Home Scenes and Home Influence

Sketches of American households: the tempers, the economies, the small tyrannies, the effect of a parent's mood on a child's whole day. Arthur left school at thirteen, half-blind and apprenticed to a watchmaker, and became one of the most widely read Americans of his century; he wrote to improve his readers, and the improving is dated — but the observation of how families actually work is not. Fifty-six plates of nineteenth-century American children at play and at work, from Eastman Johnson and Winslow Homer, match the book's close study of young lives.