Chapbooks, Children, and Children's Literature

Tt is generally held to be the case that chapbooks pre-dated what we would recognise as children's literature. It is also frequently assumed that, before a literature of their own became available, children often read these chapbooks — indeed, that they formed an important part of the market for this product. These are conjectures that this essay will explore. A more controversial supposition is that what we understand as children's literature somehow grew out of the chapbook tradition, perhaps developing in deliberate opposition to it. Clearly this is an absolutely vital question for any understanding of the genesis of modern children's literature. These are also important points to decide if we are to arrive at a full sense of how its consumers understood the chapbook. What follows, then, is organized around two lines of enquiry: did children routinely use chapbooks, and what was the relationship between the chapbook tradition and literature definitely intended for children? As is always the case when examining interconnected and overlapping varieties of popular literature, it will be necessary to begin with some attempts at working definitions.

Children's literature is not a straightforward category. It can mean any text that children read, or only those designed especially for them. It can cover texts designed for three-year-olds or eighteen-year-olds. It can mean textbooks used unwillingly at school or jest books subversively enjoyed at home. It might be argued that children's literature came into existence only when texts began to portray realistic child characters or show the child's point of view. Or its origins might lie not in the texts at all, but in its secure establishment as a separate division of the literary marketplace, when it was separately marketed, advertised, and reviewed, or when authors and publishers could make a career out of producing only children's books. It is regrettably reductive, but in this essay the term will be used loosely, referring generally to books that were not exclusively didactic or religious and that were designed especially for girls and boys, rather than young adults. Such books began to be produced in noticeable numbers in Britain from the mid-eighteenth century. By the end of the century children's literature had become established as a flourishing branch of print culture. Writing in 1790, Catherine Macaulay could observe, caustically, that 'as every kind of trash calculated for the circle of a nursery, was a saleable commodity, authors without number enlisted in the service'.¹

Just as problematic is the word 'chapbook'. It was long thought that the term was used only retrospectively, from the nineteenth century on, to describe a form of literature that had by then vanished. Recent research by Barry McKay and Jan Fergus has found much earlier uses: in 1774 and 1747 respectively.² Regardless of its origins, scholars now use the term to describe such a diverse range of texts that it has almost become more of a hindrance than a help. The designation 'chapbook' blurs boundaries between many different kinds of texts, covering volumes produced over a period of three or four centuries, amalgamating titles designed for totally different readerships and which included a wide range of material. The concept, and the actual usage, of the chapbook was also radically different in different parts of the country, Scotland notably developing its own tradition. The term is, as McKay has recently written, little more than 'a bibliographic conceit'.³

There are, I propose, four key strands to the definition of the chapbook. The first is its physical form: small in size, short in length, usually made from a single sheet of paper folded into twelve or twenty-four pages, and frequently including crude illustrations alongside the letterpress. The second is that it was cheap, often a penny or even less, and very seldom more than sixpence. The third strand is its distribution, characteristically by itinerant peddlers, or 'chapmen'. Last, and most problematically, the contents are important: chapbooks were often abridged from longer works and their texts usually carried plebeian associations. These are the various components which, interwoven, will be used...