A century of children's books

by Florence V. Barry

No sooner did she learn to read (and that was startlingly soon) than she began to teach her companions, and finding them by no means so quick nor so diligent as herself, she cut out of several pieces of wood ten “Setts” of large letters and ten of small (all printed very clear in the text); “and every Morning she used to go round to teach the Children with these Rattletraps in a Basket—as you see in the Print”.

The letter-games of Goody Two-Shoes were doubtless among the “twenty other Ways” hinted at by Mr. Locke when he described his own, in which “Children may be cozen’d into a Knowledge of the Letters”. There are minute directions for playing them in the chapter that tells “How little Two-Shoes became a trotting Tutoress”.

Nor is virtue (the philosopher’s chief concern) neglected for this matter of mere learning. There are lessons and reflections enough for the old “Schools of Virtue”; but little Margery’s true piety makes amends for her preaching and saves her from the prudential excess of the “little Boy who lived upon Learning”. When she admonished the sick gentleman for his late hours by the example of the rooks, she forced him to laugh and admit that she was “a sensible Hussey”. The Reader (more often admonished) does the same.

In this blending of morality and humour, the author is only following the practice of eighteenth century novelists. His morality (in the main, very sound and reasonable) hangs by the humour of separate incidents; yet these, together, form a sequence of moral and “cautionary” tales. There is, for example, the warning against useless display in the account of Lady Ducklington’s funeral,—“the Money they squandered away would have been better laid out in little Books for Children, or in Meat, Drink and Cloaths for the Poor”;—against superstition,—the story of the ghost in the church, or the dramatic Witch story of the Second Part; and there are parallel examples of kindness and good sense.

A small child would make his first reading by the woodcuts (which are much like a child’s drawings): here, first, are little Margery and her brother, left, like the Children in the Wood “to the Wide World”; here is Tommy Two-Shoes (at an incredibly tender age) dressed like a little sailor—“Pray look at him”,—and there again, wiping off Margery’s tears with the end of his jacket—“thus”—and bidding her cry no more, for that he will come to her again when he returns from sea. He is much blurred in this picture—perhaps with tears.

At this point the story goes back to the frontispiece: by far the best picture of Margery, in a setting of trees and fields, with a little house on one side of her and a church in the distance. She is wearing her two shoes for the first time (for until a charitable good man gave her a pair, she had but one): “stroking down her ragged Apron thus”, and crying out: “Two Shoes, Mame, see two Shoes”.

Next comes that serious business of Letters and Syllables. But Somebody (with a Basket of Rattle-traps) is at the door.

“Tap, tap, tap, who’s there?” (It might have been Red Riding-Hood! “Toc, toc! Qui est là?”) But it is only little Goody Two-Shoes, greeting her new scholar in the same childish voice.

Thus the little one gets through the lessons and proverbs of the next few pages, and at Chapter VI, which tells “How the whole Parish was frighted”, knows the triumph and delight of reading.

“Babies do not want to hear about babies”, said Dr. Johnson; but he was never, like Goldsmith, intimate with the Nursery in all its moods, and it did not occur to him that his favourite Tom Thumb was but a child seen through the diminishing-glass of a woodcut.