These three will be seen to better advantage with others of their kind.
A strong revival of romance in children’s books would have driven out the Lilliputians at the close of the eighteenth century; but the progress of Theory prevented it, and produced, with a fresh crop of moral tales, innumerable reprints.
Canning’s amusing paper in the Eton Microcosm (June 11, 1787),[71] did more than mark the vogue of those tiny “16 mo’s” at Mr. Newbery’s and “the Bouncing B, Shoe Lane”: it was also a tempting advertisement; and in the early nineteenth century small Londoners who could not rise to the splendours of “twopence Gilt” might buy their own New Year and Easter Gifts at Catnach’s or the “Toy and Marble Warehouse” in Seven Dials, for a half-penny, or even (with covers of rough blue sugar-paper) for a farthing.[72]
In 1779 Saint, the north-country Newbery, had printed a Newcastle edition of Tommy Trip, and between 1790 and 1812, the entire Lilliputian library was revived in the York chap-books by Wilson and Spence. Other provincial booksellers, following these, began to improve their stocks of school-books and battledores with pirated “Newberys”; and some, like Rusher of Banbury, retouched old rhymes and tales with local colour. It was Rusher who restored the tradition of Giles Gingerbread with the History of a Banbury Cake;[73] and in the childhood of Queen Victoria, his little shop was still famous for toy-books.
CHAPTER IV
ROUSSEAU AND THE MORAL TALE
Locke and Rousseau—A New Conception of Childhood—Rousseau’s Theory of Education—Parent and Tutor, Artificial Experiences, Books, Handicrafts, Attitude to Nature and Humanity—The Infallible Parent—Marmontel’s Contes Moraux—Berquin’s L’Ami des Enfans—The Looking Glass for the Mind—Madame d’Epinay’s Conversations d’Emilie—Madame de Genlis and her Books—French Lilliputians: Le Petit Grandison and Le Petit La Bruyère.
Rousseau, even when he repeated Locke’s precepts, caught the ear of a wider public because he appealed not so much to reason as to feeling, and instead of commending his doctrines by argument, charged them with warmth and eloquence.
Locke had been before him in exposing the shams and pedantry of schoolmasters, as in striving for a more natural method of education; but he carried out his task in a quiet professional way, regarding the child as a patient in need of a new regimen, but never setting him on a pedestal.
It was Rousseau’s inspiration to take the beauty and promise of childhood for his text, to make the child stand forth as the hope of the race, the centre of all its aspirations, the proof of its powers.[74] Thus his philosophy acquired the dignity of a new faith; and yet the child lost nothing of his personal and human interest, for in Rousseau’s scheme, he was the very core of a new conception of family life. There could be no better setting for a natural education than the family, no simpler unit of fellowship; and Rousseau drew persuasive pictures of the child at successive stages of his growth,—pictures which writers of moral tales reproduced with modifications of their own, and a greater or less amount of theory.