Eighteenth-Century Prefigurements

In the mid-1780s, the Critical Review found children's books "scarcely objects of criticism" but urged that they be "perused . . . with some care." Two centuries later, the Georgian storybook is still scarcely an object of criticism. While there have been some recent dissertations and several articles, books on the subject would include only Florence V. Barry's A Century of Children's Books (1922, rpt. 1968), Sylvia W. Patterson's Rousseau's "Émile" and Early Children's Literature (1971), and now Samuel F. Pickering, Jr.'s John Locke and Children's Books in Eighteenth-Century England.

Children's literature historians have examined the eighteenth century when, in Harvey Darton's words, juvenile literature really opens up, but often with one eye on the upcoming century. For example, Darton found in Dorothy Kilner's Life and Perambulation of a Mouse a pre-Alice fantasy framework. The eighteenth-century book becomes mere prefigurement to be lamented and disposed of before one gets to the more fanciful creations of the following century. What eighteenth-century writers were about, not what they prefigured, is the focus of Pickering's book. It shows the two men who were mainly responsible for what amusement was sanctioned at all in children's books—both named John, one a physician-philosopher and the other a small-town printer who married his boss's widow and moved to London.

John Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), as Pickering shows, urged that nothing be overlooked that would form children's minds. Finding little beyond Aesop, primers, and psalters, Locke suggested that pleasant books suited to a child's capacity be made available. Within a generation, Isaac Watts's Divine Songs (1715) became the book of poetry for English children, popular for more than a century. Watts, Pickering explains, followed Locke's denial of innate ideas and consequent fervor for forming the impressionable child, and, although not always heeding Locke's caution against "being unreasonably forward" in religious education, softened somewhat the Puritan compulsion to literally scare the hell out of children.

Forty years after Locke's death, when British parents had long taken in Locke's educational theory, as Pickering shows, John Newbery published his first juvenile, A Little Pretty Pocket-Book. Its preface to parents is an extensive paraphrase from the pediatric sections of Some Thoughts Concerning Education. Here is the kind of book "the great Mr. Locke" would approve, Newbery seems to be saying. And Newbery was, as Locke urged, making sure that children were "cozen'd into a Knowledge of the Letters" by encasing his sixpenny publication with shiny paper covers and by associating task work such as learning the alphabet with children's games like hopscotch.

Pickering plays a bit of literary hopscotch himself in taking the reader from Locke to Watts to Newbery. While Newbery is lauded for using gilt flowery Dutch boards, Thomas Boreman's books—which were sold a few years earlier—were bound, we are told in an appendix, "like Newbery's books." I agree with Pickering that Newbery's books were "shiningly superior" to Boreman's Gigantick Histories, but Newbery capitalized on a feature employed by earlier publishers, a point emphasized by the title of the appendix, "John Newbery's Predecessors." Pickering is on target in labeling the Gigantick Histories pedestrian tour-books, but Boreman did republish a miscellany with Mary Cooper, another Newbery predecessor tucked away in the same appendix. Her preface to A Child's New Play-Thing also leaned heavily on Locke. To be told that Boreman's or Cooper's books resembled the typical Newbery book can confuse. There was no typical Newbery book when Mary Cooper published A Child's New Play-Thing, which was, as Pickering notes, in its second edition in 1743. Admittedly, Pickering is not employing a strict chronology. Yet while it is valid to view Boreman and Cooper over the shoulder of John Newbery, given the fact that literature historians such as Darton did not include Boreman at all, [End...