For Betty and the Little Female Academy: A Book of Their Own

Readers of Steele's Tatler recall with fondness Mr. Bickerstaffe's report of his godson's reading matter. The boy's delight with Guy of Warwick, Bevis of Southampton, and St. George of England, and his sister Betty's preference for fairy tales, together indicate what "children's" literature was at the beginning of the eighteenth century. What is most obvious about this literature is that most of it was not intended for children. Those enterprising youngsters appropriated romances and fairy tales, adding them to Aesop's Fables and other moral tales which John Locke had recommended in 1690 as first books for children.

As Percy Muir reports, a beautiful collection of fables had been printed in 1692 by Roger L'Estrange, containing Aesop, La Fontaine, and other fables (p. 24). Many of the fairy tales which eventually made their way to England had been printed in French chapbooks, but it was not until the English translation of Perrault's collection of fairy tales, the date of which remains controversial, that Betty could have read tales like "Cinderella"—unless she was reading them in French, which is not implausible. Perrault's collection first appeared in French in 1696. Because it is not clear when the first English translation was available, we may speculate that Betty's fairy tales might also have included those native British ones that Meig reports to have been printed in chapbooks and embedded in the historical romances (p. 3-35).

According to many histories of children's literature, John Newbery single-handedly rescued children from adult works, sometime in the middle of the eighteenth century, by providing them with a literature of their own. The example most frequently cited is Goody Two-Shoes, which was published in 1766. I recall the genteel celebration which marked the acquisition of an edition of Goody Two-Shoes by a Texas university library in the late nineteen-sixties. Enchanted by the publicity surrounding this "first novel for children," I spent some time with that text. It certainly would have appealed to children, I thought, being very tiny, beautifully bound with the Dutch boards that are a Newbery hallmark. I opened the book and began to read. In his discussion of Newbery's books, Percy Muir expresses my response more diplomatically than I did: "What of the stories? They were of a rather inferior order, not very well constructed, and heavily overlaid with moral lessons. An excellent example is afforded by the most successful of them all—Goody Two-Shoes" (p. 68).

We now know that there had been published in England, probably as early as the late seventeenth century, books expressly for children. While the intent of these texts was clearly to instruct, they approached that intent from the point of view of children, rather than being slight revisions of adult texts. Throughout the eighteenth century, these instructional books became increasingly recreational, and sometimes even whimsical. In 1736 Thomas Boreman published A Description of a Great Variety of Animals and Vegetables, especially for the Entertainment of Youth. Newbery followed in 1744 with the Little Pretty Pocket Book, and continued to produce texts of this type until his death in 1767. Some of his other titles are: the Liliputian Magazine, 1753; Food for the Mind: A New Riddle Book, 1758; and Nurse Truelove's Christmas Box, 1760 (Muir, p. 58-76). It is consoling to learn that literature intended specifically for children finally blossomed in the same century which saw the great flowering of the English novel.

But here we may say with Alice, "Curiouser and curiouser." For we must notice, with some puzzlement, that the only accurate label for reading matter intended for children is "children's literature," a most general phrase. Where, we wonder, in this great age of fiction, is the children's novel? We may receive a quick reply: Goody Two-Shoes and its many imitations, the adapted fairy tales, historical romances, fables and moral tales, and the abridged pocket volumes of Richardson's novels. But the pocket abridgements of Richardson, published by Baldwin in 1756 under the...