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Cadernos de História da Educação

versión On-line ISSN 1982-7806

Cad. Hist. Educ. vol.21  Uberlândia  2022  Epub 13-Sep-2022

https://doi.org/10.14393/che-v21-2022-117 

Dossier 4 - Transnational circulation of reading books and pedagogical manuals (between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century)

Local reading books and civility manuals as material culture of Maranhão’s schools to teach reading and becoming1

Samuel Luis Velázquez Castellanos1 
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0849-348X; lattes: 5639830901440817

1Universidade Federal do Maranhão (Brasil). samuel.velazquez@ufma.br


Abstract

In this article, points of contact between reading books by authors from Maranhão and non-national civility manuals are analyzed, in order to broaden these concepts in both directions, since themes supported by the control and enforcement strategies allowed by law, they derive from conceptual armor connected to the web of meanings constructed by individuals/ institutions at specific times. The analysis of O livro do Povo by Antonio Marques Rodrigues and Código de Bom Tom by J. I. Rouquette is based, as a source and object, in the light of the theoretical-methodological assumptions of cultural history. It is concluded that the reading books of authors from Maranhão can be appreciated as prescription manuals, as they not only cohabit and compete for school consumption, but also created strategies similar to non-national production, marking singularities of the local culture without losing sight of control of habits, conducts and behaviors in the name of a specific morality.

Keywords: Local readings books; Civility manuals; Maranhão Empire

Resumo

Neste artigo analisam-se pontos de contatos entre livros de leitura de autores maranhenses e manuais de civilidade não nacionais, no intuito de se alargar estes conceitos em ambas as direções, já que temas sustentados no controle e nas estratégias de imposição permitidos em lei derivam de armaduras conceituais conectadas à teia de significados construída por indivíduos/instituições em tempos específicos. Fundamenta-se a análise d’O livro do Povo de Antonio Marques Rodrigues e do Código de Bom Tom de J. I. Rouquette como fonte e objeto à luz dos pressupostos teórico-metodológicos da história cultural. Conclui-se que os livros de leitura de autores maranhenses podem ser apreciados como manuais de prescrições, visto que não só coabitam e concorrem pelo consumo escolar; como também criaram estratégias semelhantes à produção não nacional, marcando singularidades da cultura local sem perder de vista o controle de hábitos, condutas e comportamentos em nome de uma moralidade específica.

Palavras-chave: Livros de leitura locais; Manuais de civilidade; Maranhão Império

Resumen

En este artículo, se analisan puntos de contactos entre libros de lectura de autores maranhenses y manuales de civilidad no nacionales, objetivando alargar estes conceptos en ambas direcciones, ya que temas sustentados en el control y en estratégias de imposición permitidos en lei derivan de armaduras conceptuales conectadas al tejido de significados contruido por individuos/instituciones en tiempos específicos. Se fundamenta el análisis de O Livro del Povo de Antonio Marques Rodrigues y del Código de Bom Tom de J. I. Rouquette como fuente y objeto a la luz de las directrices de la Historia Cultural. Concluimos que los libros de lectura de autores maranhenses, pueden ser apreciados como manuales de prescripciones, visto que no sólo cohabitan y concorren por el consumo escolar; como también crean estratégias semejantes a la producción no nacional, al marcar singularidades de la cultura local sin perder de vista el control de hábitos, conductas y comportamientos en nombre de una moral específica.

Palabras-clave: Libros de lectura locales; Manuales de civilidad; Maranhão Imperio

Introduction

Civility manuals, considered polysemic in their uses, plural in their composition, and diversified according to their nature and function, are hard to classify on a conventional basis. While at the same time such books vulgarize prescriptions about multiple aspects of life in society, they present defined pedagogical objectives and determinations that may be utilized in singular spaces, and they also promote specific knowledge which guides positions, relations, and trajectories. Nor entirely practical, nor just literary, the treaties of conducts were closely connected with the market of schoolbooks, specifically in the 19th and 20th centuries in Brazil; dissemination that in the educational environments accurately shows subtleties and agilities in a brief (yet, profound!) way in the transparency to convey norms, behaviors, and values, in the clarity of ideas, in the consistent writing, in involving discursive (sometimes even visual) images or performances configured to evoke perspectives, as Geertz (1989) puts it.

Simple narratives which, by means of maps and itineraries to consult, materialized in indexes organized by topics, numbered pages, illustrative drawings, and uplifting examples, intend to take root in a culture of gestures and actions, considered here as elements that help “understand cultural practices that contributed to the making of the modern individual” (GOMES, 2004, p.11), inasmuch as the relationship established is not “[...] of dependence on the mental structures regarding their material determinations [since] the very representations of the social world are the components of the social reality” (CHARTIER, 1992, p. 9). Reading books or the civility literature for children which should be conceived and devised with vocabulary familiar to the boys avoiding adaptations, with short phrases and periods which ensured the acknowledgment/comprehension of the lesson and which focused on ideas of civility and moral effect, according to Abílio Cesar Borges (Baron of Macaúba); contrasting practices which must be understood “[...] as competitions, that their differences are organized by strategies of differentiation or imitation, and that the different uses of same cultural assets are rooted in the stable predispositions particular to each group” (CHARTIER, 1992, p. 236).

Civility literature has caused changes in the body by introducing habits and disciplinary regimens which belong to a civilizing process (ELIAS, 1994), translated into the embodiment of a slow and subtle learning expressed in the form of cultural capital (BOURDIEU, 2007). The use of the body and its attributes, the skills, the values, and the attitudes reproduce class relations or social/cultural cleavages disseminated in a given space-time in which everyone learns the bodily, moral and societal conducts suitable to the different situations of life, to the social status of belonging and to the surrounding cultural spectrum, leading the body, the forms of acting, of thinking, and of taking stands to gain symbolic value. Processes that seem clear due to the protocols used in the reading books or in the manuals of conducts which intended to mold in order to absorb culture; however, in it is precisely such “apparent and evident” that certainties must be ‘de-stabilized’ as advocated by Foucault (2019) by “destroying the verbal and mental automatisms [making] problematic what has the appearance of obvious in the social world” (CHARTIER, 2011, p. 21) and identify the differentiated interests and the power relations that converge to construct norms, rules, and statutes, as well as to question as much as possible the borders, the divisions, the cut-outs considered natural when, in the long run, they are always constructions of specific groups with singular interests of imposition (CHARTIER, 2011).

In this sense, prescription-providing works as systems of collective representation are part of the power relations established in each society which aim at a certain type of integration and differentiation. Presenting themselves as discourses, they disseminate ways of being, of feeling, and of acting whose purpose is to modify the ideological grounds impregnated in the mentalities, “[...] thanks to the exercise of certain practices, replacing it with a social representation according to the ideals of civility [;] a model instrumented from instruction and, supposedly, secular” (MIRANDA OJEDA, 2007, p. 132). Therefore, the urbanity manuals (as they have been identified in the Spanish territory)2 are no more than a power-knowledge of a historical reality with strong incidence on the body and on the process of subjectivation which establishes a certain order in the society as a whole, being an integral part of power mechanisms that are inscribed in the disciplining power in modernity, making the subject the desirable prey; target used to demarcate the disciplinary power within and outside the educational institutions, through the external road (surveillance) and the internal route (self-control). Sensibilities and behaviors which have continuously been modified since the 19th century by two fundamental facts: “the violence monopolized by the State, which forces the control of pulses thus pacifying the social; and the narrowing of the individual relationships which necessarily leads to a stricter control of the emotions and affections” (ELIAS, 2001, p. 19).

Civility manuals, treaties of conduct, civility literature, books prescribing behaviors, urbanity books, manuels de civilité, classroom books or textbooks among other names, may be identified in the bibliography being studied, as well as in the documental records; although, in the 1800´s newspaper in Maranhão utilized as sources, notices of different types such as sales advertisements, accusations of circulation, management of private lessons, teaching programs, and promotions of production/editing do not indicate the kind of works nor identify them as such. This fact seems to point out how familiar the printing companies were with this type of texts, a seemingly intimacy of the public with these works and how often the institutions utilized these materials, since civility manuals from Portugal, Spain, and France (both originals and translations) cohabited and competed with reading books produced by Maranhão´s authors in the local press; signs that show the transnationality of pedagogical practices and artifacts.

According to that logic, our problems is substantiated in assessing to what extent the circulation of civility manuals in 1800´s Maranhão contributed to produce reading books from authors in the province and to what extent the nature of these treaties of conduct and the spaces of circulation influenced the educational environments? Identifying points of contact between the prescriptive literature and the reading books by local authors, according to the conceptions used, the contents proposed and the rules imposed, allows us to understand the treatment suggested by the mentors to the moralizing and disciplining rules addressed which are upheld in codes of conduct proposed and imposed; analysis, comparison, and interpretation of Código do Bom tom [code of good form (1845, 1867, 1875, 1876)] by José Inácio Roquete and O Livro do Povo [the people´s book (1861, 1865, 1881)], by Antônio Marques Rodrigues, which in the light of the theoretical-methodological assumptions of Cultura History allows to envisage them as both object and source.

Reading books or civility manuals? This is the question

In order to talk about classroom books as part of the school culture or about civility manuals as tools to consolidate orientations of personal, moral, and social conduct intended for practices of sociability, I make use of reading books written by authors from Maranhão and utilized in the local instruction in the 1800´s, through which an attempt is made to direct in schooled and systematic fashion “the ways of being” and “the ways of doing” supported by the self-control of oneself in relation to the others, and attempt is also made to mediate the relationship established in the school´s grammar between social behavior and the expression of emotions. Civility rules and ways of acting turned into habits by intensifying everyday practices which, in theory, become natural. Education of the spirit, teaching literacy and literature, and indication of the social obligations, by means of civility rules considered to be part of the philosophy and the most modest step in educating a child, which according to Erasmus, operate to communicate the three previous stages already under development (HUIZINGA, 1970).

In this respect, instilling civilized forms of personal and moral conduct by means of reading books and parade the own marks of development as a schooled knowledge enables to broaden the traditional concept of civility manual as a reading prescribed and substantiated on practice, to present it as classroom book, which although based on a didactic-pedagogical support regarding its production, organization, and use, and be inscribed in a network of governmental precepts of all kinds, even so, through it rules of conduct are defined to control and refrain feelings and sensations, at the same time it invests in the making of new sensibilities considered indispensable as signs of civility, which are always enunciated as “ways one should be”. Civility that, if for Chartier (2004) “aims to transform the disciplines and reprimands it lists and unifies in same category, into embodied, regulating, automatic and non-expressed schemes of conduct” (p.48), being defined in the 19th century XIX “[...] as the set of rules that make the relationships among men agreeable and easy” (p. 88); for Miranda Ojeda (2007) it is “[...] a total vision of man, since the details about the prevailing moral regimen moral are warned in their individual assumptions and social values, highlighted in the physical appearance, in the movements, and in the behavior” (p. 150). “In a word, it is the prime quality that reveals all other qualities, applying to the well-being, to the satisfaction of all” (ROQUETTE, 1875, p. 17).

In the case of the Province of Maranhão, textbooks that circulated satisfied the division by Bittencourt (2008, p. 43): the books of the disciplines that attempted to meet the several levels of the children´s learning, including the catechism for moral and religious education, and the reading books aimed at instrumentalizing students with the fundamentals of reading, either for entertainment, or to acquire knowledge. The edition of these works, in order to serve the growing educational market, provided a series a of investments from Bralian authors, including from Maranhão, in writing works intended for the instruction of the first letters and secondary school.

The reading books searched among the sources include, in addition to the access to the 1st, 4th, and 9th edition of O Livro do Povo, written by Antônio Marques Rodrigues (1861, 1865, 1881), the latter being printed in the printing company owned by Frias3; two works by César Augusto Marques also produced by Frias (on rua da Palma, nº. 7) and sold at the Magalhães´ Livraria Popular (popular bookstore) and at the Botica Imperial (respectively) appear to have been adopted in the schools of first letters in the entire Province of Maranhão: Almanaque das Lembranças Brasileiras [almanac of Brazilian memories (1862)] and Aos Meus Meninos [to my boys (1874)]. In this regard, other copies of this genre were identified, including: Seleta Nacional [national selection (1873)] by R. Alves Fonseca; Seleta escolar [school selection (1886)] by J. S. Castello Branco; Livro de Nina [Nina´s book (1884)] by Epomina d’Oliveira Condurú Serra, and Beleza da Literatura latina [beauty of the Latin literature (1885)] by Dr. João Henrique Vieira da Silva (CASTELLANOS, 2017).

These reading books, according to the classification of authors/typographers and the records that legitimate their assessment in the procedures of approval, adoption, and veto in the legal devices were analyzed and compared with the civility books announced in the local press, originally from Portugal, Spain, and France (original versions and translations) which clearly indicate by different ways a cultural consumption in the schooled and/or non-schooled environment, as an attempt to bring closer the points of contacts and operationalize an enlargement in the conceptualization of the works of behavior prescription. That is a historiographic operation that authorizes us to acknowledge the reading books from Maranhão´s authors in the local schooling as civility manuals which materialize in school knowledge and to understand the forms of sociability substantiated and induced by these works; parallel drawn for the scope of this article, between the reading book by Antonio Marques Rodrigues, O livro do Povo, and civility manual by Rouquete, Código do Bom tom (code of good form), taking into account several editions.

In this perspective, understanding the practices either as deciphering texts, images, and meanings, or as handling books or comprehension of the meaning of such practices, models both the representations and the experiences of the subjects and take place along the school rituals and the formation rituals (CHARTIER, 1988). Similar position is taken by Bourdieu (2007), considering it as part of a conjunctive and generating scenario that may kick off a process of structural transformation of a society, of a school, or of a space of sociability. Thus, the use of the practice to comprehend the role played by the reading book approved and indicated in the educational spaces and their performance through texts used as modeler of behaviors that stimulate the self-control of pulses in specific contexts, indicate intended modellings of representations and experiences as strategies of imposition (CERTEAU, 1995).

In the first sense it is possible, drawing from a given ritual associated with the school (of any nature) implicit in the texts, with the devices prescribed in the forms of reading and/or with the processes of approval, indication, distribution, and veto driven by the governmental management, to realize how the representation about teaching literacy, about the trainee reader´s development and, even about the prescriptions and rule, are impressed in the attitudes and decision-making by the subjects that conceive, decide, and establish rituals and practices of legal actions, but no less imposed and created; non-natural practices of differentiation, historically constructed, that aim at the subjectivation of the individual through laws, norms and regulations emanating from a story or a tale, from a poem or from a learning exercise found in the reading books as manuals of codes that bring in their genesis divisions, classifications, and forms of becoming. Literary tropes that make the world children unaware of familiar and it is precisely mediated by metaphors, metonymies, synecdoches, and ironies expressed in the reading books as manuals of prescriptions which try to induce regulated conducts and orderly behaviors, either based on the plots utilized in the texts (romantic, tragic, comic, or satirical), or by means of possible modes of the argument (formalist, mechanist, organicist, and contextualistic), or by modes of ideological implication.

In this regard, it is necessary that such objective divisions be comprehended within the historical dynamics that establish them, inasmuch as it must be understood that the struggles associated with the classifications are “[...] as real as the struggles of classes (as if they could be separated!) and the representations addressed in the social world, in addition to produce it, end up being its expression” (CHARTIER, 2011, p. 8). Therefore, questioning how the books by Maranhão´s authors conceived as urbanity manuals enabled changes in the forms of sociability, guided new thinking, and re-signified the relations with power is an interrogation that leads us to see in this civility literature objects that are not stable or natural, but rather works given to be known by means of discourses; artifacts considered here as discursive objects, which clearly show cultural relations that are expressed in the field of cultural practice and cultural production, based on the differences in the appropriation and in the uses of the cultural forms that express the existence of struggles and conflicts, requiring an analysis “[...] that is sensitive to the inequalities in the appropriations of materials or common practices” (CHARTIER, 1992, p. 17).

According to Marques Rodrigues, one of the most urgent measures to improve Maranhão´s instruction would be the uniformity of reading books and the access to them by all children and youths from the public and private schools. With that interest, he writes O Livro do Povo which becomes the greatest print run and distribution of a work throughout the history of Imperial Maranhão, as it circulated not only in several provinces, as well as in the Neutral City and in Portugal; artifacts of school material culture that turn to be transnational substantiated in recurrent interchanges between both sides of the Atlantic or among provinces on national soil. For the author, the book had the purpose of “[...] disseminating the history of the Savior of the World, his miracles, his doctrine, and his best precepts of economy and order” (RODRIGUES, 1881, p. 3). For such, its vast production and circulation should make it easier to get to the families, to teachers, to school principals, and to students of all sorts of economic level. In less than two years, the two first editions sold out with 10,000 copies each; a work that had had the canonic approval of the bishop of Maranhão, his excellency Luiz and of the Archbishop of Bahia, his excellency Manoel, certifying in the content the precepts of morality and good manners proclaimed by the Catholic church.

Figure 1 O Livro do Povo (the people´s book), 4th ed. of 1865 and 9th ed. of 1881 

In an office’s letter sent on November 2, 1864, Antônio Marques Rodrigues (Public Instruction Inspector) expressed to the President of the Province, Ambrosio Leitão da Cunha, the wish of providing the public schools, in 1865, 1,000 brochure copies of the work “already adopted in the schools of this and other provinces [and I must] declare to Your Excellency that [...] 3,200 copies have already been distributed free of charge by the [Maranhão´s] school, which, added to 1,000 [offered] now, make up a total of 4,200”4. According to Hallewell (2005), it seems that “in whole [...] 30,000 to 40,000 copies were printed, and the author donated over 5,000 to schools” (HALEWELL, 2005, p. 173), including: the House of Artifice Apprentices5, Saint Therese´s Nursing Home6, the schools of first letters and other institutions from the countryside and the from the capital, thus becoming the major reference for reading and religious instruction directed at the boys and girls from Maranhão and other localities.

In the first pages, the author dedicates the work to José Lustosa Paranaguá (President of the Province of Maranhão) in 1859, due to his initiative of creating the Agricultural School of Cutim with the purpose of training qualified workforce to implement the modern methods utilized in cropping7. He reveals the religious grounds he used to write the text, which is underpinned on História Sagrada (sacred history), by father I. J. Roquette and on the texts by Royaumont and by Brispot. The work is divided in two parts: the first one addresses the “Life of Jesus Christ” presented in five chapters, from his birth up to his ascension; the second deals with “Assorted Topics”, without ever losing the focus on the religious, moral and civility principles, emphasizing the importance of labor for the growth of Brazin and man´s dignity.

The second part addresses the description of animals, dividing them into genus and species, explaining their origins and stressing their main characteristics and imagens. The strategies of keeping the reader attentive are intercalated with several tales of moralizing nature such as O Bom Homem Ricardo (Ricardo, the good man) which seeks to show differences betwen and among people: one who is hardworking and thoughtful with money; the other idle and wasteful, and the author says in the tale that “laziness causes care, and idleness unnecessarily, [yields] place to great sorrows. Labor, on the contrary, [brings] conveniences, abondance, and considerations; [against] pleasures (which run] after the one who escapes from them” (RODRIGUES, 1881, p. 178). In O Professor Primário (the primary teacher), the only tale in the entire work addressing instruction more directly, seeks to show the importance of this profession “as one of the holiest ones” because it has the duty of instilling the most profound religious and moral ideas in the students and to extending over the lifetime.

In Moral Prática (moral practice) he discusses friendship and love as one of the greatest resources God has given men, and paternal and maternal love is the most important; filial and fraternal love “the most perfect and sublime” one. Next, he debates justice, courage, goodness and other “sentiments that aggrandize man”. The item called “Mottos and Sayings” a series of “enlightening” phrases are presented, such as: “The fear of God is the principle of wisdom; do not spend today what you may need tomorrow” (RODRIGUES, 1881, p. 246). About Higiene (hygiene) a text is provided with the role of teaching boys and girls to take care of their body and mind, of clothing and cleanness, of food and drink. The final parts seek to address the stars and ends by exposing geographic aspects and the political division of Brazil. Therefore, although the work focuses on the religious and moral principles, it displays other contents that were part of the primary instruction, which allowed to apprehend a great deal of knowledge mediated by new practices in a single book, including: learning to read and learning from reading, attempting to absorb the precepts of the Catholic faith, and assess the personal and social habits based on morality and civility.

Analyzing the purposes implicit in the contents recorded in this reading book, a parallel can be drawn with the numerous manuals of civility and etiquette which, by the end of the 19th century in Brazil, were edited and disseminated. Books transcribing behaviors that were used by the Brazilian agrarian elite who were migrating to the cities insofar as a new bourgeoise occupied the spaces. Código do Bom tom published in 1845 and written by Portuguese canon José Inácio Roquete is probably the oldest and the most famous. In its 6th edition in 1900, he attempted to normalize the rituals of Imperial Brazil and became a must-read to whoever wished to be successful in society; it was relaunched in 19988, when it introduces (inspired by French manuals) behavior rules for parties, events in society and in the arts of good living, according to Cunha (1999); but the author does not specifiy whether the mentioned relaunch corresponds to this work, regardless of the number of editions or if she is referring, specifically, to that 6th edition published in the early 20th century, inasmuch as an analysis of different editions of the same work may expand our horizon of expectancies, when it points to different conceptions of the printed material and several formulas of edition (various devices in use that guide the sense and the visuality of the texts), as well as for the textual typology of the record in its several tensions and configurations (MORTATTI, 2010).

Figure 2 Code of Good Form, 4th ed., 1867 

Among the urbanity or behavioral treaties coming from Spain and Portugal that cohabited and competed with reading books from local authors (i.e., from Maranhão) considered here as civility manuals, some copies are advertised and registered in the 1800´s press, including: Código do Bom Tom.

Chart 1 Civility or urbanity manuals recorded in the local press. 

TITLES AUTHOR DATE PURPOSE
Compêndio de civilidade e Urbanidade Cristã
(Compendium of civility and Christian urbanity)
Unknown 1839 General
Catecismo de urbanidad civil y Cristiana
(Catechism of civil and Christian urbanity)
Unknown 1845 To be used in schools
Código do Bom tom
(Code of good form)

La cortesanía. Nuevo manual práctico de urbanidade
(Courtesy, new practical manual of urbanity)

Preceitos de civilidade
(Precepts of civility)

Manual abreviado de civilidade
(Abridged civility manual)

La educación social: tratado completo de cortesanía
(Social education: complete treaty of courtesy)
J. I. Roquette

D.V.J.B.

Pereira J. F.

M.B.C

D. Juan Cortada.
1845

1850

1856

1862

1868
-

To be used in schools

Primary instruction schools

General

General
Compêndio de civilidade ou regras de educação civil, moral e religiosa, aprovado pelo Conselho Superior de Instrução Pública (p. 5)
(Compendium of civility or rules of civil, moral and religious education, approved by the Superior Council of Public Instruction)
Joaquim Lopes Carreira de Mello 1878 Elementary and middle school
Novo manual de civilidade ou regras necessárias para qualquer pessoa poder frequentar a boa sociedade
(New civility manual or rules anyone needs to attend good society)
B.N. 1883 General
Civilidade (civility)

António Maria Baptista

1886

General and schools
Catecismo de moral, virtud y urbanidad. Biblioteca de la juventude
(Moral catechism, virtue, and urbanity. The youth library)
Unknown 1885 To be used in schools
Código de civilidade e costumes de bom tom
(Civility code and customs of good form)
Not indicated 1894 General
Compêndio elementar de civilidade
(Elementary compendium of civility)
J. M. B. Ferreira 1897 General
A civilidade (civility) José Agostinho Not indicated [1899] General and Schools

Reviewing, for example, the 1845 edition of Código do Bom Tom, published by the printing company Rignoux (rua Monsieur-le-Prince (29 bis) and sold at house of J. P. Aillaud (quai Voltaire, nº 11) - both addresses located in Paris, one finds that the author is presented as a Literature teacher at College Stanislao, with a reference to his status of Franciscan priest; in turn, in the 1867 edition, published in the same city by Tipografia Portuguesa (printing company) of Simão Raçon e Companhia (at rua D’erfurth, nº 1) and sold by “booksellers of their Majesties the Emperor of Brazil and the King of Portugal”: J. P. Aillaud, Guillard, and Cª (residents at rua Saint-André-des-Arts, nº 47), Roquette appears mentioned in the book cover not only as Canon of the Patriarchal See and teacher of sacred eloquence at the Seminar of Santarem, but also as Knight of orders Our Lady of the Conception in Portugal and of the Rose in the Imperium of Brazil, in addition to being corresponding member of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Lisbon (see figure 2). In other words, looking carefully at these two publications and the period of 22 years between them, some inferences can be made.

First of all, the differences in quality regarding the conception and manufacture of each copy contrast in the type of paper used, in the style of the cover presentations, in how subjects are organized, in the mention of being a “new edition, corrected and considerably expanded”, in the layout of text and images according to the topics, as well as in the details in the author´s curriculum, which in the 1845 edition is small, but the 1867 edition highlights his status as teacher and as a honorable and distinguished man in the Portuguese spaces of sociability. These signs, once inter-related, seem to be aimed at different readers, taking into account the social and cultural cleavages and the groups such readers belong to, for example, the very division of professions, as warns Bourdieu (2011, p. 23) when he appreciate them as a historical construction and, therefore, prefers to “[...] consider the professional classifications as objects of analysis, instead of using them without hesitation or reflection”; as also these signs indicate the types of educational institutions, either public or private, either religious or secular, these mediums had been directed at according to their nature and function, insofar the indication of an increase publication, the wealth of details on the book's face sheet, as its new restoration depends on new times, conceptions, and practices, seem to suggest the need to insinuate whom they were aimed at, the intentions they had been written/edited for and why such indication is made.

This “new edition”, which is actually the fourth edition, would bring a great deal of new stuff, since according to J. I. Roquette in his warning of November 1, 1866,

we shall call it New Edition, because in effect it has a lot of new things, with the necessary improvements that time and circumstances required, and that will please and be useful to the benevolent readers. - Some articles have been simplified as, for Portugal, they were somewhat diffuse; others were modified in Harmony with the new uses that time has introduced; several witty anecdotes were interspersed to provide the book with a mild didactic style; and finally some Moral Tales were added in which bursts the modern virtue intertwined as polished civility, being the true ornament of a diligent education (ROQUETTE, 1867, 1-2).

It is true that the innovations of all sorts in this fourth edition are associated with the “necessary improvements that time and circumstances required”, thus these changes seem to indicate the novelties in the educational programs, in the demands for new methodologies, in the different uses of the medium as an excuse in forming the reader under formation regardless of their reading levels, of the restriction of approval and indication of the works that did not comply with the reforms of instruction, forcing to be reformulated and adjusted according to the prescriptions in the legal devices, as well as the appreciation of the teacher as a profession, since it was required as a mandatory reading and for formation in the Normal Schools, specifically in Maranhão, to take part in the professional trajectory of trainee primary teachers (CUNHA, 1999; CASTELLANOS, 2011). On the other hand, if Roquette (1867, p. 1) really simplified some articles and “[...] modified other articles in harmony with the new uses that time has introduced [...]”, what uses was this teacher referring to? Were his inferences were directed at the methods to teach how to read or at the nature of the reception of the discourse present in the book? Did he inquire about the types of reading taking into account the target public, either reading out loud conducted in groups or classrooms, or silent reading by more experienced readers to brand levels of reading and purposes of the uses as material culture? Was he referring to various readers and their diversified reading practices taking into account their beliefs, expectancies and the place they occupied in the local culture?

Using the selection criteria held by Roquette (1845), this booklet was destined to complete in the form of readings the “Thesouro da Adolescencia e da Juventude” (treasure of adolescence and Youth); a book that “[...] should [have come] to light after him; but for several reasons, that it did not matter to know, [came out] first”, according to the warning recorded in April the same year. However, using paternity and his educational instinct as sign to conceive his work, the writing of the text begins with a “Gentleman who had left Portugal in 1834 with two underage children, orphans of their mother, whom [he sent] to be educated in France, and whom he takes to the nation after 10 years of absence” (ROQUETTE, 1845, p.1). This author, in the 1867 fourth edition, eliminates articles related to French culture which, for Portugal, were diffuse, and he inserts friendly anecdotes to soothe the work, meaning to make it more didactic, ‒ maybe aiming at the age of the trainee readers according to the indications in the legal devices as a schoolbook (although it was considered a manual of civility and courtesy!) ‒, and he also adds moral tales that, by means of reading practices, impose rules of conducts and adjustment of behaviors.

In the division in 20 chapters in 1845 edition, with 491 pages and, in 26 chapters in the 1867 edition, with 339 pages, one can identify the author´s intentions to eliminate passages from the French milieu which did not represent the Portuguese culture, and it also seems to point to tactics of appropriation in the face of the established power; even though it was a work indicated and approved for teaching how to read and to instill norms of conduct, eliminating the amount of sheets in the volume seems to provide hints of greater acceptance by the publishing houses for its production, as this would ensure the circulation, distribution, and consumption among the trainee readers.

Comparing the ‘table of contents’ in both editions, although the first one (from 1845) presents an artifact supposedly bigger due to the composition of 491 pages in relation to the fourth edition released with 152 pages less; even so the latter exceeds in chapters. Although Rouquette (1867) says in Advertência (warning) of the fourth edition that he had simplified some articles diffused for Portugal and had modified other chapters due to the new uses, he nevertheless articulates several topics, even reducing the extent of those already published; these are practices of the author or of the publisher that seem to adapt to the new requirements of the reading books as a schoolbook that relies on the specific format to be marketed, distributed, and consumed, and of being subject to norms established according to legal devices that guided the instruction. Meaning of the texts that depend on the reader´s ideas, on printing innovations, and on multiplying scenic indications in a triangular relationship established between how the text is conceived by the author, how it is printed by the publisher, and how it is read or heard by the readerand.

Concerning the use of images, there is also divergence between the two editions. In fact, the first edition brings 20 gravures placed in apparent disorder, since simply looking at them does not obey any logic, even if all of them are related to the texts linking them; the fourth edition despite having only four images, the quality of the paper is different from the rest of the volume ‒ possibly printed in some kind of glazed paper ‒, the sharp printing and the use of colors seems to indicate some legitimacy of the book in the ascending market of letters and an acknowledgement of the work by the school industry in progress. In this regard, most chapters in the 1845 edition have their respective gravures and, although some topics are part of the same chapter, for example, the section mentioning the church that includes christenings, weddings, and funerals as religious practices, all of them are accompanied by a visual staging. This does not happen with the remaining chapters nor all of them are articulated to graphic drawings. The choice of chapters for the use of images: greetings (p. 93); dances and balls (p. 103); banquets (p. 150); conversation (in French) (p. 204); visting the countryside (p. 382) and to Theophilo in particular (p. 445) and; the distance of these gravures between the pages, seems to challenge any consistent reasoning. That is, it will not be possible “[...] to understand a structure [no matter its nature] if we are not able to see it at the same time from the them-perspective and the us-perspective” (ELIAS, 2001. p. 80).

In the 1867 edition, the four images do not either have an easy criterion to be identified. Paternal education (name of the first image) seems to compete with the cover sheet and prepare the reader to understand the warning suggested by the author, in which he places the reasons and intentions of his writing. Wedding (name of the second image) located within item Marriages on page 3, corresponding to the church as first chapter, has a direct relationship between what is written and what is observed, bringing the expected link between text and image which, in theory, would help be understood by children learning to read. Concerning chapters IX “About Visits” on page 149 and, chapter XVII “About Friends” on page 262, even if the images are not directly articulated with the context of the text, even so there is a seemingly connection between Princess Sybila and “the visits”, between Damon and Pythias and chapter XVIII. However, the criteria to select the images and the place chosen to insert them within the texts, do not seem to have rule that define the positions of these representations within the work, least of all apparently reveal the author´s or the publisher´s intentions; yet, even with such mystification outlining the choice of images, of location and articulation with the written, it is necessary to see them in the them-perspective as well and in the us-perspective: “[the images are] seen as figuration of other men, about who we say “them”; at the same time, [they are seen] the way those men saw it, how they saw themselves, when they said us” (ELIAS, 2001, p. 80)

If I take time to analyze the function of the illustrations utilized in the schoolbooks that would be intended to teach reading or the first letters, that is, images employed that would help (in theory) to understand by means of visuality the themes addressed, drawing a difference among the topics to be learned and recognize the letters and the words that designate people, animals and things, as exposed in O Livro do Povo (1861); such attempts are sometime superficial. The apparent purpose of the illustrations in the reading books is to enhance the texts with meanings, thus helping comprehend the significance in the lessons of first letters, seems somewhat twisted and inconsistent in some copies conceived and produced for that end. In O Livro do Povo (1881), a work many have classified as “the reading book intended for the moral formation of children”, there is not necessarily a direct correlation between the text exposed and the image used as reference, and much less between the figures revealed and the everyday life of children learning to read; there appear animals such as the bear and the dromedary, which are not even included in the book´s writing and certainly do not take part in the context of Brazilian children or those from Maranhão.

In this perspective, Codigo de Bom Tom ou Regras de civilidade e de bem viver no XIXº século of 1845 brings along a question by Cicero in the inscription at the cover sheet, inquiring in Latin: “what greater and better service can we provide the Republic than teaching and instructing the youth?”9; in the 1867 fourth edition, although the authors or the publisher have eliminated it, Roquette tell us in the warning that “[...] three editions have been published until 1866, but [in] none of them a remarkable change has been done in its contents and writing”, and this does not happen in this fourth issue, named “New Edition”. In these two publications, as well as in the 1875 and 1876 ediitons, it is considered that upbringing one´s children is a lottery, that the “school of the world” considered as the “treat of men” is quite often more benevolent than the classes in the colleges, but sometimes more demanding and sterner than them, that society also had its “grammar”, and it was necessary to study it “[...] those who disregard its rules, if they are not given slaps, or any other punishment, are looked at as uncultivated men, and are often rejected amidst it” (ROQUETTE, 1876, p. 10). That is, both in 1st edition of 1845 and in the fourth edition of 1867, structural changes are expressed by means of several devices, either in the types used, in the messages inserted, in the warnings interposed and even in the level of visuality. Considering the number of images and the choice of what is represented, the quality of the record and the use of color; no tangible change takes place in the 1875 publication, except the misinformation of the place of printing apparently lost from the page in the copy, nor in the 1876 edition published by Imprenta de Pillet fils ainé, calle des Grands-Augustins, nº. 5, precisely as had happened in the three editions of O livro do Povo in question.

However, it is surprising how two works intended to teach reading to children learning to read in the same time scale are published and are indicated, distributed and utilized in the school ambience and, on the opposite direction, there are discrepancies between them in terms of conceptions, functions and modes of presentation that forge a differentiation; although interrelated through interaction or contrast. This might be an indication of a plausible explanation considering the viewpoints of the authors, who in their productions had met essential aspects including: the kinds of teaching, the nature of how knowledge is apprehended, the different conceptions at stake, the rules of conduct and the adjustment of behaviors; a set of propositions logically linked to each other (through the writing, the symbols or figures) which may have common referents (CASTELLANOS, 2017). But, on the other hand, in manufacturing and projecting copies destined to reading, multiple material and/or human resources guide the production, regardless of the comprehensiveness of who is writing, the worldviews he defends and the purposes conceived.

Thus, even if it was not possible to determine at the beginning of the investigation whether father I. J. Roquette (author of História Sagrada (sacred history) which underpinned the writing of O Livro do Povo, according to Antonio Marques Rodrigues) and father J. I. Roquette (author of Código do Bom Tom)10 were the same person, since the initials seem to have been switched, by verifying in principle how these two readings with specific characteristics, apparently opposed intentions and different forms of production, distribution, and circulation (which rely on the decisions made by authors and publishers, as well as the mistakes made along the editing process), cohabit and intersect when they refer to similar themes considered as school and/or non-school knowledge available in the context of or outside the school; after following for some time clues, vestiges and signs, I have found a direct relation between the civility books of Portuguese-speaking origin and the reading books by Maranhão´s authors. According to Marques Rodrigues (Public Instruction Inspector) O Livro do Povo was sustained by História Sagrada, written b father I. J. Roquette and by the texts of Royaumont and Brispot, as José Ignácio Roquette is the authors of História Sagrada do Antigo e Novo Testamento (sacred history of the old and new testaments), enhanced with notes and moral reflections for the instruction and sanctification of the faithful. A book that, have been published in Paris at the printing company of J. P. Aillaud in 1850, and its second edition went public also in Paris in 1856; such Franciscan priest publishes not only this work in Lisbon, the same year, as well as he writes a dictionary and many other didactic instruments.

História Sagrada do Antigo e Novo Testamento by father I. J. Roquette is a remarkable work in terms of authorial matter. The author arranges, under the form of a narrative, the Old and the New Testament. The text is organized by lessons made up of information and reflection. Each lesson has about 2 pages. The discourse is accurate and limpid. The edition is illustrated. In the Preface, the author explain how he produced this Sacred History, both in relation to the reading and interpretation of the Bible and by meeting the convenience of developing a History that could be read, highlighting the importance of reading as a response to the Protestant world. The 1st edition in 1850 was published under the approval of the Bishop of Bahia, the Bishop of Mariana and the Patriarch Cardenal of Lisbon; such order was changed in the 2nd edition (1856), where the Patriarch Cardenal of Lisbon is mentioned first.

The mechanisms of domestic economy found in a reading book which address “laws of hygiene”11, by suggesting care “of the body and of the mind, of clothing and cleanliness, of food and drink” (RODRIGUES, 1861), cohabit with statements of conducts for the body, established in the civility manuals: in which Roquette (1875, p. 61) in Código do Bom Tom says that “[...] one never scratches the head, nor put one´s fingers in the hair, least of all in the nose, nor the hand touch the mouth to bite one´s nails, or a cob etc.”, and makes it clear that there is “no object more disgusting than a shaggy or uncombed woman” (p. 291); Erasmo (1978), in Civilidade Pueril (children´s civility), explains that nor “[...] bones are gnawed with teeth, as dogs do; [which are cleaned] with the aid of a knife” (p. 93), nor shall someone lick “[...] with their tongue sugar or anything else sweet that got stuck to the plate, or to the platter, since this would be] behaving like a cat and not like a man. (p. 93); Prevost (1840) in turn, suggested in Elementos da civilidade (elements of civility) that one should “[...] be always careful to have one´s head clean as well as the eyes and teeth, which if neglected or carelessness, corrupts the mouth and infects the people who one talks to” (p. 8). That is, the postures, body gestures, and the “ways of how to be and how to do” are codified, not only for the recognition of a social status, inasmuch as assimilating and applying rules allegedly direct the construction of new subjectivities which inscribe a civility code in the individual, inasmuch as surveilling postures and setting rule for the conducts through reading are practices that the subject is in charge of, and he is the one who has the role of governing his own body manners instilling the recognition in the other of the same codes he has encoded in himself within a certain slack of liberty; dynamic that notes “[...] that the problem of freedom and the problem of the effective distribution of power among men are much more closely connected that it might seem” (ELIAS, 2001, p. 159).

Concerning the language, despite being immersed in a symbolic universe pre-established by the social norms of the language and its algorithms of expression and legitimacy, even so the formula used in codes to discipline the body and the mind in the civility manuals travestied as textbooks for the early teaching of literacy or the reading by trainee readers (since most of such books are destined to primary schools) has the ability to convert itself in productive action of discourse and reconfigure, based on differentiated practices, although allegedly submitted to forms of being and of becoming. Language that for Chartier, is not neutral or fixed; since both the reality and the meanings assigned to it are constructed, inasmuch as the ‘construction of meaning’ seems “[...] to lie in the tension that articulates the inventive capacity of singular individuals or the ‘communities of interpretation’ [...] with the restrictions, norms, conventions that limit what is possible to think and enunciate” (CHARTIER, 1988, p. 10). It is precisely within this tension, where I have placed and analyzed the reading books from Maranhão´s authors as treaties of conduct, approved of and indicated by the local instruction, in an attempt not to give in more or less to neither of the sides: nor to the meanings assigned by everyday discourse, nor to the formal meanings of the official discourse. In this logic, the attempt of identify differences and agreements is in the confrontation, looking for possible answers or new questions that might emerge from the contrast between what is said and not said in the middle of this interposition, which ultimately depend on the expectancies and attitudes of the student-reader and on the level of appropriation of these norms and rules of conducts allegedly induced.

Debates established about “justice, courage, goodness” in O Livro do Povo, among mottos and sayings that aggrandize man´s practical morality, when the history of the World´s Savior is vulgarized “with his miracles, his doctrine, and the best precepts of economy and order” meeting the good customs (RODRIGUES, 1861), intersect with the concept of civility advocated in different treaties of conduct: if civility in Código do Bom tom “is nothing else than the manifestation, the visible proof, and so to speak, tangible, of the goodness of everyone that must always show in the treat of the world” (ROQUETTE, 1875, p.16); and Civilidade Pueril (children´s civility) lies on the ethical principle that, in each man, “the appearance is the sign of being, and the behavior is the safe index of the qualities of the soul and of the spirit” (ROTTERDAM, 1978, p.78); for Prévost (1840, n/p), civility becomes “a compendium of all moral virtues, and a union of modesty, urbanity, privacy, condescendence, prudence, circumspection, decency that everyone is supposed to keep in his words and actions”, in Elementos de civilidade (elements of civility). Degrees of interdependency that emanate between the individuals or several grades of power in the mutual relations, inasmuch as “[...] the relatively independent action of a man places a question regarding his relative independence toward the others; [changing] the fragile, always instable, balance of tensions among them” (ELIAS, 2001, p. 158).

Inducing a woman through reading O Livro do Povo, in order to make of her a “affectionate mother, an obedient daughter, or a faithful wife and [of] man [to love] GOD above all things [and] the neighbor as oneself”, marks discrepancies between the social positions that should be taken, as another element to be analyzed and intersects with the differentiation of social functions also expressed in the inevitable separation effected by Roquette (1875, p. 59) in the instruction of his children, when he advises Eugenia that she should prefer “[...] the study and domestic life rather than mundane hobbies”, and at the same time he excuses himself when he admits that: “[...] as our customs, according to nature, do not prescribe you the same personal duties, I am forced, to complete my instructions, to provide you with a particular instruction, just like I will do to Eugenia” (1875, p. 272).

Therefore, taking into consideration the category significance that encompasses the conceptual armors proposed by Chartier, it is here, in the practices, one of the points where the Cultural History has a highlight in the study of the civility manuals, treaties of conduct, civility literature, prescription-providing works, manuels de civilité, books of urbanity travestied as reading books in Maranhão´s instruction. Taking into account the comprehension of the significances of the subjects in the period in question, such significances must be perceived, read and articulated with the practices, the decisions, and the strategies of imposition according to the context by which they reflect the variety of their manifestations, inasmuch as said practices are resources that may push new determinations, new meanings, and new forms of appropriating the object. Thus, it is necessary to distinguish it in the discourses, since the practices, regardless of their nature, structure, and function relate to the singularity of the culture by reaffirming it, reassessing it, and legitimizing it as such. Cultural schemes that define the process through which history is culturally ordered and culture is also historically ordered in a relation of mutual influences. (BIERSACK, 1992); culture that is made up of mental and affective schemes, as Chartier (1989) puts it - influenced by Norbert Elias -, in which one must investigate the creation of significances and the re-creation of these significances through non-passive and non-linear reception by the individuals. (CHARTIER, 1988, p. 11).

Yet, regardless of the success of the reading book and the place it took in Maranhão´s educational context, the importance of the work could only be analyzed without ignoring the stratagems implied in the processes of production, dissemination, adoption, and veto. Procedures and negotiations that had been guided “[...] in the legislation in force and in the teaching programs, [in which] several ideologues of the programs and reforms [were] the authors [of the] books themselves [...]” (MACIEL; FRADE, 2003, p. 106). In other words, Antônio Marques Rodrigues as Public Instruction Inspector must have had a great influence on the educational ambience in a general sense, and on the evaluating agents in the governmental sphere, since the latent signs of excessive production of his book in record time for that period, on the editions being massively and too rapidly sold out, as well as on the processes of approval, adoptions, and use in all spaces of the local public education and in some provinces somehow show the resonance of his performance/projection as an author, promoter and lawmaker. The author, due to the fact that he was a public manager and occupied strategic positions found the special conditions that would bestow reputation on the work and enhance its dissemination, and this may explain how such reading book exceeded the expectancies on the level of achievement, keeping him active along the 1800´s on the level of standardizations and interceded and showed its relevance in the reading formation of students on the level of thematizations. (MORTATTI, 2010).

Although O Livro do Povo (1861; 1865, 1881) consists of religious and moralizing texts concerned with adjusting the bodies to civility and Christian morality (first and foremost) and it is not a book per se to teach reading to students under early formation as it was acknowledged in the official documentation, and, on the other hand, it lacks an explicit concept of reading, of teaching methods to be employed in reading and even if there no constant relationship between writing and images (which in theory would be a pedagogical strategy to comprehend the texts ‒ in the alleged analogy between word and drawing), even so, it is important to understand its usage as a reading book, to assess the pedagogical/didactic level of the work at the time and the contents of the writings, to analyze the variety of themes addressed for singular subjects and comprehend the meaning of its production and the public it was aimed at; in this case, an audience of children or the schools of first letters in which education should be supported on learning to read, to write and to count, and on the moral and religious precepts. That is, even if “Erasmus´ treaty of civility is not a schoolbook, however [it has satisfied] a more thorough necessity than the hodgepodge of old courtesy books”, according to Ariès (2006, p. 247) and that the schooling processes had made this civility manual be associated with the education of small children, who learned form it the first reading lessons, since this text “aimed mainly at making children aware of a general code of sociability” (REVEL, 1996, p.181), whose purpose was to early bring them close to the practices of civility, rather than the pedagogical concern with learning the letters; in the opposite direction, the reading books from Maranhão´s authors in the 19th century, apart from its primary function in the didactic dimension towards teaching the letters and reading, seem to point to some influence exerted on the practices of sociability and on the new representations by means of the topics addressed, the conceptualizations in question, and the imposition of rules.

By way of conclusion

Analyzing reading books from Maranhão´s authors as object and source simultaneously allows us to consider them as civility manuals or treaties of conduct, as civility literature or prescription-providing works, and even urbanity books, ‒ since specific themes sustained in the control and strategies to impose what is legally permitted are derived from conceptual armors connected with the web of significances constructed by individuals and institutions in specific temporalities ‒, it also helps us expand the concept of reading books as school material culture, since even maintaining this first-order pedagogical function (that is, teaching literacy), in a subtle, concealed and feigned manner through the reading of stories and tales, through metaphors, fables, and poems, among other literary tropes in use as a language resource, as comprehension strategy, and ways of keeping attention and the interest of children learning to read, intend in their whole as school works or repertoire of permissible codes, the formation of the school subject in an ideal of man, of society and of parents, intentionally created with the purpose of legitimizing an identity based on civility, order, and progress.

In this regard, it is possible to establish several points of contact between the reading book of local origin and the civility manuals international provenience; treaties of conducts from Spain, Portugal, and France recorded in Maranhão´s press which bring indications of use and approval of the governmental spheres to be utilized at the educational institutions and cohabit and compete with the local production by national and Maranhão´s authors in the schools. First of all, the differences regarding the quality in the conception and manufacture of the copies contrast in the type of paper used, in the styles of the front pages, in how the contents are divided; these are signs that, if related to each other, seem to indicate different readers taking into account the social and cultural cleavages or the groups readers belong to; for example, the very division of professions, either teachers of first letters, trainee teachers or teachers from Liceu Maranhense, or the very formation of those who govern with differentiated concepts and practices when discussing instruction and education, their values, and preferences. On the other hand, innovations of all kinds found from an edition to the next, as for instance, in Código de Bom Tom by J. I. Rouquette, signalizing their editions (1845; 1867; 1875; and 1876), or the copies of O Livro do Povo by Antonio Marques Rodrigues (1861; 1865; and 1881), seem to indicate the novelties in the educational programs, the requirements for new methodologies, the different uses of the medium as a pretext in the formation of the trainee reader regardless of his reading level, the approval and indication of works, or even the restriction of the works that did not comply with the reforms of the instruction, forcing them to be reformulated and to be adjusted according to the prescriptions in the legal provisions.

By identifying works of Portuguese and Spanish origins (for this study) that point to the transnationalization of practices/artifacts,, even if some of them do not indicate the genre of the works as such, it seems to be a sign of the printing companies being familiar with the types of texts, the seemingly intimacy of the public with these works, and the how frequently the institutions utilized such copies. In this regard, although the reading books produced, published, and disseminated by authors/publishers from Maranhão and their respective circulation boosted by the local press, over and above the their acceptance as schoolbooks or even the purchase by private individuals to deliver classes and the didactic-pedagogical role of these mediums, other functions (apparently of second order!) indicate the institutions gradually welcomed these books and this may justify their incremental growth as a local artifact in use for instruction in Imperial Maranhão; school reading books as civility manuals that convey a specific normative nature and a singular formative function. Last but not least, the very function of the images and gravure, far from responding to an implicit logic that justifies their location within the works and place in the open the alleged articulation between text, image, and context that would ensure greater comprehension of the writing by the little readers, by making use of the observation and draw attention to/interest in the words in children learning how to read, by creating habits/intentions that dilute the understanding of norms and prescriptions for its effective enforcement to the detriment of a mechanical authoritarianism; even so, in some cases, the expected function of visuality plays a partial role, in other cases, they are figurative means that by simply looking at them do not show apparent motivations. Finally, I consider that the reading books from Maranhão´s authors may be appreciated as prescription manuals, since they not only cohabit with and compete for school consumption considered here as a production of another nature; but they also create their own strategies, either by the authors or the publishers which sometimes are similar to the non-national production, sometimes they mark specificities of the local culture without losing control of the habits, conducts, and behaviors on behalf of a specific morality.

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1This article is part of the second Post-Doctoral studies in Educação, Circulação de Manuais de Civilidade no Maranhão oitocentista, conducted at the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP - 2018/2019) under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Mirian Jorge Warde, with the aid of professors Dr. Justino Magalhães from the University of Lisbon (UL) and Dr. Augustin Escolano Benito from the International Center for School Culture (CEINCE - Spain). My thanks to the Foundation for the Support to Scientific and Technologica Research and Develompent of Maranhão - FAPEMA for the funds for translation. English version by Luiz Ramires Neto. E-mail: lularamires@alumni.usp.br.

2In Spain, unlike Portugal, the concept of urbanity was the one that flourished, as referred to by Bolufer Peruga (2002, p. 154): the concept that “in a more durable fashion would collect in Spain the contents associated with the good manners, was urbanity [;] the noun urbanity ended up, in the contemporary era, gaining strength until it encompassed all the semantic field regarding civil behavior”.

3 Hallewell (2005) considers Frias one of the most important Brazilian printers in the 19th century and in no Maranhão he managed to print newspapers, literary works, and, mainly, schoolbooks.

4Letter sent by the Public Instruction Inspector (Antônio Marques Rodrigues) to the Presidente of the Province (Ambrosio Leitão da Cunha), on November 2, 1864.

5Institution created in 1841 to serve poor and neglected children and provide them with a training in several areas of mechanical arts: carpenters, woodworkers, tailors, coopers, etc. See Castellanos (2019).

6Institution created in São Luís in 1855 to welcome poor and neglected girls with the intent of providing them instruction in the first letters and household skills in order to educate them for the care of a home. Its activities were closed down in 1870. See Castro; Castellanos (2021).

7School created in 1865 with the purpose of welcoming poor and neglected boys and provide them with agricultural professional instruction.

8Relaunch of Código do Bom Tom by J. I. Roquette, by the publishing house Companhia das Letras in 1998, with an introduction by Lilian Schwarcz.

9Quod enim munus Reipublicae majus meliusve offerre possumus quam si docemus atque erudimus juven tutem?

10Gilberto Freire, in his work Casa Grande & Senzala (The Masters and the Slaves), makes explicit references to this manual and writes: “The author of some ´Code of Good Form´ (canon Roquette) reached great vogue among the barons and viscounts of the Empire, who began to adopt rules of good form in the upbringing of their children.” (2003: p. 420)

11The Commission in the province of Pernambuco, “[...] in charge of giving an opinion about the publication whose title is: Livro do Povo by Dr. Antonio Marques Rodrigues of Maranhão there, at the Printing Company of Frias has most carefully read the useful collection of texts of mottos of zoological species and laws of Hygiene [...]” Report from the General Board of Directors of the Public Instruction of Pernambuco (1868, n. 45, p. 58, my emphasis).

Received: November 17, 2021; Accepted: February 15, 2022

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