In England, Rousseau’s teaching had more effect on the actual life of the family than on books. Children, no longer cramped by the old pedantries, began to show unexpected powers of action and self-control, and parents, relieved of their harsher duties, chose to make friends rather than philosophers of their children.

It was only in books that theorists could represent this genuine progress by the make-believe of impossible children and perfect parents. Most writers of children’s books were theorists of one sort or another, and now that they had begun to draw from life, they tried to make it fit their theories. Thus the new books were hardly less didactic than the old.

Some reflect Johnson’s hostility to Rousseau, others support the new ideas with definite religious teaching, and many that present the Child of Nature as an existing type, endow him with the precocious wisdom of a Lilliputian. There is hardly a book among them, even among the many adaptations of French stories, in which the setting and characters are not plainly English.

The most consistent of all Rousseauists was Thomas Day,[85] the author of Sandford and Merton,[86] and he owed the success of his book at least as much to his own observations and experiments, as to Rousseau.

Much of its interest, moreover, can be traced to the example of an English novelist; for in choosing some pieces for children from Henry Brooke’s Fool of Quality, Mr. Day had been so struck by its simple and vivid style as to regret that Brooke himself had not written books for children; and it is clear that, while the theory of Sandford and Merton came direct from Rousseau, many dramatic situations, which are the life of the story, were suggested by The Fool of Quality.[87]

This, indeed, was a book after Rousseau’s own heart. The hero, Henry Earl of Moreland, is an English Emile quickened out of knowledge by more natural and livelier adventures. Brought up by a foster-mother among village children, he stands for the virtues of a natural education, against a brother bred at home in the luxurious fashion of the time. The scene of his first visit (at five years old) to his parents, is a satire on Society, and the farcical turn of his adventures brings the romance of theory into touch with the novel of life and humour. This little Harry is the most natural child of fiction; like Emile at a later stage, he knows nothing of the respect due to people of rank, and is quite unmoved by his unusual surroundings; but as yet he has no philosophy; he values things as children do, for what they mean to him. A laced hat is useless as a head-covering, but an effective missile for playing ducks and drakes among the wine-glasses; when he gets astride a Spanish pointer and rides him among the company, he sees no reason to dismount because the dog, growing outrageous, rushes into a group of little masters and misses and overthrows them like ninepins; and when he has crowned the adventure by throwing down a fat elderly lady and three men, he arises and strolls leisurely about the room “with as unconcerned an aspect as if nothing had happened amiss, and as though he had neither art nor part in this frightful discomfiture”.

Emile, a much older boy, at his dinner party, received a hint from his mentor, and for the rest of the meal “philosophised all alone in his corner” about luxury, superior all to the grown-up guests. The little Harry, merely unhappy at having to hold his knife and fork “just so” and say so many “my lords and my ladies”, very naturally cries, “I wish I was with my mammy in the kitchen.” Neither then nor at any other time does he seem conscious of superior wisdom; but Theory hangs upon the foolishness of his mother. An uncle, whimsical rather than didactic, but none the less a moralist, fills the place of Rousseau’s tutor, and later, when the boy appears in clothes “trimmed like those of your beau insects vulgarly called butterflies,” this humorist so impresses him with the comparison of that “good and clever boy called Hercules” who was given a poisoned coat to wear, that Harry rips and rends the lacings of his suit and runs down to obey a summons “with half the trimmings hanging in fritters and tatters about him.”

Where Emile was controlled and self-centred, Harry is all impulse and warmth of heart. He fights like a little tiger to avenge his brother or to punish some young scamp, and cares little for the opinion of his fellows; yet he shows the greatest tenderness to animals or persons in distress. His mother, seeking proof of his wits and finding him ready to give away all his clothes except his shirt, decides that “there is but the thickness of a bit of linen between this child and a downright fool”, and so leaves him to his more discerning father.

At times, the author, preoccupied with social and political ideals, so neglects the story that even his lively humour can scarce restore it; yet he can forget Rousseau’s theories in scenes that he invents to illustrate them; nor does he ever accept a theory without proof. To the philosopher’s contention “that self-love is the motive to all human actions”, Brooke answers in the words of the estimable Mr. Meekly, “Virtue forbid”; and his own philosophy is the sounder for a trustworthy ballast of religion and patriotism.

Among minor digressions are a dialogue about toys, another on ghosts, and some of the “thousand little fables” by which Harry’s uncle, “with the most winning and insinuating address, endeavoured to open his mind and cultivate his morals”. One of these, “The Fable of the Little Silver Trouts”, has a tenderness that sets it apart from common fables. It reads like an Irish folk-tale moralised by some good priest.

If Henry Brooke could have passed on his gifts of humour and sympathy to the writers of children’s books, they would have known better than to tie life down to theory. As it was, they were mostly obsessed by the desire to teach, and preferred Mr. Day’s model of a faultless hero to one like the Fool of Quality, who actually discovered two boys within him, one “proud, scornful, ostentatious and revengeful”, the other “humble, gentle, generous, loving and forgiving”.

This English Emile was a moral contrast in himself, an anomaly that might weaken every “Example” in moral tales.

Thomas Day would have no such compromise between good and evil. Moral truths were best expressed by distinct types. To combine these in one person was to confuse the issue. Mr. Day lived, as he wrote, to prove his theories, and whenever the unknown quantity of human nature thwarted him, went back to them with unshaken confidence. A great part of his life was given to works of active benevolence, and his death was no less consistent than his life; for he died in trying to prove that a young horse could be tamed by kindness.

Only once he seems to have acted in what must have seemed to him an irrational way, and that was at the request of the lady (Miss Elizabeth Sneyd) whom at that time he hoped to make his wife. With his natural propensity to improve and educate, he had asked her, in preparation for their future life, to forgo many pleasant and harmless diversions which seemed to him useless or unreasonable. Miss Sneyd, with proper spirit, suggested that a French dancing-master might help Mr. Day to overcome certain faults of deportment which displeased her, and so nice was his sense of justice, that he actually crossed to France and spent some time in a hopeless experiment. Nobody could have taught Mr. Day to dance; perhaps the lady knew it. Such graces as he managed to acquire only provoked her to say that she liked him better as he was before, and he retired to console himself with philosophy.

His next venture promised better success. He resolved to educate two orphan girls upon Rousseau’s plan, so that, in time, one of them might fill the place he had intended for Miss Sneyd. But Nature again proved herself too strong for Philosophy. The children quarrelled, refused to be educated “in Reason’s plain and simple way”, and could not be cured of shrieking when their guardian frightened them to test their courage. As they grew up, he was forced to admit another failure; but he clung to his theories, and oddly enough lost nothing of his belief in the reasonableness of “female character”. A later pupil of his more than justified this confidence. Richard Lovell Edgeworth, although he had been Day’s successful rival in love, was still his friend, and used to send his little daughter Maria to spend her holidays with him. By that time Mr. Day had found a lady who could endure his ways, and was settled in Essex, busy with schemes for the benefit of his poor neighbours.

Maria Edgeworth, fresh from a conventional boarding school, was quick to appreciate his odd humours and philosophic mind. She obediently swallowed his doses of tar-water, submitted to the severest tests in exact reasoning, and under his influence, acquired that intense regard for truth which stamped all her later writings. Yet it was not through any theories derived from him or from her father that she became the greatest writer of Moral Tales, but through her own experience of life and character; and her work for children must be considered apart from her Rousseauist principles. Mr. Day, indeed, whose ideal of womanhood was in some ways little in advance of Rousseau’s, did his best to crush her first effort (the translation of Adèle et Théodore) by expostulating with her father for encouraging it; but Maria was too much his pupil to give way to a prejudice based solely on his horror of “female authorship”.

Mr. Day was fully alive to the want of good books for children; not only did he put his own talents at their service, by contributing to Mr. Edgeworth’s instructive serial Harry and Lucy,[88] but he found the task so interesting that it grew into an independent volume, three parts dissertation and experiment, and the fourth a fresh effort to express life in terms of theory.

Doubtless he found it a relief to work out in a book the experiments which he had found so disconcerting in practice: to show, as the result of his system, a super-Fool of Quality,—a farmer’s son, instead of a nobleman’s,—and to make his foil the spoilt child of rich parents. These are the two children, Harry Sandford and Tommy Merton, “introduced as the actors” to give interest and coherence to Mr. Day’s collection of lessons and stories.

When he says they are “made to speak and behave according to the order of Nature,” “Nature” must be understood to mean the “natural” result of Theory; for it is only the Bad Boy who, in his naughtiness, is a real child of Nature. The Good Boy of the Moralist is a stock figure of allegory, but the Bad Boy lives; a hundred models will serve for his portrait. He is the real hero of Sandford and Merton, as Satan is of Paradise Lost.

Thus, even in a book, human nature was too much for Mr. Day; and yet his Good Boy, Harry Sandford, is something more than the good half of the Fool of Quality. His virtues, although superhuman, are not unlike those of the youthful Thomas Day; but under the guidance of Mr. Barlow, that insufferable model of the Perfect Tutor, he exhibits the mature head of Mr. Day on young shoulders, and so becomes the mouthpiece of Rousseau, the lay-preacher of Mr. Barlow’s sermons, and the chief instrument of the Bad Boy’s reformation.

There is a note of English severity in Mr. Day’s reading of Rousseau. His notion of self-control is stricter than anything in the Emile: “Mr. Barlow says we must only eat when we are hungry and drink when we are dry”; he is utterly intolerant of wealth: “The rich do nothing and produce nothing, the poor everything that is really useful”. Mr. Barlow, Harry Sandford and the amiable Miss Simmons take it in turns to express Mr. Day’s opinions of the idle and frivolous pastimes of Society. Mr. Barlow was “an odd kind of man who never went to assemblies and played upon no kind of instrument,” he was “not fond of cards” and preferred relating moral histories. Harry Sandford found the theatre “full of nothing but cheating and dissimulation;” and when the youthful guests of Tommy’s house-party were preparing for a Ball, “Miss Simmons alone appeared to consider the approaching solemnity with perfect indifference”.

Much of this is autobiography. Under the figure of Miss Simmons’s uncle, Mr. Day, in fact, discloses himself: “a man of sense and benevolence, but a very great humorist”. It is his humour to look at the world as his poor boy looks at the rich man’s house:

“To the great surprise of everybody, he neither appeared pleased nor surprised at anything he saw.”

Many incidents of the story, which, like the fight between Harry and Master Mash, owe little to Henry Brooke, may be taken as reminiscent of Mr. Day’s boyhood; for although he has a true instinct for drama, he is incapable of pure invention.

“The originality of the author” he says “is a point of the least consequence in the execution of such a work as this”. Harry Sandford refusing to betray the hare to the huntsman, or at loggerheads with the “little gentry”, is the Fool of Quality; but when he discusses the World with Miss Simmons, he is a brother of the philosophic Emile.

Mr. Day borrows many of his instructive details from Rousseau: the juggler, who taught Emile the use of magnets by means of an artificial duck, conspires with Mr. Barlow and Harry to teach the uninformed Tommy Merton; but there are other experiments more practical than Rousseau’s, which suggest actual experience and the co-operation of Mr. Edgeworth. These alternate with short tales introduced according to what Mr. Day calls the “natural order of association”; but their effect is to weaken the genuine interest of the enveloping story. “The Gentleman and the Basket Maker”[89] gains nothing by the Good Boy’s elocution; Leonidas shakes himself free from Mr. Barlow’s patronage.

Yet, with all these digressions, children found matter of interest in Sandford and Merton for another century. The most didactic parents could not have controlled the choice of so many nurseries, nor would Mr. Day accept a grown-up verdict without the children’s assent. “If they are uninterested in the work”, he wrote in his preface, “the praises of a hundred reviewers will not console me for my failure”.

The truth is that persons who stand no higher than Mr. Barlow’s knee can go through the book without seeing much of him.

The simple story of “Little Jack”, no less characteristic of Day, appeared in The Children’s Miscellany: (1787),[90] but may have been written earlier. The moral is quite explicit; “that it is of little consequence how a man comes into the world, provided he behaves well and discharges his duty when he is in it”; but Jack’s life begins at the edge of experience, when he is suckled by a goat; and later, his duty leads him into many adventures which, although they appear true, happen in a romantic setting of foreign countries.

Thus theorists, without acknowledging romance, may use it for their own purposes. Robinson Crusoe’s island lent enchantment to Emile’s most practical employments, and Rousseau’s followers chose two wholly romantic figures to point their arguments against society. The negro, cut off from his own people, freed from his oppressors, is a striking and pathetic mark in the midst of his white brothers. He now becomes a type of the Natural Man, and a hero of children’s books.[91] The second witness against social institutions is that first friend of children, the shipwrecked sailor-man in his island, who still holds them by the spell of circumstance, even while he repeats the strange jargon of revolutionary doctrines.

Mr. Day had transcribed, along with extracts from The Fool of Quality, “some part of Robinson Crusoe”, without any serious additions; but Philip Quarll the Hermit, one of Crusoe’s earliest successors, appeared in The Children’s Miscellany as a Rousseauist philosopher.

The original chap-book of 1727[92] has no suggestion of theory, but it points out one vital difference between Philip Quarll and Crusoe. Quarll actually comes to love his solitude and loses all desire to return to his own country.

To the theorist, this proved him a forerunner of Rousseau, and the editor of 1787 could furnish him with the latest version of the creed. He begins by reflecting (as Rousseau did with Robinson Crusoe) on the edifying spectacle of shipwrecked men, “deprived in an instant of all the advantage and support which are derived from mutual assistance ... obliged to call forth all the latent resources of their own minds”; and then remarks that the story “whether real or fictitious, is admirably adapted to the illustration of the subject”.

The poetical language of this hermit, so unlike Crusoe’s plain story, suggests the influence of Saint Pierre, whose descriptions of scenery were more elaborate but less vigorous than Rousseau’s. “Feathered Choristers” entertain him “with melodious harmony;” Nature “puts on her gay enamelled garb and out of her rich wardrobe supplies all vegetables with new vesture.”

In such phrases, the philosophic hermit exalts Solitude at the expense of Society.

There is much unconscious humour in the account of the hermit’s efforts to overcome Nature, for although he has some of Crusoe’s practical ability, he trusts rather to theory. Depressed at the persistent hatred of a tribe of monkeys, for whom he has dug roots, he meditates on its cause, and deciding that he must have forfeited their respect “by hiding the beauty of his fabric under a gaudy disguise”, he discards the irrational garments which distinguish men from monkeys, and presents in his own person Rousseau’s Natural Man.

A friendly monkey, “Beau Fidèle”, plays the part of Friday, and the “surprising tractability and good nature” of this beast, contrasted with the ingratitude of a shipwrecked sailor, strengthen the general argument.

This is how the Philosopher, after fifteen years in his island, apostrophises a ship that suddenly appears:

“Unlucky invention! That thou shouldst ever come into men’s thoughts! The Ark which gave the first notion of a floating habitation, was ordered for the preservation of man, but its fatal copies daily expose him to destruction”; and when the sailors fail to take him off, “despite a sudden impulse to return”, he reflects upon his good fortune in having escaped the world, and counts his own situation happier than theirs. There is, of course, no Footprint in the Sand; yet the tale has romantic features. A child might skip most of the descriptions, but he would remember the white-bearded hermit and his monkey-servant in their hut built of growing trees. Crusoe had no such leaf-tapestry on his walls; and there is a map of Philip Quarll’s island which is a formulary of romantic truth; for in it may be seen (at A) the place where the Hermit was cast away, and at B, the place where Mr. Dorrington (who discovered him) landed; at E, the Hermit’s Lodge, and at K, the lake between the Rock and the Island.

The new Philip Quarll with all its absurdities was better reading for Children than The New Robinson Crusoe (Campe’s Robinson der Jüngere, translated into English from the French in 1788).[93] Crusoe’s ship never carried a heavier cargo than Campe’s tiresome family, who break up the story with their dull colloquies; but the book is a fresh proof that these philosophers had to call in the old masters to enforce their lessons, and could discover no more attractive theme than the old one of voyages and islands.

The English Conversations of Emily appeared in the same year as The Children’s Miscellany. Four years later, Mary Wollstonecraft, full of theories for the better education of girls, assumed the mantle of Madame d’Epinay, or rather placed it on the shoulders of a Representative whom no touch of human weakness could redeem from the hard grip of Reason: Mrs. Mason, a monstrous creation of her own.[94] It would be impossible to paint Mrs. Mason’s portrait. Nothing softer than granite could suggest her outline. Compared with her, Emily’s Mother is all kindness and indulgence. Her two charges, Mary and Caroline, are mere wax tablets whereon she records her impressions of virtue. Their very faults are placed upon them like labels, for Mrs. Mason to remove. Emily, though she was her mother’s “friend”, was a real child, pleased and amused by formal Nature lessons and unimaginative stories, since nothing better might be had; playing with dolls, “jumping, running about and making a noise”.

Mary, in the Original Stories, has to prove that she can “regulate her appetites”, before Mrs. Mason says: “I called her my friend, and she deserved the name, for she was no longer a child.” Mary and Caroline have no mother; Mary Wollstonecraft had no confidence in parents. She called in Mrs. Mason, a sort of moral physician, to make good the defects of a casual up-bringing. Mrs. Mason, true to the tradition d’Epinay, “never suffered them to be out of her sight”. She exhibited every excellence that she exhorted them to attain; and that none of her perfections should escape their notice, she discoursed upon these at intervals. Her success is inevitable and complete. She conducts her pupils through carefully selected experiences; she conducts the reader through the book. She never hesitates or doubts; she never betrays surprise.

The Tales were written “to illustrate the Moral”: it is thus that Mrs. Mason answers “the Ænigma of Creation”. She sees everything, understands everything, explains everything.

“‘I declare I cannot go to sleep’, said Mary, ‘I am afraid of Mrs. Mason’s eyes’.”

Mrs. Mason conforms and makes everybody else conform to her moral formulæ: “Do you know the meaning of the word Goodness?” she asks. “I see you are unwilling to answer. I will tell you. It is, first, to avoid hurting anything; and then to continue to give as much pleasure as you can.”

Three chapters are given to “the treatment of animals”. The children are allowed to read Mrs. Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories,[95] and to read it “over again” to a little friend, if they can make her understand that birds never talk.

In the Original Stories, pleasure is administered like medicine. Benevolence is a chief part of Mrs. Mason’s Theory; she is resolutely, almost sternly benevolent. Joy is never admitted without a dispensation from Reason. When the children have acted “like rational creatures”, Mrs. Mason allows them two lines of joy:

“Look, what a fine morning it is. Insects, birds, and animals, are all enjoying this sweet day.”

Blake snatched the words eagerly for his frontispiece. His “illustrations” are a touchstone for Mary Wollstonecraft’s imagination. He could not draw Mrs. Mason. In her place he introduces a central figure of his own, meditative, sweet, and firm; spiritual, even decorative, as Mrs. Mason never was. Yet he, like the rest, was dominated by the monstrous original; his Masonic Symbol appears in every picture. The children are his own; he dresses them to order, but makes haloes of their little round straw hats.

This author has an effective manner of disposing landscape to correspond with her sombre or determinedly joyful moods. Blake does not attempt the moonlight scene that moves Mrs. Mason to discourse upon her gloomy past, and present resignation. “I am weaned from the world, but not disgusted,” she observes. Such a state of mind would be unintelligible to Blake. But he manages to convey something of the formal desolation of the ruined Mansion-house, to which Mrs. Mason brings the children “to tell them the history of the last inhabitants”. They cling about her, and one looks back in a vain hope of escape, for “when they spoke, the sound seemed to return again, as if unable to penetrate the thick stagnated air. The sun could not dart its purifying rays through the thick gloom, and the fallen leaves contributed to choke up the way and render the air more noxious”. A heavy atmosphere is characteristic of the book; it suggests the German Elements of Morality, which Mary Wollstonecraft translated two years later. The promise of romance in the settings of Mrs. Mason’s stories is never fulfilled.

Blake was oppressed by her realistic solution of the mystery of the unseen harper. He followed the “pleasing sound” in his own way, and discovered the player for himself: not Mrs. Mason’s explicit and tangible old man, but a spirit harping under a starry sky.

Neither Thomas Day nor Mary Wollstonecraft could have written a “Lilliputian” book; and even the author of the Juvenile Tatler and Fairy Spectator, whose titles suggest the old traditions, turns back only to copy the types of Marmontel, the moral fairy tales of Madame le Prince de Beaumont.

The Juvenile Tatler,[96] by Mrs. Teachwell (Lady Fenn) is a collection of moral dialogues and dramas: “The Foolish Mother”, “The Prudent Daughter”, “The Innocent Romp”, and others suggested by Marmontel. But the characters are wholly English. The Innocent Romp is a feminine counterpart of the Bad Boy.

The other persons of this drama (real people too) are Mr. Briskly, a Widower, whom Marmontel would have called “The Foolish Father”; Mrs. Freeman, his sister, “The Wise Aunt”; Miss Prudence Freeman, her daughter, “The Good Cousin”.

Lady Fenn’s humour is English, like her characters: she invents amusing pranks for her heroine, and is original in admitting a girl to the masculine pastime of mischief.

A very natural dialogue between the Foolish Father and the Wise Aunt prepares the reader for the entrance of the Romp. Her latest offence has lost her an eligible suitor. Chasing the housemaid with a rotten apple, she has just thrown it full in the face of Lord Prim, alighting from his coach to pay his compliments to her, on her return from school. Thus announced, she enters, fresh from an excursion into a neighbour’s garden by way of the wall. Questioned about the visible traces of this adventure, she confesses that she fell from the top of the wall, and adds that she would like to fall twenty times if she could be sure she was not seen, and to make her cousin Prudence fall too. “La! Cousin,” she cries, with seductive enjoyment, “’tis delightful! Just like flying.” (A cautious foot-note explains: “This was written before the invention of Air Balloons.”)

When the author has a doubt about the moral influence of her heroine, she inserts a corrective foot-note.

The Romp, it is disclosed by her Aunt, not content with dressing the cat in baby-linen to play at a mock-christening, disguised herself as an old woman, and carried it to Mr. Starchbland, the Curate. Upon this there are three separate comments: The Foolish Father’s “A profane trick”; The Wise Aunt’s “She thought no further than the surprise it would be to the person who should lift up the mantle and possibly”——Oh, excellent Wise Aunt!—“possibly, the roguery of getting the parson scratched.” And, last, the foot-note, to avert parental criticism: “Let it not be supposed that Miss B would suffer the Sacred Rite to begin”.

The author’s sympathies are with the Aunt (she was an aunt herself). So the Wise Aunt carries off her niece to undergo a moderate process of conversion. The Foolish Father, who “dotes” upon his daughter “when she is neatly dressed and tolerably sedate”, is obviously drawn from life.

The Fairy Spectator,[97] “By Mrs. Teachwell and Her Family”, is Mrs. Argus transformed into the Benevolent Educational Fairy of Madame de Beaumont. Here is a characteristic bit of dialogue:

A world where all fairies are “fabulous” is, of course, a world without dreams. When Miss Sprightly weeps on rising, because she cannot banish the thought of “the most pleasing dream which she ever had in her life”, the inexorable Mrs. Teachwell meets the situation with a simple formula: “Idle girl, make haste!” The Fabulous Beings whom she admits on sufferance are not more fairylike than “the smallest wax doll.”

Two lines from The Fairy Spectator betray the Rousseauist’s attitude to Fairyland:

“I will write you a Dialogue in which the Fairy shall converse, and I will give you a Moral for your Dream.”