The great writers for children were neither Lilliputian nor Rousseauist. They emerged from a good company of aunts and mothers who, with a sprinkling of fathers, were driven into anonymous authorship by the demands of their own families: minor moralists, without any special gifts of art or imagination, who managed to draw live pictures from their own little world, and hit upon simple devices for holding attention and exciting interest.

They were mostly innocent of Theory, but an intimate acquaintance with the Child of Nature taught them in one way or another to avoid the unpardonable sin of dulness.

Little novels, following their grown-up prototypes with unequal steps, had their own limitations of setting and character. A nursery or a schoolroom is always a nursery or a schoolroom, and varies only according to particular houses and inhabitants. The few ways of escape (by a window, a chimney or a keyhole) into fairyland, were blocked in most eighteenth century houses, and the persons of moral tales, however lifelike, were apt, from contact with a narrow circle, to assume familiar characters.

Adventures of the milder sort might happen on the road to school, but the only changes of scene were from parlour to schoolroom, or from town to country. Any effort to exceed these by travels abroad landed the unsophisticated author in a hopeless confusion of unknown tongues and half-remembered directions.

And yet there was something in these English settings to compensate a child for the loss of fairyland, if not to set his feet in the track of it. Authors chiefly concerned with character were apt to give the briefest indication of a background; but before 1780, there were woodcuts that implied more than the words of the story.

Thomas Bewick had cut his first blocks for the York and Newcastle chap-books, and although he soon passed on from these to a wider study of Nature, they were enough to seal the fate of the old slovenly pictures in children’s books.

As a boy, Bewick had filled the margins of his school-books and covered the hearthstones of his mother’s cottage with drawings of the men and beasts that he knew about his native village[98]; and these he reproduced later in the cuts for chap-books and fables.

He could never draw fairies. The “Pigmy Sprite” in Gay’s Fables[99] is not half so fairy-like as the little spinning-wheels and brooms of the corner-pieces; but his drawings of trees and meadows, rocks and pools, show the “fairy ground” of his own happy childhood.

It was thus that he gave a new meaning to the country setting which was now a recognised feature of moral tales. A writer might demand no more of Nature than that she should provide the Industrious Boy with fruit in season; but Bewick caught her among the corn ricks or at the corner of a lane, and she herself took up the parable.

The younger brother, John, who began by adapting some of Bewick’s drawings, is better known as an illustrator of children’s books. Between 1790 and 1820, there are few cuts that do not show some trace of his influence, and many of those in the smaller chap-books,—The Adventures of a Pincushion, for example, and The Life and Adventures of a Fly,[100]—have been attributed to him.

In a sense, John was more imaginative than his brother, quicker to appreciate subtleties of character and expression. There is hardly less truth of detail in the Lime-walks and rose-gardens of The Looking Glass for the Mind than in Thomas Bewick’s village scenes; but the little figures are more graceful and courtly, the backgrounds more delicate.

John Bewick’s illustrations to The New Robinson Crusoe gave shape to Rousseau’s vague ideal; but his pictures of English children in their natural surroundings were a literal return to Nature. And although they were in complete accord with the changed attitude of the story-writers, they proved (to the confusion of Theorists) that the new Philosophy had made little impression on the familiar moods of Nature and childhood.

The School-setting, however cramped, was a source of wider interest than the alternative parlour or nursery. It varied, according to the fortunes of the persons concerned, from the Village School (commonly built on the Two-Shoes foundation, but without its Lilliputian features) to the Academy for young Ladies or Gentlemen: an exclusive community which had received its traditions from Sarah Fielding’s notable little book The Governess; or, The Little Female Academy[101] published some fourteen years before Rousseau’s Emile.

Writing in the first decade of Lilliputian books, the author of David Simple anticipated Rousseau with a gallery of children’s portraits, and showed that the Child of Nature could survive pedantic forms as well as theories.

Madame le Prince de Beaumont chose the same framework for her Misses’ Magazine;[102] Charles and Mary Lamb used it to connect the separate stories of Mrs. Leicester’s School; Mrs. Sherwood seized upon the book itself and revised it ruthlessly, and a host of anonymous writers copied Miss Fielding’s method and envied her genius.

Half periodical, half novel, The Governess was a perfect medium for “Instruction and Amusement”. It contains sermons, fables, Oriental-Classic stories and a moralised romance in the style of the Cabinet des Fées.

Of the Governess herself, whose name of Mrs. Teachum became a popular pseudonym for instructive writers, it must be confessed that she is a Presence hardly less dominating than Mrs. Mason. To the mature reader, who is uncomfortably conscious of having met her in real life, she is more formidable than any lay-figure of a theorist. Her husband, described as “a very sensible Man who took great Delight in improving his Wife,” having completed his task, disappears from the story and leaves her to pass on his improvements, to the “nine young Ladies commited to her Care.” She is “about forty Years old, tall and genteel in her Person, though somewhat inclined to Fat,” and her “lively and commanding Eye” (more human, if less hypnotic than Mrs. Mason’s) “created an Awe in all her little Scholars, except when she condescended to smile and talk familiarly with them.”

Theorists, working upon this Paragon, extracted the more human elements; but the children escaped, like Hop o’ my Thumb out of the Ogre’s house.

The long line of authentic portraits that extends from Miss Fielding to Miss Edgeworth is of one family, and it is doubtful whether any amount of “practical education” could have improved some of Mrs. Teachum’s pupils, restricted as these were to “Reading, Writing, Working and all proper Forms of Behaviour”.

The naughty children in books, as in life, can take care of themselves, but it needs a writer of unusual tact to make the good ones live. Miss Fielding’s good children are more to her credit than the “Rogues” who figure in some of her best scenes; but there is nothing in the book quite so amusing as her “Account of a Fray begun and carried on for the Sake of an Apple, in which are shown the sad Effects of Rage and Anger.”

Mrs. Teachum, entering unexpectedly, produces a sudden calm in which the losses on all sides can be counted:

“Each of the Misses held in her right hand, fast clenched, some Marks of Victory. One of them held a little Lock of Hair, torn from the Head of Her Enemy, another grasped a Piece of a Cap which, in aiming at her Rival’s Hair, had deceived her Hand and was all the Spoils she could gain, a third clenched a Piece of an Apron, a fourth of a Frock. In short, everyone unfortunately held in her Hand a Proof of having been engaged in the Battle. And the Ground was spread with Rags and Tatters torn from the Backs of the little inveterate Combatants”.

Here is a satirical scene not unworthy of Fielding’s sister, yet not too subtle for her audience. (The Ladies Caroline and Fanny, new to their titles, are visiting Miss Jenny Peace.):

“Lady Caroline, who was dressed in a pink Robe embroidered thick with Gold and adorned with very fine Jewels and the finest Mechlin lace, addressed most of her Discourse to her Sister, that she might have the Pleasure every Minute, of uttering ‘Your Ladyship’, in order to show what she herself expected. Miss Jenny, amused by their insolent Affectation, addressed herself to Lady Caroline with so many Ladyships and Praises of fine Clothes as she hoped would have made her ashamed”.

Nobody who reads the book can suspect Miss Fielding of more than a distant admiration for Mrs. Teachum. Her own sympathies are clearly with the old dairywoman who, when the children were rebuked for a want of tact in their remarks to her, replied: “O, let the dear Rogues alone, I like their Prattle,” and taking Miss Polly (the youngest) by the hand, added: “Come, my Dear, we will go into the Dairy and skim the Milk pans.”

There is a kind of story-telling, touched with the same wise playfulness, which is not beyond the talents of average aunts. Two such there were, sisters-in-law, Dorothy and Mary Jane Kilner, whose stories, published in Dutch flowered covers, were as popular after 1780 as the earlier Newberys. There is some doubt about their respective pseudonyms, but the family records ascribe the signature “M. P.” to Dorothy and “S. S.” to her sister, which establishes Dorothy as the author of The Village School.[103]

Her stories grew naturally out of a happy and uneventful life spent in the little Essex Village of Maryland Point, and her best critics were the nephews and nieces for whom she wrote. But she was in the habit of sending her books to “the Good Mrs. Trimmer” for criticism, and it seems likely that she wrote The Village School to help that lady in her work of teaching poor children to read.

“M. P.” (she borrowed the initials of her village) is in some sort a nursery Crabbe. There is not an incident in her story outside a country child’s experience: no Babes-in-the Wood opening, no clever animals, no romance of improbable good fortune. This is the “clean pleasant village” of every-day life. The schoolmistress, Mrs. Bell, believes in simple virtues, but has no theories. Boys and girls learn to read, and girls to spin, knit stockings and sew. They are grouped quite simply, as in some old-fashioned print, and M. P., having borrowed Miss Fielding’s device of labelling them with symbolic names, uses it to avoid the complexities of character. Jacob Steadfast and Kitty Spruce are predestined to carry off the prizes which Betsy Giddy, Master Crafty and Jack Sneak inevitably lose; and a child is content with the main distinctions of Good and Bad.

The story, slight as it is, reveals M. P. as an aunt who is not indifferent to “Flowers picked out of the Hedges, Daisies and Butter Flowers”; who can make garlands and enjoy a singing-game,—the right sort of game for village schools:

“You cannot think” she concludes, “how pretty it is when they mind to sing and dance in the right time.”

This was an aunt who, in her own century, deserved some such tribute as Stevenson’s:

Jemima Placid,[104] variously ascribed to Dorothy and Mary Jane, is woven of the same simple stuff. George Frere, writing in 1816 to his brother Bartle[105], bore witness to its practical effect on one nursery. They evidently came to it in turn, at a particular age. “You”, he wrote, “are more of a philosopher than I am and can bear these things better, and yet I have read Jemima Placid since you have, but you have made the best use of it”.

A Rousseauist might have overlooked the philosophy in this little book,—the annals of a parsonage family, in which all the characters are individuals and friends of the writer; for there is not an ounce of theory in it. Jemima herself is neither a pedant nor an infant prodigy. She is never expected to reason about her own development. Her philosophy is of the older sort that comes of gentle discipline, and she is “placid” not through pleasing no one but herself, but in spite of other people’s unjust or exacting ways. It is doubtful whether she would have been very different under the Eye of Mrs. Mason, but assuredly she would have been less happy. No theoretic Child of Nature ever was so happy as Jemima with her brothers.

The scene of parting, when the little girl (six years old) goes to London, is an introduction to these three:

“I wish you were not going” says Charles, “for I put this box and drove in these nails on purpose for you to hang up your doll’s clothes, and now they will be no further use to us.” William bids her not cry, and promises to write about the young rabbits. “And, Jemima,” adds Charles more tactfully, “I wish I was going with you to London, for I should like to see it, ’tis such a large place, a great deal bigger than any village which we have seen; and they say the houses stand close together for a great way and there are no fields or trees....”

It is the same village, seen from a different standpoint, narrowed on the one hand to the record of a particular house, on the other, varied by journeys and visits to town.

Old customs survive with the flowered covers of the book, and the next few lines bring Jemima Placid into touch with her predecessors. For in London there is a great number of shops, and to be sure, among other things, Jemima must bring back “Some little books which we can understand, and which ... may be bought at Mr. Marshall’s somewhere in some churchyard, but Jemima must inquire about it.”

The little things that make up a child’s life happen with natural inconsequence. What gives the book a hold is the author’s unaffected truth and tenderness, the modest philosophy which hides under simple speeches or incidents.

Who but Jemima Placid, the unhappy guest of two spoilt London cousins, could comfort herself under unjust reproof with “the rough drawing of a little horse, which Charles had given her on the day of her departure and which she had since carefully preserved.”

It is no wonder that her brothers are loth to welcome the Londoners on their return visit; but “S. S.” can make her own “Book of Courtesy”, and she refreshes it with the comments of real boys. William answers his father’s rebuke with disconcerting logic: “You always tell me that the naughtiest thing I can do is to tell lies, and I am sure I am very sorry they are come, for I like Jemima to ourselves: so pray, Sir, what would you choose I should do?”

There is not a trace of the “Juvenile Correspondent” in Charles’s letters to Jemima; but the sentiment of humanitarians is mere vapouring compared with this boy’s account of how they found the dog shot by a game-keeper and buried him under the Laylock tree.

“‘Poor Hector! I shall hate Ben Hunt as Long as I live for it!’

‘Fy Charles’ said my father. ‘Hector is dead, Sir,’ said I, and I did not stay to hear any further.”

Elizabeth Sandham, who wrote somewhat later “for the Children of former Schoolfellows”, claimed a wider influence for the story of school life. “A school”, she says, “may be styled the world in miniature. There the passions which actuate the man may be seen on a smaller scale.”

On this assumption, she ventured into the unknown microcosm of a boys’ school,[106] where even Miss Edgeworth came to grief; but her book was a model for some hundreds of school stories in which ambitious, studious or mischievous boys play impossible parts. She was more at home in a later study of schoolgirls[107]: careful sketches, brightened by satirical remarks; but the moral is too obvious. Miss Sandham’s sense of humour was too slight for effective relief.

An admirable miscellany, which brings genuine adventure and comedy into the school setting, is The Academy; r, a Picture of Youth,[108] published in 1808 by a Scottish schoolmaster who, in his preface, claims to have taught “all ranks, from the peer’s son to the children of the lower orders.” His taste is hardly less catholic than his experience, for he not only adds satirical and dramatic scenes to the old fables and admonitions, but adapts Berquin to an English atmosphere, and is ready to sympathise with the shepherd, the labourer, the old man and his horse. The book is a medley of old manners and new sentiments, in which the characters, although they stand for familiar types, earn some rights of personality by individual acts and speeches.

This author is indebted to Smollett for a trick of making his characters talk in the language of their callings. Young Tradewell’s father consigns him to the Rector’s care “per the bearer,” as if he were a bale of merchandise; and a nautical father advises a son who has “gone a little out of his course” to “sail clear of faults”, but if at any time he is driven into them, to “be a brave boy and steer honourably off.”

Satire in Children’s books is apt to miss its mark. Some parents who bought this Picture of Youth must have felt like the old gentleman of the story, who was furious at a clever caricature of himself until somebody assured him that it was intended for his neighbour. Restored to good humour by similar means, they would doubtless enjoy these burlesques: the foolish indulgent mother, the sporting squire who laughs at his son’s escapades, the parents who teach their boy “to recite passages with tragic effect from our best poets”.

The Rector’s rational methods recall Sandford and Merton; but the book is for older lads. The Bad Boy of The Academy is more like a hero of Picaresque romance, and the Good Boy (the son of a naval officer, destined for the Service) is a new figure in moral tales; a pupil “highly acceptable to the Rector” for his own sake; the more so, perhaps, for the fresh memory of Trafalgar.

English people have an inherent power of reconciling opposites, which perhaps comes of their being a mixed race. The most revolutionary writers were held back by some thread of ancient custom, and those who clung to the older modes of thought were not without some broadening influence. “Nature” and “Truth” were still the accepted ideals of literature, although the meaning of both had changed; and The Juvenile Spectator,[109] which applied Addison’s method of character-drawing to the nursery, used it with a new understanding of childhood.

Mrs. Arabella Argus,[110] its author, adds piquancy to her general scheme by introducing herself as a Grandmother. Doubtless she was old enough to remember Lilliputian traditions; but she was also too young to forget the newer counsels of sanity and freedom. Like Addison, she begins by describing herself and her aims, but so far is she from admiring the model of the Baby Spectator, that she directs her brightest satire against “little prodigies” and child-philosophers.

She is “an old woman, but not an old witch nor yet a fairy”; and without resorting to anything so irrational as magic, she is able to set forth secret information upon “Nursery Anecdotes, Parlour Foibles, Garden Mischief and Hyde Park Romps”.

Now, a Newbery writer might have dealt with the first two of these items; but he never could have countenanced such portents of revolution as “Garden Mischief” and “Hyde Park Romps”.

The letters which Mrs. Argus receives from children show nothing like the decorum of the Goodwill Correspondence.

Here is one from a typical Bad Boy (which however, Mrs. Argus contrasts with another, “couched in terms of becoming timidity”, from a girl):

Mrs. Argus gives sound and pleasantly pointed advice in her replies, though she loses more than one laugh to modern readers in her care for propriety.

“Will you be so good” she writes in one postscript “as to tell your brother that the word Thump which occurred in his letter appears to me an expression unworthy of a well-educated child.”

Yet she surprises a pugnacious grandson with the novel argument that so few things are worth fighting about; and shows a genuine sympathy with boyish pranks.

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”.

On the human side, Mrs. Benson, a kind of domestic Mrs. Teachum, presides over the morals of a son and daughter. Her interest in education is almost equal to Mrs. Trimmer’s, who “wearied her friends by making it so frequently the subject of conversation”; but benevolence softens her utilitarian morality. When Master Frederick rushes to the window to feed his birds and forgets to bid his Mamma good-morning, she admonishes him thus:

“Remember, my dear, that you depend as much on your Papa and me for everything you want, as these little birds do on you; nay, more so, for they could find food in other places; but children can do nothing towards their own support; they should therefore be dutiful and respectful to those whose tenderness and care they constantly experience.”

The Robin family is more than half human. Nestlings, distinguished by the expressive names of Robin, Dicky, Flapsy and Pecksy, exhibit all the faults of children. But there is a world of difference between Mrs. Trimmer’s treatment and that of the fabulist. She has learned to look at a nest of birds from a child’s point of view; what is infinitely more novel and surprising, she actually shifts her ground and considers the Benson household from the standpoint of a bird. It is here that so many of her imitators lost the trail; and thus it is that their books were soon forgotten, while hers was read with delight for a century.

The adventure of the nestlings and the gardener has something of the fascination of Gulliver. This is Robin’s description of the “Monster” who visited them in their mother’s absence:

“.... Suddenly we heard a noise against the wall, and presently a great round red face appeared before the nest, with a pair of enormous staring eyes, a very large beak, and below that a wide mouth with two rows of bones that looked as if they could grind us all to pieces in an instant. About the top of this round face, and down the sides, hung something black, but not like feathers”.

The children dragged Mrs. Trimmer from her didactic throne: they even made her talk their language. Her own style is reserved for the parent birds, and in discussing important matters, the young ones imitate them.

“This great increase of family”, says the Robin to his mate, “renders it prudent to make use of every means for supplying our necessities. I myself must take a larger circuit.” The Mother bird thus addresses her penitent son: “I have listened to your lamentations, and since you seem convinced of your error, I will not add to your sufferings by my reproaches.”

All this can be endured for the sake of so many delightful incidents. For a child can climb up the ivy and creep under the wing of the mother bird. He can join the nestlings in their first singing-lesson, follow them in their first flight, and best of all, he can look at the great world beyond the nest with their wondering eyes:

“The orchard itself appeared to them a world. For some time each remained silent, gazing around, first at one thing, then at another; at length Flapsy cried out: ‘What a charming place the world is! I had no conception that it was half so big!’”

The Life and Perambulation of a Mouse[114] was Dorothy Kilner’s contribution to the literature of talking beasts. The author is discovered in a frontispiece, seated at a little round table, in a mob-cap and kerchief. Her quill has just reached the end of the second line. Erect in a box of wafers, the Mouse, with extended paw, is dictating the story of his life.

This “chief of aunts,” snow-bound in a country house with many “young folk,” takes up her pen at their request, to attempt her autobiography.

“I took up my pen, it is true”, she writes, “but not one word toward my appointed task could I proceed....

‘Then write mine, which may be more diverting’, said a little squeaking voice.”

Few “Introductions” were so promising, and the story (apart from inevitable lessons) keeps its promise.

Four mice, Nimble (the narrator) and his brothers Longtail, Softdown and Brighteyes, correspond to Mrs. Trimmer’s nestlings; over whom, to a child’s mind, they have one advantage: they are outlaws, repeating in miniature the adventures of Robin Hood.

To be sure, they lack the outlaw’s chief virtues, for they fly at the approach of an enemy, and rob rich and poor alike. And although such creatures could always be excused in the words of Dr. Watts:

a problem remains to puzzle the wit of a little philosopher: how it happens that creatures so keenly alive to human errors are blind to the iniquity of eating a poor woman’s cake, a present from her foster-son, or the solitary candle that lights a poor man to bed. For indeed, these mice are unsparing critics of cowardly, cruel and overbearing children; they have a full repertory of moral and cautionary tales; they preach sermons on human courage and honour.

The child of action puts aside all questioning, jumps nimbly into a mouse’s skin and makes a fifth on these marauding expeditions. He scuttles along behind the wainscot, buries himself in the most delicious of plum cakes, outwits the footman, narrowly escapes the trap and thrills at his first sight of the cat.

In a mischievous mood, he can hide in a lady’s shoe, or wake the children and hear them wonder what it was. There are Eastern adventures to be had among “spacious and elegant apartments”, where he can choose from “a carpet of various colours” a flower that will hide him, and crouch motionless at a passing footstep; and when there is a price upon his head, or the house catches fire, there are still more thrilling adventures of escape.

Should a critic remark that these things do not make up one quarter of the book, a child may tell him that he does not mind sermons and, for that matter, can preach them himself.

In 1798, one of the most realistic animal stories appeared: Keeper’s Travels in Search of his Master,[115] the adventures of a dog. Its author, Mr. Kendall, wrote other books, mostly about birds;[116] but Keeper’s Travels was the only serious rival to Fabulous Histories.

If any parent had scruples about talking beasts, here was a book that could be put into a child’s hand with perfect safety. No eighteenth century writer could help making an animal reason as if he were human; but this is a real dog, wagging and whimpering his way through the book, and if he does not speak, the story is not a whit less interesting for that.

From the time that he loses sight of his master on a market-day by being “so attentive to half a dozen fowls that were in a basket”, his adventures are entirely natural and probable.

Keeper is never too human for belief: he does nothing that any dog might not do; yet he makes a good hero,—sticking to his quest in spite of pain and hunger, refusing comforts and saving the lives of children. Mr. Kendall sums up his hero’s virtues in a quotation from Cowper, for those who are “not too proud to stoop to quadruped instructors”. He was not the only lover of animals to quote a humanitarian poet. The author of The Juvenile Spectator in her quaint Adventures of a Donkey,[117] has these lines from Coleridge below the frontispiece:

The Autobiography of a Cat was a more delicate task, a psychologist could not explain the workings of its mind, although a careful observer might record its more intelligible movements; but since every cat is a critic of human character, there was nothing in the way of sermon or satire that it could not achieve.

Elizabeth Sandham’s Adventures of Poor Puss[118] is a very literal story, setting off the philosophy of “two four-footed moralisers” on a sunny wall; but the anonymous author of Felissa; or, the Life and Opinions of a Kitten of Sentiment[119] produced a masterpiece in this kind.

Felissa is a Kitten of Satire as well as of Sentiment. This Author adopted the form of Pompey the Little in order to ridicule cant and affectation in general, and Rousseau’s doctrine in particular; yet the chief aim of the book (as the title-page shows) is to turn a child’s thoughts from the hackneyed problems of juvenile conduct:

The heroine’s pedigree goes back to Perrault; she actually claims descent from “that noble, excellent and exceeding wise Cat ... who owed his honours to the liberality and gratitude of the celebrated nobleman the Lord Marquis of Carabas”; and indeed she resembles her ancestor as much in “Genius and Discretion” as she excels him in Morals. She is one that might have sat on Dr. Johnson’s knee; her remarks upon Rousseau would have delighted him. Describing the Countess of Dashley, her little mistress’s mother, she says that this lady “had been advised by a French gentleman, one Mr. Rousseau, to suffer her children to remain foolish till seven or eight years of age, when, he said, they would grow wise of their own accord”, a plan “so easy and delightful” that she immediately adopted it.

Felissa’s satire has the prettiest effect of innocence. One moment she is all kittenish mischief, the next, lost in wonder at the lady of fashion who spares half a moment on the way to her carriage to peep in at her little girl.

“For my part,” declares the Kitten, “my eyes were so dazzled by her dress and her diamonds, and so alarmed by some feathers that grew out of her head, in a manner which I had never witnessed before, but in my old master’s cockatoo at the Castle (and she never wore hers so high), that it was some minutes before I could recover myself.”

The episode of a mock-christening, which recalls the Juvenile Tatler, serves to change the scene. Felissa, provoked to scratch, is sent down in disgrace to a country Rectory, where she enjoys a quiet interval; but before long, the Bad Nephew gets the better of the Good Midshipman, and the kitten runs away.

She now seeks a refuge in the house of “the most charitable woman living”, where, taking up her old part of unconscious critic, she discovers that charity may be a mere cloak for display; and coming thence to another house, ventures into the library of a Man of Sentiment whose portrait would have pleased Rousseau’s enemies.

“I crept behind a huge folio to recover my fright and, as usual, set about rendering my person neat and attractive, in expectation of soon becoming visible. My new master, it was evident, could never have been instructed on this subject; for as I peeped at him from behind my folio, I thought that he was the dirtiest and most disagreeable man I had ever seen in my life; and wished from my heart, that my nice clean father and mother had had the education of him. He was short and thick, and by no means pretty; of an ill complexion, and his face very far from clean; all his skins, likewise, were of a bad colour, both his shirt skin and his outer-skin, which seemed much out of repair....”

She is irresistible, this Felissa: reassured to find the sentimentalist writing an Ode to Mercy; listening “with her ears pricked up, as if she had been watching for a mouse,” while he reads it to his daughter; puzzled by the extraordinary fact that “the more she appeared distressed, the more pleased her father seemed to be.” It is even more unaccountable that a young lady of so much sensibility should turn a starved kitten out of doors. “But kittens are easily puzzled”, and Felissa runs into fresh adventures on her way to a happy ending.

Her fortune is almost too modest for a descendant of Puss in Boots: no more than the blessings of an Establishment and many friends; but the chief of these is the daughter of an officer “who lost his invaluable life in the memorable battle which deprived our country of the gallant and lamented Nelson.”

She, of course, marries the promoted Midshipman, and the Kitten, having attained a certain seniority, and finding little scope for her sly wit, devotes herself to the instruction and amusement of little Felissae. If a story could end better, let the Wyse Chylde show how.

Adventures of things, a variation of the same idea, were mostly derived from Charles Johnstone’s novel, Chrysal; or, the Adventures of a Guinea.[120]

If small coins might be supposed to talk as well as great ones (and moralists saw no reason against it), a silver Threepence,[121] the equivalent of a guinea in juvenile commerce, could relate transactions at the Village Shop or at the corner of St. Paul’s Churchyard which, if less thrilling than the Guinea’s, were more creditable to those concerned.

Other subjects of these stories had a greater fascination for unworldly youth. These were things that a child would play with or carry about: a Doll, a Pegtop or a Pincushion, which, from their intimate association with the family, were in a position to discuss its affairs.

“S. S.” designed her Adventures of a Pincushion[122] “chiefly for the use of young ladies,” little thinking that old ones would turn back with delight to these records of domestic life in their great-grandmothers’ time.

It seems that the proper place for a pincushion (that essentially feminine possession) was the pocket; but there were occasions, making for adventure, when it was put into a workbag by mistake, or “lent to Miss Meekly to fasten her Bib”, and then it was sure to be carried off in another pocket to another house.

One effect of the book, unforeseen by its gentle author, was doubtless to increase the number of lost pincushions; for never, until it was published, had little Misses suspected what secret critics and inveterate gossips they carried about with them, disguised in harmless taffetas.

Rarely indeed is this watchful companion at a loss for information, but once (when S. S. decides to skip a scene) it remarks:

“The ladies now retired to dinner, but I am ignorant of what passed there, as I was left upon a piece of embroidery.”

As for the woodcuts, they may well be John Bewick’s; they follow each turn of the author’s quiet humour. Any little Miss could tell at a glance that Martha was personating the Music Master and Charlotte teaching the rest to dance. These pictures show everything but the colours, and for that matter, nobody shrank from painting the Green Parlour, when the pincushion declared that “the furniture was all of that colour”. Bewick Collectors have never understood the fatal attraction of “plain” cuts.

“S. S.”, justifying her simple narrative in a preface (and thinking, perhaps, of Chrysal), admits that “the pointed satire of ridicule might have added zest to her story”, but thinks it unfit for children.

“To exhibit their superiors in a ridiculous view is not the proper method to engage the youthful mind to respect. To represent their equals as objects of contemptuous mirth is by no means favourable to the interest of good nature. And to treat the characters of their inferiors with levity, the author thought, was inconsistent with the sacred rights of humanity.”

The criticism is a thought too serious. Ridicule is not always a bad method of dealing with children’s faults; “S. S.” herself could use it on occasion. Had she forgotten the Wagstaffs’ party in Jemima Placid, or the delightful mischief of the dressing of Sally Flaunt, in which the Pincushion played a chief part?

It is really a question of treatment; a wooden sword is sharp enough for the nursery. If children are simply tickled by incongruities or miss the point altogether, it is because the satirist has an eye on the grown-up part of his audience. But, as “S. S.” points out, there is a danger that incidents will be dragged in for satirical ends “without any cause to produce them”; and, true to her own simple canon of art, she decides “to make them arise naturally from the subject”, though it increase the difficulties of her task.

The Preface shows a concern for form which is rare in these modest writers; and the method justifies itself.

It is extraordinary that so much food for profit and enjoyment could be stored in the shelves of old-fashioned houses.