Chap-books of the Eighteenth Century / With Facsimiles, Notes, and Introduction

From The Cries and Habits of the City of London, by M. Lauron, 1709.
WITH
FACSIMILES, NOTES, AND INTRODUCTION
JOHN ASHTON
London CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY 1882
( All rights reserved )
PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES.

Although these Chap-books are very curious, and on many accounts interesting, no attempt has yet been made to place them before the public in a collected form, accompanied by the characteristic engravings, without which they would lose much of their value. They are the relics of a happily past age, one which can never return, and we, in this our day of cheap, plentiful, and good literature, can hardly conceive a time when in the major part of this country, and to the larger portion of its population, these little Chap-books were nearly the only mental pabulum offered. Away from the towns, newspapers were rare indeed, and not worth much when obtainable—poor little flimsy sheets such as nowadays we should not dream of either reading or publishing, with very little news in them, and that consisting principally of war items, and foreign news, whilst these latter books were carried in the packs of the pedlars, or Chapmen, to every village, and to every home.
Previous to the eighteenth century, these men generally carried ballads, as is so well exemplified in the Winter's Tale, in Shakespeare's inimitable conception, Autolycus. The servant (Act iv. sc. 3) well describes his stock: He hath songs, for man, or woman, of all sizes; no milliner can so fit his customers with gloves. He has the prettiest love songs for maids; so without bawdry, which is strange; with such delicate burdens of 'dildos' and 'fadings:' 'jump her' and 'thump her;' and where some stretch-mouthed rascal would, as it were, mean mischief, and break a foul gap into the matter, he makes the maid to answer, 'Whoop, do me no harm, good man;' puts him off, slights him, with 'Whoop, do me no harm, good man.' And Autolycus, himself, hardly exaggerates the style of his wares, judging by those which have come down to us, when he praises the ballads: How a usurer's wife was brought to bed of twenty money-bags at a burden; and how she longed to eat adders' heads, and toads carbonadoed; and of a fish, that appeared upon the coast, on Wednesday the fourscore of April, forty thousand fathom above water, and sung this ballad against the hard hearts of maids; for the wonders of both ballads, and early Chap-books, are manifold, and bear strange testimony to the ignorance, and credulity, of their purchasers. These ballads and Chap-books have, luckily for us, been preserved by collectors, and although they are scarce, are accessible to readers in that national blessing, the British Museum. There the Roxburghe, Luttrell, Bagford, and other collections of black-letter ballads are easily obtainable for purposes of study, and, although the Chap-books, to the uninitiated (owing to the difficulties of the Catalogue), are not quite so easy of access, yet there they exist, and are a splendid series—it is impossible to say a complete one, because some are unique, and are in private hands, but so large, especially from the middle to the close of the last century, as to be virtually so.