The Coach and Six: Chapbook Residue in Late Eighteenth-Century Children's Literature

The predominantly didactic form of the children's book characteristic of the rational and evangelical writing movements of the late eighteenth century did not, of course, appear on the market fully formed. Predating, and, indeed, eventually coexisting with, the rational diversions and evangelical children's books by such authors as Maria Edgeworth, Thomas Day, Sarah Trimmer, and Dorothy Kilner that flooded the English market in the last two decades of the eighteenth century were scores of what I have dubbed "transitional" or "hybrid" books. These books, while acknowledging the trend toward inculcating middle-class values and ideology in young readers, still clung to earlier chapbook forms and themes. The survival of such chapbook elements in a middle-class pedagogical environment that was growing increasingly hostile to plebeian influences raises issues of class relations and the cultural production of class. To demonstrate the ubiquity of these transitional books in the late eighteenth century, this article will survey not only such well-known early children's books as A Little Pretty Pocket Book (1744), and The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes (1766), but also such works as The Friends; or the History of Billy Freeman and Tommy Truelove (c. 1787), and Nurse Dandlem's Little Repository of Great Instruction (c. 1784), which have received little or no critical attention. ¹

From 1801 to 1805, Sarah Trimmer published The Guardian of Education, a compendium of her views on education, anti-Jacobinical essays, and reviews of contemporary pedagogical theories and children's books. Her reviews, especially, provide an index of the changing attitudes toward what constituted acceptable children's reading in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While her evangelical agenda in reforming children's literature led her to dismiss such enormously influential works as Rousseau's Émile as irreligious, she still found much to praise in the Rousseau-inspired rational diversions for children of such writers as Maria Edgeworth and Thomas Day. The middle-class values of utility, industry, and book-learning were becoming increasingly prevalent in children's books, and while Trimmer insisted that these be tempered with an education in the Scriptures, she welcomed the change. One of the main points on which she and the rationalist children's writers fully concurred was the need to rid the nursery of the vicious and potentially subversive influences of the chapbooks and fairy tales, which had perennially stocked its shelves. The fairy tales "which were in circulation when those who are now grandmothers, were themselves children," such as "Cinderella," "Blue Beard," and "Little Red Riding Hood," had by now become the potential sites of "danger" and "impropriety" (4.74-75). ²

Victor Neuburg's and Harry B. Weiss's histories of English chapbooks provide some useful insights into this once ubiquitous form of literature. Neuburg defines chapbooks loosely as cheap, "paper-covered books offered for sale by pedlars, hawkers and other itinerant merchants who were generally known as chapmen" (3). Chapbooks, Neuburg says, consisted primarily of tales of romance and chivalry, fantastic voyages and supernatural creatures, which, although certainly not an exhaustive list of chapbook literary themes, accounts for the most popular and widely circulating varieties of the form. It should be noted that Neuburg focuses on fantasy-oriented chapbooks, as opposed to, for example, such popular chapbook narratives as accounts of famous criminal trials, because he is analyzing these texts principally as works of children's literature. His goal is to call attention to a previously overlooked form of children's reading, and his study takes the form of a nostalgic appreciation of forgotten classics. Although he does acknowledge that chapbooks were "[i]ntended in the first instance for adults" (mostly of the "poorer classes"), his main concern is with children's consumption of these texts: "the content and convenient size of these books had made an immediate appeal to young readers" (75...