Although these Chap-books are very curious, and on many accounts interesting, no attempt has yet been made to place them before the public in a collected form, accompanied by the characteristic engravings, without which they would lose much of their value. They are the relics of a happily past age, one which can never return, and we, in this our day of cheap, plentiful, and good literature, can hardly conceive a time when in the major part of this country, and to the larger portion of its population, these little Chap-books were nearly the only mental pabulum offered. Away from the towns, newspapers were rare indeed, and not worth much when obtainable—poor little flimsy sheets such as nowadays we should not dream of either reading or publishing, with very little news in them, and that consisting principally of war items, and foreign news, whilst these latter books were carried in the packs of the pedlars, or Chapmen, to every village, and to every home.

Previous to the eighteenth century, these men generally carried ballads, as is so well exemplified in the "Winter's Tale," in Shakespeare's inimitable conception, Autolycus. The servant (Act iv. sc. 3) well describes his stock: "He hath songs, for man, or woman, of all sizes; no milliner can so fit his customers with gloves. He has the prettiest love songs for maids; so without bawdry, which is strange; with such delicate burdens of 'dildos' and 'fadings:' 'jump her' and 'thump her;' and where some stretch-mouthed rascal would, as it were, mean mischief, and break a foul gap into the matter, he makes the maid to answer, 'Whoop, do me no harm, good man;' puts him off, slights him, with 'Whoop, do me no harm, good man.'" And Autolycus, himself, hardly exaggerates the style of his wares, judging by those which have come down to us, when he praises the ballads: "How a usurer's wife was brought to bed of twenty money-bags at a burden; and how she longed to eat adders' heads, and toads carbonadoed;" and "of a fish, that appeared upon the coast, on Wednesday the fourscore of April, forty thousand fathom above water, and sung this ballad against the hard hearts of maids;" for the wonders of both ballads, and early Chap-books, are manifold, and bear strange testimony to the ignorance, and credulity, of their purchasers. These ballads and Chap-books have, luckily for us, been preserved by collectors, and although they are scarce, are accessible to readers in that national blessing, the British Museum. There the Roxburghe, Luttrell, Bagford, and other collections of black-letter ballads are easily obtainable for purposes of study, and, although the Chap-books, to the uninitiated (owing to the difficulties of the Catalogue), are not quite so easy of access, yet there they exist, and are a splendid series—it is impossible to say a complete one, because some are unique, and are in private hands, but so large, especially from the middle to the close of the last century, as to be virtually so.

I have confined myself entirely to the books of the last century, as, previous to it, there were few, and almost all black-letter tracts have been published or noted; and, after it, the books in circulation were chiefly very inferior reprints of those already published. As they are mostly undated, I have found some difficulty in attributing dates to them, as the guides, such as type, wood engravings, etc., are here fallacious, many—with the exception of Dicey's series—having been printed with old type, and any wood block being used, if at all resembling the subject. I have not taken any dated in the Museum Catalogue as being of this present century, even though internal evidence showed they were earlier. The Museum dates are admittedly fallacious and merely approximate, and nearly all are queried. For instance, nearly the whole of the beautiful Aldermary Churchyard (first) editions are put down as 1750?—a manifest impossibility, for there could not have been such an eruption of one class of publication from one firm in one year—and another is dated 1700?, although the book from which it is taken was not published until 1703. Still, as a line must be drawn somewhere, I have accepted these quasi dates, although such acceptation has somewhat narrowed my scheme, and deprived the reader of some entertainment, and I have published nothing which is not described in the Museum Catalogue as being between the years 1700 and 1800.

In fact, the Chap-book proper did not exist before the former date, unless the Civil War and political tracts can be so termed. Doubtless these were hawked by the pedlars, but they were not these pennyworths, suitable to everybody's taste, and within the reach of anybody's purse, owing to their extremely low price, which must, or ought to have, extracted every available copper in the village, when the Chapman opened his budget of brand-new books.

In the seventeenth, and during the first quarter of the eighteenth century, the popular books were generally in 8vo form, i.e. they consisted of a sheet of paper folded in eight, and making a book of sixteen pages; but during the other seventy-five years they were almost invariably 12mo, i.e. a sheet folded into twelve, and making twenty-four pages. After 1800 they rapidly declined. The type and wood blocks were getting worn out, and never seem to have been renewed; publishers got less scrupulous, and used any wood blocks without reference to the letter-press, until, after Grub Street authors had worked their wicked will upon them, Catnach buried them in a dishonoured grave.

But while they were in their prime, they mark an epoch in the literary history of our nation, quite as much as the higher types of literature do, and they help us to gauge the intellectual capacity of the lower and lower middle classes of the last century.

The Chapman proper, too, is a thing of the past, although we still have hawkers, and the travelling "credit drapers," or "tallymen," yet penetrate every village; but the Chapman, as described by Cotsgrave in his "Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues" (London, 1611), no longer exists. He is there faithfully portrayed under the heading "BissoÜart, m. A paultrie Pedlar, who in a long packe or maund (which he carries for the most part open, and (hanging from his necke) before him) hath Almanacks, Bookes of News, or other trifling ware to sell."

Shakespeare uses the word in a somewhat different sense, making him more of a general dealer, as in "Love's Labour's Lost," Act ii. sc. I:

And in "Troilus and Cressida," Act iv. sc. I:

Unlike his modern congener, the colporteur, the Chapman's life seems to have been an exceptionally hard one, especially if we can trust a description, professedly by one of the fraternity, in "The History of John Cheap the Chapman," a Chap-book published early in the present century. He appears, on his own confession, to have been as much of a rogue as he well could be with impunity and without absolutely transgressing the law, and, as his character was well known, very few roofs would shelter him, and he had to sleep in barns, or even with the pigs. He had to take out a licence, and was classed in old bye-laws and proclamations as "Hawkers, Vendors, Pedlars, petty Chapmen, and unruly people." In more modern times the literary Mercury dropped the somewhat besmirched title of Chapmen, and was euphoniously designated the "Travelling," "Flying," or "Running Stationer."

Little could he have dreamed that his little penny books would ever have become scarce, and prized by book collectors, and fetch high prices whenever the rare occasion happened that they were exposed for sale. I have taken out the prices paid in 1845 and 1847 for nine volumes of them, bought at as many different sales. These nine volumes contain ninety-nine Chap-books, and the price paid for them all was £24 13s. 6d., or an average of five shillings each—surely not a bad increment in a hundred years on the outlay of a penny; but then, these volumes were bought very cheaply, as some of their delighted purchasers record.

The principal factory for them, and from which certainly nine-tenths of them emanated, was No. 4, Aldermary Churchyard, afterwards removed to Bow Churchyard, close by. The names of the proprietors were William and Cluer Dicey—afterwards C. Dicey only—and they seem to have come from Northampton, as, in "Hippolito and Dorinda," 1720, the firm is described as "Raikes and Dicey, Northampton;" and this connection was not allowed to lapse, for we see, nearly half a century later, that "The Conquest of France" was "printed and sold by C. Dicey in Bow Church Yard: sold also at his Warehouse in Northampton."

From Dicey's house came nearly all the original Chap-books, and I have appended as perfect a list as I can make, amounting to over 120, of their publications. Unscrupulous booksellers, however, generally pirated them very soon after issue, especially at Newcastle, where certainly the next largest trade was done in this class of books. The Newcastle editions are rougher in every way, in engravings, type, and paper, than the very well got up little books of Dicey's, but I have frequently taken them in preference, because of the superior quaintness of the engravings.

After the commencement of the present century reading became more popular, and the following, which are only the names of a few places where Chap-books were published, show the great and widely spread interest taken in their production:—Edinburgh, Glasgow, Paisley, Kilmarnock, Penrith, Stirling, Falkirk, Dublin, York, Stokesley, Warrington, Liverpool, Banbury, Aylesbury, Durham, Dumfries, Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Coventry, Whitehaven, Carlisle, Worcester, Cirencester, etc., etc. And they flourished, for they formed nearly the sole literature of the poor, until the Penny Magazine and Chambers's penny Tracts and Miscellanies gave them their deathblow, and relegated them to the book-shelves of collectors.

That these histories were known and prized in Queen Anne's time, is evidenced by the following quotation from the Weekly Comedy, January 22, 1708:—"I'll give him Ten of the largest Folio Books in my Study, Letter'd on the Back, and bound in Calves Skin. He shall have some of those that are the most scarce and rare among the Learned, and therefore may be of greater use to so Voluminous an Author; there is 'Tom Thumb' with Annotations and Critical Remarks, two volumes in folio. The 'Comical Life and Tragical Death of the Old Woman that was Hang'd for Drowning herself in Ratcliffe High-Way:' One large Volume, it being the 20th Edition, with many new Additions and Observations. 'Jack and the Gyants;' formerly Printed in a small Octavo, but now Improv'd to three Folio Volumes by that Elaborate Editor, Forestus, Ignotus Nicholaus Ignoramus Sampsonius; then there is 'The King and the Cobler,' a Noble piece of Antiquity, and fill'd with many Pleasant Modern Intrigues fit to divert the most Curious."

And Steele, writing in the Tatler, No. 95, as Isaac Bickerstaff, and speaking of his godson, a little boy of eight years of age, says, "I found he had very much turned his studies, for about twelve months past, into the lives and adventures of Don Bellianis of Greece, Guy of Warwick, The Seven Champions, and other historians of that age.... He would tell you the mismanagements of John Hickerthrift, find fault with the passionate temper in Bevis of Southampton and loved St. George for being Champion of England."

As before said, their great variety adapted them for every purchaser, and they may be roughly classed under the following heads:—Religious, Diabolical, Supernatural, Superstitious, Romantic, Humorous, Legendary, Historical, Biographical, and Criminal, besides those which cannot fairly be put in any of the above categories; and under this classification and in this sequence I have taken them. The Religious, strictly so called, are the fewest, the subjects, such as "Dr. Faustus," etc., connected with his Satanic Majesty being more exciting, and probably paying better; whilst the Supernatural, such as "The Duke of Buckingham's Father's Ghost," "The Guildford Ghost," etc., trading upon man's credulity and his love of the marvellous, afford a far larger assortment. About the same amount of popularity may be given to the Superstitious Chap-books—those relating to fortune telling and the interpretation of Dreams and Moles, etc. But they were nothing like the favourites those of the Romantic School were. These dear old romances, handed down from the days when printing was not—some, like "Jack the Giant Killer," of Norse extraction; others, like "Tom Hickathrift," "Guy of Warwick," "Bevis of Hampton," etc., records of the doughty deeds of local champions; and others, again, "Reynard the Fox," "Valentine and Orson," and "Fortunatus," of foreign birth—hit the popular taste, and many were the editions of them. Naturally, however, the Humorous stories were the prime favourites. The Jest-books, pure and simple, are, from their extremely coarse witticisms, utterly incapable of being reproduced for general reading nowadays, and the whole of them are more or less highly spiced; but even here were shades of humour to suit all classes, from the solemn foolery of the "Wise Men of Gotham," or the "World turned upside down," to the rollicking fun of "Tom Tram," "The Fryer and the Boy," or "Jack Horner." In reading these books we must not, however, look upon them from our present point of view. Whether men and women are better now than they used to be, is a moot point, but things used to be spoken of openly, which are now never whispered, and no harm was done, nor offence taken; so the broad humour of the jest-books was, after all, only exuberant fun, and many of the bonnes histoires are extremely laughable, though to our own thinking equally indelicate. The old legends still held sway, and I have given four—"Adam Bell," "Robin Hood," "The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green," and "The Children in the Wood"—all of them remarkable for their illustrations. History has a wide range from "Fair Rosamond," to "The Royal Martyr," Charles I., whilst, naturally, such books as "Robinson Crusoe," "George Barnwell," and a host of criminal literature found ready purchasers.

I have not included Calendars, and I have purposely avoided Garlands, or Collections of ballads, which equally come under the category of Chap-books. I should have liked to have noticed more of them, but the exigencies of publishing have prevented it; still, those I have taken seem to me to be the best fitted for the purpose I had in view, which was to give a fairly representative list: and I hope I have succeeded in producing a book at once both amusing and instructive, besides having rescued these almost forgotten booklets from the limbo into which they were fast descending.

CONTENTS.