Of patriotic poetry there was much for grown folks, but the “Patriotic and Amatory Songster,” advertised by S. Avery of Boston about the time Weems’s biography was published, seems a title ill-suited to the juvenile public for whom Avery professed to issue it.
Among the books which may be cited as furnishing instructive amusement with less of the admixture of moral purpose was the “London Cries for Children,” with pictures of street peddlers. This was imitated in America by the publication of the “Cries of New York” and “Cries of Philadelphia.”
In the Lenox Collection there is now one of the various editions of the “Cries of New York” (published in 1808), which is valuable both as a record of the street life of the old-fashioned town of ninety-six thousand inhabitants, and as perhaps the first child’s book of purely local interest, with original woodcuts very possibly designed and engraved by Alexander Anderson.
The “Cries of New York” is of course modelled after the “London Cries,” but the account it gives of various incidents in the daily life of old New York makes us grateful for the existence of this child’s toy. A picture of a chimney-sweep, for instance, is copied, with his cry of “Sweep, O, O, O, O,” from the London book, but the text accompanying it is altered to accord with the custom in New York of firing a gun at dawn:
“About break of day, after the morning gun is heard from Governor’s Island, and so through the forenoon, the ears of the citizens are greeted with this uncouth sound from figures as unpleasant to the sight, clothed in rags and covered with soot—a necessary and suffering class of human beings indeed—spending their childhood thus. And in regard to the unnecessary bawling of those sooty boys; it is admirable in such a noisy place as this, where every needless sound should be hushed, that such disagreeable ones should be allowed. The prices for sweeping chimneys are—one story houses twelve cents; two stories, eighteen cents; three stories, twenty-five cents, and so on.”
“Hot Corn” was also cried by children, whose business it was to “gather cents, by distributing corn to those who are disposed to regale themselves with an ear.” Baked pears are pictured as sold “by a little black girl, with the pears in an earthen dish under her arm.” At the same season of the year, “Here’s your fine ripe water-melons” also made itself heard above the street noises as a street cry of entirely American origin. Again there were pictured “Oyster Stands,” served by negroes, and these were followed by cries of
“Fine Clams: choice Clams,
Here’s your Rock-a-way beach
Clams: here’s your fine
Young, sand Clams,”
from Flushing Cove Bay, which the text explains, “turn out as good, or perhaps better,” than oysters. The introduction of negroes and negro children into the illustrations is altogether a novelty, and together with the scenes drawn from the street life of the town gave to the old-fashioned child its first distinctly American picture-book. Indeed, with the exception of this and an occasional illustration in some otherwise English reproduction, all the American publishers at this time seem to have modelled their wares for small children after those of two large London firms, J. Harris, successor to Newbery, and William Darton.
To Darton, the author of “Little Truths,” the children were indebted for a serious attempt to improve the character of toy-books. A copper-plate engraver by profession, Darton’s attention was drawn to the scarcity of books for children by the discovery that there was not much written for them that was worth illustrating. Like Newbery, he set about to make books himself, and with John Harvey, also an engraver, he set up in Grace Church Street an establishment for printing and publishing, from which he supplied, to a great extent, the juvenile books closely imitated by American printers. Besides his own compositions, he was very alert to encourage promising authors, and through him the famous verses of Jane and Ann Taylor were brought into notice. “Original Poems,” and “Rhymes for the Nursery,” by these sisters, were to the old-time child what Stevenson’s “Child’s Garden of Verses” is to the modern nursery. Darton and Harvey paid ten pounds for the first series of “Original Poems,” and fifteen pounds for the second; while “Rhymes for the Nursery” brought to its authors the unusual sum of twenty pounds. The Taylors were the originators of that long series of verses for infants which “My Sister” and “My Governess” strove to surpass but never in any way equalled, although they apparently met with a fair sale in America.