A Father’s Memoirs of his Child, by Benjamin Heath Malkin (1806), contains letters written by a child from his third to his seventh year (1798-1802).
The little boy, Thomas Williams Malkin, born in October, 1795, died when he was seven. His father, beginning the Memoirs, says: “It is not intended to run a parallel of his infancy with that of Addison in his assumed character of Spectator, who ‘threw away his rattle before he was two months old, and would not make use of his coral until they had taken away the bells from it’”; but the disclaimer proves that he was conscious of the parallel.
On his own showing, he had made the child into a “little Philosopher” who never had so much as a rattle to throw away, whose first toy was a box of letters. The boy’s letters show a pathetic struggle between natural simplicity and the artificial system on which he was being trained. Some are more precocious and pedantic than any in Juvenile Correspondence.
The tendency of parents to encourage stilted “epistolary patterns” was shown earlier in the childish letters of Mrs. Trimmer (See The Life and Writings of Mrs. T.)
Canning deals with the Newbery books much as Addison does with the ballads, though Canning’s classical parallels are not serious. He begins by recommending to novel-readers, instead of “the studies which usually engross their attention”, the “instructive and entertaining Histories of Mr. Thomas Thumb, Mr. John Hickathrift and sundry other celebrated Worthies; a true and faithful account of whose adventures and atchievements may be had by the Curious and the Public in general, price two-pence gilt, at Mr. Newbery’s, St. Paul’s Churchyard, and at some other Gentleman’s whose name I do not now recollect, the Bouncing B., Shoe-Lane”. (This refers to John Marshall’s sign of the “Great A and Bouncing B”.)
He identifies “Tom Thumb” with Perrault’s “Little Thumb”, and draws a parallel between that hero and Ulysses; and between the Ogre and Polyphemus, comparing the incidents in a mock-heroic vein. There is no trace of the “Lilliputian” Hickathrift which he mentions.
“Jemmy” Catnach, and “Johnny” Pitts of the “Toy and Marble Warehouse”, were rival printers of ballads and chap-books in Seven Dials.
Catnach’s nursery books include rhymed versions of Perrault’s Tales, The Butterfly’s Ball, The Tragical Death of an Apple Pie (a very old alphabet rhyme) and various “gifts”. (See Charles Hindley’s History of the Catnach Press, 1886.)