Page from The Juvenile Biographer
The painfully religious tales of James Janeway were not the only ones to familiarize death to the reading child. The Fairchild Family was once deemed a most charming, as it was certainly a most earnest book, and it has ever had popularity, for within a few years it has been reprinted in a large edition. I wonder how many death-bed scenes and references there are in that book! Nor are ordinary death-beds the saddest or most grewsome scenes. The little Fairchilds having lost their little tempers and pommelled each other somewhat, their father takes them as a shocking object-lesson to see the body of a man hung in chains on a gibbet. The horror of the progress through the gloomy wood to this revolting sight, the father's unsparing comments, the hideous account of the thing, rattling, swinging, turning its horrible countenance while Mr. Fairchild described and explained and gloated over it, and finally kneeled and prayed,—all this through several pages no carefully reared child to-day would be permitted to read. Mr. Fairchild's reason for taking them to this gibbeted corpse should not be omitted from this account; it was "to show them something which I think they will remember as long as they live, that they may love each other with perfect and heavenly love."
A painful and ever present lesson found on every page is the sinfulness of the world. The children recite verses and quote Bible texts to prove that all mankind have bad hearts, and Lucy commits to memory a prayer, a portion of which runs thus:—
"My heart is so exceedingly wicked, so vile, so full of sin, that even when I appear to be tolerably good, even then I am sinning. When I am praying, or reading the Bible, or hearing other people read the Bible, even then I sin. When I speak, I sin; when I am silent, I sin."
Sandford and Merton is most insincerely recommended by many folk to children to-day. I cannot believe any one who has recently read the book would ever expect a modern child to care for it. It is haloed in the memory of people who read it in their youth and fancy they still like it, but won't take the trouble to read it and see that they don't.
Jane and Ann Taylor should be added to this class of authors. The poem, My Mother, by Ann Taylor, was published in book form, and had many imitations. My Father, My Sister, My Brother, My Grandmother, My Playmate, My Pony, My Fido, and lastly, My Governess,—all, says the advertisement, "in the same stile,"—a style so easily imitated as to seem almost like parody:—
"Who learnt me how to read and Spell,
And with my Needle work as well,
And called me her good little Girl?
My Governess.
"Who made the Scholar proud to show
The Sampler work'd to friend and foe,
And with Instruction fonder grow?
My Governess."
We have the contemporary opinion of Charles Lamb of this new school of juvenile literature. In 1802 he wrote thus to Coleridge:—
"Goody Two Shoes is almost out of print. Mrs. Barbauld's stuff has banished all the old classics of the nursery, and the shopman at Newbery's hardly deigned to reach them off an old exploded corner of a shelf, when Mary asked for them. Mrs. Barbauld's and Mrs. Trimmer's nonsense lay in piles about. Knowledge as insignificant and vapid, as Mrs. Barbauld's books convey, it seems must come to a child in the shape of knowledge; his empty noddle must be turned with the conceit of his own powers when he has learned that a horse is an animal, and Billy is better than a horse, and such-like, instead of the beautiful interest in mild tales which made the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger than a child.... Hang them!—I mean the cursed Barbauld crew, those blights and blasts of all that is human in man and child."