Many incidents of the story, which, like the fight between Harry and Master Mash, owe little to Henry Brooke, may be taken as reminiscent of Mr. Day’s boyhood; for although he has a true instinct for drama, he is incapable of pure invention.
“The originality of the author” he says “is a point of the least consequence in the execution of such a work as this”. Harry Sandford refusing to betray the hare to the huntsman, or at loggerheads with the “little gentry”, is the Fool of Quality; but when he discusses the World with Miss Simmons, he is a brother of the philosophic Emile.
Mr. Day borrows many of his instructive details from Rousseau: the juggler, who taught Emile the use of magnets by means of an artificial duck, conspires with Mr. Barlow and Harry to teach the uninformed Tommy Merton; but there are other experiments more practical than Rousseau’s, which suggest actual experience and the co-operation of Mr. Edgeworth. These alternate with short tales introduced according to what Mr. Day calls the “natural order of association”; but their effect is to weaken the genuine interest of the enveloping story. “The Gentleman and the Basket Maker”[89] gains nothing by the Good Boy’s elocution; Leonidas shakes himself free from Mr. Barlow’s patronage.
Yet, with all these digressions, children found matter of interest in Sandford and Merton for another century. The most didactic parents could not have controlled the choice of so many nurseries, nor would Mr. Day accept a grown-up verdict without the children’s assent. “If they are uninterested in the work”, he wrote in his preface, “the praises of a hundred reviewers will not console me for my failure”.
The truth is that persons who stand no higher than Mr. Barlow’s knee can go through the book without seeing much of him.
The simple story of “Little Jack”, no less characteristic of Day, appeared in The Children’s Miscellany: (1787),[90] but may have been written earlier. The moral is quite explicit; “that it is of little consequence how a man comes into the world, provided he behaves well and discharges his duty when he is in it”; but Jack’s life begins at the edge of experience, when he is suckled by a goat; and later, his duty leads him into many adventures which, although they appear true, happen in a romantic setting of foreign countries.
Thus theorists, without acknowledging romance, may use it for their own purposes. Robinson Crusoe’s island lent enchantment to Emile’s most practical employments, and Rousseau’s followers chose two wholly romantic figures to point their arguments against society. The negro, cut off from his own people, freed from his oppressors, is a striking and pathetic mark in the midst of his white brothers. He now becomes a type of the Natural Man, and a hero of children’s books.[91] The second witness against social institutions is that first friend of children, the shipwrecked sailor-man in his island, who still holds them by the spell of circumstance, even while he repeats the strange jargon of revolutionary doctrines.
Mr. Day had transcribed, along with extracts from The Fool of Quality, “some part of Robinson Crusoe”, without any serious additions; but Philip Quarll the Hermit, one of Crusoe’s earliest successors, appeared in The Children’s Miscellany as a Rousseauist philosopher.
The original chap-book of 1727[92] has no suggestion of theory, but it points out one vital difference between Philip Quarll and Crusoe. Quarll actually comes to love his solitude and loses all desire to return to his own country.
To the theorist, this proved him a forerunner of Rousseau, and the editor of 1787 could furnish him with the latest version of the creed. He begins by reflecting (as Rousseau did with Robinson Crusoe) on the edifying spectacle of shipwrecked men, “deprived in an instant of all the advantage and support which are derived from mutual assistance ... obliged to call forth all the latent resources of their own minds”; and then remarks that the story “whether real or fictitious, is admirably adapted to the illustration of the subject”.