At present there is no evidence that these rhymes were printed in the colonies until long after this ninth edition was issued.  It is possible that the success attending a book printed in Boston shortly after the original “Country Rhimes” was written, made the colonial printers feel that their profit would be greater by devoting spare type and paper to the now famous “New England Primer.”  Moreover, it seems peculiarly in keeping with the cast of the New England mind of the eighteenth century that although Bunyan had attempted to combine play-things with religious teaching for the English children, for the little colonials the first combination was the elementary teaching and religious exercises found in the great “Puritan Primer.”  Each child was practically, if not verbally, told that

    “This little Catechism learned by heart (for so it ought)
    The Primer next commanded is for Children to be taught.”

The Primer, however, was not a product wholly of New England.  In sixteen hundred and eighty-five there had been printed in Boston by Green, “The Protestant Tutor for Children,” a primer, a mutilated copy of which is now owned by the American Antiquarian Society.  “This,” again to quote Mr. Ford, “was probably an abridged edition of a book bearing the same title, printed in London, with the expressed design of bringing up children in an aversion to Popery.”  In Protestant New England the author’s purpose naturally called forth profound approbation, and in “Green’s edition of the Tutor lay the germ of the great picture alphabet of our fore-fathers."[14-A] The author, Benjamin Harris, had immigrated to Boston for personal reasons, and coming in contact with the residents, saw the latent possibilities in “The Protestant Tutor.”  “To make it more salable,” writes Mr. Ford in “The New England Primer,” “the school-book character was increased, while to give it an even better chance of success by an appeal to local pride it was rechristened and came forth under the now famous title of ’The New England Primer.’"[14-B]

A careful examination of the titles contained in the first volume of Evans’s “American Bibliography” shows how exactly this infant’s primer represented the spirit of the times.  This chronological list of American imprints of the first one hundred years of the colonial press is largely a record in type of the religious activity of the country, and is impressive as a witness to the obedience of the press to the law of supply and demand.  With the Puritan appetite for a grim religion served in sermons upon every subject, ornamented and seasoned with supposedly apt Scriptural quotations, a demand was created for printed discourses to be read and inwardly digested at home.  This demand the printers supplied.  Amid such literary conditions the primer came as light food for infants’ minds, and as such was accepted by parents to impress religious ideas when teaching the alphabet.