books would be reissued by the fledgling publisher McLoughlin Bros. some fifteen years later. Apparently, the title page illustration is a redrawn version of the frontispiece for Catherine Parr Strickland Traill’s Fables from the Nursery (1839).
