JOHN AMOS COMENIUS · JAMES JANEWAY · JOHN BUNYAN · ISAAC WATTS · JOHN NEWBERY
Orbis Sensualium Pictus; A Token for
Children; The Pilgrim’s Progress; A Book for
Boys and Girls; Divine Songs; A Little Pretty
Pocket-Book; The Lilliputian Magazine;
The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes
THE TUG-OF-WAR BETWEEN INSTRUCTION AND DELIGHT in children’s literature goes right back to the very beginning. The dawning of the so-called Golden Age, smackbang in the middle of the nineteenth century, with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Tom Brown’s School Days, and The Water-Babies, set children’s writing on a path to modernity. But it didn’t come from nowhere, and it was preceded by two distinct traditions that, in varying ways, it responded to or assimilated. The first of these traditions was instructive; the second narrative. And it’s to the first that what’s generally described as the world’s first children’s book belongs.
Orbis Sensualium Pictus (1658) is a bit like an illustrated encyclopedia. The Enlightenment was just getting under way, Knowing Things was in fashion, and its author, a Moravian educationalist called John Amos Comenius (1592–1670), saw no reason children shouldn’t be part of it. Originally published in German and Latin, it became popular throughout Europe and was in English* within a year of its original German publication: “It is a little book, as you see, and no great bulk, yet a brief of the whole World, and a whole language: full of Pictures, Nomenclatures, and Descriptions of things.”
Comenius was not kidding about the whole world: Orbis Pictus is a wildly ambitious omnium-gatherum, which can still be read with pleasure and curiosity, covering everything from animal noises (we learn that “the Lamb blaiteth,” “the Goose gagleth,” “the Duck quaketh,” “the Bear grumbleth,” “the Chicken peepeth,” and, mindful perhaps of all this good eating nearby, “the Dog grinneth”) to comparative religion.
Here, in true Enlightenment style, is an attempt to gather information about the world about us and organize it into categories (“Flying vermin” are differentiated from “Crawling vermin,” for instance, and freshwater from marine fish). The reader learns about animals, vegetables, minerals, and natural processes, and then about Man – inside and out. There’s even an agreeable chapter on “Deformed and Monstrous People,” illustrated by pictures of a giant, a dwarf, “One with two Bodies,” and “One with two Heads” – the last two categories, possibly for reasons of space, being combined into one very amusing illustration). Our students are invited to consider the “jolt-headed,” the “goggle-eyed,” the “blubber-lipped,” and the “wry-necked” among us with the dispassionate eye of the scientist.†
In due course Comenius turns to Man’s social organization and effect on his environment, from gardening and agriculture to fishing and hunting to butchery and brewing. Different shops, domestic spaces and professions are quite charmingly described in simple language. In a reflexive twist, it even offers introductions to the history of the written word (“The Ancients writ in Tables done over with wax, with a brazen Poitrel, with the sharp end, whereof Letters were engraved, and rubbed out again with the broad end”), paper-making, printing, and bookselling. It all reminds me, just a little, of the educational excursions “through the Round Window” in the Play School of my own childhood.
Like that Play School slot, its educative project is advanced by the appeal to pleasure and curiosity. Its preface argues that the key to getting knowledge of the world into children’s heads is to make it concretely available to their senses – “not obscure, or confused, but apparent, distinct, and articulate, as the Fingers on the Hands. The ground of this business is that sensual objects be rightly presented to the senses. I say, and say it again loud, that this last is the foundation of all the rest.”
Eye-catching pictures are accompanied by parallel descriptions in Latin and the reader’s own vernacular, in order to associate these images and words firmly together: not “torment to be in the School, but dainty-fare.” Its “Symbolical Alphabet” – associating letter-shapes and letter-sounds with images – will help children learn to read without “troublesome torture of wits.” There are the stirrings, here, of a sort of intuitive cognitive science.
But Orbis Pictus also, in form and content, evinces a sense of the structures and hierarchy into which the child is expected to fit. It is bookended by images of a master and his pupil standing in the countryside outside a city. The opening image is headed “The Invitation,” and the text begins with the master’s words: “Come, boy, learn to be wise.” The envoi is marked “The Close”: the same child stands in the countryside outside a city. His teacher is gesticulating with one hand. It looks now as if he might not be beginning a lecture so much as offering one last word of advice to his charge before the boy sets off on a journey. Comenius intends to send a child on the journey from childhood to adulthood, and from foolishness to wisdom.
The closing words of the book are addressed to the child reader:
Thus thou hast seen in short, all things that can be shewed, and hast learned the chief words of the English and Latin Tongue.
Go on now and read other good Books diligently, and thou shalt become learned, wise, and godly.
Remember these things; fear God, and call upon him, that he may bestow upon thee the Spirit of Wisdom.
Farewell.
There’s a touching tenderness to the image Comenius presents of a child’s proper place and road to adulthood, but the watchwords are conventional: piety, labor, chastisement, reverence and service; all under the aegis of duty to parents and, above them, duty to God and gratitude for His grace. Where Comenius is forward-looking is in tipping his floppy seventeenth-century hat to the pleasure principle. Not all who followed, particularly not the English writers in the century or two after, did. In the unimprovable formula of another critic, children’s literature through most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was dominated by “Calvinists of unrelenting severity.”*
Severest of the lot was the Puritan hellfire preacher James Janeway (1636–1674) – now forgotten by all but scholars of this sort of thing, but rivaled only by Bunyan and the Bible for popularity in his own era. His best-known work, A Token for Children: Being an exact account of the conversion, holy and exemplary lives, and joyful deaths of several young children. In two parts (1671) was going into edition after edition hundreds of years after his death. John Wesley published an edited and updated version of it in the following century, and, in the US, that notorious fun-sponge Cotton Mather produced a home-grown knock-off called A Token for the Children of New England.
Janeway’s A Token is your basic snuff-fiction anthology: thirteen supposedly true stories of piteous infants rolling a seven and going gladly, but painfully, to their Maker. Its purpose was not to entertain so much as to scare the willies out of its young audience, taking a shock-and-awe approach to the business of converting them to Janeway’s austere Puritan creed. “Sarah Howley” dies before she turns ten, but finds time to warn her schoolmates: “O make use of time to get Christ for your souls; spend no time in running up and down in playing.”
The stories all follow a similar pattern: conversion, astounding protestations of faith, copious tears and self-reproach, and a peaceful death. Janeway lends them authenticity by including dates, names and details of their parents’ employment or circumstances, and often descriptions of how the stories came to him. He boasts in his first preface that “several passages are taken verbatim in writing from their dying lips.” But what’s absent, however they are differentiated in their labeling, is any real novelistic detail that makes the children sound or seem like human children: they are paragons, exemplars, mashups of Bible verses, and pious sayings. Writing for children, in this account of it, is designed to affect rather than to reflect its audience.
Janeway prefaced it with a note “To Parents, School Masters & School Mistresses, or Any concerned with the Education of Children” (as with Comenius, whose book comes with a preface addressed to adults, children were the secondary addressees) making clear what was at stake:
Remember, the devil is at work hard, wicked ones are industrious; and corrupt nature is a rugged, knotty piece to hew […] Is not the duty clear? And dare you neglect so direct a command? Are the souls of your children of no value? Are you willing that they should, be brands of Hell?
He moves on to address his child readers – “my dear lambs” –in a second preface:
How art thou affected, poor Child, in the Reading of this Book? Have you shed ever a tear since you begun reading? Have you been by your self upon you knees; and begging that God would make you like these blessed Children? or are you as you use to be, as careless & foolish and disobedient and wicked as ever?
If this sounds hair-raising, it was. But if, as Janeway undoubtedly did, you believe children are born in sin and will burn in hell if they die without the mercy of their redeemer, you can be expected to set about the matter with some urgency. As he tells his young readers, “I fain would do what I can possibly to keep thee from falling into everlasting fire.”
Janeway connects, as a long line of successors were to do, the hierarchy of the family with heaven’s authority. The devil, he says, is “father” to naughty children, and he warns his readers that “O! Hell is a terrible place; that is worse a thousand times than whipping. God’s anger is worse than your father’s anger.” Naughtiness, in Janeway’s account, consists of most of the things that we would now think of as natural and enjoyable childhood activities (“play”; “idleness”; “to run up and down upon the Lord’s Day”) and many things (fibbing, bad language and truancy) that in later children’s writing came to be winked at as minor sins or positively celebrated.
Janeway himself lived fast and died young. When the government tried to get England’s post-Reformation religious turbulence under control with the 1662 Act of Uniformity – imposing the new Book of Common Prayer on the church – Janeway was one of the refuseniks, kicked out in the so-called “Great Ejection.” He set up shop as a nonconformist preacher in east London, attracting so huge a congregation that it has been claimed the Church, un-Christianly, put out a hit on him. (I can’t find a reliable source for the claim that in one of two attempts on his life he was shot through the hat, but I pass it on because the image is too good to waste.) Certainly, it’s a matter of record that his meeting house in Rotherhithe was burned to the ground. He died of tuberculosis in 1674.
His contemporary John Bunyan (1628–1688) was a more attractive figure. His The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) was to become another constant in early modern children’s reading, and that it has survived longer in the canon than Janeway speaks to its narrative satisfactions. Bunyan’s introduction to the first edition says he produced the work “mine own self to gratify” and “to divert myself”: having fun was a feature of its make-up.
It’s a good story, following its protagonist Christian’s journey from his unfortunately named hometown “The City of Destruction” to the “Celestial City” via all sorts of strange and wonderful encounters. Its curious and rather enchanting quest narrative dramatizes the theological message. Where Janeway offered something purporting to be reportage, Bunyan was writing a medieval-style allegory in dream-vision form, whose “dark and cloudy words […] do but hold / The truth, as cabinets enclose the gold.” He knows that stories are more memorable when filled with “what doth our imaginations please,” and in his defense of its approach he points out that fowlers, in order to catch birds, will “pipe and whistle,” and that some fish need to be tickled to be caught.
Even if it was to become a staple of nursery bookshelves, though, Bunyan didn’t write The Pilgrim’s Progress as a children’s book. He made a direct contribution to children’s literature in 1686, however, in the form of A Book for Boys and Girls, or, Country-rhimes for children. The verse introduction gives you a sense not only of his didactic project but of his method – and how the now-clichéd tagline “for children of all ages” really did indicate how blurry the distinction between childhood and adulthood was.
He announces that the book’s “proper Subject” is “Boys and Girls of all Sorts and Degrees / From those of age to Children on the Knees,” before conceding that “we now have Boys with Beards, and Girls that be / Big as old Women, wanting Gravity.” That is to say: childhood is a state of mind, and the untrained or childish soul can be found in a fully grown (and, perhaps, uneducated or un-evangelized) body.
After an instructional section on spelling and grammar, the book consists of a series of allegorically minded rhymed verses on a range of subjects, beginning with the Ten Commandments in heroic couplets (“From Fornication keep thy body clean / Thou shalt not steal, though thou be very mean.”) and moving on through such curios as “Meditations Upon An Egg,” “Of the Boy and Butter Fly,” “Upon the Sight of a Pound of Candles falling to the Ground,” “Upon the Kackling of a Hen,” and “Upon a stinking Breath.”
Even as Bunyan allegorizes, though, there are glimmerings of actuality; glimpses of what childhood was in the real world. That boy chasing a butterfly, for all that he stands as a symbol of the foolish love for worldly fripperies, is instinct with human detail: “He hollo’s, runs, and cries out here Boys, here, / Nor doth he Brambles or the Nettles fear: / He stumbles at the Mole-Hills, up he gets, / And runs again.” A boy with “a Paper full” of plums is seen pulling them out of their wrapping “with joy.” Bunyan’s allegorical imagination lights on ordinary objects, the furniture of his world – a whipping-top, a penny loaf, the unwound watch that a boy has inherited from his father. The poem on a swallow opens: “This pretty bird, oh! How he flies and sings!” Even when pleasure and irresponsibility in childhood is described to serve a didactic purpose, the life of it peeps through.
Writing in the same evangelical vein was Isaac Watts (1674– 1748), whose Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children (1715) was a collection of pious poems seeking to bridge the gap between the jangle of the nursery rhyme and the sonorities of the hymnal. It hoped to “furnish [children’s] memories and beautify their Souls.” It’s these days best known for being spoofed by Lewis Carroll in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
That Watts was so obvious a target for mockery in the middle of the nineteenth century was a compliment of sorts: indicative of how universal these poems still were in the victorian nursery and schoolroom, at the same time as hinting that, by then, readers might be open to giggling at their fustiness. Carroll wasn’t the only one to do so. Dickens has a schoolmaster quote Watts sententiously in David Copperfield (1850), and in Moby-Dick (1851) a pious little old lady goes round the Pequod before it sails leaving copies of Watts on the sailors’ bunks in the hopes of weaning them off vulgar sea-shanties.
It was toward the middle of the eighteenth century that the idea children should enjoy what they read rather than being corrected by it was gaining a real foothold. John Newbery (1713–1767) is sometimes called “The Father of Children’s Literature.” He was an entrepreneurial publisher who spotted a gap in the market and piled in to exploit it. Over the course of a nearly thirty-year career he produced more than a hundred children’s books in all sorts of genres, starting to shape the very idea of children’s writing as a separate domain; and he launched, in The Lilliputian Magazine (first published 1751), the first children’s periodical. When the world’s first prize for children’s literature was established in 1922, it was named for him. The Newbery Medal continues to be awarded to this day.
His career in children’s publishing started with 1744’s A Little Pretty Pocket-Book. It came with quite the subtitle: “Intended for the Instruction and Amusement of Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly: With Two Letters from Jack the Giant-Killer; as also A Ball and Pincushion; the Use of which will infallibly make Tommy a good Boy and Polly a good Girl. To which is added, A Little Song-Book, being a new Attempt to teach children the Use of the English Alphabet, by way of Diversion.”
Facing the title page is an engraved frontispiece showing a wellto-do woman sitting in in a comfortable room with a fireplace. Standing in front of her chair are two children, a periwigged boy in a smart little suit and a slightly older girl in a bell-like dress, both apparently attending to her with animated interest. The lady’s right hand rests on an open book on her lap; her left is raised in gesticulation. The motto below reads: “Delectando Monemus,” which is glossed: “Instruction With Delight.”
It really is a pocket-book. It sits very comfortably in the palm of your hand, not much bigger than two or three inches by four, and it’s a properly loveable object. It had, in its original edition, a brightly colored cover, and almost every page is livened by attractive simple woodcut pictures. This very Lockean principle, that instruction and delight, or teaching and “diversion,” go together, runs through the production. There’s even a pointed shout-out to “the great Mr Locke,” from whom these precepts are lifted.
Only once several pages have been spent on setting out the program for the benefits of the parents, though, does the book turn to address its primary audience. There follow two letters (all but identical in wording; the first to Tommy, the second to Polly) from Jack the Giant-Killer, in which the noted mythological mass-murderer addresses little Tommy and little Polly with warm affection. Those gimmicky free gifts of the ball and the pincushion – which, perhaps, we could see as ancestors of the cover-mounted toys on children’s magazines – are not just for play, either.
As the letter from Jack tells the children, these balls and pincushions are for keeping score: “I have […] sent you a Ball; the one Side of which is Red, the other Black, and with it ten Pins; and I must insist upon making this Bargain, that your Nurse may hang up the Ball by the String to it, and for every good Action you do, a Pin shall be stuck on the Red Side, and for every bad Action a Pin shall be stuck on the Black Side. And when by doing good and pretty Things you have got all the ten Pins on the Red Side, then I will send you a Penny […] But if ever the Pins be all found on the Black Side of the Ball, then I will send a Rod, and you shall be whipt.” He signs off; “Your Friend, JACK the GIANT-KILLER.”
Carrot and stick, then. Prefaces all dispensed with, we’re into the fun stuff. First there’s a great catalog of children’s games and pastimes, starting with “Chuck-Farthing” and moving on through kite-flying, dancing round the maypole, shuttlecock, thread-theneedle, leapfrog, tip-cat, birds-nesting, blind-man’s buff, pegfarthing, hop-step-and-jump, marbles, cricket, fishing, and any number of others, many of them still recognizable today. Among its many distinctions, the Little Pretty Pocket-Book contains the first mention of “Base-ball” in the English language.
The allegorical habit is still strong: each game is illustrated with a woodcut and a rhyming quatrain pointing up the “moral” or “rule of life” it illustrates. There’s a learn-the-alphabet section (“Great A, B and C, / And tumble-down D, / The cat’s a blind buff, / and she cannot see”), a sequence of fables (one, slightly alarmingly, has a stork getting “trepann’d by a crane” after being foolish enough to try to make friends with it), pretty pictures of children doing virtuous things, a list of proverbs and a weirdly exact “One Hundred and Sixty three Rules for the Behaviour of Children.” “Smell not of thy Meat, nor put it to thy Nose,” it advises its young audience. “Throw not any Thing under the Table.” (I wish my own youngest child would take such advice.) It also states a principle that was to have a long afterlife: “Among Superiours speak not until thou art spoken to, and bidden to speak.”
Generically speaking, then, A Little Pretty Pocket-Book is a wonderful mess: part etiquette manual, part light verse anthology, part songbook, part picture book, part commonplace book – a ragbag such as you might find in a children’s comic annual in the present day, and a document that abundantly follows its stated intention to educate through play. More than that, there’s a sense in its tone of address of how intimate and affectionate parents could be with their children. Is the lady in the frontispiece Nurse, or Mother? The preface suggests it could be either. The teasing addresses from Jack the Giant-Killer have a playful quality, and it affirms that good behavior will be rewarded not just in heaven but in this world – “This Character, my Dear, has made every Body Love you.” Home-fires, not the fires of hell.
It was a roaring success – not only or even especially, as far as we know, with the children who were encouraged to read it, but with the adults who were buying it. Newbery published more and more into the market, and he made the books attractive: “Neatly Bound, Gilt and Glaz’d.” By the 1760 tenth edition (the earliest that survives, according to the British Library) it was a thriving retail space. The closing endpapers of the book contain advertisements for further reading, as “printed for and sold by John Newbery, at the Bible and Sun in St. Paul’s Church-Yard.”
They included The Royal Battledore; or, First Book for Children – an ABC “laid down in a plain, easy and entertaining manner, in order to Induce Children to learn their Letters”; The Royal Primer (“an Easy and pleasant guide to the Art of Reading”); an educational game-set – “A Set of Fifty-Six Squares”; spelling books; picture books of beasts and birds (“To which is added, the History of little Tom Trip himself, of his Dog Jouler, and of Woglog, the Giant”); Food for the Mind; or, a new Riddle Book; two different poetry volumes – A Collection of Pretty Poems, for the Amusement of Children Three Foot high, and the indispensable sequel A Collection of Pretty Poems, for the Amusement of Children Six Foot high; a volume containing “fables in verse” by one Abraham Aesop Esq, with additional fables in verse and prose apparently contributed by the aforementioned Woglog the Great Giant; books of improving maxims; a collection of “Letters on the most common, as well as important Occasions in Life” (anthologizing everyone from Cicero to Dryden); not to mention an illustrated and annotated abridgment of the Bible “illustrated with notes and adorned with Cuts, for the Use of Children.”
That lively salmagundi of material is full of whimsical characters, and emphasizes illustrations, pretty bindings and “amusement”; yet at the same time it promises homiletics, education in letters and morals. That gives you a sense of how children’s books were conceived; depending on how you looked at them, they were learning under the cover of play or they were play under the cover of learning. A spoonful of sugar helped the medicine go down. Newbery knew all about that too: he combined his publishing business with a sidehustle selling patent medicines, and he was not shy about exploiting potential synergies by advertising them in the backs of his books.
The endpapers of The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes (1765), a sentimental fable of the progress of its orphan heroine Margery Meanwell, listed no fewer than ten pills and potions, and there were even product placements in the text. Its tragic story is kicked off by the non-availability of one of the medicines advertised in the back. “Care and Discontent shortened the Days of Little Margery’s Father,” opens the first chapter. “He was forced from his Family, and seized with a violent Fever in a Place where Dr. James’s Powder was not to be had, and where he died miserably.” Fortunately, Little Goody Two-Shoes makes out all right without the help of Dr James’s powder. She goes from childhood destitution to adult eminence and pious death, accruing along the way a long roll of good works done and homilies pronounced (the death of a dormouse is the occasion to deliver “a Lecture on the Uncertainty of Life, and the Necessity of always being prepared for Death”). She plants free potatoes for all who want them, gives poor parishioners the price of a loaf for coming to church, and offers financial incentives to promote the honorable state of matrimony. She’s a one-woman National Conservative nudge unit. After her death a stone in the local churchyard is, we’re told, “ever bathed in tears” because of the incessant weeping of the poor when they pass by it.
She gets her nickname (“Goody” is short for “goodwife” – an old-fashioned form of address, something like “Missy”), by the way, when a kindly benefactor buys her a pair of shoes. After her father goes to the grave and her mother dies of a broken heart, Margery and her brother are destitute and own only three shoes between them: “Tommy had two Shoes, but Margery had but one.” That nickname survives in playground taunts long after the book that popularized it has fallen into obscurity.
* Translated by Charles Hoole as Visible World, or a Picture and Nomenclature of all the chief Things that are in the world, and of Men’s Employments therein.
† You could see this material as presaging the weird and wonderful gallimaufry of human extremity to be found in the annual Guinness World Records books, still a perennial Christmas bestseller.
* Percy Muir, English Children’s Books 1600–1900 (Batsford, 1985), [p].