The seven volumes comprise seven subjects almost
identical
with
those of the trivium and quadrivium of scholasticism.
those of the trivium and quadrivium of scholasticism.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v11
.
.
Epictetus appeared before the public in 1758, and its success and
sale make it one of the minor romances of publishing. It was in
one volume, large quarto, and 1018 copies were struck off at first;
2
## p. 358 (#380) ############################################
358
[ch.
The Bluestockings
but, as these were insufficient, 250 more were printed a few months
later. It was issued by subscription, and the price was a guinea
in sheets. In her own copy were the names of no fewer than 1031
subscribers, and, since many copies were not claimed ‘by way of
compliment,' Mrs Carter gained nearly a thousand pounds profit.
Richardson's bill for printing the first impression amounted to
£67. 78. Two further editions were printed in her life-time, and,
for many years, it remained a good selling book at a high price.
Epictetus gained for its author a European reputation. So far
afield as Russia, where, said Elizabeth Carter, ‘they were only just
beginning to walk on their hind legs,' there appeared a notice of
the learned English woman, and she was told that the Tsarina had
read it through with high approbation. After its publication, she
was regarded by the bluestocking circle with something akin to
awe, and it is almost a relief to find her intimates, Mrs Montagu
and Miss Talbot, jestingly referring to her uncle Epictetus,' or
writing of her as 'cousin-german to Xenophon,' while Walpole,
with his facile talent for bestowing unchristian names, frequently
calls her Mrs Epictetus Carter.
After Epictetus, Mrs Carter did not write anything more for
publication, though, in 1762, Lord Bath persuaded her to publish
a small volume of poems that had been written at various times.
She gave such reluctant consent to this that Miss Talbot accused
her of thinking it ‘no small degradation from a quarto of Greek
Philosophy to dwindle into an eighteenpenny pamphlet of English
verse. The dedication was to the earl of Bath, and, writes her
biographer, 'is wholly unsullied by that flattery which is too often
a disgrace both to the author and the patron. But this praise is
somewhat discounted, when, on the next page, he quotes a letter
from Mrs Carter, indicating that Lord Bath wrote the dedication
himself!
For the remainder of her long life, Elizabeth Carter settled
down to the comfortable enjoyment of her fame on the modest
competence of which the profits from Epictetus were the foundation
Her influential friends invested this money profitably; and, some
years later, when Mrs Montagu inherited her husband's fortune,
she allowed her friend £100 a year. Lord Bath did not leave her
an annuity, according to the expectation of many of the blue-
stockings; but his heirs generously made good this deficiency by a
grant of £100 a year. During the summer months, she lived with
her father at Deal, or went on visits to her friends among the
great at their country houses. The winter she invariably spent in
1
## p. 359 (#381) ############################################
Xv]
Hannah More
359
London in handsome and comfortable apartments in Clarges street,
within easy distance of several of the bluestocking hostesses.
“She kept no table,' and never dined at home, except when ill, or
unable to go out. In the wide bluestocking circle, she was always
a welcome guest, and, not only did they invite her to their houses,
but they invariably sent for her their sedan chairs or carriages,
which again carried her back to Clarges street by ten o'clock
at the latest. She was, apparently, a sympathetic listener rather
than a talker, but she was always, to the end of her long life,
a notability in the inner circle of the bluestockings.
Di
Flot
The bluestocking, however, whose fame reached to the furthest
ends of the earth—though as a philanthropist rather than as
a blue—is Hannah More! When she first appeared in the blue-
stocking coteries, she had not yet become a passionate reformer, a
stern moralist, “the eminent divine,' as she was called in later years.
Her connection with the blues represents the 'gay and worldly'
side of her serious life. During her first winter among them she
was still in the twenties, and her hasty impressionist descriptions
of the literary society of London scintillate with the fresh enthusiasm
of a girl whose eyes and mind are slightly dazzled by unaccustomed
experiences. She was not unworthy to be admitted to the society
of those learned ladies and ingenious gentlemen. She spoke
fluent French, polished by conversation with some French officers
on parole, who often visited her home. Her father taught her
Latin, and some mathematics, though, frightened by her pre-
cocity, he did not take her far in the latter science. Her elder
sisters, not having any fortune in prospect, opened a boarding-
school at Bristol to which she was sent, at the age of twelve.
Later, like her four sisters, she taught in the school, assiduously
carrying on her own education at the same time. She studied
Latin, Italian and Spanish, improving her style by translations
and imitations of the Odes of Horace, and some of the dramatic
compositions of Metastasio.
Hannah More was a precocious child—a child who, indisputably,
was the mother of the woman. In youthful days, she would
treasure any stray scrap of paper on which she scribbled verses or
essays that were always adorned with a well directed moral. '
When her ardent wish took form in the shape of 'a whole quire
of paper to herself,' it was soon filled by the budding moralist with
supposititious letters to depraved characters, intended to reclaim
ZIE
1 See, also, ante, vol. x, chap. XI, pp. 267—8, and vol. xi, chap. XII.
711
## p. 360 (#382) ############################################
360
[CH.
The Bluestockings
them from their errors. The one romance of her life began when
she was twenty-two, and came to naught, though, indirectly, it
paved the way for her literary career. She was engaged to a
wealthy man of good position, the cousin of two of her pupils.
This gentleman named Turner is said to have had every good
quality to make marriage a success, save 'a cheerful and composed
temper,' and—still more important lack—the initial courage to
marry. Twice was the wedding-day fixed and postponed, when
Hannah, on the advice of her friends, determined not to be trifled
with any longer. Turner was repentant, but Hannah was inexor-
able. Finally, however, he insisted on settling on her an annuity
of £200, to compensate her for her great expense in preparing
to be the wife of a man of large fortune. This income per-
mitted her to devote her time to literary pursuits, though, when
she first visited London in 1774, she had not published anything
except a small play for schools, The Search after Happiness.
She was introduced to London society by one of those fortunate
events that suggest the guiding hand of destiny. She, with two
of her sisters, had not been in London a week when she wrote to a
friend describing her emotions at seeing Garrick as king Lear.
Her friend, who knew Garrick, showed him the letter, and, as the
actor was curious to see the young enthusiast, an introduction was
arranged. The day after this she was invited to the Garricks'
house to meet Mrs Montagu, and, as her biographer succinctly puts
it, ‘her introduction to the great, and the greatly endowed, was
sudden and general. ' Her portrait, painted some years later by
Opie, suggests a strong and pleasant personality, and one finds that,
wherever she was taken by the Garricks, she gravitated towards
people of high rank in intellect by a species of mental elective
affinity. She had long desired to see Johnson, but Sir Joshua
Reynolds, at whose house she met him, prepared her, as he 'handed
her
up the stairs,' for a mood of possible sadness and silence in the
great man. She was, however, fortunate enough to find him
advancing to meet her with good humour in his countenance, and
a macaw of Sir Joshua's in his hand,' while he gallantly greeted her
with a verse from a morning hymn of her own composition. Other
introductions speedily followed: to Edmund Burke, to bishop
Percy, the collector of the Reliques, who was 'quite a sprightly
modern, instead of a rusty antique,' and to other distinguished
members of the bluestocking coteries.
In the following year, 1775, Hannah again visited London in
February. This time, she dined at Mrs Montagu's, where she met
2
## p. 361 (#383) ############################################
xv]
Hannah
More and Cadell
361
6
6
Elizabeth Carter and Mrs Boscawen, the widow of the admiral.
The bluestocking parties were now at their zenith, and the clearcut
thumbnail sketches Hannah gives of the chief dramatis personae
are always vivid and lifelike. Of Mrs Montagu, she says,
She is not only the finest genius, but the finest lady I ever saw . . . she lives in
the highest style of magnificence . . . her form is delicate even to fragility . . .
she has the sprightly vivacity of fifteen, with the judgment and experience of
a Nestor.
The young provincial, though not “violently modish,' kept at least
one eye on the fashion, and permitted her hair to be dressed in the
extravagant mode that, as moralist, she was compelled to censure,
even while she adopted it. She quickly noted Elizabeth Carter's
indifference to dress, which, with tactful euphuism, she thus
describes. “Mrs Carter has in her person a great deal of what the
gentlemen mean when they say such a one is a “poetical lady”. . .
however, I like her much. She was, perhaps, most attracted by
Mrs Boscawen, who, she said, was polite, learned, judicious and
humble. This first impression was strengthened as she knew her
more intimately, and there was not one of the bluestocking ladies
of whom Hannah wrote with more admiration, though, perhaps
because but few of her letters that were thought not inferior to
those of Mrs Montagu-have been published, she is less well-
known to the general reader.
In 1775, after her return to Bristol, Hannah More told her
sisters that she had been 'so fed with praise and flattering atten-
tions' that she would find out her real value by writing a poem,
and offering it to Cadell. In a fortnight, she had finished Sir
Eldred of the Bower, to which she added the poem entitled The
Bleeding Rock, written some years before. Cadell had probably
heard something of her, as he not only offered for it a sum beyond
her expectation, but ‘very handsomely' said that, if she could
discover what Goldsmith had received for his Deserted Village, he
would allow her the same price. A unique fashion surely of re-
ceiving a young writer, even in the eighteenth century! The two
poems, which scarcely filled thirty small pages, were welcomed
with acclaim by the bluestockings. Garrick recited them, Johnson
added a stanza, Richard Burke called the book 'a truly elegant
and tender performance,' and the writer's head, said her sisters,
needed to be unusually steady to withstand the flood of adulation
-and it was !
In the following year, the Garricks hospitably offered Hannah
a suite of rooms in their house, and, from that time onwards, for
>
## p. 362 (#384) ############################################
362
[ch.
The Bluestockings
6
more than twenty years, whenever she came to London, she
invariably stayed with them at the Adelphi, or at their Thames-
side retreat at Hampton. Under Garrick's influence, her next
literary venture was the play Percy, which launched her in London
society as a celebrity. The bluestockings congratulated her and
themselves on its extraordinary success, and if they did not 'crown
her, cover her, hide her with laurels,' as Richard Berenger, one of
them suggested, Mrs Boscawen, on its twelfth performance, sent
her a laurel wreath with the 'stems confined within an elegant
ring,' for which she returned thanks in an elegant copy of verses. '
She had almost finished The Fatal Falsehood, when, in 1779,
David Garrick died, and, greatly affected by his death, she deter-
mined to write no more plays. From this time, her thoughts
followed their natural trend towards serious subjects, and, her
letters, she gradually reveals herself as philanthropist and reformer.
She even attempted, said Cowper, ‘to reform the unreformable
Great,' and her Thoughts on the importance of the Manners of the
Great went into many large editions? Her grief at Garrick's
death found some vent in Sensibility, a poem addressed to Mrs
Boscawen, in which several bluestockings are mentioned. The
poem, however, that made the greatest stir in the bluestocking
coteries, was Bas Bleu, or Conversation. It is illustrative of the
fact that Hannah More, with her strong sense of dramatic values,
had the faculty of mentally visualising the significance of the
various movements with which she was connected. This poem, as
she explained in the preface, owed its name to the mistake of
a foreigner of distinction, who gave the literal name Bas-bleu to
a small party of friends that had often been called by way of
pleasantry Blue Stockings. She says further that these little
societies—sometimes misrepresented—were composed of persons
distinguished in general for their rank, talent, or respectable
character, who met frequently at Mrs Vesey's and at a few other
houses for the sole purpose of conversation. She adds a brief
a
tribute to the charm of these gatherings, where, she says, learning
was not disfigured by pedantry, good taste was not marred by
affectation and conversation was as little disgraced by calumny,
levity and other censurable errors as has, perhaps, been known
in any society. The poem is not of permanent value, though
Johnson told her that 'there was no name in poetry that might
6
1 The tracts with which she tried to reform the poor, Village Politics and the
Repository Tracts, had an amazing success, and were found so well-suited to the
purpose that the Religious Tract society was formed to continue the work.
## p. 363 (#385) ############################################
Xv]
Horace Walpole
363
>
not be glad to own it. ' Naturally, this poème à clef had a great
vogue among the bluestockings, as most of them were mentioned
either by their own names, or under some classical appellation. It
was written to amuse Mrs Vesey, and, after circulating some years
in manuscript, was eventually printed in 1786.
Perhaps the most curious friendship in the bas-bleu coteries,
was that between Hannah More and Horace Walpole. She was
not long in discovering that 'Horace liked nonsense talk better
than Greeks or Romans,' but, apparently, she could do her own
share of such conversation. When she spent evenings among the
bluestockings, she frequently mentions that she and Horace Wal-
pole, with another friend or two,ʻmake up a pleasant little coterie
of their own. Friendly correspondence passed between them,
when they were away from London; and, when Hannah More
went to live at her cottage, Cowslip green-cousin in name,
declared Walpole, to Strawberry hill—he collected all his own
works, printed at the Strawberry hill press, to give her 'for
remembrance. As a mark of great distinction, he printed her
Bishop Bonner's Ghost at the famous press, for distribution among
their common friends—in other words, the bluestockings. He gave
her a beautifully bound Bible, which she wished he would read;
but, in spite of the amazing differences of character between the
cynic and the reformer, they remained good friends till his death.
He was on intimate terms with Mrs Carter, too, and both the
famous bluestocking ladies were amazed when his Letters were
published. The Horace Walpole there revealed was an entirely
different person from the bluestocking they had known. When he
talked with them, there were not any traces of 'that truly French,
light and frivolous way of thinking which is so evident in his
printed letters. ' Indeed, it was something of a shock to them to
find that he had actually selected his letters for publication.
Hannah More was the chief chronicler as well as the poet
laureate of the blues. It is from the hasty impressionist sketches
in her letters that we gather the significance of the movement.
Of a bluestocking evening at William Pepys's, she says
There was all the pride of London, every wit and every wit-ess. . . but the
spirit of the evening was kept up on the strength of a little lemonade till
past eleven, without cards, scandal or politics.
A terse description that might serve as a type of most of the
bluestocking meetings. This cult of 'conversation—the pursuit of
ideas,' as it has been defined-acted as a subtle leaven to the
hard brilliant materialism of the eighteenth century. The social
## p. 364 (#386) ############################################
364
The Bluestockings
[CH.
refinement introduced by the bluestocking interest in literature
can be better appreciated by a glimpse at the glaring foil made
by ordinary society.
‘On Monday,' writes Hannah More, ‘I was at a very great assembly at
the Bishop of St Asaph’s. Conceive to yourself one hundred and fifty or two
hundred people met together. . . painted as red as bacchanals; poisoning the
air with perfumes; treading on each other's gowns; not one in ten able to
get a chair. . . ten or a dozen card tables crammed with dowagers of quality,
grave ecclesiastics and yellow admirals. '
It was another advantage of the bas-bleu societies, that 'common
or genteel swearing' was not countenanced : and, as tea, coffee,
orgeat and lemonade were the only beverages offered, intoxication
—then a general vice of society-seldom brought its embarrass-
ments into their midst.
From the somewhat elusive references to the bluestocking
parties, we gather that—unlike the Parisian salons—there was not
a fixed day or date for any of the meetings. A dinner might be
given by Mrs Montagu, after which there would be 'a strong
reinforcement of the Blues'; or, Mrs Vesey would hold an
assembly of rank, fashion and literati: 'so blue it was Mazarin
blue,' as Horace Walpole once described 'a Vesey. Or, Mrs
Boscawen might 'receive,' though parties at her house were
usually more exclusive, and thirty or forty was there considered
quite a large meeting. These were the principal bluestocking
hostesses, to whom came the elite of London both for talent
and fashion. Since the first conversation had been given by Mrs
Vesey, these societies had multiplied, and, from the seventies to
the end of the century, bluestocking meetings were held in many
other London houses. Sir Joshua Reynolds, 'the idol of every
company, and his sister had most interesting evenings at their
house in Leicester fields and, later, at Richmond. Here, even
Johnson was 'as brilliant as himself, and as good-humoured as
anyone else,' and there was scarce an expletive man or woman '
among the company. Mrs Thrale, of the little silver tongue,'
welcomed rank and talent to her home at Streatham, and much
good talk was heard in the famous library. Miss Mary Monckton,
afterwards the witty countess of Cork and othôry, had, said
Boswell, the finest bit of blue at her parties. Dressed in fine
thin muslin in the coldest weather, she would nonchalantly receive
her distinguished guests with a nod and a smile and a short
“How do do"? ; and then, without moving from her seat in the
middle of the room, would continue her conversation, lounging
6
rel
## p. 365 (#387) ############################################
Xv]
Fanny Burney
365
on one chair while she leaned on the back of another. At this
house, the guest of honour was Johnson, of whom dean Marlay
once remarked, “the ladies might well be proud when they could
turn a wolf-dog into a lap dog! '
Mrs Chapone, born Hester Mulso, occasionally gave blue-
stocking receptions that were 'rational, instructive and social,
and, also, unfortunately, somewhat spiritless and dull. Though
Johnson thought sufficiently well of her literary talent to include
her among the few contributors to his Rambler, the promise of
her youth never ripened to any noteworthy performance, if we
except Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, which, in its
day, was considered an educational work of the first importance.
The author was, by temperament, argumentative, impulsive, emo-
tional; and, perhaps because of her experience, such qualities are
condemned in her Letters. These are only interesting now as
embodying an acclaimed ideal of eighteenth century feminine
manners. Mrs Chapone was frequently a guest at North End,
where she would earnestly discuss with Richardson his female
characters. Mrs Delany, that ‘fairest model of female excellence,'
asserted that Mrs Chapone was the prototype of some of his
principal heroines, which, she said, “is the reason they are not
really so polished as he takes them to be. '
Perhaps the most charming description of a bluestocking
evening is from the vivid and sprightly pen of Fanny Burney'.
She was a blue, but not of what Hannah More called the old set.
She had not long visited among them-where Evelina and her
own amiable personality secured her a warm welcome—before her
appointment to a post at court. She snatched an evening from her
wearisome duties, however, to visit Mrs Ord, a later but hardly
less distinguished hostess than the original three, and there
found practically all the members of the circle : Mrs Montagu,
Mrs Boscawen, Owen Cambridge, Horace Walpole, Sir Lucas
Pepys, Leonard Smelt, Bennet Langton and Lady Rothes, his
wife, Mrs Carter, Mrs Chapone, William Pepys and others. The
talk was of The Streatham Letters, the correspondence between
Mrs Thrale and Dr Johnson which had just been published, and
many of the blues feared the indiscretions of her too fluent pen.
It is a lively and graceful picture of eighteenth century society,
and an excellent representation of the friendly charm of the
bas-bleu meetings.
· See Hill, Constance, Fanny Burney at the Court of Queen Charlotte (1912), chap. XII.
## p. 366 (#388) ############################################
CHAPTER XVI
CHILDREN'S BOOKS
CHILDREN's books, throughout the history of English literature,
have been in that literature, but not of it. Phrases and persons
from nursery lore have passed irrevocably into the national arsenal
of metaphor and allusion, while the sources of them may not have
had any claim to serious literary consideration. Children, too,
have annexed the books of their elders-Robinson Crusoe is the
standard example—and have almost established a prescriptive
right to the conquered territory. But not many books written
specially for children have also been enduring literature, in any
real sense, though the exceptions are notable. The nursery
library, in fact, has been a separate thing ; developed differently,
furnished from a different standpoint, with works written in a
different vein of inspiration and produced, commercially, with
different limitations and standards. Nor is the criterion of judg-
ment upon it, whether the reader or the historian be the judge, the
same as upon more solemn or artistic performances.
Its history really opens in the eighteenth century. Yet, in the
beginnings, the grown-up' and the child coincide, in a way. The
writers who, in the first volume of this work, treated of the riddles
of Cynewulf, Aelfric and Aldhelm, and of the scholastic labours of
Alcuin at York, were chronicling the very earliest books for
children in the language. Those who, in the same volume”, dis-
cussed the metrical romances of 1200—1500 set forth at large the
adult works whose disjecta membra were still the framework of
the cheapest books for children in the eighteenth century; while
Aesop, and bestiaries, and such a collection as Gesta Romanorum
were certainly, to some extent, read by children as well as by the
older flock at whom the monkish editors aimed.
1 Chaps. IF and v.
2 Chaps. XIII and xiv.
## p. 367 (#389) ############################################
CH, XVI] Educational Books
367
But these early productions are hardly what would be meant
today by the term 'children's books,' which, perhaps, is best and
most conveniently interpreted as 'books read or meant to be read
by children for pleasure or for profit, or for both, in their leisure
hours. ' Children read medieval riddles and schoolbooks, cer-
tainly; but they read them perforce, as part of their education.
So far as the social life of these early periods is clear, it is probable
that children read little out of school, for the simple reason that,
outside learned establishments, there was nothing to read. The
fables and anecdotes of which they acquired a knowledge must
usually, from the same cause, have been communicated to them
either orally or by the chances of tuition. Apart from purposes
of education, children had no books of their own before the
seventeenth century, and very few then.
Educational books deserve brief mention. They are only lite-
rature by accident, but they are, sometimes, not wholly scholastic.
Aelfric's Colloquy and the numerous successors to it have this
feature of artistic composition in them, that they are not merely
tabular; the dialogue form could be given a certain fictitious
vivacity. It long survived the renascence! Erasmus endued it
with fresh popularity and authority, and it persisted until the
eighteenth century. Sententiae Pueriles, a work of this kind
which, in form, goes back to Aelfric, appears in various editions over
a long period, the last being 1728. Pueriles Confabulationculae
—there were two works of the same name, one by Cordier, the other
by Evaldus Gallus—appears in 1693—with a preface dated 1548.
Such works as these—the powder of learning with the jam of
amusement thinly spread—stand midway between the only two
other kinds of written or printed books for children in the Norman,
Plantagenet and Tudor centuries. The pure lessonbook-powder
and no jam—was, of course, a necessity. It is not of great interest
or value here to pursue its history in detail, and its position has
already been discussed? Alphabets were printed in numbers
1 Of one curious instance of longevity no preliminary stages seem to exist. In
1745–6, John Newbery published The Circle of the Sciences, a dialogue manual in
seven volumes. It went into several editions, and other publishers reissued it between
1780 and 1800.
The seven volumes comprise seven subjects almost identical with
those of the trivium and quadrivium of scholasticism. Newbery said that he himself
compiled it at great pains; but the choice of subjects implies some pedigree for his
selection. No ancestors for the little books, however, have been discovered. The facts
are an example of the way in which children's books at once preserve and mutilate
very ancient material.
2 See vol. m, chap. XIX; vol. vir, chaps. XIII and xIv; vol. ix, chap. xv; and the
corresponding bibliographies.
## p. 368 (#390) ############################################
368
[CH.
Children's Books
6
from the sixteenth century onwards ; the stationers' records give
many entries. In the same century, the hornbook appeared-an
alphabet, a short syllabary, and, usually, the Lord's prayer, printed
on a little sheet of paper, nailed on a piece of board of the shape
of a spade's head and covered with transparent horn. It conferred
two words on the language-criss-cross-row' and 'ampersand. '
This invention was succeeded, late in the eighteenth century, by
the battledore, a folded card containing, as well as the literary
elements, a few woodblock illustrations ; battledores were still
being manufactured in 1840, so sluggish and yet so long is the
stream of elementary instruction. Alphabetical rimes began to
appear under Elizabeth, though familiar verses or jingles like
'A was an Apple-pie’ did not get into print (they may have been
in oral existence) till at least a century later.
Another early species (of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries)
was neither a schoolbook nor a book of mere recreation : the
succession of books of courtesy,' which became current soon
after the invention of printing. For historical purposes, they
have been admirably grouped (and as admirably edited) in two
publications of the Early English Text Society, The Babees' Boke",
and Queene Elizabethe's Achademy. They provide the antithesis to
monkish or literary education. The pamphlets in them were
written to fit the young gentleman for this world, not for the next;
and for the active life of this world rather than for the contem-
plative. They describe manners, not culture: their ideal is
anticipated in Chaucer's squire. They were not for the poor of
Langland :
Now may each cobbler send his son to school,
And every beggar's brat learn from his book,
Turn to a writer and get into a lord's house.
To that end, you must enter a monastic or cathedral school: there,
you could get learning. Here, in these treatises, you got, instead,
virtue and knowledge of the world. Incidentally, it may be noted,
readers were warned against adult works : 'Keep them from
reading of feigned fables, vain fantasies, and wanton stories,
and songs of love, which bring much mischief to youth? The
alternative was 'good Godly books. But there was not any
special provision of such works.
These educational and semi-educational books have been men-
tioned because, in early periods, they possessed the importance
i See vol. II, p. 341.
? Rhodes's Boke of Nurture (1577); printed before 1554.
## p. 369 (#391) ############################################
xvi]
Hell-fire Tales
369
conferred by isolation. The effect of that isolation is seen when,
in more authentic beginnings of children's literature, good Godly
books' first emerge. The new feature is a natural by-product of
the national life. The end of religious persecution in its more
virulent forms, the Elizabethan diffusion of knowledge and en-
thusiasm, the Jacobean growth of style, the puritan fierce flame
of morality, the vast increase in the activity of the press—all
helped to make the child-mind, not, perhaps, a centre of in-
tensive cultivation, but, at least, not a fallow field. But, since all
previous efforts (except the decayed and, so to speak, illegally
acquired romances, which will be dealt with when chapbooks are
considered) had been, more or less, more rather than less, didactic,
the new product was, also, didactic. Its novelty lay in the fact
that it was not a text-book. It was purely moral, not forensic
nor technical.
It was a grim affair, with few literary merits.
Hell-fire was its chief theme; anything might turn out to be a
faggot for the conflagration of wicked little souls. More than a
century later, Mrs Sherwood was influenced by the same obsession.
The kingdom of heaven might be of children; but children were
;
always dreadfully in jeopardy of another fate.
The best vision of these grisly performances is to be seen in
one of them. Thomas White, minister of the gospel, in A Little
Book for Little Children (1702)a volume of brief moral
addresses-recommends his audience to read
no Ballads or foolish Books, but the Bible, and the Plain-mans path way
to Heaven, a very plain holy book for you; get the Practice of Piety;
Mr Baxter's Call to the Unconverted; Allen's Allarum to the Unconverted;
read the Histories of the Martyrs that dyed for Christ; and in the Book of
Martyrs. . . . Read also often Treatises of Death, and Hell, and Judgement,
and of the Love and Passion of Christ.
Some perfectly horrible stories of martyrdom ensue. Foxe's
Book of Martyrs, as it is colloquially called, was and long con-
tinued to be, perhaps still is in some strata of society, a great
incentive to piety and gateway to religious adventure; and it
must be admitted that many children like such horrors, and do
not suffer any harm from them. Still, White's love of tortured
saints (young ones, for choice) and his readiness to describe their
torments in detail pass the limits of innocuous ferocity.
The religious works catalogued by White as suited to the
young were adult or semi-adult in purpose. More definitely
juvenile was the anonymous Young Man': Calling . . . a Serious
and Compassionate Address to all Young Persons to remember
24
6. L XI.
CH. XVI.
## p. 370 (#392) ############################################
370
[CH.
Children's Books
6
their Creator in the days of their Youth (1685). The author of a
great part of it was, probably, Samuel Crossman, whose initials
are at the end of the preface. “Richard Burton' (ie. Nathaniel
Crouch) wrote the residue. An eighth edition appeared in 1725,
so the book was clearly in demand. Crossman outdoes White in
his examples of martyrdom ; his homilies, also, are longer, but not
at all more valuable or enduring. Like White, he was vigorously
protestant. Some Divine Poems—passably good hymns-were
included in the final pages. Among the advertisements at the
end is one of Winter Evening Entertainments? This, perhaps-
one work alone excepted—is the nearest approach, before the
eighteenth century, to a child's book in the modern sense.
Here's Milk for Children, Wisdom for Young Men,
To teach them that they turn not Babes again,
says a prefatory poem. The 'wisdom' was, presumably, the ten
coarse stories of the jest-book type (“ten pleasant and delightful
relations ') which form the first part; the 'milk,' no doubt, the fifty
riddles of the second part, each of which is adorned with an
explanation, an observation and a moral, to say nothing of dupli-
cated woodcuts. A somewhat similar work was The Father's
Blessing Penn'd for the Instruction of his Children (by W. J. ,
M. A. ), the date of which may be roughly conjectured from one of
the 'riddles in rhyme' which (in addition to thirteen 'lessons')
it contains :
Q. What rare Outlandish Fruit was that of late
Which Heaven sent us to restore our State ?
A. Our Statesmen had the Scurvy deeply, sure
The Princely Orange was a sovereign cure.
It is accompanied by a woodcut of an orange. This cut and
its fellows did duty elsewhere, in another Little Book for Little
Children, also by Thomas White (not dated; the frontispiece,
however, is a portrait of queen Anne). Here, too, is a mixture of
a
education and amusement—a cut of a hornbook, some spelling
lessons, alphabetical rimes and riddles. The volume is notable
for the first appearance in print of A was an Archer, and the
lines displaying the errors of misplaced punctuation, beginning
'I saw a Peacock with a fiery Tail. ' Practically contemporary
1 No copy earlier than 1737 (“Sixth Edition') is available to the writer. But the
description in the advertisement of 1685 exactly coincides with the contents of the
1737 edition, in which the author is given as Richard Burton--Nathaniel Crouch.
Crouch died, probably, before 1725. Winter Evenings, and variants upon it, is &
perpetually recurrent title among children's books,
## p. 371 (#393) ############################################
xvi] • Exemplary’ Compilations 371
with this was The Child's Week's-Work, by William Ronksley
(1712). It is the best of all these early attempts to purvey
'pleasure with profit duly mixt,' though there is more profit than
pleasure in it. Its simplicity of method and absence of dogmatic
frenzy are remarkable. In four successive series of lessons, each
calculated to occupy a week, it runs up to words of four syllables.
A monosyllabic verse may be quoted :
Hear you a Lark?
Tell me what Clerk
Can match her. He that beats
The next Thorn-bush
May raise a Thrush
Would put down all our lays.
Finally, perhaps the most popular-or, at any rate, most widely
read-of all these oppressive compilations was James Janeway's
Token for Children: being an Exact Account of the Conversion,
Holy and Exemplary Lives, and Joyful Deaths of several young
Children (? 1720): a supreme example of morbid and gloating
piety. The title conveys its scope. It was not alone; three or
four works like it can be discovered; but it was the most highly
coloured.
A more polished type—indeed, pietists might have said a politely
immoral type—is the Chesterfield of the seventeenth century, A
Lady's Gift (1688, published without authorisation, often re-
printed). Halifax—the trimmer-could write admirable English,
and, if his Advice to a Daughter (the sub-title) is worldly, it
is, also, honest and sensible. It had other counterparts in the
next century besides Chesterfield's Letters. Advice to a Young
Nobleman, Letters from a Tutor to his Pupils and similar works
carried out the gentlemanly ideal of making the best of this world
without either despising or making too much of the next.
Works of these types were, if not common, at any rate not
unique. They are not, perhaps, in the direct succession of pure
children's literature: they are but the unennobled ancestors.
But they deserve not to be forgotten by the historian. The more
authentic pedigree follows a line of less unmixed descent-lines,
rather, for the family has, at first, three branches. The older
branches are among the oldest forms of literature preserved to us :
the cadet branch is fathered by two eminent men.
To take the youngest first. The parent work in it has, naturally,
been overshadowed by greater works in the chapter on its author
in a previous volume! All through the eighteenth century, a
1 Vol. VII, chap. VII.
24-2
## p. 372 (#394) ############################################
372
Children's Books
[ch.
work called Divine Emblems; or Temporal Things Spiritualized,
by John Bunyan, was recurrent in little rough editions. It was
not until 1889 that this was identified as a curtailed version of a
longer book-A Book for Boys & Girls: or, Country Rhimes
for Children. By J. B. The first edition contained seventy-four
'meditations'; in 1701, an editor revised it ruthlessly, and cut the
number of emblems down to forty-nine. It consists of short poems
-exceedingly bad poetry, but plain rugged morality-on such
subjects as the frog, the hen, and other common objects, each with
a rimed moral. Bunyan declares his object :
I do't to show them how each fingle-fangle,
On which they doting are, their souls entangle,
As with a web, a trap, a gin, or snare,
And will destroy them, have they not a care.
His 'morals' are as recondite and laborious as those of Gesta
Romanorum. The importance of the book lies in its authorship,
its intention and its method. It reveals not a little of the inspired
tinker's mind. It shows a real desire to provide something special
for children, not merely the old clothes of adult literature cut
down. And it is a deliberate use of a responsible artistic form
and of material not traditional but original.
By Bunyan stands a lesser man but a more skilled artificer-
Isaac Watts. His Divine Songs have already been treated'.
They are quoted every day, and usually misquoted. Some of
them—three or four, at most, it may be; but that is an honourable
percentage-will resound through nurseries for generations yet
to come : the rest are dead, slain by time. For their epoch,
they were not far from perfection, as publishers saw. They were
reprinted endlessly for far more than a century. Mrs Trimmer, in
1789, gave them renewed vogue by a Comment setting forth their
virtues and elaborating their doctrinal teaching. Another writer
adapted their theology to unitarian beliefs. They were at once
carried off into the literary Alsatia of the chapbook. A kind of
imitation appeared in 1751, Puerilia, by John Marchant, 'Songs
for Little Misses, Songs for Little Masters, Songs on Divine, Moral
and other Subjects. ' They had a certain spirit, but did not strike
the imagination of the day: only two editions were issued.
It was the chapbook, that last poor refuge of Middle Age
enchantments, which provided children with what they wanted in
the reign of queen Anne and the first three Georges. They had
to learn the alphabet, they had to read the guides to goodness, the
i Vol. 1x, p. 178.
## p. 373 (#395) ############################################
XVI]
The Chapbook
373
Ollendorfs of petty culture, the anecdotal or poetic allurements
to superior virtue, which, as a matter of fact, young persons are
often quite ready enough to acquire without force. But they were
not less ready to enjoy other fare. A famous passage in The
Tatler (No. 95), in which Mr Bickerstaff describes his little godson
as absorbed in the stories of Bevis and Don Belianis and other
great and famous heroes, sums up the charm of forbidden romance
with the nicest perfection. The chapbook was what the poor
and the young could read familiarly. In these little penny, two-
penny and sixpenny productions-octavo in form, with sixteen
pages, at first, but, after 1726, usually duodecimo, with twenty-four
pages—the last fragments of the old romances were enshrined.
They existed before 1700—certainly early in the eighteenth
century, at least ; but few early copies have survived, and it was
not until the Georgian era that they were profusely manufactured.
Who wrote these versions is not known. They may have been
abbreviations of the manuscript texts of the thirteenth or four-
teenth centuries ; but the discrepancies are so marked that, more
probably, they were oral versions committed to print indepen-
dently in some obscure way. They were issued all over the king-
dom, the centres with the greatest output being, apparently,
London (Aldermary churchyard in particular), Dublin, York,
Glasgow, Newcastle, Stirling and Banbury. The books were not,
in the first instance, meant for children, though, in the latter
half of the eighteenth century, whole series expressly juvenile
appeared (the Banbury set was the best known and, perhaps, best
produced); but children possessed themselves of them. Wood-
blocks were used almost haphazard : Guy slaying a boar in one
booklet was George slaying a dragon in another. The indigenous
heroes of Britain-Tom Thumb, certain Jacks, Hickathrift, Friar
Bacon—were here preserved in a vernacular epic cycle, with such
additions as fashion, fact, or sheer literary piracy from time to
time provided. In some volumes, indecency was the sole point;
others were merely coarse in a natural way; in all, the English
was vile. After 1800, they fell into a decline: better production
ousted them from favour; 'the blocks and types were getting
worn out. . . . Catnach buried them in a dishonoured grave? '
The chief addition to the common stock of chapbook material
made in the eighteenth century were the adventures of Robinson
Crusoe and Gulliver, Watts's poems, the adventures of Philip Quarll
(a pseudo-Crusoe), anecdotes decked out with names invented
1 Ashton, J. , Chapbooks of the Eighteenth Century (1882).
6
## p. 374 (#396) ############################################
374
[CH.
Children's Books
by John Newbery for his own much better productions, collections
of nursery rimes (after about 1760) and various versions of
Perrault's fairy tales ; towards the end of the century, eastern and
Arabian tales were added.
It was the chapbook, also, which preserved to us our scant
native fairy lore. Andrew Lang once said that England had but
one authentic fairy-hero-Jack the slayer of Blunderbore and
other giants. But, wherever the stories originated in the long
history of man's mind, many were current, and England once was
'al fulfild of fayerye. ' Popular taste ascribed the decay of Titania's
kingdom to monks : where monks were, ‘farewell, rewards and
fairies. But the stories remained; and a curious allusion in
bishop Corbett's rough but charming seventeenth century poem
shows that they were respected and treasured:
To William Churne of Staffordshire,
Give land and praises due,
Who every meal can mend your cheer
With tales both old and true:
To William all give audience,
And pray ye for his noddle:
For all the fairies' evidence
Were lost if were addle.
William Churne, whoever he was, perished, and his tales with
him ; and the sad friends of fairy truth must go up and down with
careful search for such relics as they may find in the byways of
folklore. It was from France that the revival of magic came.
Fairy tales reached the French court about 1676, and set a fashion
of simplicity, sometimes real, more often affected. In 1996,
Charles Perrault began to publish (in Moetjen’s Recueil de pièces
curieuses et nouvelles) the famous stories alleged to be written by
his little boy; they came out in a separate volume in 1697, as
Histoires ou Contes du Tems Passé, avec de Moralités ; the frontis-
piece contained the immortal legend, Contes de ma mère l'Oie.
This is not the place to go into the anthropology of fairy tales
in general, or of these fairy tales in particular. It is quite
probable that Perrault's son did actually tell the tales himself to
his father, much as he heard them from his nurse. Their delightful
simplicity made them instantly popular. An English translation
appeared, apparently, in 17291, by Robert Samber. The stories
>
>
1 Advertised in The Monthly Chronicle, March 1729 (Andrew Lang, on the authority
of Austin Dobson, in Perrault's Popular Tales, with Introduction, etc. , 1888). The
earliest surviving copy is the sixth edition, 1764, giving both French and English,
Mrs Trimmer, born in 1741, was familiar with the tales in her childhood.
## p. 375 (#397) ############################################
xvi]
Nursery Rimes
375
passed speedily into chapbooks, as did those of Madame d'Aulnoy
about the same time. It should be added that they were provided
with morals': Red Riding Hood proved that
Wolves for sure there are
Of every sort, and every character;
while Bluebeard exemplified 'curiosity, thou mortal bane. '
So, the fairy tale attained print, and tradition became litera-
ture. About the same period, the other strain of traditional lore,
also, was glorified into printed matter. Nursery rimes have all
manner of origins, and may be detected in allusions long before
they appear whole and unadorned. But, there was, apparently, no
Corpus Poetarum Infantilium till, in 1744, Cooper published
Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book, in two volumes. Here, for
the first time, some unknown hand established a classic. Here
was the nucleus upon which, in all probability, all later collec-
tions--and there was not much to be added to it, were founded.
The rimes, in themselves, do not call for comment. Except for a
few which would offend modern taste, they are the same-verbally,
for all practical purposes-as nurses use today.
No earlier collection, if one was made, survives ; and it is
sixteen years before another is recorded-The Top Book of All;
the date, 1760, is determined by a little woodblock at the end.
This is not entirely a nursery rime book; it contains nine familiar
rimes, Watts's Sluggard, some riddles and three wellknown short
tales.
Epictetus appeared before the public in 1758, and its success and
sale make it one of the minor romances of publishing. It was in
one volume, large quarto, and 1018 copies were struck off at first;
2
## p. 358 (#380) ############################################
358
[ch.
The Bluestockings
but, as these were insufficient, 250 more were printed a few months
later. It was issued by subscription, and the price was a guinea
in sheets. In her own copy were the names of no fewer than 1031
subscribers, and, since many copies were not claimed ‘by way of
compliment,' Mrs Carter gained nearly a thousand pounds profit.
Richardson's bill for printing the first impression amounted to
£67. 78. Two further editions were printed in her life-time, and,
for many years, it remained a good selling book at a high price.
Epictetus gained for its author a European reputation. So far
afield as Russia, where, said Elizabeth Carter, ‘they were only just
beginning to walk on their hind legs,' there appeared a notice of
the learned English woman, and she was told that the Tsarina had
read it through with high approbation. After its publication, she
was regarded by the bluestocking circle with something akin to
awe, and it is almost a relief to find her intimates, Mrs Montagu
and Miss Talbot, jestingly referring to her uncle Epictetus,' or
writing of her as 'cousin-german to Xenophon,' while Walpole,
with his facile talent for bestowing unchristian names, frequently
calls her Mrs Epictetus Carter.
After Epictetus, Mrs Carter did not write anything more for
publication, though, in 1762, Lord Bath persuaded her to publish
a small volume of poems that had been written at various times.
She gave such reluctant consent to this that Miss Talbot accused
her of thinking it ‘no small degradation from a quarto of Greek
Philosophy to dwindle into an eighteenpenny pamphlet of English
verse. The dedication was to the earl of Bath, and, writes her
biographer, 'is wholly unsullied by that flattery which is too often
a disgrace both to the author and the patron. But this praise is
somewhat discounted, when, on the next page, he quotes a letter
from Mrs Carter, indicating that Lord Bath wrote the dedication
himself!
For the remainder of her long life, Elizabeth Carter settled
down to the comfortable enjoyment of her fame on the modest
competence of which the profits from Epictetus were the foundation
Her influential friends invested this money profitably; and, some
years later, when Mrs Montagu inherited her husband's fortune,
she allowed her friend £100 a year. Lord Bath did not leave her
an annuity, according to the expectation of many of the blue-
stockings; but his heirs generously made good this deficiency by a
grant of £100 a year. During the summer months, she lived with
her father at Deal, or went on visits to her friends among the
great at their country houses. The winter she invariably spent in
1
## p. 359 (#381) ############################################
Xv]
Hannah More
359
London in handsome and comfortable apartments in Clarges street,
within easy distance of several of the bluestocking hostesses.
“She kept no table,' and never dined at home, except when ill, or
unable to go out. In the wide bluestocking circle, she was always
a welcome guest, and, not only did they invite her to their houses,
but they invariably sent for her their sedan chairs or carriages,
which again carried her back to Clarges street by ten o'clock
at the latest. She was, apparently, a sympathetic listener rather
than a talker, but she was always, to the end of her long life,
a notability in the inner circle of the bluestockings.
Di
Flot
The bluestocking, however, whose fame reached to the furthest
ends of the earth—though as a philanthropist rather than as
a blue—is Hannah More! When she first appeared in the blue-
stocking coteries, she had not yet become a passionate reformer, a
stern moralist, “the eminent divine,' as she was called in later years.
Her connection with the blues represents the 'gay and worldly'
side of her serious life. During her first winter among them she
was still in the twenties, and her hasty impressionist descriptions
of the literary society of London scintillate with the fresh enthusiasm
of a girl whose eyes and mind are slightly dazzled by unaccustomed
experiences. She was not unworthy to be admitted to the society
of those learned ladies and ingenious gentlemen. She spoke
fluent French, polished by conversation with some French officers
on parole, who often visited her home. Her father taught her
Latin, and some mathematics, though, frightened by her pre-
cocity, he did not take her far in the latter science. Her elder
sisters, not having any fortune in prospect, opened a boarding-
school at Bristol to which she was sent, at the age of twelve.
Later, like her four sisters, she taught in the school, assiduously
carrying on her own education at the same time. She studied
Latin, Italian and Spanish, improving her style by translations
and imitations of the Odes of Horace, and some of the dramatic
compositions of Metastasio.
Hannah More was a precocious child—a child who, indisputably,
was the mother of the woman. In youthful days, she would
treasure any stray scrap of paper on which she scribbled verses or
essays that were always adorned with a well directed moral. '
When her ardent wish took form in the shape of 'a whole quire
of paper to herself,' it was soon filled by the budding moralist with
supposititious letters to depraved characters, intended to reclaim
ZIE
1 See, also, ante, vol. x, chap. XI, pp. 267—8, and vol. xi, chap. XII.
711
## p. 360 (#382) ############################################
360
[CH.
The Bluestockings
them from their errors. The one romance of her life began when
she was twenty-two, and came to naught, though, indirectly, it
paved the way for her literary career. She was engaged to a
wealthy man of good position, the cousin of two of her pupils.
This gentleman named Turner is said to have had every good
quality to make marriage a success, save 'a cheerful and composed
temper,' and—still more important lack—the initial courage to
marry. Twice was the wedding-day fixed and postponed, when
Hannah, on the advice of her friends, determined not to be trifled
with any longer. Turner was repentant, but Hannah was inexor-
able. Finally, however, he insisted on settling on her an annuity
of £200, to compensate her for her great expense in preparing
to be the wife of a man of large fortune. This income per-
mitted her to devote her time to literary pursuits, though, when
she first visited London in 1774, she had not published anything
except a small play for schools, The Search after Happiness.
She was introduced to London society by one of those fortunate
events that suggest the guiding hand of destiny. She, with two
of her sisters, had not been in London a week when she wrote to a
friend describing her emotions at seeing Garrick as king Lear.
Her friend, who knew Garrick, showed him the letter, and, as the
actor was curious to see the young enthusiast, an introduction was
arranged. The day after this she was invited to the Garricks'
house to meet Mrs Montagu, and, as her biographer succinctly puts
it, ‘her introduction to the great, and the greatly endowed, was
sudden and general. ' Her portrait, painted some years later by
Opie, suggests a strong and pleasant personality, and one finds that,
wherever she was taken by the Garricks, she gravitated towards
people of high rank in intellect by a species of mental elective
affinity. She had long desired to see Johnson, but Sir Joshua
Reynolds, at whose house she met him, prepared her, as he 'handed
her
up the stairs,' for a mood of possible sadness and silence in the
great man. She was, however, fortunate enough to find him
advancing to meet her with good humour in his countenance, and
a macaw of Sir Joshua's in his hand,' while he gallantly greeted her
with a verse from a morning hymn of her own composition. Other
introductions speedily followed: to Edmund Burke, to bishop
Percy, the collector of the Reliques, who was 'quite a sprightly
modern, instead of a rusty antique,' and to other distinguished
members of the bluestocking coteries.
In the following year, 1775, Hannah again visited London in
February. This time, she dined at Mrs Montagu's, where she met
2
## p. 361 (#383) ############################################
xv]
Hannah
More and Cadell
361
6
6
Elizabeth Carter and Mrs Boscawen, the widow of the admiral.
The bluestocking parties were now at their zenith, and the clearcut
thumbnail sketches Hannah gives of the chief dramatis personae
are always vivid and lifelike. Of Mrs Montagu, she says,
She is not only the finest genius, but the finest lady I ever saw . . . she lives in
the highest style of magnificence . . . her form is delicate even to fragility . . .
she has the sprightly vivacity of fifteen, with the judgment and experience of
a Nestor.
The young provincial, though not “violently modish,' kept at least
one eye on the fashion, and permitted her hair to be dressed in the
extravagant mode that, as moralist, she was compelled to censure,
even while she adopted it. She quickly noted Elizabeth Carter's
indifference to dress, which, with tactful euphuism, she thus
describes. “Mrs Carter has in her person a great deal of what the
gentlemen mean when they say such a one is a “poetical lady”. . .
however, I like her much. She was, perhaps, most attracted by
Mrs Boscawen, who, she said, was polite, learned, judicious and
humble. This first impression was strengthened as she knew her
more intimately, and there was not one of the bluestocking ladies
of whom Hannah wrote with more admiration, though, perhaps
because but few of her letters that were thought not inferior to
those of Mrs Montagu-have been published, she is less well-
known to the general reader.
In 1775, after her return to Bristol, Hannah More told her
sisters that she had been 'so fed with praise and flattering atten-
tions' that she would find out her real value by writing a poem,
and offering it to Cadell. In a fortnight, she had finished Sir
Eldred of the Bower, to which she added the poem entitled The
Bleeding Rock, written some years before. Cadell had probably
heard something of her, as he not only offered for it a sum beyond
her expectation, but ‘very handsomely' said that, if she could
discover what Goldsmith had received for his Deserted Village, he
would allow her the same price. A unique fashion surely of re-
ceiving a young writer, even in the eighteenth century! The two
poems, which scarcely filled thirty small pages, were welcomed
with acclaim by the bluestockings. Garrick recited them, Johnson
added a stanza, Richard Burke called the book 'a truly elegant
and tender performance,' and the writer's head, said her sisters,
needed to be unusually steady to withstand the flood of adulation
-and it was !
In the following year, the Garricks hospitably offered Hannah
a suite of rooms in their house, and, from that time onwards, for
>
## p. 362 (#384) ############################################
362
[ch.
The Bluestockings
6
more than twenty years, whenever she came to London, she
invariably stayed with them at the Adelphi, or at their Thames-
side retreat at Hampton. Under Garrick's influence, her next
literary venture was the play Percy, which launched her in London
society as a celebrity. The bluestockings congratulated her and
themselves on its extraordinary success, and if they did not 'crown
her, cover her, hide her with laurels,' as Richard Berenger, one of
them suggested, Mrs Boscawen, on its twelfth performance, sent
her a laurel wreath with the 'stems confined within an elegant
ring,' for which she returned thanks in an elegant copy of verses. '
She had almost finished The Fatal Falsehood, when, in 1779,
David Garrick died, and, greatly affected by his death, she deter-
mined to write no more plays. From this time, her thoughts
followed their natural trend towards serious subjects, and, her
letters, she gradually reveals herself as philanthropist and reformer.
She even attempted, said Cowper, ‘to reform the unreformable
Great,' and her Thoughts on the importance of the Manners of the
Great went into many large editions? Her grief at Garrick's
death found some vent in Sensibility, a poem addressed to Mrs
Boscawen, in which several bluestockings are mentioned. The
poem, however, that made the greatest stir in the bluestocking
coteries, was Bas Bleu, or Conversation. It is illustrative of the
fact that Hannah More, with her strong sense of dramatic values,
had the faculty of mentally visualising the significance of the
various movements with which she was connected. This poem, as
she explained in the preface, owed its name to the mistake of
a foreigner of distinction, who gave the literal name Bas-bleu to
a small party of friends that had often been called by way of
pleasantry Blue Stockings. She says further that these little
societies—sometimes misrepresented—were composed of persons
distinguished in general for their rank, talent, or respectable
character, who met frequently at Mrs Vesey's and at a few other
houses for the sole purpose of conversation. She adds a brief
a
tribute to the charm of these gatherings, where, she says, learning
was not disfigured by pedantry, good taste was not marred by
affectation and conversation was as little disgraced by calumny,
levity and other censurable errors as has, perhaps, been known
in any society. The poem is not of permanent value, though
Johnson told her that 'there was no name in poetry that might
6
1 The tracts with which she tried to reform the poor, Village Politics and the
Repository Tracts, had an amazing success, and were found so well-suited to the
purpose that the Religious Tract society was formed to continue the work.
## p. 363 (#385) ############################################
Xv]
Horace Walpole
363
>
not be glad to own it. ' Naturally, this poème à clef had a great
vogue among the bluestockings, as most of them were mentioned
either by their own names, or under some classical appellation. It
was written to amuse Mrs Vesey, and, after circulating some years
in manuscript, was eventually printed in 1786.
Perhaps the most curious friendship in the bas-bleu coteries,
was that between Hannah More and Horace Walpole. She was
not long in discovering that 'Horace liked nonsense talk better
than Greeks or Romans,' but, apparently, she could do her own
share of such conversation. When she spent evenings among the
bluestockings, she frequently mentions that she and Horace Wal-
pole, with another friend or two,ʻmake up a pleasant little coterie
of their own. Friendly correspondence passed between them,
when they were away from London; and, when Hannah More
went to live at her cottage, Cowslip green-cousin in name,
declared Walpole, to Strawberry hill—he collected all his own
works, printed at the Strawberry hill press, to give her 'for
remembrance. As a mark of great distinction, he printed her
Bishop Bonner's Ghost at the famous press, for distribution among
their common friends—in other words, the bluestockings. He gave
her a beautifully bound Bible, which she wished he would read;
but, in spite of the amazing differences of character between the
cynic and the reformer, they remained good friends till his death.
He was on intimate terms with Mrs Carter, too, and both the
famous bluestocking ladies were amazed when his Letters were
published. The Horace Walpole there revealed was an entirely
different person from the bluestocking they had known. When he
talked with them, there were not any traces of 'that truly French,
light and frivolous way of thinking which is so evident in his
printed letters. ' Indeed, it was something of a shock to them to
find that he had actually selected his letters for publication.
Hannah More was the chief chronicler as well as the poet
laureate of the blues. It is from the hasty impressionist sketches
in her letters that we gather the significance of the movement.
Of a bluestocking evening at William Pepys's, she says
There was all the pride of London, every wit and every wit-ess. . . but the
spirit of the evening was kept up on the strength of a little lemonade till
past eleven, without cards, scandal or politics.
A terse description that might serve as a type of most of the
bluestocking meetings. This cult of 'conversation—the pursuit of
ideas,' as it has been defined-acted as a subtle leaven to the
hard brilliant materialism of the eighteenth century. The social
## p. 364 (#386) ############################################
364
The Bluestockings
[CH.
refinement introduced by the bluestocking interest in literature
can be better appreciated by a glimpse at the glaring foil made
by ordinary society.
‘On Monday,' writes Hannah More, ‘I was at a very great assembly at
the Bishop of St Asaph’s. Conceive to yourself one hundred and fifty or two
hundred people met together. . . painted as red as bacchanals; poisoning the
air with perfumes; treading on each other's gowns; not one in ten able to
get a chair. . . ten or a dozen card tables crammed with dowagers of quality,
grave ecclesiastics and yellow admirals. '
It was another advantage of the bas-bleu societies, that 'common
or genteel swearing' was not countenanced : and, as tea, coffee,
orgeat and lemonade were the only beverages offered, intoxication
—then a general vice of society-seldom brought its embarrass-
ments into their midst.
From the somewhat elusive references to the bluestocking
parties, we gather that—unlike the Parisian salons—there was not
a fixed day or date for any of the meetings. A dinner might be
given by Mrs Montagu, after which there would be 'a strong
reinforcement of the Blues'; or, Mrs Vesey would hold an
assembly of rank, fashion and literati: 'so blue it was Mazarin
blue,' as Horace Walpole once described 'a Vesey. Or, Mrs
Boscawen might 'receive,' though parties at her house were
usually more exclusive, and thirty or forty was there considered
quite a large meeting. These were the principal bluestocking
hostesses, to whom came the elite of London both for talent
and fashion. Since the first conversation had been given by Mrs
Vesey, these societies had multiplied, and, from the seventies to
the end of the century, bluestocking meetings were held in many
other London houses. Sir Joshua Reynolds, 'the idol of every
company, and his sister had most interesting evenings at their
house in Leicester fields and, later, at Richmond. Here, even
Johnson was 'as brilliant as himself, and as good-humoured as
anyone else,' and there was scarce an expletive man or woman '
among the company. Mrs Thrale, of the little silver tongue,'
welcomed rank and talent to her home at Streatham, and much
good talk was heard in the famous library. Miss Mary Monckton,
afterwards the witty countess of Cork and othôry, had, said
Boswell, the finest bit of blue at her parties. Dressed in fine
thin muslin in the coldest weather, she would nonchalantly receive
her distinguished guests with a nod and a smile and a short
“How do do"? ; and then, without moving from her seat in the
middle of the room, would continue her conversation, lounging
6
rel
## p. 365 (#387) ############################################
Xv]
Fanny Burney
365
on one chair while she leaned on the back of another. At this
house, the guest of honour was Johnson, of whom dean Marlay
once remarked, “the ladies might well be proud when they could
turn a wolf-dog into a lap dog! '
Mrs Chapone, born Hester Mulso, occasionally gave blue-
stocking receptions that were 'rational, instructive and social,
and, also, unfortunately, somewhat spiritless and dull. Though
Johnson thought sufficiently well of her literary talent to include
her among the few contributors to his Rambler, the promise of
her youth never ripened to any noteworthy performance, if we
except Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, which, in its
day, was considered an educational work of the first importance.
The author was, by temperament, argumentative, impulsive, emo-
tional; and, perhaps because of her experience, such qualities are
condemned in her Letters. These are only interesting now as
embodying an acclaimed ideal of eighteenth century feminine
manners. Mrs Chapone was frequently a guest at North End,
where she would earnestly discuss with Richardson his female
characters. Mrs Delany, that ‘fairest model of female excellence,'
asserted that Mrs Chapone was the prototype of some of his
principal heroines, which, she said, “is the reason they are not
really so polished as he takes them to be. '
Perhaps the most charming description of a bluestocking
evening is from the vivid and sprightly pen of Fanny Burney'.
She was a blue, but not of what Hannah More called the old set.
She had not long visited among them-where Evelina and her
own amiable personality secured her a warm welcome—before her
appointment to a post at court. She snatched an evening from her
wearisome duties, however, to visit Mrs Ord, a later but hardly
less distinguished hostess than the original three, and there
found practically all the members of the circle : Mrs Montagu,
Mrs Boscawen, Owen Cambridge, Horace Walpole, Sir Lucas
Pepys, Leonard Smelt, Bennet Langton and Lady Rothes, his
wife, Mrs Carter, Mrs Chapone, William Pepys and others. The
talk was of The Streatham Letters, the correspondence between
Mrs Thrale and Dr Johnson which had just been published, and
many of the blues feared the indiscretions of her too fluent pen.
It is a lively and graceful picture of eighteenth century society,
and an excellent representation of the friendly charm of the
bas-bleu meetings.
· See Hill, Constance, Fanny Burney at the Court of Queen Charlotte (1912), chap. XII.
## p. 366 (#388) ############################################
CHAPTER XVI
CHILDREN'S BOOKS
CHILDREN's books, throughout the history of English literature,
have been in that literature, but not of it. Phrases and persons
from nursery lore have passed irrevocably into the national arsenal
of metaphor and allusion, while the sources of them may not have
had any claim to serious literary consideration. Children, too,
have annexed the books of their elders-Robinson Crusoe is the
standard example—and have almost established a prescriptive
right to the conquered territory. But not many books written
specially for children have also been enduring literature, in any
real sense, though the exceptions are notable. The nursery
library, in fact, has been a separate thing ; developed differently,
furnished from a different standpoint, with works written in a
different vein of inspiration and produced, commercially, with
different limitations and standards. Nor is the criterion of judg-
ment upon it, whether the reader or the historian be the judge, the
same as upon more solemn or artistic performances.
Its history really opens in the eighteenth century. Yet, in the
beginnings, the grown-up' and the child coincide, in a way. The
writers who, in the first volume of this work, treated of the riddles
of Cynewulf, Aelfric and Aldhelm, and of the scholastic labours of
Alcuin at York, were chronicling the very earliest books for
children in the language. Those who, in the same volume”, dis-
cussed the metrical romances of 1200—1500 set forth at large the
adult works whose disjecta membra were still the framework of
the cheapest books for children in the eighteenth century; while
Aesop, and bestiaries, and such a collection as Gesta Romanorum
were certainly, to some extent, read by children as well as by the
older flock at whom the monkish editors aimed.
1 Chaps. IF and v.
2 Chaps. XIII and xiv.
## p. 367 (#389) ############################################
CH, XVI] Educational Books
367
But these early productions are hardly what would be meant
today by the term 'children's books,' which, perhaps, is best and
most conveniently interpreted as 'books read or meant to be read
by children for pleasure or for profit, or for both, in their leisure
hours. ' Children read medieval riddles and schoolbooks, cer-
tainly; but they read them perforce, as part of their education.
So far as the social life of these early periods is clear, it is probable
that children read little out of school, for the simple reason that,
outside learned establishments, there was nothing to read. The
fables and anecdotes of which they acquired a knowledge must
usually, from the same cause, have been communicated to them
either orally or by the chances of tuition. Apart from purposes
of education, children had no books of their own before the
seventeenth century, and very few then.
Educational books deserve brief mention. They are only lite-
rature by accident, but they are, sometimes, not wholly scholastic.
Aelfric's Colloquy and the numerous successors to it have this
feature of artistic composition in them, that they are not merely
tabular; the dialogue form could be given a certain fictitious
vivacity. It long survived the renascence! Erasmus endued it
with fresh popularity and authority, and it persisted until the
eighteenth century. Sententiae Pueriles, a work of this kind
which, in form, goes back to Aelfric, appears in various editions over
a long period, the last being 1728. Pueriles Confabulationculae
—there were two works of the same name, one by Cordier, the other
by Evaldus Gallus—appears in 1693—with a preface dated 1548.
Such works as these—the powder of learning with the jam of
amusement thinly spread—stand midway between the only two
other kinds of written or printed books for children in the Norman,
Plantagenet and Tudor centuries. The pure lessonbook-powder
and no jam—was, of course, a necessity. It is not of great interest
or value here to pursue its history in detail, and its position has
already been discussed? Alphabets were printed in numbers
1 Of one curious instance of longevity no preliminary stages seem to exist. In
1745–6, John Newbery published The Circle of the Sciences, a dialogue manual in
seven volumes. It went into several editions, and other publishers reissued it between
1780 and 1800.
The seven volumes comprise seven subjects almost identical with
those of the trivium and quadrivium of scholasticism. Newbery said that he himself
compiled it at great pains; but the choice of subjects implies some pedigree for his
selection. No ancestors for the little books, however, have been discovered. The facts
are an example of the way in which children's books at once preserve and mutilate
very ancient material.
2 See vol. m, chap. XIX; vol. vir, chaps. XIII and xIv; vol. ix, chap. xv; and the
corresponding bibliographies.
## p. 368 (#390) ############################################
368
[CH.
Children's Books
6
from the sixteenth century onwards ; the stationers' records give
many entries. In the same century, the hornbook appeared-an
alphabet, a short syllabary, and, usually, the Lord's prayer, printed
on a little sheet of paper, nailed on a piece of board of the shape
of a spade's head and covered with transparent horn. It conferred
two words on the language-criss-cross-row' and 'ampersand. '
This invention was succeeded, late in the eighteenth century, by
the battledore, a folded card containing, as well as the literary
elements, a few woodblock illustrations ; battledores were still
being manufactured in 1840, so sluggish and yet so long is the
stream of elementary instruction. Alphabetical rimes began to
appear under Elizabeth, though familiar verses or jingles like
'A was an Apple-pie’ did not get into print (they may have been
in oral existence) till at least a century later.
Another early species (of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries)
was neither a schoolbook nor a book of mere recreation : the
succession of books of courtesy,' which became current soon
after the invention of printing. For historical purposes, they
have been admirably grouped (and as admirably edited) in two
publications of the Early English Text Society, The Babees' Boke",
and Queene Elizabethe's Achademy. They provide the antithesis to
monkish or literary education. The pamphlets in them were
written to fit the young gentleman for this world, not for the next;
and for the active life of this world rather than for the contem-
plative. They describe manners, not culture: their ideal is
anticipated in Chaucer's squire. They were not for the poor of
Langland :
Now may each cobbler send his son to school,
And every beggar's brat learn from his book,
Turn to a writer and get into a lord's house.
To that end, you must enter a monastic or cathedral school: there,
you could get learning. Here, in these treatises, you got, instead,
virtue and knowledge of the world. Incidentally, it may be noted,
readers were warned against adult works : 'Keep them from
reading of feigned fables, vain fantasies, and wanton stories,
and songs of love, which bring much mischief to youth? The
alternative was 'good Godly books. But there was not any
special provision of such works.
These educational and semi-educational books have been men-
tioned because, in early periods, they possessed the importance
i See vol. II, p. 341.
? Rhodes's Boke of Nurture (1577); printed before 1554.
## p. 369 (#391) ############################################
xvi]
Hell-fire Tales
369
conferred by isolation. The effect of that isolation is seen when,
in more authentic beginnings of children's literature, good Godly
books' first emerge. The new feature is a natural by-product of
the national life. The end of religious persecution in its more
virulent forms, the Elizabethan diffusion of knowledge and en-
thusiasm, the Jacobean growth of style, the puritan fierce flame
of morality, the vast increase in the activity of the press—all
helped to make the child-mind, not, perhaps, a centre of in-
tensive cultivation, but, at least, not a fallow field. But, since all
previous efforts (except the decayed and, so to speak, illegally
acquired romances, which will be dealt with when chapbooks are
considered) had been, more or less, more rather than less, didactic,
the new product was, also, didactic. Its novelty lay in the fact
that it was not a text-book. It was purely moral, not forensic
nor technical.
It was a grim affair, with few literary merits.
Hell-fire was its chief theme; anything might turn out to be a
faggot for the conflagration of wicked little souls. More than a
century later, Mrs Sherwood was influenced by the same obsession.
The kingdom of heaven might be of children; but children were
;
always dreadfully in jeopardy of another fate.
The best vision of these grisly performances is to be seen in
one of them. Thomas White, minister of the gospel, in A Little
Book for Little Children (1702)a volume of brief moral
addresses-recommends his audience to read
no Ballads or foolish Books, but the Bible, and the Plain-mans path way
to Heaven, a very plain holy book for you; get the Practice of Piety;
Mr Baxter's Call to the Unconverted; Allen's Allarum to the Unconverted;
read the Histories of the Martyrs that dyed for Christ; and in the Book of
Martyrs. . . . Read also often Treatises of Death, and Hell, and Judgement,
and of the Love and Passion of Christ.
Some perfectly horrible stories of martyrdom ensue. Foxe's
Book of Martyrs, as it is colloquially called, was and long con-
tinued to be, perhaps still is in some strata of society, a great
incentive to piety and gateway to religious adventure; and it
must be admitted that many children like such horrors, and do
not suffer any harm from them. Still, White's love of tortured
saints (young ones, for choice) and his readiness to describe their
torments in detail pass the limits of innocuous ferocity.
The religious works catalogued by White as suited to the
young were adult or semi-adult in purpose. More definitely
juvenile was the anonymous Young Man': Calling . . . a Serious
and Compassionate Address to all Young Persons to remember
24
6. L XI.
CH. XVI.
## p. 370 (#392) ############################################
370
[CH.
Children's Books
6
their Creator in the days of their Youth (1685). The author of a
great part of it was, probably, Samuel Crossman, whose initials
are at the end of the preface. “Richard Burton' (ie. Nathaniel
Crouch) wrote the residue. An eighth edition appeared in 1725,
so the book was clearly in demand. Crossman outdoes White in
his examples of martyrdom ; his homilies, also, are longer, but not
at all more valuable or enduring. Like White, he was vigorously
protestant. Some Divine Poems—passably good hymns-were
included in the final pages. Among the advertisements at the
end is one of Winter Evening Entertainments? This, perhaps-
one work alone excepted—is the nearest approach, before the
eighteenth century, to a child's book in the modern sense.
Here's Milk for Children, Wisdom for Young Men,
To teach them that they turn not Babes again,
says a prefatory poem. The 'wisdom' was, presumably, the ten
coarse stories of the jest-book type (“ten pleasant and delightful
relations ') which form the first part; the 'milk,' no doubt, the fifty
riddles of the second part, each of which is adorned with an
explanation, an observation and a moral, to say nothing of dupli-
cated woodcuts. A somewhat similar work was The Father's
Blessing Penn'd for the Instruction of his Children (by W. J. ,
M. A. ), the date of which may be roughly conjectured from one of
the 'riddles in rhyme' which (in addition to thirteen 'lessons')
it contains :
Q. What rare Outlandish Fruit was that of late
Which Heaven sent us to restore our State ?
A. Our Statesmen had the Scurvy deeply, sure
The Princely Orange was a sovereign cure.
It is accompanied by a woodcut of an orange. This cut and
its fellows did duty elsewhere, in another Little Book for Little
Children, also by Thomas White (not dated; the frontispiece,
however, is a portrait of queen Anne). Here, too, is a mixture of
a
education and amusement—a cut of a hornbook, some spelling
lessons, alphabetical rimes and riddles. The volume is notable
for the first appearance in print of A was an Archer, and the
lines displaying the errors of misplaced punctuation, beginning
'I saw a Peacock with a fiery Tail. ' Practically contemporary
1 No copy earlier than 1737 (“Sixth Edition') is available to the writer. But the
description in the advertisement of 1685 exactly coincides with the contents of the
1737 edition, in which the author is given as Richard Burton--Nathaniel Crouch.
Crouch died, probably, before 1725. Winter Evenings, and variants upon it, is &
perpetually recurrent title among children's books,
## p. 371 (#393) ############################################
xvi] • Exemplary’ Compilations 371
with this was The Child's Week's-Work, by William Ronksley
(1712). It is the best of all these early attempts to purvey
'pleasure with profit duly mixt,' though there is more profit than
pleasure in it. Its simplicity of method and absence of dogmatic
frenzy are remarkable. In four successive series of lessons, each
calculated to occupy a week, it runs up to words of four syllables.
A monosyllabic verse may be quoted :
Hear you a Lark?
Tell me what Clerk
Can match her. He that beats
The next Thorn-bush
May raise a Thrush
Would put down all our lays.
Finally, perhaps the most popular-or, at any rate, most widely
read-of all these oppressive compilations was James Janeway's
Token for Children: being an Exact Account of the Conversion,
Holy and Exemplary Lives, and Joyful Deaths of several young
Children (? 1720): a supreme example of morbid and gloating
piety. The title conveys its scope. It was not alone; three or
four works like it can be discovered; but it was the most highly
coloured.
A more polished type—indeed, pietists might have said a politely
immoral type—is the Chesterfield of the seventeenth century, A
Lady's Gift (1688, published without authorisation, often re-
printed). Halifax—the trimmer-could write admirable English,
and, if his Advice to a Daughter (the sub-title) is worldly, it
is, also, honest and sensible. It had other counterparts in the
next century besides Chesterfield's Letters. Advice to a Young
Nobleman, Letters from a Tutor to his Pupils and similar works
carried out the gentlemanly ideal of making the best of this world
without either despising or making too much of the next.
Works of these types were, if not common, at any rate not
unique. They are not, perhaps, in the direct succession of pure
children's literature: they are but the unennobled ancestors.
But they deserve not to be forgotten by the historian. The more
authentic pedigree follows a line of less unmixed descent-lines,
rather, for the family has, at first, three branches. The older
branches are among the oldest forms of literature preserved to us :
the cadet branch is fathered by two eminent men.
To take the youngest first. The parent work in it has, naturally,
been overshadowed by greater works in the chapter on its author
in a previous volume! All through the eighteenth century, a
1 Vol. VII, chap. VII.
24-2
## p. 372 (#394) ############################################
372
Children's Books
[ch.
work called Divine Emblems; or Temporal Things Spiritualized,
by John Bunyan, was recurrent in little rough editions. It was
not until 1889 that this was identified as a curtailed version of a
longer book-A Book for Boys & Girls: or, Country Rhimes
for Children. By J. B. The first edition contained seventy-four
'meditations'; in 1701, an editor revised it ruthlessly, and cut the
number of emblems down to forty-nine. It consists of short poems
-exceedingly bad poetry, but plain rugged morality-on such
subjects as the frog, the hen, and other common objects, each with
a rimed moral. Bunyan declares his object :
I do't to show them how each fingle-fangle,
On which they doting are, their souls entangle,
As with a web, a trap, a gin, or snare,
And will destroy them, have they not a care.
His 'morals' are as recondite and laborious as those of Gesta
Romanorum. The importance of the book lies in its authorship,
its intention and its method. It reveals not a little of the inspired
tinker's mind. It shows a real desire to provide something special
for children, not merely the old clothes of adult literature cut
down. And it is a deliberate use of a responsible artistic form
and of material not traditional but original.
By Bunyan stands a lesser man but a more skilled artificer-
Isaac Watts. His Divine Songs have already been treated'.
They are quoted every day, and usually misquoted. Some of
them—three or four, at most, it may be; but that is an honourable
percentage-will resound through nurseries for generations yet
to come : the rest are dead, slain by time. For their epoch,
they were not far from perfection, as publishers saw. They were
reprinted endlessly for far more than a century. Mrs Trimmer, in
1789, gave them renewed vogue by a Comment setting forth their
virtues and elaborating their doctrinal teaching. Another writer
adapted their theology to unitarian beliefs. They were at once
carried off into the literary Alsatia of the chapbook. A kind of
imitation appeared in 1751, Puerilia, by John Marchant, 'Songs
for Little Misses, Songs for Little Masters, Songs on Divine, Moral
and other Subjects. ' They had a certain spirit, but did not strike
the imagination of the day: only two editions were issued.
It was the chapbook, that last poor refuge of Middle Age
enchantments, which provided children with what they wanted in
the reign of queen Anne and the first three Georges. They had
to learn the alphabet, they had to read the guides to goodness, the
i Vol. 1x, p. 178.
## p. 373 (#395) ############################################
XVI]
The Chapbook
373
Ollendorfs of petty culture, the anecdotal or poetic allurements
to superior virtue, which, as a matter of fact, young persons are
often quite ready enough to acquire without force. But they were
not less ready to enjoy other fare. A famous passage in The
Tatler (No. 95), in which Mr Bickerstaff describes his little godson
as absorbed in the stories of Bevis and Don Belianis and other
great and famous heroes, sums up the charm of forbidden romance
with the nicest perfection. The chapbook was what the poor
and the young could read familiarly. In these little penny, two-
penny and sixpenny productions-octavo in form, with sixteen
pages, at first, but, after 1726, usually duodecimo, with twenty-four
pages—the last fragments of the old romances were enshrined.
They existed before 1700—certainly early in the eighteenth
century, at least ; but few early copies have survived, and it was
not until the Georgian era that they were profusely manufactured.
Who wrote these versions is not known. They may have been
abbreviations of the manuscript texts of the thirteenth or four-
teenth centuries ; but the discrepancies are so marked that, more
probably, they were oral versions committed to print indepen-
dently in some obscure way. They were issued all over the king-
dom, the centres with the greatest output being, apparently,
London (Aldermary churchyard in particular), Dublin, York,
Glasgow, Newcastle, Stirling and Banbury. The books were not,
in the first instance, meant for children, though, in the latter
half of the eighteenth century, whole series expressly juvenile
appeared (the Banbury set was the best known and, perhaps, best
produced); but children possessed themselves of them. Wood-
blocks were used almost haphazard : Guy slaying a boar in one
booklet was George slaying a dragon in another. The indigenous
heroes of Britain-Tom Thumb, certain Jacks, Hickathrift, Friar
Bacon—were here preserved in a vernacular epic cycle, with such
additions as fashion, fact, or sheer literary piracy from time to
time provided. In some volumes, indecency was the sole point;
others were merely coarse in a natural way; in all, the English
was vile. After 1800, they fell into a decline: better production
ousted them from favour; 'the blocks and types were getting
worn out. . . . Catnach buried them in a dishonoured grave? '
The chief addition to the common stock of chapbook material
made in the eighteenth century were the adventures of Robinson
Crusoe and Gulliver, Watts's poems, the adventures of Philip Quarll
(a pseudo-Crusoe), anecdotes decked out with names invented
1 Ashton, J. , Chapbooks of the Eighteenth Century (1882).
6
## p. 374 (#396) ############################################
374
[CH.
Children's Books
by John Newbery for his own much better productions, collections
of nursery rimes (after about 1760) and various versions of
Perrault's fairy tales ; towards the end of the century, eastern and
Arabian tales were added.
It was the chapbook, also, which preserved to us our scant
native fairy lore. Andrew Lang once said that England had but
one authentic fairy-hero-Jack the slayer of Blunderbore and
other giants. But, wherever the stories originated in the long
history of man's mind, many were current, and England once was
'al fulfild of fayerye. ' Popular taste ascribed the decay of Titania's
kingdom to monks : where monks were, ‘farewell, rewards and
fairies. But the stories remained; and a curious allusion in
bishop Corbett's rough but charming seventeenth century poem
shows that they were respected and treasured:
To William Churne of Staffordshire,
Give land and praises due,
Who every meal can mend your cheer
With tales both old and true:
To William all give audience,
And pray ye for his noddle:
For all the fairies' evidence
Were lost if were addle.
William Churne, whoever he was, perished, and his tales with
him ; and the sad friends of fairy truth must go up and down with
careful search for such relics as they may find in the byways of
folklore. It was from France that the revival of magic came.
Fairy tales reached the French court about 1676, and set a fashion
of simplicity, sometimes real, more often affected. In 1996,
Charles Perrault began to publish (in Moetjen’s Recueil de pièces
curieuses et nouvelles) the famous stories alleged to be written by
his little boy; they came out in a separate volume in 1697, as
Histoires ou Contes du Tems Passé, avec de Moralités ; the frontis-
piece contained the immortal legend, Contes de ma mère l'Oie.
This is not the place to go into the anthropology of fairy tales
in general, or of these fairy tales in particular. It is quite
probable that Perrault's son did actually tell the tales himself to
his father, much as he heard them from his nurse. Their delightful
simplicity made them instantly popular. An English translation
appeared, apparently, in 17291, by Robert Samber. The stories
>
>
1 Advertised in The Monthly Chronicle, March 1729 (Andrew Lang, on the authority
of Austin Dobson, in Perrault's Popular Tales, with Introduction, etc. , 1888). The
earliest surviving copy is the sixth edition, 1764, giving both French and English,
Mrs Trimmer, born in 1741, was familiar with the tales in her childhood.
## p. 375 (#397) ############################################
xvi]
Nursery Rimes
375
passed speedily into chapbooks, as did those of Madame d'Aulnoy
about the same time. It should be added that they were provided
with morals': Red Riding Hood proved that
Wolves for sure there are
Of every sort, and every character;
while Bluebeard exemplified 'curiosity, thou mortal bane. '
So, the fairy tale attained print, and tradition became litera-
ture. About the same period, the other strain of traditional lore,
also, was glorified into printed matter. Nursery rimes have all
manner of origins, and may be detected in allusions long before
they appear whole and unadorned. But, there was, apparently, no
Corpus Poetarum Infantilium till, in 1744, Cooper published
Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book, in two volumes. Here, for
the first time, some unknown hand established a classic. Here
was the nucleus upon which, in all probability, all later collec-
tions--and there was not much to be added to it, were founded.
The rimes, in themselves, do not call for comment. Except for a
few which would offend modern taste, they are the same-verbally,
for all practical purposes-as nurses use today.
No earlier collection, if one was made, survives ; and it is
sixteen years before another is recorded-The Top Book of All;
the date, 1760, is determined by a little woodblock at the end.
This is not entirely a nursery rime book; it contains nine familiar
rimes, Watts's Sluggard, some riddles and three wellknown short
tales.
