A century of children's books

by Florence V. Barry

“The world is so full of a number of things.

I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings”;

but the authors of Evenings at Home chose instead the encyclopædic ideal of “Eyes and no Eyes”, and produced a series of object lessons. What was worse, Mrs. Barbauld, in her anxiety to be clear, made the fatal mistake of “talking down”.

Charles Lamb, writing to Coleridge in 1802, bitterly resents her popularity: “Goody Two Shoes” he says, “is almost out of print. Mrs. Barbauld’s stuff has banished all the old classics of the nursery, and the shopman at Newbery’s hardly deigned to reach them off an old exploded corner of the shelf when Mary asked for them. Mrs. Barbauld’s and Mrs. Trimmer’s nonsense lay in piles about. Knowledge, insignificant and vapid as Mrs. Barbauld’s books convey, it seems must come to a child in the shape of knowledge; and his empty noddle must be turned with conceit of his own powers when he has learnt that a horse is an animal, and Billy is better than a horse, and such like, instead of that beautiful interest in wild tales, which made the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger than a child. Science has succeeded to poetry no less in the little walks of children than with men. Is there no possibility of averting this sore evil? Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives’ fables in childhood, you had been crammed with Geography and Natural History!”

Lamb is so clear upon the main issue that he cannot be just to the “instructive” children’s book. He loved the tales of his own childhood, with their “flowery and gilt” and all their delightful oddities.

For that, and because he understood the gentle humour of the “Lilliputians”, he forgot whole pages of “instruction” in Goody Two Shoes, and placed it on a level with the “wild tales” of romance and adventure.

Had Mary and he read Fabulous Histories together, or “The Transmigrations of Indur”, he might have allowed some “old exploded corner of a shelf” to the schoolroom authors; at any rate he would not have written:

“Hang them! I mean the cursed Barbauld crew, those blights and blasts of all that is human in man and child!”

Science had succeeded to poetry. “The little walks of children” ran through Botanical Gardens; but there is no doubt at all that children, those amphibious breathers of romance and realism, enjoyed it.

Lamb’s quarrel with the Schoolroom was something of a paradox. He took the side of the Romantics against the Scientists; and yet wrote children’s books at the suggestion of the arch-theorist Godwin, who, as his publisher, naturally had some influence upon his choice. It was doubtless through Godwin that, instead of following the traditions he admired, he began by “adapting” greater works, and went on to write about children from a grown-up point of view.