The man responsible for writing the first fictional series for children, for introducing many of the key types and techniques of series books, for popularizing the genre virtually single-handedly, and for writing some of the earliest American juveniles deserving of the term "children's literature" was the multi-talented Jacob Abbott. Born 14 November 1803 in Hallowell, Maine, Abbot was the second of seven children (and the eldest son) of Jacob and Lydia Abbot. Abbot's parents were, according to his brother John, "the strictest class of Christians," who impressed upon their children the importance of a Christian life and who were "loved [by their children] with a fervor that could hardly be surpassed."
Jacob spent a happy childhood in Hallowell, where he and his brothers all attended Hallowell Academy. All five Abbot sons followed strikingly similar paths; as one biographer notes, "all five graduated from Bowdoin College, all studied theology at Andover, all became teachers and ministers; all became authors except the youngest [Samuel] who died in 1849."
Abbott graduated from Bowdoin in 1820. At some point during his years there, he supposedly added the second t to his surname, to avoid being "Jacob Abbot the 3rd" (although one source notes he did not actually begin signing his name with two ts until several years later).After graduation, he taught at Portland Academy -- where one of his pupils was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and studied theology at Andover. In 1824, he began as a tutor at Amherst College, and by 1825 or 1826, was Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy there. In 1826, he was also ordained, and, thereafter, in addition to teaching, occasionally gave sermons in the college chapel.
On May 18, 1828, Jacob Abbott and Harriet Vaughan married; the following year, he and his brother John founded Mt. Vernon School, a high school for girls, which opened in Boston in June 1829. One of his pupils was Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (who later wrote another of the earliest girls' series, Kitty Brown). The sixteen-year-old Stuart lived with the Abbott family while attending school and "published her first stories in a magazine edited by Abbott."
In 1834, Abbott left Mt. Vernon and moved to Roxbury, where he accepted the pastorate of a Congregational Church. The following year, he published what became the first of the Rollo series, The Little Scholar Learning to Talk. A Picture Book for Rollo (later reissued as Rollo Learning to Talk). The book originated when a book agent "unearthed an assortment of engravings which he thought could be used as [book] illustrations" and showed them to Abbott, who worked them into book form.
In 1836 or 1837, Abbott resigned his pastorate for health reasons and returned to Maine with his family, wintering in his father's house in Farmington. He bought land across the street and built a home, "Little Blue," so dubbed "because of a hillock upon it whimsically named [by Abbott] after the loftier Mt. Blue twenty miles to the north."
In 1848, Abbott took the first of many trips to Europe, later drawing on his travels for a new Rollo series, the ten-volume Rollo's Tour in Europe (1853-58), in which twelve-year-old Rollo, like Marco Paul, journeyed under the protection and supervision of a wise companion (in this case, his uncle, Mr. George). Abbott also remarried in November 1853, to Mary Woodbury. During this period, Jacob and his brother John wrote a series of "Illustrated Histories" (1848-54), biographies of historical figures such as Alexander the Great, Cleopatra, Ghengis Khan, and Elizabeth I, intended for adolescents. Jacob authored twenty-two of the thirty-two volumes in the series.