A century of children's books

by Florence V. Barry

This is somewhat more entertaining than the “Travels”, having an odd humour of its own; but the Tom Thumb of the Exhibition has changed his fairy dress for a schoolmaster’s gown, and lies in wait for pupils “in a large commodious room at Mr. Lovegood’s, number 3 in Wiseman’s Buildings, at the upper end of Education Road”.

Here he examines, under the lens of an “Intellectual Perspective Glass”, the unreasonable things which please a child. For example, unripe apples or gooseberries thus scrutinized, “instantly appear to be changed into a swarm of worms and other devouring reptiles”.

From this it is tempting to infer that the same merciless glass had discovered, instead of the traditional wren or robin, that “little feathered songster called the Advice Bird” which a child might see at the Exhibition. Such a lens, focussed upon Whittington’s Cat, would doubtless prove it a figment, or applied to a magic sword, might instantly change it to a piece of rusty iron.

Old ballads suffered the same transforming process. Robin Goodfellow,[38] dragged from his haunts to show “a virtuous little mortal” the way to Fairyland, took on the likeness of a Philosopher, the better to fool his victims.

Fairyland, he asserts, is “neither a continent nor an island, and yet it is both or either. It exists in the air, at a distance of about five feet and a half or six feet at most from the surface of the Earth”.

The solution of this pleasing riddle is found in a diagram of the human frame, whereon the Fairyland of Philosophy is shown to exist nowhere but in a man’s head, hard by those notable tracts, the “Land of Courage” and the “Land of Dumplins”.

A knavish sprite, this, who can find matter for jests in a fairy revolution; for by his account, “the reigning Monarch Fancy, and Whim, his royal Consort” have usurped the throne of Oberon; and Imagination is their eldest son.

In such an age, the boldest outlaw would have much ado to rescue Robin Hood; and since Robin could point but a one-sided moral, the writer of little books forgot his virtues and published his “Life” as a “Warning-piece”. He, forsooth, “did not know how to work”, had “neglected to learn a trade”, and being justly outlawed, skulked with his “gang” in Sherwood Forest, living “what they called a merry life”.

The Two Children in the Wood afforded ampler scope for moral contrasts. Addison’s praise had included even the pretty fiction of the robins, on the authority of Horace and his doves; but the makers of toy-books were not satisfied with this. They expunged the robins and prepared two prose versions of the ballad, one expanding the story into a novel of domestic life, and the other marring it with a happy ending.[39]

The novel, an amusing medley, deals in an underplot with the adventures of the wicked Uncle at sea, laying bare a past about which the ballad was silent; the rest is concerned with the home life of the two children, and contains a chapter of stories told for their benefit. At the end (by way of reparation, perhaps) the ballad itself is printed. The novelist carries enough moral ballast to float it all, and anticipates its effect in rhyme: