Dr. Anderson was born in New York in seventeen hundred and seventy-five, and by seventeen hundred and ninety-three was employed by printers and publishers in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, and even Charleston to illustrate their books.  Like other engravers, he began by cutting in type-metal, or engraving upon copper.  In seventeen hundred and ninety-four, for Durell of New York, he undertook to make illustrations, probably for “The Looking Glass for the Mind.”  Beginning by copying Bewick’s pictures upon type-metal, when “about one-third done, Dr. Anderson felt satisfied he could do better on wood."[166-A] In his diary we find noted an instance of his perseverance in the midst of discouragement:  “Sept. 24.  This morning I was quite discouraged on seeing a crack in the wood.  Employed as usual at the Doctor’s, came home to dinner, glued the wood and began again with fresh hopes of producing a good wood engraving.”  September 26 found him “pretty well satisfied with the impression and so was Durell.”  In eighteen hundred he engraved all the pictures on wood for a new edition of the same book, and from this time he seems to have discontinued the use of type-metal, which he had employed in his earlier work as illustrator of the “Pilgrim’s Progress” issued by Hugh Gaine, and of “Tom Thumb’s Folio” printed by Brewer.  After eighteen hundred and twelve Anderson almost gave up engraving on copper also, and devoted himself to satisfying the great demand for his work on wood.  For Durell of New York, an extensive reprinter of English books, from toy-books to a folio edition of Josephus, he reproduced the English engravings, never making, according to Mr. Lossing, more than a frontispiece for the larger volumes.

Although Samuel Wood and Sons of New York also gave Dr. Anderson many orders for cuts for their various juvenile publications, he still found time to engrave for publishers of other cities.  We find his illustrations in the toy-books printed in Boston and Philadelphia; and for Sidney Babcock, a New Haven publisher of juvenile literature, he supplied many of the numerous woodcuts required.  The best of Anderson’s work as an engraver coincided with the years of Babcock’s very extensive business of issuing children’s books, between 1805 and 1840.  His cuts adorned the juvenile duodecimos that this printer’s widely extended trade demanded; and even as far south as Charleston, South Carolina, Babcock, like Isaiah Thomas, found it profitable to open a branch shop.

Anderson’s illustrations are the main features of most of Babcock’s little blue, pink, and yellow paper-covered books; especially of those printed in the early years of the nineteenth century.  We notice in them the changes in the dress of children, who no longer were clothed exactly in the semblance of their elders, but began to assume garments more appropriate to their ages, sports, and occupations.  Anderson also sometimes introduced into his pictures a negro coachman or nurse in the place of the footman or maid of the English tale he illustrated.