To open a child’s book nowadays is to discover some part of that unknown world which touches experience at so many points. The city beyond the clouds, the underground country, all the enchantments of woods and islands are open to the little traveller. From The Water Babies to Peter Pan there has been little else in nursery tales but the stuff of dreams.
It is hard to believe that the child who read the story of Rosamond and the Purple Jar, less than a hundred years ago, had no curiosity about dream countries, no sense of poetry in nature; yet the first sign of a romantic movement in children’s books was the printing of unknown or forgotten fairy tales under the title of The Court of Oberon, in 1823. The actual awakening came later, with the nature stories of the Howitts and the imaginative nonsense of Edward Lear.
A century of little books had passed before a child could read fairy tales without shame, and the taste for true “histories” prevailed long after Miss Edgeworth had written her last sequel.
For although there were eighteenth century chap-books that kept alive old tales of chivalry, these had no proper place on the nursery shelves. Books written for children were always designed to instruct as well as to amuse, and it was only because the human interests of the eighteenth century included children that it became a century of children’s books.
Those that survived the use of their first owners,—a little company in old sheepskin or flowered paper covers,—are either treasured by collectors or hidden away in some old library; but some of the best are still to be had in reprints and collections of “Old-fashioned” or “Forgotten” children’s books.
The new generation, pressing forward to discover more of the dream country, cares little for tales that reflect the quiet schooling of its ancestors; yet the most moral and instructive of these books mark the child’s escape from a sterner school. It was on his way to the Child’s Garden that he passed through this town of Georgian dolls’ houses, where, indeed, he found some rare and curious things.
In the earlier centuries a child made shift with such tales as his elders chose to tell him. There were few books that he could call his own, and those were devised to advance him in knowledge or courtesy. Yet the monks of the eleventh and twelfth centuries had a way of turning the natural instincts of children to account. They taught Latin by means of imaginary conversations, and put the raw material of wonder tales into their instructive “Elucidarium”, a sort of primitive “Child’s Guide” which told of fabulous beasts and gave miraculous accounts of heaven and earth.
The successors of these old schoolmasters devised a book for parents which they might share with their children. This was the Gesta Romanorum, a collection of stories put together in Latin about the fourteenth century to serve as texts for “Moralities”. It became the popular story-book of the Middle Ages, and a woodcut in the early editions shows a whole family gathered round the fire on a winter night telling stories to pass the time.
This was no book for children, even in the days before nurseries; yet it contained variants of the Arabian Tales, a story that Chaucer afterwards used for his “History of Constance”, and two strands of the Merchant of Venice plot.
Travellers’ tales, also shared between men and children, filled a gap between the truthful records of King Alfred and Caxton’s new-discovered wealth of romance. Marco Polo and other voyagers brought back stories and fables from the East; Sir John Mandeville wrote of “the Meruayles of Ynde and of other diuerse Coûtries”. These cross the border between truth and fancy much as children do; but children knew them only from hearsay.
Caxton alone, had he been so minded, could have filled a child’s library; for besides his Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, he printed Sir Thomas Malory’s Noble Histories of King Arthur with many romances of his own translating and legends and lives of Saints. He was actually the first printer and editor of the very books which Locke, in the eighteenth century, prescribed for children: Æsop’s Fables and The History of Reynard the Fox; but Caxton intended none of these for children. The Fables showed men their follies; and Reynard was then a satire that ridiculed unjust rulers under the figures of beasts. For children, he chose the kind of books that their parents would buy: the instructive Parvus et Magnus Chato, with its woodcut print of a monastery school; Stans Puer ad Mensam, a museum of quaint formalities, and The Book of Courtesy, addressed to “Lytyl John” in “tendre enfancye”.
Thus early did grown-up persons monopolise the pleasures of fiction, while they prepared handbooks of learning and courtesy for youth. Chaucer, it will be remembered, wrote a scientific treatise instead of a story for his little boy; and The Babees Book, designed for the royal wards and pages of the fifteenth century, had not a word of romance or fable; nothing but precepts of fair behaviour, and lessons that should teach those “Bele Babees” how to give their reasons smoothly, “in words that are gentle but compendious”.
There were many such books, nor were they all confined to children of gentle birth. The Book of Courtesy was for the sons “of gentleman, yeoman or knave”, and Symon’s Lesson of Wisdom (1500) “for all manner children”.
As for Caxton’s successors, they were content with his ideas about children’s books; it was simply a choice between manners and learning. Wynkyn de Worde, though he printed the splendid romance of Bevis of Southampton, gave his child-readers a “Wyse Chylde of Thre Year Old” that could answer the fearful question: “Sage enfaunt, how is the skye made?”; and William Copland produced The Secret of Secrets of Aristotle, “very good to teach children to read English”, while he lavished the adventures of Guy of Warwick upon their parents.
It is true that the child of the sixteenth century had much to compensate him for a lack of books. If he dwelt in the country, he saw Robin Hood and St. George played out upon the village green, or if in a town, he might meet with strange merchantmen in any street. He lived in an age of practical romance, and could match you the exploits of Guy or Bevis any day from the adventures of his neighbours. Moreover the Elizabethan child, if he could not read the old stories, at least had a chance of hearing them set to a new measure. Puttenham in his Art of English Poesie (1589) writes of the “Blind Harpers and such like taverne Minstrels” who sang “stories of old time” to ballad tunes: “the tale of Sir Topas, the reportes of Bevis of Southampton, Guy of Warwick, Adam Bell and Clymme of the Clough, and such other old romances or historical rimes”.
But a boy had to evade his schoolmaster before he could listen to such things; and the schoolmaster saw to it that he had no English story-books. The new learning, which poured out its treasures for scholars, meant little more to the average boy than longer hours of study and more stripes; and reformers in education, although they looked upon him as a creature of promise, and were concerned to make his lot more bearable, came no nearer than their predecessors to the secrets of his mind.
Companies of schoolboy-players,—the children of the Chapel, or of Paul’s—might make the most of such plays as they could understand; and the Queen’s wards had times of “honest recreation” when they might tell each other stories; but their hours with tutors and music-masters would astonish the youth of these days.
Perhaps the happiest child of the great age of romance was the truant who could follow some pedlar along the road. For the pedlar’s songs were more enthralling than his “unbraided wares”; and he had ballads, such as “The Two Children in the Wood” and “Chevy Chace”, that a child could paste upon his nursery walls.
There was at least one writer who recognised the pedlar’s claims, and made him the hero of an instructive book. This was Thomas Newberry, who in 1563 wrote “A booke in English metre, of the great Marchaunt man called Dives Pragmaticus, very pretye for chyldren to rede: wherby they may the better, and more readyer, rede and wryte Wares and Implements, in this World contayned”.
This merchant knows all crafts and deals in every kind of wares; but he does it in the manner of Autolycus, calling all men to come and buy. His “Inkyll, crewell and gay valances fine” perhaps made copy for A Winter’s Tale; his “ouches, brooches and fine aglets for Kynges” might lie in the pack with
and though he had neither songs nor ballads, he spoke in verse and could find poetry in the “chyselle” and “blade” which Stevenson, more than three centuries later, praised in his Child’s Garden:
It was a hard day for the men of the road when the Roundhead prevailed over King Charles. Had the Puritans been gifted with the worldly wisdom of old religious orders, the pedlar’s songs, interpreted as allegories, would have passed, with a word or two altered here and there; as it was, many of these poor merchants were reduced to carrying tracts that reflected the gloomy spirit of the times. But the seventeenth century garlands still preserved some of the older ballads, and the true Autolycus was never without copies of Tom Thumb, The Wise Men of Gotham, and other chap-books for the unregenerate. He suffered the penalties of rogues and vagabonds, and the child shared his disgrace.
George Fox, in his Warning to all Teachers, condemns, among other sins of children, “the telling of Tales, Stories, Jests, Rhimes and Fables”. The doctrine of Original Sin left no hope of grace by means of books. Courtesy, as concerning the mere outward forms and carriage of a child, was held of no account, and instruction itself was abandoned in favour of “Emblems”, “Warnings”, and morbid “Examples for Youth”: such books, for example, as James Janeway’s Token for Children, which contained “an exact account of the conversion, holy and exemplary lives and joyful deaths of several young children”: a literature of denial and negation.
And yet the greatest child’s book of the age was written by a Puritan. John Bunyan was the first to reconcile the claims of religion and romance, and he never could have written The Pilgrim’s Progress if he had not been a good customer of the pedlar in his youth. But in writing it, Bunyan had no more thought of children than Caxton when he printed the stories of King Arthur. Both were thinking of grown-up children. And when, some eight years later, Bunyan tried his hand at a Book for Boys and Girls, he made it a mere collection of “Emblems” in doggerel verse. The alternative title, Country Rhimes for Children, seems to refer to certain farmyard creatures which he introduced to point analogies even more absurd than those of the old monkish Bestiaries; but the monks had sirens and other wonderful things in their natural history. There is nothing to atone for the dulness of these rhymes; any child would be better entertained in the Interpreter’s House.
After the Restoration, the pedlar had a better market for his books, but he also came upon new enemies; for it was then that members of the Royal Society were beginning to question those “strange and wonderful Relations” which simple folk, seeing them in print, received as true.
When Shakespeare’s shepherdess asked the pedlar “Is it true, think you?” he answered “Five justices’ hands at it, and witnesses more than my pack will hold”; but these men of letters and science accepted no evidence save that of their own reason, and this was fatal to the common matter of chap-books. It is the more surprising that one of their number should have been an unacknowledged maker of children’s books.
John Locke was the first to apply the methods of the Royal Society to education. He cared neither for creeds nor grammars, followed Montaigne in denouncing the pedantry of the old schoolmasters, and held with Rabelais that “the greatest clerks are not the wisest men.”
It is true that his concern for literal truth made him a very imperfect reader of children’s minds. He never understood the part that imagination plays in a child’s life, and his plan of education allows no scope for it; yet he understood children so well on the practical side that every eighteenth century writer of little books quoted his maxims, despised romance and produced “fables” that made a certain appeal to childish interests while they proved the advantages of common sense.
Locke’s book, Some Thoughts concerning Education, which he published in 1693, was put together from the letters he had written during his exile in Holland, to Edward Clarke; but it suggests notes rather than letters. Locke so condenses the human element that it reads like a book of educational prescriptions. The key is to be found in the letters of his friends, and in the records of his pupil, the third Lord Shaftesbury, author of the Characteristics. Locke was the first earl’s friend and medical adviser, and for a time had taught his son; the third earl came to him as “Mr. Anthony” at the age of three, and was his “more peculiar charge” till he was twelve years old. After the grandfather’s death, they sent him to Westminster, entirely against Locke’s wish, for he hated schools; but when “Mr. Anthony” came to write about his childhood, he had not a good word for “pedants and schoolmasters”; only for Mr. Locke to whom, next his “immediate parents”, he owed “the highest gratitude and duty”.
Men do not write thus of tutors who were not their friends; and doubtless others could have said the same of Locke: the younger brothers of Lord Shaftesbury, the Dutch Quaker’s little boy, Arent Furly, a kind of foster-child of his in Holland, or little Frank Masham, his last pupil, who was between four and five when Locke came to live with his family. They all owed him good health and a happy childhood, and it does not appear that they hankered after the forbidden joys of romance.
Locke’s belief in physical training was a welcome contrast to the average tutor’s insistence upon books. He put aside the rod, invented games for his pupils and, as soon as possible, treated them as “rational creatures”.
By reversing the order of Books of Courtesy, he relieved them of rules and maxims. Virtue stood first in his judgment, then wisdom, then breeding, and learning last. At heart he was not less concerned for manners than the old masters of courtesy; but he thought they could only be acquired by habit and good company. It is the more curious to find him, in another part of the book, assuming that the right kind of tutor could teach Virtue and Wisdom as another might teach Latin. Locke himself came as near as a man could to his ideal of a tutor more wise than learned, a man of the world that knew how to bear himself in any company; and it mattered little to his pupils that such a tutor could not be found for every child.
Intelligent parents found in his published Thoughts some confirmation of their own experience, and his very inconsistencies made his ideas seem the more reasonable to them. For it cannot be denied that Locke, although he believed in teaching children not what, but how to think, yet fell into the error of impressing facts upon their memory, and facts that could only be learned from books. His Irish friend Molyneux, on whose advice the Thoughts were put together, brought up his little boy according to Locke’s plan, and proved that the system could produce a rival to Wynkyn de Worde’s Wyse Chylde: one that at five years old could read perfectly and trace out upon the globes “all the noted parts, countries and cities of the world”. At six, his knowledge was incredible, he was “obedient and observant to the nicest particular”, and his father believed that no child “had ever his passions more perfectly at command”.
There is nothing in Locke’s theory to account for the encyclopædic knowledge of this child; but in practice he had replaced Latin and Greek with Geometry, Chronology, the use of the Globes, and even some part of “the incomparable Mr. Newton’s” Philosophy, so far as it was justified by “Matter of Fact”.
This helps to explain the little pedantries of later children’s books, although many of these do not go beyond Locke’s directions for teaching a child to read.
“There may be Dice and Play-things with the letters on them,” he says, “to teach Children the Alphabet by Playing; and twenty other Ways may be found, suitable to their particular Tempers, to make this Kind of Learning a Sport to them. Thus Children may be cozen’d into a Knowledge of the Letters....”
If this smacks of artifice, there is no question of his wisdom about essentials: “If you have any Contests with him, let it be in Matters of Moment, of Truth and Good Nature; but lay no Task on him about A.B.C.”
About books he is very plain: when “by these gentle Ways” a child begins to read, “some easy pleasant Book, suited to his Capacity should be put into his Hands, wherein the Entertainment that he finds might draw him on, and reward his Pains in Reading, and yet not such as should fill his Head with perfectly useless Trumpery, or lay the Principles of Vice and Folly. To this purpose I think Æsop’s Fables the best, which being Stories apt to delight and entertain a Child, may yet afford useful Reflections to a grown Man; and if his Memory retain them all his Life after, he will not repent to find them there, amongst his manly Thoughts and serious Business”.
Then, after recommending an Æsop with pictures in it, he adds: “Reynard the Fox is another Book I think may be made Use of to the same Purpose”. Talking beasts that can be made the mouthpiece of a moralist are Locke’s nearest approach to the supernatural. In another place, he admonishes parents to preserve a child’s mind “from all Impressions and Notions of Spirits and Goblins, or any fearful Apprehensions in the Dark”. Thus the child is to be protected from ghost-stories or fairy-tales and “cozen’d” into reading what will be useful to him when he is a man.
Locke knew no other books in English “fit to engage the liking of children and tempt them to read”; and indeed there were few to know. The Seven Wise Masters of Rome is an example of what was thought fit for children. This was a very old sequence of Eastern parables first printed by Wynkyn de Worde. Francis Kirkman, who translated it from the French in 1674, declared that it was “held in such estimation in Ireland that it was always put into the hands of young children immediately after the horn book”. English copies were common; but the tales had less interest for children than those of the Gesta. “Pedants and Schoolmasters” must have conspired to keep it in print.
Thus at the close of the seventeenth century the greater number of children, if they read anything, amused themselves with chap-books or broadsheets,—all of which, doubtless, came under Locke’s ban as “perfectly useless Trumpery”; and for those that read no books, in spite of Locke, there were still tales “of Sprites and Goblins”.