A reading primer, 1866

Reading without tears Or, a pleasant mode of learning to read, by the author of ‘Peep of day’ [Favell Lee Mortimer]. Part the first. London, 1866: Hatchard & Co and Simpkin, Marshall, & Co. Printed letterpress, 16 cm x 12.5 cm (collection Sue Walker).

One famous reader of this primer kept no fond memories of it. In his memoir My early life, Winston Churchill recalled that his nurse "produced a book called Reading without tears. It certainly did not justify its title in my case." Its author identifies English orthography, the unpredictable relationship between sounds and signs, speech and writing, as the cause of learners’ tears:
"The great difficulty in learning to read our own language arises from the anomalies in its spelling. Why is the e in bread short and in bean long? Why are the words dear and bear so different in their pronunciation? These irregularities occasion the child continual perplexity, and render it dependent upon memory."

Reading without tears pioneered phonics in the teaching of reading. It enjoins that "the consonants be called by their sounds, B' D' — not Be De". The book cultivates visual memory for letter signs: "G is like a monkey eating a cake", and "P is like a man with a pack on his back." It displays vowel-consonant and consonant-vowel combinations (ab, eb, ib, ob, and ba, be,bi, bo), and word rhyme patterns (ham, jam, ram). It stresses syllabic divisions within words by hyphenation (dai-ly, gai-ly, dai-sy). Minimal sound-sign contrasts are illustrated by elemental – and scary – sentence sequences such as ‘A pig bit a kid. Bill hit a pig. Bill hid a kid. Bill will kill a pig.’

The book was designed with enough care in the relationship between words and pictures, and in matching semantic boundaries to pages and double-page spreads, to justify its claim that "Great pains have been taken to render this book pleasing to children. To allure them to tread the path of knowledge, steps have been cut in the steep rock, and flowers have been planted by the wayside. Pictures are those flowers — careful arrangement and exact classification are those steps."

Favell Lee Mortimer (1802–1878, née Bevan) was an evangelical and prolific educational writer, born into a rich banking family. In her time best known for her first book – The peep of day, or, A series of the earliest religious instruction the infant mind is capable of receiving (1836) – she is remembered now for her uncharitable accounts of foreigners. Though not in the least a traveller, she nonetheless wrote Near home, or, the countries of Europe described (1849) in which her least offensive observations include those on Italy: ‘It is full of fine houses and palaces – empty and going to decay – but that is not the worst part – the people are ignorant and wicked. Their religion is the Roman Catholic. Their chief amusement is gambling’.

First published in 1857 and followed by several subsequent editions (our pictures are from 1866), Reading without tearswas still in print in 1924. There was also a cheap version: "An abridgement of this work has been published for the use of the poor. It is entitled, ‘Teaching Myself’, and costs only Fourpence. By means of that little book, poor cottagers may teach themselves to read with hardly any assistance."