Johnson himself would have advised them better. “Babies do not want to hear about babies,” he told Mrs. Thrale; “they like to be told of giants and castles, and of somewhat which can stretch and stimulate their little minds.”[35]
He expressly warned her against the nursery editions which contained, as a substitute for genuine romance, his own moralised “Eastern tales”. But the Great Cham’s remarks upon children’s books were not published with his works, and parents went on buying the books which he declared that children never read.
Mrs. Sheridan’s Nourjahad (1767) appeared as a nursery chap-book in 1808, and Miss Edgeworth, in her tale of “Murad the Unlucky” (one of the Popular Tales), gives similar contrasted examples of wisdom and folly.
Minor moralists were unnumbered. Mr. Cooper, the author of Blossoms of Morality, having by his own account “accidentally met with a French edition of the Arabian Nights during a trip on the Continent”, and being “induced to wade through it, having no other book at hand”, was so far moved by the entertainment as to select and adapt some of the tales “for Youth”, under the title of The Oriental Moralist.[36]
A remark at the close of “Prince Agib and the Adamantine Mountain” gives a fair example of his treatment: “It may not be amiss to remind my youthful readers that an unwarrantable curiosity, and a degree of obstinacy too natural to young people, were the causes of the third Calender losing his eye”.
The author of The Governess; or, Evening Amusements at a Boarding School, though she allows Persian stories, admits that whenever she found “a sentiment that would answer her purpose”, she did not hesitate to “make it breathe from the lips of the Eastern Sage”.
The Grateful Turk, one of Thomas Day’s moral tales, appeared in the same year as Mrs. Pilkington’s Asiatic Princess, and Miss Porter followed with The Two Princes of Persia, “adapted to youth”. Alluring titles, such as “The Ruby Heart” and “The Enchanted Mirror” were another means of recommending improving histories.
Yet the oriental tale suffered less than native romance and folk-lore, by this sort of adaptation. Perhaps the Jinn, being “the slaves of him who held the lamp”, or “of him on whose hand was the ring”, were more helpless than other spirits in the power of the Moralist.
English fairies were not so submissive; indeed they played strange tricks with the little didactic works that bore their names.
Already (in 1746) Tom Thumb had turned pedagogue and published his “Travels”,[37] a barefaced introduction to Topography. Tom Thumb’s Folio (1768) was followed in 1780 by Tom Thumb’s Exhibition, “being an account of many valuable and surprising curiosities which he had collected in the course of his travels, for the instruction and amusement of the British Youths”.