A century of children's books

by Florence V. Barry

“Out on thee, villain,” cried Friar Bacon, “thou hast undone us both; hadst thou but called us when it did speak, all England had been walled about with brass, to its glory and our eternal fame.”

Locke’s followers were never tired of setting the “plain Magique of tru Reason’s Light” against Friar Bacon’s conjurings. There were later moralists who recognized the Wizard as a pioneer of science; but these would have none of his magic, and rejected all tales of undeserved good fortune.

Wordsworth alone had the courage to tum a child loose in the enchanted woods. He praised The History of Fortunatus, which is more like “Aladdin” than any tale of chivalry. By sheer luck the Spendthrift finds a Galley of Venice lying at anchor and gets his choice of gifts. These vanished like fairy gold in the hands of his sons, and children remembered little else but his Wishing Cap and his Purse that never was empty. Yet Fortunatus was a name to conjure by, and the pure spirit of adventure was in his first setting out, as the woodcut shows, “with a Hawk in his Hand”.

It seems odd that the eighteenth century child should have ballads about King Arthur and his Knights, but no account of them in prose. Malory’s “Noble Histories”, like the once famous cycles of Amadis and the Palmerins, escaped the chap-book writers; but they had one or two relics of the old Historyes of Troye, in which Priam’s palace had become an enchanted castle, and Hector a knight errant.

The pedlar had no chronology. Patient Grissel, fresh from a new translation of Boccaccio, was a lady of the eighteenth century, and what pleased the country fireside of 1700 still pleased it in 1760. The tales that Mr. Burchell gave the children in The Vicar of Wakefield might have come out of a chapman’s bundle in almost any part of the century: “the story of the Buck of Beverland, with the History of Patient Grissel, the Adventures of Catskin and then Fair Rosamond’s Bower.”

Among other “useless Trumpery” were riddles, nonsense-books and farcical tales of rogues or simpletons.[5] These are full of the topsy-turvy nonsense that children love, and the coarse jests from which they were seldom guarded. The older stories, even when they deal with everyday life, give it a romantic flavour. The Cobbler feasts with the King; the Valiant London Prentice leaves his shop on London Bridge, and sets out to joust with eastern princes. A Tudor pedlar, Tom Long, in the course of his absurd adventures, visits the Cave of the Seven Sleepers, whose story makes a welcome interlude:

“Coming to the town, they found everything altered, the inhabitants being other sort of people than they were the night before. So, going to buy food, the people refused to take their money, saying they knew not the coin; but enquiring further, found that since their being there, three generations had been dead and the fourth was in being”.

Tom Long was the puppet of a nonsense-book; but other chap-books, following Deloney, told the “true histories” of industrious fortune-makers who were not out of place in a commercial age; and the life of an eighteenth century pedlar was plain enough to pass for truth. An account (in a late Stirling tract)[6] of the “Flying Stationer”, Peter Duthie, shows that he took up his trade in 1729, when he was eight years old, and was upon the road for eighty years—a Georgian Autolycus, known for his quaint wit “in every city, town, village and hamlet in great Britain”. At some time, perhaps, he sold “lives” of his brethren Dougal Graham and John Cheap the Chapman, whose story was “moralised” by Hannah More.

The traveller is always a romantic figure. No amount of fact can take the pleasure of expectation and surprise out of a journey, and the setting of most chap-books was a journey by land or sea. The “Flying Stationer” asked no more for the Wonderful Voyages of Sir John Mandeville than for the rough yarn of a ship-wrecked sailor.

This last, if it pointed a moral, might serve a double purpose, for the old allegories were dying out, except in burlesques. Abstractions always had a way of coming alive when they set foot on English ground, and The History of Laurence Lazy, of “Lubberland Castle in the County of Sloth” was no mere allegory of Idleness, but the tale of a scapegrace who, to the joy of all children, got the better of the Schoolmaster, the Squire’s Cook and the Farmer. His “Arraignment and Trial” in the Town Hall of “Never Work” was a triumphant apology for idlers; yet a scene like this may have suggested the symbolic trial of Christian and Faithful in the Town of Vanity.