A century of children's books

by Florence V. Barry

It is easy to see why Charles Lamb put Goody Two-Shoes among “the old classics of the Nursery”[55], and no matter for wonder that it should be set down to Goldsmith.

For apart from that hint of The Deserted Village in the “Introduction”, it has living characters, natural speech and incidents of genuine comedy. The playful tenderness of the first chapters suggests Goldsmith’s treatment of children, and the whole theme is near enough to his idea of a story “like the old one of Whittington were his Cat left out”[56]. For if he ever had written such a story and managed to keep the cat out of it, he would certainly have repented and introduced some other animal in its place, or with native inconsistency, might have multiplied it into a menagerie such as Goody Two-Shoes kept. The idea of talking animals had once attracted him, and if he could write a good Fable, why not a “History”?

Forster records Godwin’s “strong persuasion” that Goldsmith wrote Goody Two-Shoes, and Godwin, himself a publisher of children’s books, may have had good reason for his belief; yet there is no certain evidence to confirm it, nor will the book, as a whole, bear all the claims of its admirers.

Nichols, in his Literary Anecdotes,[57] associates this and other “Lilliputian Histories” with the brothers Griffiths and Giles Jones, and family tradition credits Giles with Goody Two-Shoes as well as Giles Gingerbread and Tommy Trip; but if, as Goldsmith would have it, Mr. Newbery was the real author of Tommy Trip, there is no reason why he should not have had a hand in the rest. Goody Two-Shoes, in fact, has several turns of speech and grammatical slips which occur in John Newbery’s journal;[58] nor is it at all unlikely that Goldsmith, the friend of Giles Jones and Newbery, contributed such lively matter as the ghost and witch stories, or so quaint a fancy as the “Considering Cap”.

John Newbery’s successors[59] carried on the tradition, but at his death the great period of “Lilliputian Histories” was past. Their numbers were always increasing, but they were mostly imitations and moralised echoes of folklore like Tom Thumb’s Exhibition or The Enchanted Castle.

Yet there are a few late “Lilliputians” that have the true Newbery touch, and even a fresh spice of satire. The Lilliputian Masquerade,[60] though it goes back to Gulliver, belongs to the age of the Pantheon and Almack’s, and its gay “Masks” (all “Lilliputians of Repute”) include two romantic surprises. For in the company of Sir William Wise and Sir Francis Featherbrain of Butterfly Hall, there is the unexpected figure of a Beggar “singing merrily”, and one undoubted harbinger of the New Age—a little hero of Blake and of Charles Lamb,—the Chimney Sweeper, new as yet to the mystery of his “cloth”.

In the meantime, a whole section of the dwarf library was devoted to the Wyse Chylde in a variety of rôles. Following that “Rise and Progress of Learning in Lilliput”, there came a formidable crowd of little Philosophers, little Statesmen, little Judges, little Divines and (to keep an accurate record of their careers) little Historians and Biographers.

“Self-Government” in the Schoolroom (by no means, as some may suppose, a present-day innovation) made its first appearance in Juvenile Trials,[61] the acknowledged device of a Tutor and Governess who prescribe it as a “Regimen” for their “unruly Pupils”, and thus, profiting by the wisdom of Cato, induce the authors of great evils to remove them.

This is the first hint of a Lilliputian Republic: the logical outcome of Locke’s principles in a revolutionary age. The Lilliputians give their best support to the new Government and throw themselves with zest into their parts.