A century of children's books

by Florence V. Barry

CHAPTER III
THE LILLIPUTIAN LIBRARY

Locke and the baby Spectator—Gulliver in the nursery—The children’s bookseller—A Little Pretty Pocket Book, The Circle of the Sciences and The Philosophy of Tops and Balls—Mr. Newbery’s shop in St. Paul’s Churchyard—The Lilliputian Magazine—“The History of Mr. Thomas Trip”—Nursery “Richardsons”—Mother Goose’s Melody—“A very great Writer of very little Books”—The History of Goody Two-Shoes as an epitome of the Lilliputian Library—The question of Goldsmith’s authorship—Late “Lilliputians”—The Wyse Chylde in many rôles—Juvenile Trials—The Juvenile Biographer—Lilliputian Letters—A hint of revolution—The new Tatler and Spectator—A farthing sugar-paper series—Lilliputian books in the provinces.

For every parent that read Locke’s Thoughts, a hundred took his ideas at second hand from The Spectator. Many, indeed, seem to have confused his notion of childhood with the description of the baby Addison, 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.

It was no new thing to regard a child as a small man or woman. Since Shakespeare’s time, children had followed the fashions of their elders. But the tastes of grown-up Elizabethans were not so different from those of children. Never, until the eighteenth century, had a child been taught to think and act like a man of middle age. The little Georgian walked gravely where his for-bears danced, and was expected to read dwarf essays, extracts from Addison and Pope, and little novels after Richardson.

Swift’s engrossing pictures of Lilliput had no sooner captured the nursery than grown-up persons began to fancy themselves in the part of Gulliver stooping to instruct a little nation; and the logical outcome of this was a “Lilliputian Library”.

The ingenious artist of an older generation, who could put “all th’ Iliads in a Nut” must have passed on his secret to the makers of toy-books; and of these the first and greatest was John Newbery, a descendant of the very Newbery who, in the sixteenth century, had published the rhyme of the “great Marchaunt Man”.

There is no better portrait of John Newbery than the one drawn by Goldsmith in The Vicar of Wakefield. That “good-natured man” with his “red pimpled face” who befriended Dr. Primrose when he lay sick at a roadside inn, was “no other than the philanthropic bookseller of St. Paul’s Churchyard, who has written so many little books for children”.

Goldsmith was writing for Newbery between 1762 and 1767, and on more than one occasion he, like his Vicar, “borrowed a few pieces” from the kindly publisher. He could not have chosen a more graceful way of thanking him, nor one more likely to give him pleasure, than by thus imitating Mr. Newbery’s own method of internal advertisement, associating him with those “little books for children”, and adding that “he called himself their friend, but he was the friend of all mankind”.

The rest of the passage recalls Dr. Johnson’s caricature of Newbery as “Jack Whirler,” in The Idler:

“Overwhelmed as he is with business, his chief desire is to have still more. Every new proposal takes possession of his thoughts; he soon balances probabilities, engages in the project, brings it almost to completion and then forsakes it for another.”