But Goldsmith again lays stress on his pet project:
“He was no sooner alighted but he was in haste to be gone; for he was ever on business of the utmost importance, and was at that time actually compiling materials for the history of one Mr. Thomas Trip.”
An account of John Newbery’s career would itself furnish matter for a children’s book. He was a very Whittington of booksellers—a farmer’s son who made his way in the world “by his talents and industry and a great love of books”. Every day of his life was an adventure, and he never lost his Pepysian interest in men and things. Goldsmith’s story of the inn (or its counterpart) might almost have come out of the pocket-book in which Mr. Newbery kept a record of his journey through England in 1740, with notes of his various “projects” and purchases.[40]
It was at Reading, where he had begun his trade of printer and publisher, that he produced his first children’s book: Spiritual Songs for Children, by one of the many imitators of Dr. Watts;[41] but the genuine “Newberys” appeared after he settled in London, first at the Bible and Crown, without Temple Bar, and afterwards at the famous little shop in St. Paul’s Churchyard.
He began with miscellanies—quaint imitations of the periodicals, announced by whimsical “advertisements”, and professing the aims and methods of John Locke: A Little Pretty Pocket Book (1744),[42] and The Lilliputian Magazine, advertised in the General Evening Post, March 4, 1751.
Two quotations in the Pocket Book suggest a connection between two prevailing interests of the day, Education and Landscape-gardening. The first is from Dryden:
“Children, like tender Osiers, take the Bow
And as they first are fashioned always grow”;
the second from Pope: