A century of children's books

by Florence V. Barry

George Fox, in his Warning to all Teachers, condemns, among other sins of children, “the telling of Tales, Stories, Jests, Rhimes and Fables”. The doctrine of Original Sin left no hope of grace by means of books. Courtesy, as concerning the mere outward forms and carriage of a child, was held of no account, and instruction itself was abandoned in favour of “Emblems”, “Warnings”, and morbid “Examples for Youth”: such books, for example, as James Janeway’s Token for Children, which contained “an exact account of the conversion, holy and exemplary lives and joyful deaths of several young children”: a literature of denial and negation.

And yet the greatest child’s book of the age was written by a Puritan. John Bunyan was the first to reconcile the claims of religion and romance, and he never could have written The Pilgrim’s Progress if he had not been a good customer of the pedlar in his youth. But in writing it, Bunyan had no more thought of children than Caxton when he printed the stories of King Arthur. Both were thinking of grown-up children. And when, some eight years later, Bunyan tried his hand at a Book for Boys and Girls, he made it a mere collection of “Emblems” in doggerel verse. The alternative title, Country Rhimes for Children, seems to refer to certain farmyard creatures which he introduced to point analogies even more absurd than those of the old monkish Bestiaries; but the monks had sirens and other wonderful things in their natural history. There is nothing to atone for the dulness of these rhymes; any child would be better entertained in the Interpreter’s House.

After the Restoration, the pedlar had a better market for his books, but he also came upon new enemies; for it was then that members of the Royal Society were beginning to question those “strange and wonderful Relations” which simple folk, seeing them in print, received as true.

When Shakespeare’s shepherdess asked the pedlar “Is it true, think you?” he answered “Five justices’ hands at it, and witnesses more than my pack will hold”; but these men of letters and science accepted no evidence save that of their own reason, and this was fatal to the common matter of chap-books. It is the more surprising that one of their number should have been an unacknowledged maker of children’s books.

John Locke was the first to apply the methods of the Royal Society to education. He cared neither for creeds nor grammars, followed Montaigne in denouncing the pedantry of the old schoolmasters, and held with Rabelais that “the greatest clerks are not the wisest men.”

It is true that his concern for literal truth made him a very imperfect reader of children’s minds. He never understood the part that imagination plays in a child’s life, and his plan of education allows no scope for it; yet he understood children so well on the practical side that every eighteenth century writer of little books quoted his maxims, despised romance and produced “fables” that made a certain appeal to childish interests while they proved the advantages of common sense.

Locke’s book, Some Thoughts concerning Education, which he published in 1693, was put together from the letters he had written during his exile in Holland, to Edward Clarke; but it suggests notes rather than letters. Locke so condenses the human element that it reads like a book of educational prescriptions. The key is to be found in the letters of his friends, and in the records of his pupil, the third Lord Shaftesbury, author of the Characteristics. Locke was the first earl’s friend and medical adviser, and for a time had taught his son; the third earl came to him as “Mr. Anthony” at the age of three, and was his “more peculiar charge” till he was twelve years old. After the grandfather’s death, they sent him to Westminster, entirely against Locke’s wish, for he hated schools; but when “Mr. Anthony” came to write about his childhood, he had not a good word for “pedants and schoolmasters”; only for Mr. Locke to whom, next his “immediate parents”, he owed “the highest gratitude and duty”.

Men do not write thus of tutors who were not their friends; and doubtless others could have said the same of Locke: the younger brothers of Lord Shaftesbury, the Dutch Quaker’s little boy, Arent Furly, a kind of foster-child of his in Holland, or little Frank Masham, his last pupil, who was between four and five when Locke came to live with his family. They all owed him good health and a happy childhood, and it does not appear that they hankered after the forbidden joys of romance.

Locke’s belief in physical training was a welcome contrast to the average tutor’s insistence upon books. He put aside the rod, invented games for his pupils and, as soon as possible, treated them as “rational creatures”.

By reversing the order of Books of Courtesy, he relieved them of rules and maxims. Virtue stood first in his judgment, then wisdom, then breeding, and learning last. At heart he was not less concerned for manners than the old masters of courtesy; but he thought they could only be acquired by habit and good company. It is the more curious to find him, in another part of the book, assuming that the right kind of tutor could teach Virtue and Wisdom as another might teach Latin. Locke himself came as near as a man could to his ideal of a tutor more wise than learned, a man of the world that knew how to bear himself in any company; and it mattered little to his pupils that such a tutor could not be found for every child.