Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-Book: The First Collection of English Nursery Rhymes; A Facsimile Edition with a History and Annotations ed. by Andrea Immel and Brian Alderson (review)

Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-Book is a wonderful example of the power and beauty of archival research. The primary sources used by editors Andrea Immel and Brian Alderson are the scarce, fragile, chapbook-size books printed for children beginning in the 1740s and extending into the second half of the eighteenth century, often surviving in a single copy or, as in the case of one of the primary objects of their analysis, in newspaper advertisements only. Their book comes attractively bound in maroon cloth, encased in an identically clothed box along with three jewel-like facsimiles of eighteenth-century books under discussion: Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-Book, volume 2 (Sold by M. Cooper); Tommy Thumb’s Song Book (Worcester, Mass.: Isaiah Thomas, 1788); and The Pretty-Book (George Bickham).

The main premise of their argument is that rather than celebrating John Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocket-book as the putative origin point for children’s literature, history ought to commend Mary Cooper’s Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-Book, volume 2, an earlier, and in their words, thoroughly “revolutionary venture” (3). Their consideration of contemporary publishing in support of their argument is detailed and highly interesting, containing discussions of Perrault’s Contes, Janeway’s Token, Croxall’s Aesop, and other literary precursors and contemporaries. Although the editors aim to demonstrate the significance of the Pretty Song-Book, they are also sensitive to the utility of viewing children’s literature of this time as a kind of wave phenomenon whose character reveals itself through the collective efforts of many mutually enlightened individuals acting within a matrix of historical and cultural forces. However, the genius of their book lies in its clarity of focus on the physical makeup of the Pretty Song-Book and on the efforts of Cooper and her collaborators, George Bickham and Charles Corbett (along with the pseudonymous Nurse Lovechild), to bring the book into being within the print culture of its time. Toward this end, they write with great liveliness and force about the nature of bookselling and illustration in this period.

Children’s literature scholars may find Immel and Alderson’s deprioritization of Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocket-Book provocative, although I would be surprised if many still regard Newbery’s status as the “Father” of children’s literature as anything more than a heuristic fiction or etymological myth. While Newbery the bookseller remains a complicated figure (it is hard for the editors not to admire his craftiness, even as they carry his throne into the street), Newbery the Father is more or less the equivalent of Abner Doubleday. One can correct history, one can disprove facts and rearrange inferences, but it is altogether trickier to dispel a myth. For that matter, the editors are not claiming that Cooper deserves to be put on the pedestal occupied now by Newbery, but merely that publishing nursery rhymes for children became popular in the 1740s, and that Corbett, Bickham, and Cooper were probably the first to publish them. In their careful descriptions of contemporary texts that the editors claim were influenced by Pretty Song-Book and their detailed argument that the volume “precipitated” the “burst of publishing activity” of the period (29), they are persuasive.

Immel and Alderson are thorough in their inclusion of contemporary texts, reprinting illustrations in larger sizes when possible, and giving readers peeks into scarce volumes. They also are good at situating children’s books of the 1740s within their wider contexts, both in publishing history and in popular culture. Their allusions to Swift and other writers who combined oral lore into “unusual literary works” (55) are edifying and largely entertaining. I found myself laughing aloud several times: for example, while reading the aristocratic condemnations of David Dalrymple, Lord Hailes, who...