And yet there was something in these English settings to compensate a child for the loss of fairyland, if not to set his feet in the track of it. Authors chiefly concerned with character were apt to give the briefest indication of a background; but before 1780, there were woodcuts that implied more than the words of the story.
Thomas Bewick had cut his first blocks for the York and Newcastle chap-books, and although he soon passed on from these to a wider study of Nature, they were enough to seal the fate of the old slovenly pictures in children’s books.
As a boy, Bewick had filled the margins of his school-books and covered the hearthstones of his mother’s cottage with drawings of the men and beasts that he knew about his native village[98]; and these he reproduced later in the cuts for chap-books and fables.
He could never draw fairies. The “Pigmy Sprite” in Gay’s Fables[99] is not half so fairy-like as the little spinning-wheels and brooms of the corner-pieces; but his drawings of trees and meadows, rocks and pools, show the “fairy ground” of his own happy childhood.
It was thus that he gave a new meaning to the country setting which was now a recognised feature of moral tales. A writer might demand no more of Nature than that she should provide the Industrious Boy with fruit in season; but Bewick caught her among the corn ricks or at the corner of a lane, and she herself took up the parable.
The younger brother, John, who began by adapting some of Bewick’s drawings, is better known as an illustrator of children’s books. Between 1790 and 1820, there are few cuts that do not show some trace of his influence, and many of those in the smaller chap-books,—The Adventures of a Pincushion, for example, and The Life and Adventures of a Fly,[100]—have been attributed to him.
In a sense, John was more imaginative than his brother, quicker to appreciate subtleties of character and expression. There is hardly less truth of detail in the Lime-walks and rose-gardens of The Looking Glass for the Mind than in Thomas Bewick’s village scenes; but the little figures are more graceful and courtly, the backgrounds more delicate.
John Bewick’s illustrations to The New Robinson Crusoe gave shape to Rousseau’s vague ideal; but his pictures of English children in their natural surroundings were a literal return to Nature. And although they were in complete accord with the changed attitude of the story-writers, they proved (to the confusion of Theorists) that the new Philosophy had made little impression on the familiar moods of Nature and childhood.
The School-setting, however cramped, was a source of wider interest than the alternative parlour or nursery. It varied, according to the fortunes of the persons concerned, from the Village School (commonly built on the Two-Shoes foundation, but without its Lilliputian features) to the Academy for young Ladies or Gentlemen: an exclusive community which had received its traditions from Sarah Fielding’s notable little book The Governess; or, The Little Female Academy[101] published some fourteen years before Rousseau’s Emile.
Writing in the first decade of Lilliputian books, the author of David Simple anticipated Rousseau with a gallery of children’s portraits, and showed that the Child of Nature could survive pedantic forms as well as theories.