A century of children's books

by Florence V. Barry

As to “Sinbad”, it may be, as De Quincey judged, “a mere succession of adventures”; to a child, it is a second Odyssey. The giant that throws masses of rock at Sinbad’s raft is a brother of the Cyclops; Proteus is one with the Old Man of the Sea. But the adventures of Odysseus are plain and straight compared with the extravagant splendours of this merchant-adventurer. He walks by a river of dreams (which is yet a real river) till he finds the tall vessel that pleases him; but once afloat with black slaves and pages and bales of merchandise, he cares less for the occupation of traffic than for “the pleasure of seeing the countries and islands of the world”.

This is the very desire of the child; nor did dream-islands ever yield romance in greater profusion. One, indeed, is no island, but a great fish, on whose back the sand has been heaped up till trees have grown upon it; no sooner is the sailors’ fire alight than the solid ground sinks under their feet. In another, Sinbad descries from the top of a tree a “white object of enormous size”, the egg of a Roc, that gigantic bird whose wings obscure the sun.

Sir John Mandeville might have set down the adventures of the rhinoceros and the elephant, the valley of diamonds or the river of jacinths and pearls; but his account could never compare with this for reality.

These voyages among the islands, from El-Basrah to Sarandib, though they are set down in the language of myth, are as easy to trace upon a map as the wanderings of Odysseus between Troy and Ithaca. Nor is the Eastern story-teller without a Homeric interest in things seen and discovered, both great and small: a thousand horsemen clad in gold and silk, or a letter sent by the King of Sarandib to Harun Er-Rashid, written “on the skin of the Khawi, which is finer than parchment”, in writing of ultramarine.

The quality of realism is indeed one of the distinguishing features of Eastern romance. Sinbad’s account of the building of his raft from the planks and ropes of the wrecked ship almost reads like an entry in Crusoe’s journal, and there is the characteristic opening which simulates a narrative of fact: “In the time of the Khalifeh, the Prince of the Faithful Harun Er-Rashid, in the city of Baghdad”. All the sounds and colours of the East are in the setting of these tales, all the details of life and traffic; and yet it is never out of keeping with the supernatural. Wizards and fairies simply move among the natural inhabitants of bazaars or palaces,—a thing in no way surprising to a child; and forms of enchantment surpassing the illusions of a dream rise up in existing cities.

In a realistic age, such a setting would atone for the elements of unreality; yet the authors of the Tatler and Spectator (those gentle schoolmasters of grown-up children) held it of less account than the aptness of the stories to “reflection” and philosophy. For this they could forgive “that Oriental extravagance which is mixed with it”; but the more philosophical the tale, the less it needed a real background and moving figures. Vague allusions took the place of description, and incidents were turned to illustrate particular virtues or to point the arguments of Mr. Locke. Thus treated, the stories were said to be “writ after the Eastern manner, but somewhat more correct.”

Johnson followed the same method, but with more profound philosophy, in the Rambler; and it was in this “moralised” form that Eastern tales came, straight from the pages of the Spectator and the Rambler, into the first books which John Newbery devised “for the Amusement and Instruction” of children.

Thus the story of Alnascar, the Persian Glassman,[33] is printed in the last section (“Letters, Poems, Tales and Fables”) of A Museum for Young Gentlemen and Ladies: or, a Private Tutor for little Masters and Misses (1763); and the Twelfth Day Gift (1767) has Johnson’s tale of Obidah and the Hermit,[34] here called “The Progress of Life”.

Nor was there any attempt to choose the lighter and more entertaining stories for children. Such a tale, for example, as Will Honeycomb’s of Pug’s adventures (Spectator, 343), which Addison borrowed from the Chinese Tales, never found its way into the early children’s miscellanies, though Mrs. Barbauld, at the close of the century, produced a somewhat similar series of adventures in Evenings at Home.

In France, as in England, there were Eastern tales which came half way between the romance of pure adventure and the “Moral Tale”. Marmontel chose an Eastern setting for two of his stories; but English writers for children not unnaturally preferred Johnson’s “oriental” examples of conduct and duty, and were willing to sacrifice interest to moral significance.