Jacob Abbott, teacher, minister, and author, is often unfairly dismissed as a representative of the flock of didactic writers who responded to demands from the American Sunday School Union and the American Tract Society for pious fare for young children. Abbott, the oldest son and second child of Jacob and Betsey Abbot, is remembered primarily as the author of the Rollo series. He was born and spent his childhood with seven brothers and sisters in the Maine town of Hallowell, at the time a bustling Puritan town on the Kennebec River. Abbott's brother John, in his Reminiscences of Childhood, recounts the children's early Puritan upbringing, characterized by love and security, rather than by the harshness and rigidity often associated with Puritanism: "We children all knew that both father and mother would rather we would struggle all our days with adversity, and be Christians, than to have all the...