The vast horde of story-books so constantly poured into modern nurseries makes it difficult to realize that the library of the early colonial child consisted of such books as have been already described. The juvenile books to-day are multiform. The quantities displayed upon shop-counters or ranged upon play-room shelves include a variety of subjects bewildering to all but those whose business necessitates a knowledge of this kind of literature. For the little child there is no lack of gayly colored pictures and short tales in large print; for the older boys and girls there lies a generous choice, ranging from Bunny stories to Jungle Books, or they

The contrast is indeed extreme between that scanty fare of dull sermons and “The New England Primer” given to the little people of the early eighteenth century, and this superabundance prepared with lavish care for the nation of American children.

The beginning of this complex juvenile literature is, therefore, to be regarded as a comparatively modern invention of about seventeen hundred and forty-five. From that date can be traced the slow growth of a literature written with an avowed intention of furnishing amusement as well as instruction; and in the toy-books published one hundred and fifty years ago are found the prototypes of the present modes of bringing fun and knowledge to the American fireside.

The question at once arises as to the reason why this literature came into existence; why was it that children after seventeen hundred and fifty should have been favored in a way unknown to their parents?

To even the casual reader of English literature the answer is plain, if this subject of toy-books be regarded as of near kin to the larger body of writing. It has been somewhat the custom to consider children’s literature as a thing wholly apart from that of adults, probably because the majority of the authors of these little tales have so generally lacked the qualities indispensable for any true literary work. In reality the connection between the two is somewhat like that of parent and child; the smaller body, though lacking in power, has closely imitated the larger mass of writing in form and kind, and has reflected, sometimes clearly, sometimes dimly, the good or bad fashions that have shared the successive periods of literary history, like a child who unconsciously reproduces a parent’s foibles or excellences.

It is to England, then, that we must look to find the conditions out of which grew the necessity for this modern invention—the story-book.

The love of stories has been the splendid birthright of every child in all ages and in all lands. “Stories,” wrote Thackeray,—“stories exist everywhere; there is no calculating the distance through which the stories have come to us, the number of languages through which they have been filtered, or the centuries during which they have been told. Many of them have been narrated almost in their present shape for thousands of years to the little copper-coloured Sanscrit children, listening to their mothers under the palm-trees by the banks of the yellow Jumna—their Brahmin mother, who softly narrated them through the ring in her nose. The very same tale has been heard by the Northern Vikings as they lay on their shields on deck; and the Arabs couched under the stars on the Syrian plains when their flocks were gathered in, and their mares were picketed by the tents.” This picturesque description leads exactly to the point to be emphasized: that children shared in the simple tales of their people as long as those tales retained their freshness and simplicity; but when, as in England in the eighteenth century, the literature lost these qualities and became artificial, critical, and even skeptical, it lost its charm for the little ones and they no longer cared to listen to it.

Fashion and taste were then alike absorbed in the works of Dryden, Pope, Addison, Steele, and Swift, and the novels from the pens of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett had begun to claim and to hold the attention of the English reading public. The children, however, could neither comprehend nor enjoy the witty criticism and subtle treatment of the topics discussed by the older men, although, as will be seen in another chapter, the novels became, in both the original and in the abridged forms, the delight of many a “young master and miss.” Meanwhile, in the American colonies the people who could afford to buy books inherited their taste for literature as well as for tea from the Puritans and fashionables in the mother country; although it is a fact familiar to all, that the works of the comparatively few native authors lagged, in spirit and in style, far behind the writings of Englishmen of the time.

The reading of one who was a boy in the older era of the urbane Addison and the witty Pope, and a man in the newer period of the novelists, is well described in Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography. “All the little money,” wrote that book-lover, “that came into my hands was laid out in books. Pleased with the Pilgrim’s Progress, my collection was of John Bunyan’s works in separate volumes. I afterwards sold them to buy R. Burton’s Historical Collections; they were Chapmen’s books, and cheap, 40 or 50 in all.”

Burton’s “Historical Collections” contained history, travels, adventures, fiction, natural history, and biography. So great was the favor in which they were held in the eighteenth century that the compiler, Nathaniel Crouch, almost lost his identity in his pseudonym, and like the late Mr. Clemens, was better known by his nom-de-plume than by his family name. According to Dunton, he “melted down the best of the English histories into twelve-penny books, which are filled with wonders, rarities and curiosities.” Although characterized by Dr. Johnson as “very proper to allure backward readers,” the contents of many of the various books afforded the knowledge and entertainment eagerly grasped by Franklin and other future makers of the American nation. The scarcity of historical works concerning the colonies made Burton’s account of the “English Empire in America” at once a mine of interest to wide-awake boys of the day. Number VIII, entitled “Winter Evenings’ Entertainment,” was long a source of amusement with its stories and riddles, and its title was handed down to other books of a similar nature. To children, however, the best-known volume of the series was Burton’s illustrated versification of Bible stories called “The Youth’s Divine Pastime.” But the subjects chosen by Burton were such as belonged to a very plain-spoken age; and as the versifier was no euphuist in his relation of facts, the result was a remarkable “Pastime for Youth.” The literature read by English children was, of course, the same; the little ones of both countries ate of the same tree of knowledge of facts, often either silly or revolting.

To deliver the younger and future generations from such unpalatable and indigestible mental food, there was soon to appear in London a man, John Newbery by name, who, already a printer, publisher, and vendor of patent medicines, seized the opportunity to issue stories written especially for the amusement of little children.

While Newbery was making his plans to provide pleasure for young folks in England, in the colonies the idea of a child’s need of recreation through books was slowly gaining ground. It is well to note the manner in which the little colonists were prepared to receive Newbery’s books as recreative features crept gradually into the very few publications of which there is record.

In seventeen hundred and forty-five native talent was still entirely confined to writing for little people lugubrious sermons or discourses delivered on Sunday and “Catechize days,” and afterwards printed for larger circulation. The reprints from English publications were such exotics as, “A Poesie out of Mr. Dod’s Garden,” an alluring title, which did not in the least deceive the small colonials as to the religious nature of its contents.

In New York the Dutch element, until the advent of Garrat Noel, paid so little attention to the subject of juvenile literature that the popularity of Watts’s “Divine Songs” (issued by an Englishman) is well attested by the fact that at present it is one of the very few child’s books of any kind recorded as printed in that city before 1760. But in Boston, old Thomas Fleet, in 1741, saw the value of the element of some entertainment in connection with reading, and, when he published “The Parents’ Gift, containing a choice collection of God’s judgments and Mercies,” lives of the Evangelists, and other religious matter, he added a “variety of pleasant Pictures proper for the Entertainment of Children.” This is, perhaps, the first printed acknowledgment in America that pictures were commendable to parents because entertaining to their offspring. Such an idea put into words upon paper and advertised in so well-read a sheet as the “Boston Evening Post,” must surely have impressed fathers and mothers really solicitous for the family welfare and anxious to provide harmless pleasure. This pictorial element was further encouraged by Franklin, when, in 1747, he reprinted, probably for the first time in this country, “Dilworth’s New Guide to the English Tongue.” In this school-book, after the alphabets and spelling lessons, a special feature was introduced, that is, illustrated “Select Fables.” The cuts at the top of each fable possess an added interest from the supposition that they were engraved by the printer himself; and the constant use of the “Guide” by colonial school-masters and mistresses made their pupils unconsciously quite ready for more illustrated and fewer homiletic volumes.

Indeed, before the middle of the century pictures had become an accepted feature of the few juvenile books, and “The History of the Holy Jesus” versified for little ones was issued by at least two old Boston printers in 1747 and 1748 with more than a dozen cuts. Among the rare extant copies of this small chap-book is one that, although torn and disfigured by tiny fingers and the century and a half since it pleased its first owner, bears the personal touch of this inscription “Ebenezer ... Bought June ... 1749 ... price 0=2=d.” Was the price marked upon its page as a reminder that two shillings was a large price to pay for a boy’s book? Perhaps for this reason it received the careful handling that has enabled us to examine it, when so many of its contemporaries and successors have vanished.

The versified story, notwithstanding its quaintness of diction, begins with a dignified directness:

At the end are two Hymns, entitled “Delight in the Lord Jesus,” and “Absence from Christ intolerable.” The final stanza is typical of one Puritan doctrine:

The woodcuts are not the least interesting feature of this old-time duodecimo, from the picture showing the mother reading to her children to the illustration of the quaking of the earth on the day of the crucifixion. Crude and badly drawn as they now seem, they were surely sufficient to attract the child of their generation.

About the same time old Zechariah Fowle, who apprenticed Isaiah Thomas, and both printed and vended chap-books in Back Street, Boston, advertised among his list of books “Lately Publish’d” this same small book, together with “A Token for Youth,” the “Life and Death of Elizabeth Butcher,” “A Preservative from the Sins and Follies of Childhood and Youth,” “The Prodigal Daughter,” “The Happy Child,” and “The New Gift for Children with Cuts.” Of these “The New Gift” was certainly a real story-book, as one of a later edition still extant readily proves.

Thus the children in both countries were prepared to enjoy Newbery’s miniature story-books, although for somewhat different reasons: in England the literature had reached a point too artificial to be interesting to little ones; in America the product of the press and the character of the majority of the juvenile importations, the reprints, or home-made chap-books, has been shown to be such as would hardly attract those who were to be the future arbiters of the colonies’ destiny.

The reasons for the coming to light of this new form of infant literature have been dwelt upon in order to show the necessity for some change in the kind of reading-matter to be put in the hands of the younger members of the family. The natural order of consideration is next to point out the phase it assumed upon its appearance in England,—a phase largely due to the influence of one man,—and once there, the modifications effected by the fashions in adult fiction.

Although there was already much interest in the education and welfare of children still in the nursery, the character of the first play-books was probably due to the esteem in which the opinions of the philosopher, John Locke, were held. He it was who gradually moved the vane of public opinion around to serious consideration of recreation as a factor in the well-being of these nursery inmates. Although it took time for Locke’s ideas upon the subject to sink into the public mind, it is impossible to compare one of the first attempts to produce a play-book, “The Child’s New Play-thing,” with the advice written to his friend, Edward Clarke, without feeling that the progress from the religious books to primers and readers (such as “Dilworth’s Guide”), and then onward to story-books, was largely the result of the publication of his letters under the title of “Thoughts on Education.”

In these letters Locke took an extraordinary course: he first made a quaint plea for the general welfare of Mr. Clarke’s little son. “I imagine,” he wrote, “the minds of children are as easily turned this or that way as Water itself, and though this be the principal Part, and our main Care should be about the inside, yet the Clay Cottage is not to be neglected. I shall therefore begin with the case, and consider first the Health of the body.” Under Health he discussed clothing, including thin shoes, “that they may leak and let in Water.” A pause was then made to show the benefits of wet feet as against the apparent disadvantages of filthy stockings and muddy boots; for mothers even in that time were inclined to consider their floors and steps. Bathing next received attention. Bathing every day in cold water, Locke regarded as exceedingly desirable; no exceptions were to be made, even in the case of a “puleing and tender” child. The beneficial effects of air, sunlight, the establishment of good conduct, diet, sleep, and “physick” were all discussed by the doctor and philosopher, before the development of the mind was touched upon. “Education,” he wrote, “concerns itself with the forming of Children’s Minds, giving them that seasoning early, which shall influence their Lives later.” This seasoning referred to the training of children in matters pertaining to their general government and to the reverence of parents. For the Puritan population it was undoubtedly a shock to find Locke interesting himself in, and moreover advocating, dancing as a part of a child’s education; and worst of all, that he should mention it before their hobby, Learning. In this connection it is worth while to make mention of a favorite primer, which, published about the middle of the eighteenth century, was entitled “The Hobby Horse.” Locke was quite aware that his method would be criticised, and therefore took the bull by the horns in the following manner. He admitted that to put the subject of learning last was a cause for wonder, “especially if I tell you I think it the least part. This may seem strange in the mouth of a bookish man, and this making usually the chief, if not only bustle and stir about children; this being almost that alone, which is thought on, when People talk about Education, make it the greater Paradox.” An unusual piece of advice it most surely was to parents to whose children came the task of learning to read as soon as they were given spoon-food.

Even more revolutionary to the custom of an eighteenth century mother was the admonition that reading “be never made a Task.” Locke, however, was not the man to urge a cure for a bad habit without prescribing a remedy, so he went on to say that it was always his “Fancy that Learning be made a Play and Recreation to Children”—a “Fancy” at present much in vogue. To accomplish this desirable result, “Dice and Play-things with the Letters on them” were recommended to teach children the alphabet; “and,” he added, “twenty other ways may be found ... to make this kind of Learning a Sport to them.” Letter-blocks were in this way made popular, and formed the approved and advanced method until in these latter days pedagogy has swept aside the letter-blocks and syllabariums and carried the sport to word-pictures.

This theory had a practical result in the introduction to many households of “The Child’s New Play-thing.” This book, already mentioned, was printed in England in seventeen hundred and forty-three, and dedicated to Prince George. In seventeen hundred and forty-four we find through the “Boston Evening Post” of January 23 that the third edition was sold by Joseph Edwards, in Cornhill, and it was probably from this edition that the first American edition was printed in seventeen hundred and fifty. From the following description of this American reprint (one of which is happily in the Lenox Collection), it will be seen that the “Play-thing” was an attempt to follow Locke’s advice, as well as a connecting link between the primer of the past and the story-book of the near future.

The title, which the illustration shows, reads, “The Child’s New Play-thing being a spelling-book intended to make Learning to read a diversion instead of a task. Consisting of Scripture-histories, fables, stories, moral and religious precepts, proverbs, songs, riddles, dialogues, &c. The whole adapted to the capacities of children, and divided into lessons of one, two, three and four syllables. The fourth edition. To which is added three dialogues; 1. Shewing how a little boy shall make every body love him. 2. How a little boy shall grow wiser than the rest of his school-fellows. 3. How a little boy shall become a great man. Designed for the use of schools, or for children before they go to school.”

Coverless and faded, hard usage is written in unmistakable characters upon this play-thing of a whole family. Upon a fly-leaf are the autographs of “Ebenezer Ware and Sarah Ware, Their Book,” and upon another page these two names with the addition of the signatures of “Ichabod Ware and Cyrus Ware 1787.” One parent may have used it when it was fresh from the press of Draper & Edwards in Boston; then, through enforced economy, handed it down to the next generation, who doubtless scorned the dedication so eminently proper in seventeen hundred and fifty, so thoroughly out of place thirty-seven years later. There it stands in large black type:

To his ROYAL HIGHNESS PRINCE GEORGE This Little
Play-thing is most humbly dedicated
By
His ROYAL HIGHNESS’S
Devoted Servant

Of especial interest are the alphabets in “Roman, Italian, and English Names” on the third page, while page four contains the dear old alphabet in rhyme, fortunately not altogether forgotten in this prosaic age. We recognize it as soon as we see it.

and involuntarily add, D divided it. After the spelling lessons came fables, proverbs, and the splendid “Stories proper to raise the Attention and excite the Curiosity of Children” of any age; namely, “St. George and the Dragon,” “Fortunatus,” “Guy of Warwick,” “Brother and Sister,” “Reynard the Fox,” “The Wolf and the Kid.” “The Good Dr. Watts,” writes Mrs. Field, “is supposed to have had a hand in the composition of this toy book especially in the stories, one of which is quite in the style of the old hymn writer.” Here it is:

Thus we find that Locke sowed the seed, Watts watered the soil in which the seed fell, and that Newbery, after mixing in ideas from his very fertile brain, soon reaped a golden harvest from the crop of readers, picture-books, and little histories which he, with the aid of certain well-known authors, produced.

According to his biographer, Mr. Charles Welsh, John Newbery was born in a quaint parish of England in seventeen hundred and thirteen. Although his father was only a small farmer, Newbury inherited his bookish tastes from an ancestor, Ralph or Rafe Newbery, who had been a great publisher of the sixteenth century. Showing no inclination toward the life of a farmer, the boy, at sixteen, had already entered the shop of a merchant in Reading. The name of this merchant is not known, but inference points to Mr. Carnan, printer, proprietor, and editor of one of the earliest provincial newspapers. In seventeen hundred and thirty-seven, at the death of Carnan, John Newbery, then about twenty-four years of age, found himself one of the proprietor’s heirs and an executor of the estate. Carnan left a widow, to whom, to quote her son, Newbery’s “love of books and acquirements as a printer rendered him very acceptable.” The amiable and well-to-do widow and Newbery were soon married, and their youngest son, Francis Newbery, eventually succeeded his father in the business of publishing.

Shortly after Newbery’s marriage his ambition and enterprise resulted in the establishment of his family in London, where, in seventeen hundred and forty-four, he opened a warehouse at The Bible and Crown, near Devereux Court, without Temple Bar. Meanwhile he had associated himself with Benjamin Collins, a printer in Salisbury. Collins both planned and printed some of Newbery’s toy volumes, and his name likewise was well-known to shop-keepers in the colonies. Newbery soon found that his business warranted another move nearer to the centre of trade. He therefore combined two establishments into one at the now celebrated corner of St. Paul’s Churchyard, and at the same time decided to confine his attention exclusively to book publishing and medicine vending.

Before his departure from Devereux Court, Newbery had published at least one book for juvenile readers. The title reads: “Little Pretty Pocket-Book, intended for the instruction and Amusement of Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly, with an agreeable Letter to read 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 the whole is prefixed a letter on education humbly addressed to all Parents, Guardians, Governesses, &c., wherein rules are laid down for making their children strong, healthy, virtuous, wise and happy.” To this extraordinarily long title were added couplets from Dryden and Pope, probably because extracts from these poets were usually placed upon the title-page of books for grown people; possibly also in order to give a finish to miniature volumes that would be like the larger publications. A wholly simple method of writing title-pages never came into even Newbery’s original mind; he did for the juvenile customer exactly what he was accustomed to do for his father and mother. And yet the habit of spreading out over the page the entire contents of the book was not without value: it gave the purchaser no excuse for not knowing what was to be found within its covers; and in the days when books were a luxury and literary reviews non-existent, the country trade was enabled to make a better choice.

The manner in which the “Little Pretty Pocket-Book” is written is so characteristic of those who were the first to attempt to write for the younger generation in an amusing way, that it is worth while to examine briefly the topics treated. An American reprint of a later date, now in the Lenox Collection, will serve to show the method chosen to combine instruction with amusement. The book itself is miniature in size, about two by four inches, with embossed gilt paper covers—Newbery’s own specialty as a binding. The sixty-five little illustrations at the top of its pages were numerous enough to afford pleasure to any eighteenth century child, although they were crude in execution and especially lacked true perspective. The first chapter after the “Address to Parents” and to the other people mentioned on the title-page gives letters to Master Tommy and Miss Polly. First, Tommy is congratulated upon the good character that his Nurse has given him, and instructed as to the use of the “Pocket-Book,” “which will teach you to play at all those innocent games that good Boys and Girls divert themselves with.” The boy reader is next advised to mark his good and bad actions with pins upon a red and black ball. Little Polly is then given similar congratulations and instructions, except that in her case a pincushion is to be substituted for a ball. Then follow thirty pages devoted to “alphabetically digested” games, from “The great A Play” and “The Little a Play” to “The great and little Rs,” when plays, or the author’s imagination, give out and rhymes begin the alphabet anew. Modern picture alphabets have not improved much upon this jingle:

Next in order are four fables with morals (written in the guise of letters), for in Newbery’s books and in those of a much later period, we feel, as Mr. Welsh writes, a “strong determination on the part of the authors to place the moral plainly in sight and to point steadily to it.” Pictures also take a leading part in this effort to inculcate good behaviour; thus Good Children are portrayed in cuts, which accompany the directions for attaining perfection. Proverbs, having been hitherto introduced into school-books, appear again quite naturally in this source of diversion, which closes—at least in the American edition—with sixty-three “Rules for Behaviour.” These rules include those suitable for various occasions, such as “At the Meeting-House,” “Home,” “The Table,” “In Company,” and “When abroad with other Children.” To-day, when many such rules are as obsolete as the tiny pages themselves, this chapter affords many glimpses of the customs and etiquette of the old-fashioned child’s life. Such a direction as “Be not hasty to run out of Meeting-House when Worship is ended, as if thou weary of being there” (probably an American adaptation of the English original), recalls the well-filled colonial meeting-house, where weary children sat for hours on high seats, with dangling legs, or screwed their small bodies in vain efforts to touch the floor. Again we can see the anxious mothers, when, after the long sermon was brought to a close, they put restraining hands upon the little ones, lest they, in haste to be gone, should forget this admonition. The formalism of the time is suggested in this request, “Make a Bow always when come Home, and be instantly uncovered,” for the ceremony of polite manners in these bustling days has so much relaxed that the modern boy does all that is required if he remembers to be “instantly uncovered when come Home.” Among the numerous other requirements only one more may be cited—a rule which reveals the table manners of polite society in its requisite for genteel conduct: “Throw not anything under the Table. Pick not thy teeth at the Table, unless holding thy Napkin before thy mouth with thine other Hand.” With such an array of intellectual and moral contents, the little “Pocket-Book” may appear to-day to be almost anything except an amusement book. Yet this was the phase that the English play-book first assumed, and it must not be forgotten that English prose fiction was only then coming into existence, except such germs as are found in the character sketches in the “Spectator” and in the cleverly told incidents by Defoe.

In 1744, when Newbery published this duodecimo, Dr. Samuel Johnson was the presiding genius of English letters; four years earlier, fiction had come prominently into the foreground with the publication of “Pamela” by Samuel Richardson; and between seventeen hundred and forty and seventeen hundred and fifty-two, Richardson’s “Clarissa Harlowe,” Smollett’s “Roderick Random” and “Peregrine Pickle,” and Fielding’s “Tom Jones” were published. This fact may seem irrelevant to the present subject; nevertheless, the idea of a veritable story-book, that is a book relating a tale, does not seem to have entered Newbery’s mind until after these novels had met with a deserved and popular success.

The result of Newbery’s first efforts to follow Locke’s advice was so satisfactory that his wares were sought most eagerly. “Very soon,” said his son, Francis Newbery, “he was in the full employment of his talents in writing and publishing books of amusement and instruction for Children. The call for them was immense, an edition of many thousands being sometimes exhausted during the Christmas holidays. His friend, Dr. Samuel Johnson, who, like other grave characters, could now and then be jocose, had used to say of him, ‘Newbery is an extraordinary man, for I know not whether he has read or written most Books.’”51-*

The bookseller was no less clever in his use of other people’s wits. No one knows how many of the tiny gilt bindings covered stories told by impecunious writers, to whom the proceeds in times of starvation were bread if not butter. Newbery, though called by Goldsmith “the philanthropic publisher of St. Paul’s Churchyard,” knew very well the worth to his own pocket of these authors’ skill in story-writing. Between the years seventeen hundred and fifty-seven and seventeen hundred and sixty-seven, the English publisher was at the height of his prosperity; his name became a household word in England, and was hardly less well known to the little colonials of America.

Newbery’s literary associations, too, were both numerous and important. Before Oliver Goldsmith began to write for children, he is thought to have contributed articles for Newbery’s “Literary Magazine” about seventeen hundred and fifty-eight, while Johnson’s celebrated “Idler” was first printed in a weekly journal started by the publisher about the same time. For the “British Magazine” Newbery engaged Smollett as editor. In this periodical appeared Goldsmith’s “History of Miss Stanton.” When later this was published as “The Vicar of Wakefield,” it contained a characterization of the bookseller as a good-natured man with red, pimpled face, “who was no sooner alighted than he was in haste to be gone, for he was ever on business of the utmost importance, and he was at that time actually compiling materials for the history of Mr. Thomas Trip.”52-* With such an acquaintance it is probable that Newbery often turned to Goldsmith, Giles Jones, and Tobias Smollett for assistance in writing or abridging the various children’s tales; even the pompous Dr. Johnson is said to have had a hand in their production—since he expressed a wish to do so. Newbery himself, however, assumed the responsibility as well as the credit of so many little “Histories,” that it is exceedingly difficult to fix upon the real authors of some of the best-known volumes in the publisher’s juvenile library.

The histories of “Goody Two-Shoes” and “Tommy Trip” (once such nursery favorites, and now almost, if not quite, forgotten) have been attributed to various men; but according to Mr. Pearson in “Banbury Chap-Books,” Goldsmith confessed to writing both. Certainly, his sly wit and quizzical vein of humor seem to pervade “Goody Two-Shoes”—often ascribed to Giles Jones—and the notes affixed to the rhymes of Mother Goose before she became Americanized. Again his skill is seen in the adaptation of “Wonders of Nature and Art” for juvenile admirers; and for “Fables in Verse” he is generally considered responsible. As all these tales were printed in the colonies or in the young Republic, their peculiarities and particularities may be better described when dealing with the issues of the American press.

John Newbery, the most illustrious of publishers in the eyes of the old-fashioned child, died in 1767, at the comparatively early age of fifty-four. Yet before his death he had proved his talent for producing at least fifty original little books, to be worth considerably more than the Biblical ten talents.

No sketch of Newbery’s life should fail to mention another large factor in his successful experiment—the insertion in the “London Chronicle” and other newspapers of striking and novel advertisements of his gilt volumes, which were to be had for “six-pence the price of binding.” An instance of his skill appeared in the “London Chronicle” for December 19, 1764-January 1, 1765:

“The Philosophers, Politicians, Necromancers, and the learned in every faculty are desired to observe that on the 1st of January, being New Year’s Day (oh, that we may all lead new lives!) Mr. Newbery intends to publish the following important volumes, bound and gilt, and hereby invites all his little friends who are good to call for them at the Bible and Sun in St. Paul’s Churchyard, but those who are naughty to have none.”54-*

Christopher Smart, his brother-in-law, who was an adept in the art of puffing, possibly wrote many of the advertisements of new books—notices so cleverly phrased that they could not fail to attract the attention of many a country shop-keeper. In this way thousands were sold to the country districts; and book-dealers in the American commonwealths, reading the English papers and alert to improve their trade, imported them in considerable quantities.

After Newbery’s death, his son, Francis, and Carnan, his stepson, carried on the business until seventeen hundred and eighty-eight; from that year until eighteen hundred and two Edward Newbery (a nephew of the senior Newbery), who in seventeen hundred and sixty-seven had set up a rival establishment, continued to publish new editions of the same little works. Yet the credit of this experiment of printing juvenile stories belongs entirely to the older publisher. Through them he made a strong protest against the reading by children of the lax chap-book literature, so excellently described by Mr. John Ashton in “Chap-Books of the Eighteenth Century;” and although his stories occasionally alluded to disagreeable subjects or situations, these were unfortunately familiar to his small patrons.

The gay little covers of gilt or parti-colored paper in which this English publisher dressed his books expressed an evident purpose to afford pleasure, which was increased by the many illustrations that adorned the pages and added interest to the contents.

To the modern child, these books give no pleasure; but to those who love the history of children of the past, they are interesting for two reasons. In them is portrayed something of the life of eighteenth century children; and by them the century’s difference in point of view as to the constituents of a story-book can be gauged. Moreover, all Newbery’s publications are to be credited with a careful preparation that later stories sadly lacked. They were always written with a certain art; if the language was pompous, we remember Dr. Johnson; if the style was formal, its composition was correct; if the tales lacked ease in telling, it was only the starched etiquette of the day reduced to a printed page; and if they preached, they at least were seldom vulgar.

The preaching, moreover, was of different character from that of former times. Hitherto, the fear of the Lord had wholly occupied the author’s attention when he composed a book “proper for a child as soon as he can read;” now, material welfare was dwelt upon, and a good boy’s reward came to him when he was chosen the Lord Mayor of London. Good girls were not forgotten, and were assured that, like Goody Two-Shoes, they should attain a state of prosperity wherein

Goody Two-Shoes, with her particular method of instilling the alphabet, and such books as “King Pippin” (a prodigy of learning) may be considered as tiny commentaries upon the years when Johnson reigned supreme in the realm of learning. These and many others emphasized not the effects of piety,—Cotton Mather’s forte,—but the benefits of learning; and hence the good boy was also one who at the age of five spelt “apple-pye” correctly and therefore eventually became a great man.

At the time of Newbery’s death it was more than evident that his experiment had succeeded, and children’s stories were a printed fact.