The Dartons: Publishers of Educational Aids Pastimes & Juvenile Ephemera 1787-1876. A Bibliographic Checklist (review)

In 2004 the late Lawrence Darton published his monumental, and modestly-labelled, 'check-list' of children's books issued by his publishing forbears — The Dartons. Conceived almost sixty years before that event, the book was planned to cover not just codices but also the companies' considerable output of prints and such like, which often shared the aims of their educational and recreational publishing. Such a conjunction may have seemed a good idea in 1946, but as the garnering of materials proceeded it eventually became apparent first that the quantity of entries for books would shoulder other matters out of any manageable volume (they finally amounted to 2,701 main entries), and second that no satisfactory models existed for describing the multiplicity of 'educational aids' that were the fruits of almost a hundred years of the companies' prolific and often inventive production.

The community of historians of English children's books is not a large one and towards the end of his life Darton came to know and respect the work of Jill Shefrin, a Canadian scholar who had undertaken research on matters associated with 'the Darton period' in both the Osborne Collection at Toronto and the Cotsen Children's Library at Princeton. He suggested a collaborative venture in which she would take over his research records and, with his advice, commence an assault on what has turned out to be a rather large assortment of more or less 'unknown unknowns'. The project aimed to produce a volume that (as its present title indicates) was closely related to Darton's own check-list (there's a difference over hyphens here) and almost from its inception it received the overwhelmingly generous support of the Cotsen Family Foundation in Los Angeles, who funded the whole of Shefrin's six-year stint chasing after records that, by their very nature, subsisted in places well outside the predictable bibliographic circuit.

For their liberal disbursement, the Cotsen Foundation have been most richly rewarded, although it is sad to report that Lawrence Darton lived only to see Shefrin's manuscript and not its final spectacular manifestation. Free to investigate all sources that might yield results, Shefrin has assembled the details of a corpus of print-based materials whose presence should bring a fresh understanding alike to historians of nineteenth century education and the book trade. The three or four hundred items that she and Darton expected to encounter has expanded to some 1246 main entries, many of which are themselves subdivided into distinct categories. Thus, Ann Taylor's famous poem My Mother appears four times under the number H2000, twice as a hand-coloured sheet and twice as a dissected puzzle.

This vast miscellany of goods manufactured by or for the Darton firms, and some times invented by them, confirms Darton's judgement that new descriptive techniques were required for their listing and Shefrin's confrontation with the problem is perhaps the most valuable of her contributions in this massive book. She sets the scene with 'A Brief History of Printed Teaching Aids' whose brevity may be more than the unversed reader bargained for and less than the professional would like to have seen (it is hard to encompass a hundred years-worth of educational and publishing developments in so short a compass) but this section then gives way to the book's fulcrum, the all-important 'Vade Mecum'. At its simplest this lengthy section gives glosses on terms employed in the checklist such as 'Monitorial Schools' or 'Not Located', but at its most illuminating it provides a taxonomy of different educational and commercial endeavours which, so far as I know, has never been attempted or carried out with such close attention to the variegated evidence.

In the fourteen categories of materials that Shefrin singles out for special consideration nothing is as straightforward as it seems. Thus, Battledores...