Her remarks upon fairy tales are a juvenile version of Addison on the “Lady’s Library”. She knows exactly what sort of writing pleases some children; how “the eager eyes of a little story-loving dame glisten with delight” at a promising opening, and the lover of fairy tales “wishes, just to gratify her curiosity, that there were really such creatures as fairies”. Yet she is so far persuaded that “an early course of light reading is very prejudicial to sound acquirement”, that she rejects any story without the hall-mark of a “Moral”.
A favourite device for connecting the haphazard events of ordinary life (and one that embellished the bare truth) was borrowed from current satires. The History of Pompey the Little; or, the Life and Adventures of a Lap-Dog[111] became a model for stories in which an animal, telling the story of its life, acts as an observer and critic of human conduct.
Humanitarians and lovers of nature, taking up this form, produced more or less faithful studies of birds and animals; and critics who objected to fables, or thought satire dangerous had nothing to say against this mixture of Natural History and Morality.
Doubtless the stricter guardians of youth looked askance at such a defiance of Reason; but the “Creatures” had an immense influence in the Nursery: their morals were vouched for by Æsop and all his tribe. After all, it was only a new way of presenting the old lessons, and the sternest parent could hardly reject so engaging a tutor as a Robin or a Mouse.
Miss Fielding’s Governess had not a larger following of School Stories than Mrs. Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories[112] produced in moral tales of birds and beasts. This little book, better known by its later title, The History of the Robins, was suggested by Mrs. Trimmer’s children, which may account for its being her only imaginative work. The children, taught during walks in the fields and gardens “to take particular notice of every object that presented itself to their view”, were able, by a natural process of elimination, to develop a chief interest in animals, and “used often to express a wish that their Birds, Cats, Dogs etc., could talk, that they might hold conversations with them”. Their mother, instead of rebuking them for so irrational a desire, adapted the idea of talking birds to her own theories of morality and for once managed to see things from a child’s point of view.
Her own childhood had never been anything but middle-aged. At ten she wrote like a grown-up person, and her youth was spent in the company of people much older then herself. Dr. Johnson, meeting her as a girl of fifteen at Reynolds’s, was so much struck by her behaviour that he invited her to his house next day, and presented her with a copy of The Rambler.[113] This may have had its effect upon a style developed in formal “correspondence” under her father’s direction; at any rate, her diction remained pompous and conventional. Mrs. Trimmer “composed” works as she “indited” letters. In “composing” Fabulous Histories, she “seemed to fancy herself conversing with her own children in her accustomed manner”; but that was because she was accustomed to converse, not talk.
The children, secure in the possession of a “kind pussy Mamma”, never noticed it; to them it was the most natural thing in the world that birds should converse in the same way.
In their family relations, the robins are passable understudies of the excellent Mr. and Mrs. Trimmer and their children; but the introduction of a human family as their patrons and protectors restores them to the shape of birds. For the first time in the history of children’s books, the real centre of interest is transferred from the conduct of children to such matters as living in a nest and learning to fly.
Here is a good example of Mrs. Trimmer’s style:
“When Miss Harriet first appeared, the winged suppliants approached with eager expectation of the daily handful which their kind benefactress made it a custom to distribute”.