"Goody Two Shoes" was published in April 1765, and few nursery books have had a wider circulation, or have retained their position so long. The number of editions that have been published both in England and America is legion, and it has appeared in mutilated versions under the auspices of numerous publishing houses in London and the provinces, although of late years there have been no new issues. Even in 1802, Charles Lamb in writing to Coleridge, said--
" "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, [ix]insignificant and vapid as Mrs Barbauld's books convey, it seems must come to a child in the shape of knowledge; and his empty noddle must be turned with conceit of his own powers when he has learnt that a horse is an animal, and Billy is better than a horse, and such like, instead of that beautiful interest in wild tales, which made the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger than a child. Science has succeeded to poetry no less in the little walks of children than with men. Is there no possibility of averting this sore evil? Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!
"Hang them!--I mean the cursed Barbauld [x]crew, those blights and blasts of all that is human in man and child."[B]
There must, however, be many parents still living who remember the delight that the little story gave them in their younger days, and they will, no doubt, be pleased to see it once more in the form which was then so familiar to them. The children of to-day, too, will look on it with some curiosity, on account of the fact that it is one of the oldest of our nursery tales, and amused and edified their grand-parents and great grand-parents when they were children, while they cannot fail to be attracted by its simple, pretty, and interesting story.
The question of the authorship of the book is still an unsettled one. It was at one time commonly attributed to Oliver Goldsmith, and no one who reads the book will consider it to be unworthy of the poet's pen. We find, however, in Nichol's Literary Anecdotes, that
"It is not perhaps generally known that to Mr Griffith Jones, and a brother of his, Mr Giles Jones, in conjunction with Mr John Newbery, the public are indebted for the origin of those numerous and popular little books for the amusement and instruction of children which have been ever since received with universal approbation. The Lilliputian histories of Goody Two Shoes, Giles Gingerbread, Tommy Trip, &c., &c., are remarkable proofs of the benevolent minds of the projectors of this plan of [xii]instruction, and respectable instances of the accommodation of superior talents to the feeble intellects of infantine felicity."
Mr Giles Jones was the grandfather of the late Mr Winter Jones, formerly the Principal Librarian of the British Museum, and the book is attributed to the first-named gentleman in the catalogue of the British Museum. It is claimed also that the book offers internal evidence in support of Mr Giles Jones' authorship, inasmuch as Goody Two Shoes becomes Lady Jones, and one of the prominent families in the book is also named Jones.
Beyond this, however, there appears to be no evidence as to Mr Giles Jones being the writer, and I think something may be said as to the claim on behalf of the poet Goldsmith, although I am by no means anxious that the [xiii]honour of having written it should be ascribed either to the one or to the other: the following remarks, which are mainly taken from an article I contributed to the Athenæum in April 1881, are offered simply as speculations which may not be without interest to lovers of the little book. They may, perhaps, show that there is some reason for attributing the work to Oliver Goldsmith, although, of course, it is not claimed that they absolutely establish the fact.