#childrens librarians
Bridget Quinn-Carey, CEO of Hartford Public Library, submitted today’s post.
The image above is part of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Library and Information Studies Collection.
In 1882, Caroline M. Hewins had been a librarian in Hartford for only six years when, through a fledgling group called the American Library Association, she sent a questionnaire to twenty-five libraries around the country and asked: “What are you doing to encourage a love of reading in boys and girls?” (Hog River Journal, Vol 5, No. 3, Summer 2007, “Hartford’s First Lady of the Library,” page 28.) A devoted reader since early childhood, Bostonian Hewins came to Hartford in 1876 to serve as the librarian of the Young Men’s Institute Library, then housed at the Wadsworth Atheneum and a precursor to what became the Hartford Public Library. She stayed with the library for the next fifty years, and oversaw its transformation from a small lending library that charged fees into the free Hartford Public Library, complete with its own flagship facility including a room for children.
She came from a wealthy and cultured home where books had been her magic carpet, and she wanted them to be available to children at every economic level. The Institute Library had not welcomed children, but Hewins quickly changed that, and gathered together books by Grimm, Andersen, Hawthorne, Thackeray and Dickens to furnish a corner for children. She used the power of the local press and professional library periodicals to encourage parents to bring their children to libraries, to read with them, and to choose quality books that would inspire the young imagination. The same year that she sent out the questionnaire, she published a nationally available bibliography of children’s books she loved and thought valuable. During the time when a paid subscription to the library was $3 a year to borrow one book at a time, Hewins worked with local Hartford schools to encourage subscription cards for the children, at pennies per card.
By the time the library became a free service in 1892, Hewins had already lowered the annual subscription fee to $1 and doubled the membership. Opinionated, iconoclastic and not a follower of rules others had established, she believed that children deserved better books than the formulaic and often violent Horatio Alger stories and weekly novels of the penny press. The Children’s Room she established had furniture suitable for different ages of children, pictures of flowers, lots of light and a resident dog the children had helped name. When she was not working at the library or writing for a national audience about the need for books and library settings appropriate to children, Hewins traveled. On her many trips, she wrote letters home to the children of Hartford, which the local newspapers published, and she shopped for books and dolls which she brought back to the library and shared with the children.
She collected books to be used in city classrooms, and made the library a place for book groups, theatrical skits, exhibits for parents and parties. By building connections between local school schools and the library, and between the library and the urban poor, as well as encouraging children reading for pleasure, Caroline Hewins anticipated by more than a century the common practices of today. She promoted library branches and believed that if the poor could not come to the books, the books should come to them.
Hartford Public Library’s Hartford History Center is home to her collection of more than 150 dolls, originals of some of the letters she wrote to Hartford children from Europe, correspondence and newspaper clippings, and the large collection of European and American nineteenth- and twentieth-century children’s books she acquired for the library. Scholar Leonard S. Marcus guest curated a popular Hartford History Center exhibition (December 2009 to April 2010) of fifty of Miss Hewins’s books, and is one of the nation’s leading authorities on children’s literature wrote in the accompanying catalog, “The fine collection…sampled throughout this exhibition bears witness to the adventurous spirit that powered her innovative life’s work.” (footnote page 1, catalog of exhibit.)
Today’s submission is by Christopher A. Brown, Special Collections Curator for the Children’s Literature Research Collection, Free Library of Philadelphia. The image of Mrs. Field is courtesy of the Children’s Literature Research Collection, Free Library of Philadelphia.
It’s impossible to think of the field of children’s librarianship without thinking of Carolyn Wicker Field. Mrs. Field (as she is still known at the Free Library of Philadelphia) was a driving force across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania as well nationally. In her 30-plus year career, Mrs. Field headed the Office of Work with Children and oversaw the creation of the Children’s Literature Research Collection, the second largest repository of children’s literature, original artwork, manuscripts, and ephemera in the nation. Field’s passion for the promotion of children’s literature was unquenchable; she served as the president of the Children’s Division of the American Library Association (now known as the Association for Library Service to Children) and the Pennsylvania Library Association. From 1958-1960, Mrs. Field was a member of the Newbery-Caldecott Medal Selection Committee and chaired the committee in 1958.
Carolyn Field published several books on children’s literature, including Subject Collections in Children’s Literature,a catalogue of the special collections of children’s literature housed in the United States, and Values in Selected Children’s Books of Fiction and Fantasy,an exploration and bibliography of over 700 fiction and fantasy titles, co-authored with Jacqueline Shachter Weiss. Field was also an editorial advisor for, That’s Me! That’s You! That’s Us! A Bibliography of Multicultural Books for Children.
Mrs. Field was honored with numerous awards throughout her lifetime. In 1963, she was awarded the Scholastic Library Publishing Award. In 1974, she was named a Distinguished Daughter of Pennsylvania, an award given to Pennsylvania women whose accomplishments have state or national importance. In 1994, Mrs. Field was the recipient of the Association for Library Service to Children’s Distinguished Service Award, and in 1996 she was the first recipient of the Catholic Library Association’s Mary A. Grant Award for outstanding volunteer service. She was honored by the Pennsylvania Library Association in 1984 when the Youth Services Division named an award in her honor. The Carolyn W. Field Award is presented annually to a Pennsylvania children’s author or illustrator.
Carolyn Wicker Field died from congestive heart failure in Philadelphia on July 24, 2010. A copy of her favorite quote by Walter de la Mare still hangs in the Children’s Literature Research Collection: “Only the rarest kind of best in anything can be good enough for the young.” It is a philosophy that is still firmly embraced at the Free Library of Philadelphia.
