ABSTRACT
How much happiness was Ernestine the means of bestowing through her good elocution, united to the happy circumstance that brought it to the knowledge of the King! (William McGuffey, “The Good Reader” [1879] 179)
At mid century, William McGuffey’s popular Fifth Eclectic Reader featured a story entitled “The Good Reader,” in which Ernestine, the young daughter of a royal gardener, outshines two boy pages in reading aloud a petition from a poor widow to the King of Prussia. Although the fact that Ernestine reads a petition testifi es to the cultural resonance of the form of the petition in the mid 19th century, what is particularly notable here is that Ernestine’s reading of the widow’s petition signifi es the proper engagement of her voice. While one of the boys reads the widow’s story with “a dismal monotony of voice” and the other with “a good share of self-conceit” and “great formality,” Ernestine reads “with so much feeling, and with an articulation so just, in tones so pure and distinct, that when she had fi nished, the King, into whose eyes the tears had started, exclaimed, ‘Oh! Now I understand what it is all about; but I might never have known, certainly I never should have felt, its meaning had I trusted to these young gentlemen,’” whom he dismisses for a year, advising them to spend the time in learning to read (177-78). Through “her good elocution,” Ernestine bestows much happiness, not only on the King, whose eyesight is weak, but also on the widow who sent the petition, and on her son, the two pages, her father, and the neighbors who often assembled at her father’s house to hear her read: Ernestine has “the satisfaction of aiding her father to rise in the world, so that he became the King’s chief gardener”; and “As for the two pages, she was indirectly the means of doing them good, also; for, ashamed of their bad reading, they commenced studying in earnest, till they overcame the faults that had offended the King. Both fi nally rose to distinction, one as a lawyer, and the other as a statesman; and they owed their advancement in life chiefl y to their good elocution” (179).
