Number of books known to be published
for children or read by them:
1621 to 1740 – 17 entries
1741 to 1800 – 135 entries
Source: Be Merry and Wise: Origins of Children’s Book Publishing In England, 1650-1850
• Social Developments leading to a‘Market’ for
Children’s books
• Lockean Ideology: John Newbery and His Successors
• The Popular Market: Chapbooks and Forbidden Lore
• The Ideological versus the Popular:
New Tendencies in Children’s Books
Social and economic factors conducive to the rise
of a ‘book market’ for children in mid
18th C England
1. Increase in the child population
2. Rapid growth in educational provisions and hence,
a rise in the literacy levels
3. Commercial prosperity and social mobility following
a larger middle-class social sector, more people could
afford books and education than before
4. Reading developed as a pastime; books were not only
sources of education but were increasingly looked upon
as a way of spending leisure
John Locke and the subject of educating the child
Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)
Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)
I have always had a fancy that learning might be made a play and recreation to children:
and that they might be brought to desire to be taught, if it were proposed to them as a thing
of honour, credit, delight, and recreation, or as a reward for doing something else; and if
they were never chid or corrected for the neglect of it.
Thus children may be cozen’d into a knowledge of the letters; be taught to read, without
perceiving it to be any thing but a sport, and play themselves into that which others are
whipp’d for.
When by these gentle ways he begins to read, some easy pleasant book, suited to his capacity,
should be put into his hands, wherein the entertainment that he finds might draw him on,
and reward his pains in reading…. To this purpose, I think Æsop’s Fables the best, which
being stories apt to delight and entertain a child…. If his Æsop has pictures in it, it will
entertain him much the better, and encourage him to read
Teach him to get a mastery over his inclinations, and submit his appetite to reason.
•disciplining the mind through rational judgement
•distrust of imagination
•instruction through diversion
The History of Little Goody Two-shoes (1765)
Who from a state of rags and care
And having shoes but half a pair
Their fortune and their fame would fix
And gallop in a coach of six
They take all kinds of names and forms: almanacks for
children, newspapers for children, journals for children,
stories for children, comedies for children, dramas for
children, geography for children history for children
physics for children, logic for children, catechisms for
children, travels for children, morals for children,
grammars for children and reading books in all
languages…poetry, sermon, letters, talks for children
and unlimited variation on the same theme, so that the
literary doll-shops are crammed all year round with
them…
(A German Schoolmaster writing in 1787, source –
Muir Percy , English Children’s Books)
Newbery’s advertisement for a new book
Nurse Truelove’s New Year’s Gift or the Book of Books
for Children, adorned with cuts and designed as a Present
for every little Boy who would become a great Man and
ride upon a fine Horse, and to every little Girl who would
become a great Woman and ride in a Lord Mayor’s gilt
Coach. Printed for the Author who has ordered these
books to be given gratis to all little Boys at the Bible and
the Sun in St Paul’s Churchyard, they paying for the
binding which is only Twopence each Book.
At Harris’ St Paul’s Churchyard
Good children meet a sure reward
In coming home the other day
I heard a little master say
For ev’ry threepence there he took
He had received a little book
With covers neat and cuts so pretty
Theres not its like in all the City
And that for threepence he could buy
A story book would make one cry
For a little more a book of riddles
Then let us not buy drums or fiddles
Nor yet be stopt at pastry-cooks
But spend our money all in books
For when we have learnt each book by heart
Mama will treat us with a tart.
Advertisement by John Harris (London) and Joseph Johnson (Philadelphia)
Newbery’s books and those of his successors, were aimed
at the middle class of young citizens, for the ‘young
gentlemen and ladies’
Mary Cooper’s Tommy Thumb’s Song Book for all the
little Masters and Misses: to be sung to them by their
Nurses till they can sing them themselves. By Nurse
Lovechild’ (advertised in London Evening Post, March
1744)
Nurse Truelove’s Christmas Box (1760)
Nurse Truelove’s New Year’s Gift (1760)
Twelfth Day Gift (1767)
Whitsuntide Gift (1767)
Banishment of the ‘faerie realm’
“feigned fables, vain fantasies, wanton stories and
songs of love”
• to the Puritans they were ungodly and untrue,
• to Locke and the Age of Reason they were irrational
and dangerous, (Fairy and fairy-lore, goblins and
spirits with other superstitions Locke regarded as
‘useless trumpery’)
• to Rousseau and the moralists they were utterly useless.
• Chapbooks were inexpensive publications designed for
the poorer literate classes
• Hawked by itinerant pedlars or ‘chapmen’ in remote parts
of the country where there were no bookshops
• the chapbooks had to be brief,
without refinements of book production, roughly printed
on coarsest and cheapest paper, without wrapper or cover
of any sort and an entire book printed on a single sheet,
folded to make eight, sixteen, or twenty-four pages
History of the Seven Champions of Christendom
The Children in the Wood
The Most Excellent and Delightful History
of Guy Earl of Warwick
The Life and Death of Fair Rosamond,
Concubine to King Henry the Second...
The Story of the Cruel Bluebeard and His Many Wives
A True Tale of Robin Hood
The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
Adventures of Captain Gulliver
History of Jack the Giant Killer
James Boswell noted in 1763: ‘Having
when a boy, been much entertained with Jack the Giant-Killer and such little
Store Books, I have always retained a kind affection for them…’
John Clare, born in 1793, describes in his autobiography what such reading
material meant to a child growing up in a poor, rural home, with a barely
literate father who ‘was very fond of superstitious tales that are hawked about
the streets for a penny’…. gleaned from the ‘sixpenny Romances’ like Cinderella,
Little Red Riding Hood or Jack and the
Beanstalk.
Wordsworth, The Prelude(V, 364-9, 1805-6 version)
Oh, give us once again the wishing-cap
Of Fortunatus, and the invisible coat
Of Jack the Giant-killer, Robin Hood,
And Sabra in the forest with St George!
Encompassing witchcraft, superstition, street cries, dragons, ogres, fairies and
every kind of magic shunned by the age of reason, for many generations the
chapbooks gave children a wide range of easily digestible reading matter that
could not be found elsewhere.
The Most Excellent History of Argalus and Parthenia
Simple Simon's Misfortunes : and His Wife,
Margery's Outragious Cruelty
Impact of the ‘respectable’ and the ‘popular’ books giving
rise to new tendencies in the children’s book market
‘Respectable’ Market
• mood grows more lighthearted
• fairy tales are printed officially for children
‘chapbook content’ explored and ‘chapbook format’ imitated by several
respectable publishers (Elizabeth Newbery’s 1800 catalogue contained thirteen
penny and fourteen two penny items, James Lumsden & Son of Glasgow had
at least twenty-seven of these)
Chapbook Market
• chapbooks for children : better quality of print and cuts, contents designed
to suit child readers
• Coloured wappers and volume numbers creating a ‘series’ to be collected like
‘Juvenile Library’ or ‘Juvenile Books’
Whittington and His Cat
Mrs. Lovechild's Golden Present, for all
Good Little Boys and Girls
Secondary Sources
1.Pickering, Samuel F. John Locke and Children’s Books in Eighteenth Century England
2. Townsend, John Rowe. Written for Children
3. Hunt, Peter (ed). Children’s Literature: An Illustrated History
4. Muir, Percy. English Children’s Books
5. Alderson, Brian and Felix De Marez Oyens. Be Merry and Wise:
Origins of Children’s Book Publishing In England, 1650-1850
The Chapbook facsimiles used have been accessed online from
the Edith Nesbit Chapbook Collection at
http://www.library.pitt.edu/libraries/is/enroom/index.html
Thank You