Number of books known to be publishedfor 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 riseof a ‘book market’ for children in mid18th 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 followinga larger middle-class social sector, more people couldafford books and education than before

4. Reading developed as a pastime; books were not onlysources of education but were increasingly looked uponas 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 thingof honour, credit, delight, and recreation, or as a reward for doing something else; and ifthey 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, withoutperceiving it to be any thing but a sport, and play themselves into that which others arewhipp’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, whichbeing stories apt to delight and entertain a child…. If his Æsop has pictures in it, it willentertain 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 forchildren, newspapers for children, journals for children,stories for children, comedies for children, dramas forchildren, geography for children history for childrenphysics for children, logic for children, catechisms forchildren, travels for children, morals for children,grammars for children and reading books in alllanguages…poetry, sermon, letters, talks for childrenand unlimited variation on the same theme, so that theliterary doll-shops are crammed all year round withthem…

(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 Booksfor Children, adorned with cuts and designed as a Presentfor every little Boy who would become a great Man andride upon a fine Horse, and to every little Girl who wouldbecome a great Woman and ride in a Lord Mayor’s giltCoach. Printed for the Author who has ordered thesebooks to be given gratis to all little Boys at the Bible andthe Sun in St Paul’s Churchyard, they paying for thebinding which is only Twopence each Book.

At Harris’ St Paul’s ChurchyardGood children meet a sure rewardIn coming home the other dayI heard a little master sayFor ev’ry threepence there he tookHe had received a little bookWith covers neat and cuts so prettyTheres not its like in all the CityAnd that for threepence he could buyA story book would make one cryFor a little more a book of riddlesThen let us not buy drums or fiddlesNor yet be stopt at pastry-cooksBut spend our money all in booksFor when we have learnt each book by heartMama will treat us with a tart.

Advertisement by John Harris (London) and Joseph Johnson (Philadelphia)

Newbery’s books and those of his successors, were aimedat the middle class of young citizens, for the ‘younggentlemen and ladies’

Mary Cooper’s Tommy Thumb’s Song Book for all thelittle Masters and Misses: to be sung to them by theirNurses till they can sing them themselves. By NurseLovechild’ (advertised in London Evening Post, March1744)  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 andsongs 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 Historyof 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: ‘Havingwhen a boy, been much entertained with Jack the Giant-Killer and such littleStore Books, I have always retained a kind affection for them…’  John Clare, born in 1793, describes in his autobiography what such readingmaterial meant to a child growing up in a poor, rural home, with a barelyliterate father who ‘was very fond of superstitious tales that are hawked aboutthe streets for a penny’…. gleaned from the ‘sixpenny Romances’ like Cinderella,Little Red Riding Hood or Jack and theBeanstalk. Wordsworth, The Prelude(V, 364-9, 1805-6 version)

Oh, give us once again the wishing-capOf Fortunatus, and the invisible coatOf Jack the Giant-killer, Robin Hood,And Sabra in the forest with St George!

 Encompassing witchcraft, superstition, street cries, dragons, ogres, fairies andevery kind of magic shunned by the age of reason, for many generations thechapbooks gave children a wide range of easily digestible reading matter thatcould 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 givingrise 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 severalrespectable publishers (Elizabeth Newbery’s 1800 catalogue contained thirteenpenny and fourteen two penny items, James Lumsden & Son of Glasgow hadat 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 allGood 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 fromthe Edith Nesbit Chapbook Collection athttp://www.library.pitt.edu/libraries/is/enroom/index.html

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