Author: Lamb, Jonathan
Biography:
LAMB, Jonathan (1795-1851: ancestry.com)
A native of Vermont, Lamb was teaching at Burlington Academy and studying at the University of Vermont when he was recruited in 1828 by his contemporary Chauncey Goodrich, a writer and publisher. Goodrich published nearly all of Lamb's educational and recreational writings for children, starting with The Child's Primer, or First Book for Use in Primary Schools (1828) and ending with Gospel Sonnets (1830). In 1830 he also brought out a series of twelve small chapbooks by Lamb, generally a mixture of verse and prose but in some cases prose fiction exclusively. These included The Story of Little Linnaeus, The Lion and the Snake, A Present for a Good Boy, A Present for a Little Niece, and an abridged version of The Shipwreck by R. M. In three months, Goodrich claimed to have sold 20,000 copies of the Little Books, and some of them continued to be reprinted into the 1840s. Lamb graduated from UVM in 1829 and left Burlington in 1833 to become the first principal of an academy in Keeseville NY. He later settled in Ann Arbor MI, where he ran a bookshop. There are no reliable records of his parentage or marriage. He died in Michigan. (ancestry.com 25 Aug. 2019; Prudence Doherty, "J. Lamb's Little Books for Children," blog.uvm.edu [posted 31 Mar. 2019] 25 Aug. 2019) HJ