Silver Linings: Print and Gentility in the World of Johnny Tremain.

This appraisal of Esther Forbes's Johnny Tremain 1943 describes the novel as a book about the uses of reading. The fictional adventures of an apprentice silversmith who lived in Boston, observed Paul Revere at work, listened to his impassioned clandestine speeches, and carried the word to the sexton of the Old North Church that he was to position two lanterns in the steeple on the night of April 18, 1775, are well known to several generations of readers. As the story unfolds, considerations of the value of silver and of reading reveal ultimately that literary, not wealth, will create the informed citizenry that will sustain the new republic.