“Would you think it? I am sitting in a little Room full of Books, with a Desk for Reading and my Papers round me, as if I were a Woman! But I am not so silly as to forget that I am but a little Girl,
and, my dear Brother,
Your loving Sister, Jane Goodchild.”
This is the first sign of revolution. The puppets are still content to play their parts, but they refuse to believe in them. Instead, they begin to assert their own “Gothick Mythology”, and are no longer so “subservient to the Rules of Reason” as to despise the name of Fairies.
Miss Goodchild “could talk all day of the Play” (Mr. Garrick’s “Fairy Tale” from Shakespeare).[69] She actually quotes the song beginning: “Come follow, follow me, ye fairy Elves that be” from an Entertainment “full of Fairies”, and confesses that she and Jenny were ready to jump up and join in the chorus, singing:
“Hand in Hand we’ll dance around
For this Place is Fairy Ground.”
But the book is full of contradictions; nothing in it bears out the promise of those early letters. Master Gentle, at the age of seven, is delivered into the hands of Mr. Birch who, as his name forebodes, believes neither in Reasoning nor mild Discipline; and at ten, Mr. Birch’s pupils become little monsters of virtue and precocity. They are Lilliputians of a larger growth, but they certainly are not boys. This book, moreover, lacks the Newbery touch of comedy. Its humour is mostly unconscious, as in the account of a father who asks permission to read his son’s letters, where the boy confides to a friend that he feels “like the Swain in Shenstone: ‘fearful, but not averse’”.
Among the numberless books for children printed between 1780 and 1810, there were three which, although they discarded the nursery badge of “Flowery and Gilt”, and had little in common with the Newbery miscellanies, followed Lilliputian precedent in form and title.
These were the Juvenile Tatler (1783), the Fairy Spectator (1789) and the Juvenile Spectator (1810).[70] The first two are among the earliest books that show the influence of Marmontel and Madame de Beaumont; they therefore are no true Lilliputians: the third mimics Addison’s method with absolute fidelity, and sparkles with the satirical spirit of its original; yet this too breaks loose from Lilliputian convention; it has almost enough sanity and wit to be called a nursery Jane Austen.