Imagining Lizzie's Bookshelf

Book stack

Census records indicate that Elizabeth "Lizzie" Breckenridge was illiterate, but a 1903 newspaper article contradicts this. It states that Lizzie was literate and is more likely to be accurate than the census records. Several of her family members were literate and formally educated. She also lived with an academic family, in a home surrounded by books. There is no evidence that she received any formal education, but the newspaper article states that Professor Theophilus Wylie taught her. She was also knowledgeable about astronomy.

Lizzie owned a copy of Easy Star Lessons, by white astronomer Richard Proctor. Given her interest in the subject, perhaps she was aware of Benjamin Banneker, a Black astronomer and scientist who published a series of almanacs in 1792. Below is a short list of publications by 19th century Black authors, poets, and activists that may have found their way onto Lizzie's bookshelves. 

  1. Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia Almanack and Ephemeris, Benjamin Banneker, 1792
  2. The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Dubois, 1903
  3. Oak and Ivy, Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1893
  4. The Two Offers, Frances E. W. Harper, 1859
  5. Incidents of a Slave Girl, Harriety Jacobs, 1861
  6. The Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, Jarena Lee, 1849
  7. A Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince, Nancy Gardner Prince, 1850
  8. Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, Mary Seacole, 1857
  9. Why Sit Ye here and Die?, Maria Stewart, 1832
  10. Narrative of Sojourner Truth, Sojourner Truth, 1850 
  11. Poems on Various Subjects, Religious, and Moral, Philllis Wheatley, 1773
  12. America and Other Poems, James Monroe Whitfield, 1853

For information about these individuals and their works, see sources such as New York Public Library Schomburg Center's Black Literature Matters series and their research guide on African American Women Writers of the 19th Century.