Recess! Essay - "The Childhood Reading of Theodore Roosevelt"
Tomorrow is the birthday of Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States and an avid outdoorsman and naturalist. In an early chapter of his 1913 autobiography he talks about his boyhood and youth, including the books he read as a child.
His parents offered him a wide choice of reading material and made very little effort to compel him to read certain books. They gave him the opportunity to read books that they thought he should read, but if he didn't like them, he was then given other books that he did like. His favorite books were the adventure tales of Robert Ballantyne, Frederick Marryat, and Mayne Reid. These novels were the first to portray boys enjoying real adventures by themselves, in exotic places, away from home and free from parental restraints. The boys were manly, courageous, honest, dutiful, and resourceful and survived daunting physical challenges.
It was the work of Mayne Reid that truly inspired the future outdoorsman. Reid wrote adventure novels, but he also wrote works of natural history and his stories, according to one critic, "usually opened with lengthy descriptions of the terrain in which the events would take place. He often paused in the narrative for digressions about flora and fauna." (Oxford Companion to Children's Literature, p. 446) "I was too young to understand much of Mayne Reid," Roosevelt explains in his autobiography, "excepting the adventure part and the natural history part -- these enthralled me."
It was an experience of his own that solidified his interest in both the adventurous life and the natural world. One day, young Roosevelt walked up Broadway, and as he passed the market where he occasionally was sent before breakfast to get strawberries, he suddenly saw a dead seal laid out on a slab of wood. "That seal," he wrote, "filled me with every possible feeling of romance and adventure."
"Where was it killed?" he asked.
"In the harbor," was the response.
He thought of Mayne Reid's books, and felt that this seal brought all these adventures in realistic fashion before him. He was fascinated with the seal and as long as it remained in the market, he went back to it every day. He measured it with a folding pocket ruler, and carefully made a detailed record of the utterly useless measurements. He began to write a natural history of his own, all on the strength of that seal. Somehow, he acquired the seal's skull, and with two of his cousins started what they ambitiously called the "Roosevelt Museum of Natural History."
Childhood reading can influence and inspire us as adults in the choices we make and the interests we pursue as vocation or avocation. In the literature of Roosevelt's childhood, we find foreshadowed the passions of his adult life; a life of adventure and a deep love of the natural world, inspired by the writers of boys adventure stories and solidified by an adventure of his own on the streets of New York City.
Sources: Roosevelt, Theodore. Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography; New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916. Chapter 1, "Boyhood and Youth."
Carpenter, Humphrey and Mari Prichard. The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1984. Aired October 27, 1999 on Classic 89, WUFT-FM
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For further information contact Rita Smith, Curator of the Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature.
