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This is a pre-copy-, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in The , following peer review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version, M. O. Grenby. Chapbooks, Children, and Children's . The Library: Transactions of the 2007 , 8(3), 277-303. is available online at: http://library.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/8/3/277

Chapbooks, Children and Children's Literature M. O. Grenby

It is generally held to be the case that chapbooks pre-dated what we would recognise as children's literature. It is also frequently assumed that, before a literature of their own became available, children often read these chapbooks – indeed, that they formed an important part of the market for this product. These are conjectures that this essay will explore. A more controversial supposition is that what we understand as children's literature somehow grew out of the chapbook tradition, perhaps developing in deliberate opposition to it. Clearly this is an absolutely vital question for any understanding of the genesis of modern children's literature. These are also important points to decide if we are to arrive at a full sense of how its consumers understood the chapbook. What follows, then, is organised around two lines of enquiry: did children routinely use chapbooks, and what was the relationship between the chapbook tradition and a literature definitely intended for children. As is always the case when examining interconnected and overlapping varieties of popular literature, it will be necessary to begin with some attempts at working definitions.

Children’s literature is not a straightforward category. It can mean any text which children read, or only those designed especially for them. It can cover texts designed for three-year-olds or eighteen-year-olds. It can mean used unwillingly at school or jest subversively enjoyed at home. It might be argued that children’s literature came into existence only when texts began to portray realistic child characters or the child’s point of view. Or its origins might lie not in the texts at all, but in its secure establishment as a separate division of the literary marketplace, when it was separately marketed, advertised and reviewed, or when authors and publishers could make a career out of producing only children’s books. It is regrettably reductive, but in this essay the term will be used loosely, referring generally to books which were not exclusively didactic or religious and which were designed especially

1 for girls and boys, rather than young adults. Such books began to be produced in noticeable numbers in Britain from the mid-eighteenth century. By the end of the century, children’s literature had become established as a flourishing branch of . Writing in 1790, Catherine Macaulay could observe, caustically, that ‘as every kind of trash calculated for the circle of a nursery, was a saleable commodity, authors without number enlisted in the service.’ 1

Just as problematic is the word ‘chapbook’. It was long thought that the term was used only retrospectively, from the nineteenth century on, to describe a form of literature which had by then vanished. Recent research by Barry McKay and Jan Fergus has found much earlier uses: in 1774 and 1747 respectively. 2 Regardless of its origins, scholars now use the term to describe such a diverse range of texts that it has almost become more of a hindrance than a help. The designation ‘chapbook’ blurs boundaries between many different kinds of texts, covering volumes produced over a period of three or four centuries, amalgamating titles designed for totally different readerships and which included a wide range of material. The concept, and the actual usage, of the chapbook was also radically different in different parts of the country, notably developing its own tradition. The term is, as McKay has recently written, little more than 'a bibliographic conceit'. 3

There are, I propose, four key strands to the definition of the chapbook. The first is its physical form: small in size, short in length, usually made from a single sheet of folded into twelve or twenty-four pages, and frequently including crude illustrations alongside the letterpress. The second is that it was cheap, often a penny or even less, and very seldom more than sixpence. The third strand is its distribution, characteristically by itinerant , or ‘chapmen’. Last, and most problematically, the contents are important: chapbooks were often abridged from longer works and their texts usually carried plebeian associations. These are the various components which, interwoven, will be used to define the chapbook in this essay. But it was probably the relationship between these various traits which caused contemporary readers to understand a text as a chapbook. Indeed, the precise mixture of the ingredients necessary to produce the chapbook changed over time. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it seems likely that the key defining feature of the chapbook

2 was that it was sold by hawkers. By the later eighteenth century, the plebeian tone of the text and images was probably a more important criterion.

One factor that is missing from this definition of chapbooks is readership. This is because there is so little conclusive evidence. A common hypothesis has been that most pre-nineteenth-century chapbooks were 'intended mainly for ill-educated but literate adults', as Roger Davis puts it. 4 But the correlation of chapbooks with lower- class culture is not straightforward. When scholars began to take a renewed interest in chapbooks in the 1970s this association was not challenged. Indeed, the new attention was largely premised on the supposition that the chapbook represented a ‘unique source’ for an exploration of what Neuburg called the ‘mental universe of the poor in the eighteenth century’. 5 The first problem with this formula is that just because chapbooks could cost only a penny or so, this does not guarantee that their purchasers were from the lower classes. ‘A chapbook was not a cheap ’, John Simons insists, pointing out that even one penny’s-worth of literature was probably ‘seen as a luxury quite beyond reach’ for a labourer in Britain in the late eighteenth century. 6 Moreover, the idea that we can divide elite and plebeian culture in the way that Neuburg suggested has been disputed. In his influential Popular Culture in , Peter Burke argued that notions of separate 'high' and 'low' cultures did not take account of the élite's frequent participation in what he preferred to call the 'little tradition': popular festivities, popular rituals, and popular literature. In other words, aristocrats read chapbooks too, even if the lower classes could not ‘reciprocate’ by those texts which required a formal education. 7 Other writers have echoed and developed this view, notably Roger Chartier, examining the French chapbook tradition (the Bibliothéque bleue ), and Tessa Watt, looking at religious popular literature in England. ‘Chapbooks which sold for twopence, and appealed to “honest folks that have no lands”,’ Watt demonstrates, were also valued by the affluent, which is why records exist of them being ‘bought by a Staffordshire lady and carefully left in her will to her clergyman son.’ 8

This is germane to this essay because it provides the context for the question of whether children read chapbooks too. Both Roger Davis and Victor Neuburg have argued that chapbooks were indeed enjoyed by those children who could read, as well as by those who could find someone to read to them.9 Certainly, there seems little

3 reason to believe that chapbook use was determined by age, except in so far as age would have been a factor in determining reading prowess. But in early modern England (and Scotland, differently), other factors were just as important in determining : class, gender, religion, location, parental occupation and so on. It is tempting, then, to suggest that chapbooks were used by those who could not read well: adults who had not been well-educated plus the children of the affluent. John Simons, for instance, maintains that ‘while the labourers read chapbooks in their cottages, the children of the gentry also avidly consumed them in the great houses.’ Gary Kelly is more specific, claiming that chapbooks were 'commonly used by middle- and upper-class families as their children's first books'. 10 These claims are very difficult to substantiate, but by drawing on a wide variety of evidence, we can begin to replace speculation with a more substantiated view on the extent of children's immersion in popular literature.

There are several streams of evidence to tap. Anecdotal evidence is unreliable, but it remains appealing. Perhaps the most frequently-cited affidavit is in the 17 November 1709 instalment of Richard Steele's Tatler . Richard Steele's Mr. Bickerstaff provides an account of his meeting with a precocious eight-year-old. Bickerstaff reports that the boy has rejected Aesop's Fables 'because he did not believe they were true', and prefers what he apparently considers to be the much more plausible 'Lives and Adventures of Don Bellianis of , Guy of Warwick , the Seven Champions '. So well-acquainted was the boy with chapbook literature, Bickerstaff notes, that he could 'tell you the Mismanagements of John Hickathrift , find fault with the passionate Temper in Bevis of , and love St. George for being the Champion of England '. 11 Another fictional lover of chapbooks, a much less indulged child, is Jerry Blackacre, 'a true raw squire, under age and his mother's government', in William Wycherley's The Plain-Dealer (1677). He craves chapbooks. 'Pray let me see St. George for Christendom , or The Seven Champions of England ', he begs his mother when they visit a bookseller. But she will allow him only The Young Clerk's Guide , for fear that the chapbooks might encourage a 'humour of rambling, and fighting, and studying military discipline and wearing red breeches'. 12 Reading of the same titles by less prosperous children is also fairly frequently depicted. In 1794, Thomas Holcroft’s Hugh Trevor, a orphaned apprentice, describes being so engrossed in ‘The Seven

4 Champions of Christendom’ that he forgets his duties and is severely beaten by his master. 13

A little more objective than these fictional accounts is the evidence to be found in journals, memoirs and autobiographies. A very early example is the account of his life and early reading left by Robert Ashley, a well-educated and affluent Wiltshire boy. As a schoolboy and (from the age of fifteen) student at University in the 1570s and '80s, he read 'Bevis of Hampton', 'Guy of Warwick', 'The of Valentine and Orson' and the 'Life of King Arthur of Britain'. 14 A hundred and fifty years later, it was still tales like St. George and the Dragon which delighted the infant Samuel Johnson, while James Boswell, had 'when a boy, been much entertained with Jack the Giant-Killer and such little story-books'. 15 Surviving marginalia can support such testimony. For instance, an early nineteenth-century copy of The History of in the Osborne in Toronto bears this inscription: 'To my dearest schoolfellow Emma Clinton In remembrance of the many happy times we have spent together at Mrs. Heathcotes' academy; This book is presented with the kindest and most undying love of her friend M. Washlyn'. 16

Also more reliable, because unfiltered through either fiction or memory, are those few records of the book-trade which survive. Jan Fergus has analysed ledgers detailing the sales made by the Clays to the boys of Rugby School between 1744 and 1784. She has found that twelve per cent of the little books whose names appear in the ledgers were chapbooks: 171 out of 1401. These cost eight-pence (and so stretch, but do not break, any standard definition of the chapbook) and were generally recorded as ‘History of’ books – the History of Parismus , for instance, or Robin Hood , or Moll Flanders . The most popular were Guy, Earl of Warwick (twenty-five copies sold), Seven Champions of Christendom (fifteen) and Valentine and Orson (eleven). The ledgers also list other cheaper books, probably also chapbooks, such as a two-pence House that Jack Built and some listed only as ‘Little Books’. Fergus recognises that the Rugbeans probably consumed other chapbooks which do not feature in the Clays’ records, either because they were bought for cash (not on credit, which was the reason for their entry in the ledgers) or because they were purchased from other sources, quite possibly the chapmen who, the account books show, stocked up at the Clays’ shops. 17

5

Another strategy employed by some of those investigating chapbook readership has been to deduce the readership of chapbooks from their contents. Margaret Spufford, for instance, was happy to assume a youthful readership for some of the chapbooks collected by in the late seventeenth century from her judgment that their story-lines would have been relished by children. So many chapbooks tell of the adventures of apprentices, she suggested, that we might be fairly sure that teenage males probably formed part of their intended readership. She named Aurelius, the Valiant Prentice and John and His Mistress . The latter, she thought, catered for 'specifically sexual adolescent fantasies' with its account of an apprentice's seduction of his master's wife. Likewise, Spufford was convinced that a chapbook called Country Garlands was designed for females just past adolescence because it contains verses such as this: You little do think while I sleep in my bed How many strange fancies do run in my head; I dream that my love upon my breast he leans, Dear Mother, you know I am now in my teens Therefore, I am just in my prime. 18 One might very well argue that an audience as explicitly indicated as this need not necessarily have correlated with the actual readership - that, to put it in a nutshell, old men might have happily read of young girls (Pepys himself springs to mind). Yet other book historians have inferred even the specific age of the target readers from the texts and images. Peter Isaac, for instance, writing of the chapbooks published by Davison of Alnwick in the early nineteenth century, has noted that ' The House that Jack Built , with its relatively large type and profusion of illustrations (by no means always relevant to the text), is suitable for the entertainment of the very young reader', while ' The Orphan Boy and The Invisible Prince , with their rather minute text type, would appeal to an older child.' 19 By the same token, we might deem many chapbooks decidedly not intended for children on the basis of their very graphic content. Some could bear titles as overtly unsuitable (to modern eyes) as Cupid's annual festival or The blackamoor in the wood; or a lamentable on the tragical end of a gallant lord and virtuous lady; together with the untimely death of their two children .20 Perhaps children read these too, just as stories of valiant apprentices and pubescent girls might have been enjoyed by adult readers. We should be wary of interpreting

6 readership, either intended or actual, through the distorting lens of our current assumptions about childhood.

By far the largest cache of evidence derives from the condemnation of children's chapbook reading. An early example is William Tyndale's attack on restrictions on reading in 1528 which included a complaint that the clergy were too lax in tolerating the reading of 'Robin Hood and Bevis of Hampton, Hercules, Hector, and Troylus, with a thousand and fables of love and wantons and of ribaldry, as filthy as heart can think, to corrupt the minds of youth withal.' 21 The very same point was being made by Puritans almost two centuries later. It is a great blessing, The History of Genesis (1708) reports, That Children in England have liberty to read the holy Scripture, when others abroad are denied it. And yet alas! how often do we see Parents prefer a Tom Thumb , Guy of Warwick , Valentine and Orson , or some such foolish Book, before the Book of Life! Let not your Children read these vain Books, profane , and filthy songs, for these fill them with wanton Thoughts, and nasty and obscene Discourse. Throw away all fond and amorous Romances, and fabulous Histories of Giants, the bombast Atchievements of Knight Errantry, and the like; for these imprint false Notions and irregular Conceits, and fill the Heads of Children with vain, silly and idle Imaginations. Do not think of curing the Diseases of Ignorance with such dangerous Remedies. 22 It might be thought that this last phrase goes some way to supporting the contention that chapbooks were indeed frequently used to teach children to read.

There are two clear problems with this kind of evidence. First, it might be argued that such condemnations were a conventional part of the post-Reformation spiritual autobiography and that the chapbooks were doing service as routine signifiers of profane interests and recreations. The repudiations of such reading, therefore, should not necessarily be taken as certain evidence of children's actual use of chapbooks. 23 Against this it can be pointed out that many much more secular disavowals of youthful chapbook reading also exist. Henry Crosse, for instance, was less worried

7 about the spiritual damage the chapbooks were doing and more concerned about the injury they could do to morality and character formation. Writing in the early seventeenth century, he lamented that the young were gaining access to texts such as 'the Court of Venus , the Pallace of Pleasure, Guy of Warwicke, Libbius and Arthur , Bevis of Hampton , the wise men of Goatam , Scogins Jeasts, Fortunatus , and those new delights that have succeeded these, and are now extant, too tedious to recken up'. Such 'sweete songs and wanton tales' he worried, would 'ravish and set on fire the young untempered affections’. 24 His account draws attention to the second possible objection to this kind of evidence. The amalgamation of titles such as 'The Court of Venus' with 'Guy of Warwick' might make us question whether these attacks were narrowly targeted at children's reading of what we can with confidence call chapbooks, or whether they were aimed indiscriminately at all forms of impious and worldly literature, just as likely to be a pornographic narrative, or the sort of chivalric romance which turned Don Quixote's reason. Certainly, Francis Meres' 1598 list of twenty-three publications which he deemed harmful to youth included a very miscellaneous collection of titles. Bevis of Hampton and Guy of Warwick were at the top of the list, but also reprehended were such heroic romances as 'the foure Sonnes of Aymon Gargantua ', 'Primaleon of Greece', 'the Myrror of Knight-hood' and ' Ornatus and Artesia ' (all of which Meres describes as 'no lesse hurtfull to youth, than the workes of Machiauell to age'). 25

Against this objection might be set some confessions of childhood chapbook reading which do discriminate between chivalric romances and 'proper' chapbooks. Francis Kirkman describes how his delight in the former was brought about by his early acquaintance with the latter. His account is worth quoting at length because it also points out exactly what their critics feared might be the consequences of reading chapbooks when young: once I happened upon a Six Pence & having lately read that famous Book of the Fryar and the Boy , and being hugely pleased with that, as also the excellent History of the Seven Wise Masters of Room [sic ], and heard great Commendation of Fortunatus , I laid out all my money for that, and thought I had a great bargain, conceiting that the Lady Fortune would one time or other bestow such a Purse upon me as she did on Fortunatus ; now having read

8 this Book and being desirous of reading more of that nature; one of my School-fellows lent me Doctor Faustus , which also pleased me, especially when he travelled in the Air, saw all the world and did what he listed…. The next book I met with was Fryar Bacon , whose pleasant Stories much delighted me: But when I came to Knight Errantry, and reading Montelion Knight of the Oracle , and Ornatus and Artesia , and the Famous Parismus ; I was contented beyond measure…. 26 As Margaret Spufford has pointed out, Kirkman's reminiscences show both that the son of a London merchant was reading a corpus of rather humble chapbook tales (before he graduated to chivalric romances), and that a 'lively system of exchange and barter of sixpenny existed among his schoolfellows'. 27 We get the same sense that it was not only lower-class children who were reading chapbooks, but that affluent children were buying their own, from Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy , where Uncle Toby recalls that 'When Guy, Earl of Warwick, and Parismus and Parismenus, and Valentine and Orson, and the Seven Champions of England, were handed round the school, – were they not all purchased with my own pocket money?' 28 These were affluent children reading chapbooks for fun, it should be noted, not as part of the curriculum imposed by their parents or teachers. When chapbooks were used as part of an educational programme (as Gary Kelly suggested they frequently were) the plan could apparently backfire. In The Art of Teaching in Sport (1785), Ellinor Fenn tells of a boy who, being designed for the church, was given by his father a copy of Seven Champions of Christendom so that he might learn to read the black letter alphabet in which many were printed. The scheme may have worked, but the boy, become a minister, recalled only the delight he had taken in the knights’ adventures, reading the book sitting astride a beam in a barn.29

After the mid-eighteenth century, the tone of the evidence changes. Memoirs and autobiographies become full of fond reminiscences of childhood chapbook reading, often written as if chapbooks were a thing of the past, both for the writers personally and for children in general. Leigh Hunt remembered the 'little six-penny numbers' of his childhood, paying special attention to their physical characteristics: 'I doated on their size; I doated on their type, on their ornaments, on their wrappers containing lists of other poets, and on the engravings'. 30 William Wordsworth, Charles Lamb and

9 many of the other leading Romantic writers echoed this enthusiasm. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for instance, recollected his love of Tom Hickathrift , Jack the Giant-Killer , 'Belisarius, Robinson Crusoe, and Philip Quarles; and … the Arabian Nights' Entertainments'. 31 Strikingly, though born into penury and deprived of formal education, John Clare named very similar titles: I was very fond of books before I began to write [.] these were such that came my way 6 p[enn]y that are in the possession of every doorcalling hawker & found on every bookstall at fairs & market whose bills are as familiar with everyone as his own name[.] shall I repeat some of them Little Red Riding Hood , Valentine & Orson , Jack & the Giant, Long Tom the Carrier , The King & the Cobbler , Tawney Bear , The Seven Sleepers , Tom Hickathrift , Johnny Armstrong , Idle Laurence , who carried that power spell about him that laid everybody to sleep – old Mother Bunch , Robin Hood's Garland , Old Mother Shipton & Old Nixon's Prophecys , History of Gothan [sic], & many others. 32 Charles Dickens, more socially and educationally privileged than Clare but less than Coleridge and Hunt, remembered reading 'Faust', 'the Norwood Fortune Teller', 'Fairburn's Comic Songsters', 'Tom Thumb', 'Fair Rosamond', 'Fortunatus', 'The Seven Champions', 'Mother Bunch's Wonders' and other chapbooks which were, he remembered, 'infinite delights to me'. 33 The impression we get from all these accounts is that the children found their way to these chapbooks independently, and perhaps illicitly, rather than that these texts formed part of their education. John Clare, though very poor, 'savd all the pence I got to buy them', just like Uncle Toby and Francis Kirkman. 34 Samuel Bamford, also born into poverty (in 1788), bought his own too, remembering that 'every farthing' he could 'scrape together was … spent in purchasing histories of "Jack the Giant Killer", "Saint George and the Dragon", "Tom Hickathrift", "Jack and the Beanstalk", "The Seven Champions of Christendom", the tale of "Fair Rosamond" … and such like romances.' 35

Perhaps this kind of evidence is just as questionable as those ashamed confessions of childhood chapbook reading which had proliferated earlier. One distorting factor is the way in which a writer like Bamford, in common with many working-class autobiographers, wanted to stress that through hard work and talent, he had risen from

10 a humble background, symbolised by the plebeian chapbooks, to a much more eminent position in society, associated with more high-brow books. The account set down earlier by Mary Collier, the working-class poet, is probably fulfilling a similar function. ‘I was taught to read when very Young, and took great delight in it; but my Mother dying, I lost my Education', she wrote in the preface to a 1762 of her poems. 'My Recreation was reading', she continued, and 'I bought and borrow'd many Books, any foolish History highly delighted me; but as I grew Older I read Speed and Baker's Chronicles, Fox's Acts and Monuments of the Church, Josephus, and others.’ Her graduation from 'any foolish History' – chapbooks, that is – to serious, religious works symbolises the victory over her working-class roots, won by dint of her industry and intelligence – a victory which is supposed to persuade readers to favour her poems. 36 Collier was one of the few women to comment on chapbook reading in childhood. On its own, this imbalance is perhaps too flimsy a basis for the conclusion that chapbooks appealed more to boys than girls. If we can be fairly certain that children read chapbooks in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, though, we cannot be as confident that girls consumed equal quantities to boys.

Romantic writers’ testimony of their childhood chapbook reading is not only often rather nostalgic but tends also to be couched in terms of its difference to the experience of subsequent generations. In The Prelude , Wordsworth complained about a new kind of serious, moral and scientific children’s literature which, by 1804 (when these lines were first drafted), had displaced the old chapbook tales and reared a breed of infant prodigy, ‘no Child, / But a dwarf Man; in knowledge, virtue, skill’. What he infinitely preferred was the reading matter of an earlier age, his own youth: 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! It is not quite clear who he was imploring to do this ‘giving’ – contemporary children’s authors, or perhaps ‘they who have the art / To manage books’. But Wordsworth’s account of the way that a new, rational children’s literature was cutting off children’s access to older chapbook tales is in any case surely somewhat compromised by both his wistfulness and polemicism.37 Alan Richardson has contended that in defending chapbook and fairy tales, Wordsworth was displaying his

11 increasing conservatism. Traditional tales kept the ‘new mass readership … apolitical’, Richardson argues, and, because they were hardly educational as the newer rational and moral children’s books were designed to be, the socio-economic and cultural aspirations of their readers were not encouraged. 38 But irrespective of whether we see Wordsworth’s view as a defence against social or even political revolution, his view of children’s literary history was widely held. Charles Lamb, writing with much the same nostalgia and polemicism, shared the opinion that the age of children reading chapbooks had passed. He wrote to Coleridge in 1802 that ‘Mrs. Barbauld’s stuff has banished all the old classics of the nursery’, and instead of ‘wild tales’ arousing a ‘beautiful Interest’, turn-of-the-century children were force-fed ‘Knowledge insignificant and vapid’ in their books. He does not mention chapbooks per se , but that these are the kinds of texts he approves of, and whose loss he resents, is fairly clear. ‘Think what you would have been now,’ he commiserated with Coleridge, ‘if instead of being fed with Tales and old wives’ fables in childhood, you had been crammed with and natural history?’ 39 A decade or two later, John Clare was saying much the same thing, lamenting that in his youth 'rustics listened with astonishment to the Strenth [sic] of Hickathrift', but that 'these things will do nothing now'.40

Just because these Romantics believed, or even affected to believe, that children were no longer reading chapbooks does not mean that this was in fact the case. 41 Indeed, the unanimity of their assertion is in itself almost enough to cast doubt on its veracity. After all, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Lamb, children in the 1770s and '80s, were lamenting that the children of the years around the turn of the century were denied chapbooks, but this was precisely the time when Clare and Bamford were claiming to enjoy them. They, for their part, were insisting that chapbooks had died out by the 1820s, which was precisely when Dickens testified to have been reading them. If we are to believe all these writers, in other words, the end of children's chapbook reading must have been a protracted process which lasted well over half a century. Yet this evidence is not necessarily self-contradictory. Wordsworth, Coleridge and Lamb were from comparatively affluent backgrounds. Bamford and Clare were much poorer. This suggests that Wordsworth’s assertion that children’s chapbook reading had been superseded by a newer kind of children’s literature applied only to the fairly

12 privileged; that in fact, chapbooks were still being read by those lower down the social order.

Any suggestions that chapbooks had vanished from children's lives by the early nineteenth century is also exposed as misleadingly class-specific by the confident assertions of chapbooks' continuing popularity expressed by Evangelical groups. The Cheap Repository Tracts (CRTs) published between 1795 and 1798, and the publications of the Religious Tract Society (RTS) published from 1799, were intended to build on a flourishing chapbook tradition. They were to supplant them, their instigators made clear, by imitating chapbooks in every particular: to be cheap, short and small, to be peddled by chapmen, and to include content calculated to appear plebeian in tone and associations. A retrospective account in the Christian Spectator of the RTS's origins makes the deception that was used quite clear: the Committee were obliged, in the first instance, to prepare tracts with striking titles, and in some degree inferior in their contents, to prevent too great a discrepancy from those they were designed to supplant. The titles of some of them fully evince this: 'The Fortune Teller's Conjuring Cap', 'The Wonderful Cure of General Naaman', 'The Stingy Father's Dream', 'Tom Toper's Tale over his Jug of Ale', 'Rhyming Dick and the Strolling Player', all indicate that it was necessary to catch at very uninformed minds…. 42 It is not wholly clear, however, whether these tracts were aimed at children, though it has generally been assumed that they were (certainly, RTS pamphlets and CRTs are a frequent feature of collections of historical British children's books). Hard evidence is very difficult to come by. Jacqueline Bratton, historian of the contribution of the RTS to children's literature, infers that a young readership was intended, citing their production of 'suitably christianised versions of ancient tales like Jack the Giant-Killer and Little Red Riding Hood.' 43 On the other hand, Beilby Porteous, Bishop of London, in a letter to Hannah More at the initiation of the CRT scheme, spoke only of 'the poor people' and 'multitudes of the lowest rabble' as the constituency for her tracts. It was to them, he said, that the booksellers, 'hawkers, pedlars, and match- women' vend 'the vilest penny pamphlets', and therefore at them that the new tracts should be aimed. 44 Hannah More apparently agreed, for it was only two years later, in

13 1796, that she spoke of children as having become part of her target audience, a surprise apparently. Or rather, children constituted two separate audiences. First, she said, she had found that the gentry wished to have the tracts 'for their children, for schools, &c.', and to meet this demand she decided to produce better quality editions. Second, she noted that Bishop Porteous had come up with the 'idea of getting our little books given to the charity children of London … (as it has been done at , to a great extent)'. 45 She thought that the great advantage of this proposal was that, through the children, the tracts would reach a greater number of their parents. But her readiness to direct the tracts to children, both rich and poor, demonstrates that a youthful readership of chapbooks was expected, and so entrenched that it required counteraction.

Irrespective, then, of certain stock reactions to memories of chapbook use - the regretful, the nostalgic, the polemical - it seems possible to draw several tentative conclusions. First, alongside their elders, children read chapbooks throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This should probably not surprise us since the format, images and cheapness of the chapbooks, as well as the simplicity of their content, the ease with which they could be read, and the fact they were brought straight to the consumer without the necessity of a planned and expensive trip to a retail outlet, all made them suitable. Second, before 1800, according to the limited evidence available, children seem just as likely to have bought their own chapbooks than to have acquired them as gifts or as teaching tools, and they seem to have read them for pleasure, not as part of any curriculum. Third, and a much more uncertain conclusion, it might be argued that child chapbook users came from all social classes at first, but towards the end of the chapbook era, were drawn increasingly from less economically and educationally privileged sections of society.

There is, however, one very important complication. By the turn of the nineteenth century, the chapbook had evolved considerably, or rather a new form of publication, which has routinely shared the same designation, had become available. The most important change was one of intended audience: they were designed exclusively for children. They were also different because they were sold, almost always, not by travelling chapmen, but through the normal range of retail outlets or direct from their publishers or printers. And they exhibit ostensibly minor, but actually quite significant,

14 physical differences from earlier chapbooks. They were usually comprised of eight, twelve or, at the most, sixteen pages. They generally included a on every page, and these could be dab- or stencil-coloured. They were sometimes covered with Dutch flowered paper wrappers, or with coloured paper. They were slightly smaller than earlier chapbooks, usually 6-9cm high by 4-6cm broad. And they were generally better printed than earlier chapbooks, although they were still cheap, costing only a halfpenny or a penny. But it is the change in content which is most significant. Short moral tales and didactic fictions were to be found as frequently as fairy stories and legendary tales. In fact, as Sue Dipple, one of the few book historians to be clear about this taxonomical distinction, concludes, ‘The two kinds have little in common other than their inexpensive price, crude cuts and cheap method of .’ 46 Anyone who has worked with historic children's books will instantly recognise this new kind of product. The ‘children’s chapbooks’, as they might be called, were produced by firms like J. G. Rusher of Banbury, William Walker of Otley, Thomas Richardson, and John Drewry, of Derby, Mozley of Gainsborough, Houlston of Wellington, Isaac Marsden of Harwich and Ipswich, James Lumsden of Glasgow, George Ross of Edinburgh, James Kendrew, or Wilson and Spence, of York, William Davison of Alnwick, as well as several London businesses. 47 John Newbery himself, the pioneer of a more respectable children's literature in the mid-eighteenth century, might even be included in this list since he published at least four one-penny books for children in the 1750s and '60s. 48

These children’s chapbooks did not immediately displace the classic chapbooks; rather, the two varieties overlapped. In fact, the fragmentation of the chapbook market had apparently started much earlier. A catalogue of chapbooks issued by Cluer Dicey and John Marshall in 1764 listed separately 'Penny History Books' and 'Small Histories or Books of Amusement for Children'. Although there were similarities between these two products - both were sold in bulk, and both were still very cheap - some important differences were already clear. Most notably, the 'Penny History Books' sold at two shillings and sixpence for one hundred and four (presumably according to the formula half a crown for a hundred, plus four thrown in for free: working out at 0.29 pence per chapbook). The children's books were over twice as expensive, wholesaling at six shillings per hundred (0.69 pence each, or even a little more if Dicey did not extend his buy-a-hundred-get-four-free offer to these). They could also be had 'stitch'd on embossed paper' at ninepence for thirteen (also 0.69 pence each). 49 What this

15 demonstrates is that Dicey and Marshall had identified, and were beginning to exploit, a new market for books written especially for children, a market which they recognised demanded better quality and could bear higher prices. This bifurcation would lead to the parallel forms of the classic and children’s chapbooks by the end of the century. But it might also be argued that this division between the standard chapbook and publications designed especially for children marks the beginning of a complete schism, with the new, respectable children’s literature of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries founded on its difference from the older popular literature tradition.

This notion that chapbooks were most significant in children's culture in their role as the antithesis of a respectable children's literature, one half of the dialectic out of which emerged a nineteenth-century ‘great tradition’, is very attractive. That chapbooks were locked in a protracted contest with a newer, more respectable children’s literature has been a cornerstone of modern children’s literature criticism. According to The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature , for instance, 'The work of the writers of moral tales for the young in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was largely a reaction against chapbook literature'? 50 And for Geoffrey Summerfield, as for many other critics, it was a gradually developing hostility to these moral tales which encouraged the reintroduction of fantasy to children’s literature in the early nineteenth century, leading to the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen (translated in 1823) and, ultimately, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). 51 In other words, it was out of the conflict between the chapbook and the moral tale, according to this view, that modern children’s literature emerged.

This version of literary history accords with the opinions of influential Romantic-era commentators. As we have seen, Wordsworth, Lamb and Clare, and others too, had said much the same thing in much the same terms: that children’s chapbook reading was losing out in the early nineteenth century in a battle with more earnest children’s literature. These statements of regret, though are rather tendentious, and are very evidently enmeshed in a wider commentary on cultural change. Clare's meditation on changes in children's attitudes to chapbooks since his own youth makes this clear. If early nineteenth-century children were to hear the story of Tom Hickathrift , he conjectured, not recognising him, they would be bewildered by his supernatural strength and ‘enquire if he was not a steam engine'. 52 This is also a reproachful

16 observation of the advance of a modern, industrial, rationalist mentality. The most fervent statement of this concern was from Dickens, in the 1850s, talking of fairy tales. He feuded with George Cruikshank over the latter's publication of reworked fairy stories designed to convey a temperance message. 'In an utilitarian age, of all other times,' Dickens wrote in his Household Words , 'it is a matter of grave importance that fairy tales should be respected'. 53 Chapbooks were for the Romantics what fairy tales were for Dickens: a charm against the encroachment of modern society. They understood them as a direct manifestation of the traditions of ordinary people, and of the nation's identity, accreted over many centuries. 54

Looking again at Clare's comment, it seems that he was using chapbooks as an indicator not only of the progress of industry but also of the effects of a new educational programme that taught children not to wonder at the incredible feats of characters like Hickathrift, but instead to rationalise, to think in terms of modern technology, to be more at home with mechanical facts than fanciful heroes. It was a lament to be developed at much greater length in Dickens’ Hard Times (1854), but it was also at the core of a certain understanding of the chapbook as early as the last decades of the eighteenth century. The Romantics blamed the demise of children reading chapbooks on the rise of a new culture of childhood, which emphasised the importance of using childhood years productively and to equip infants for adulthood as quickly as possible. This anxiety about changes in society's understanding of childhood was related to many other concerns - to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's influential idea of the natural, artless, innocent child, to Wordsworth's ideas of the child's more direct connection with the numinous, and to an idea that children were more closely linked to the true, unrefined and uncorrupted spirit of the land and its people. What is most interesting here, though, is that this perception of a new, more utilitarian culture of childhood could very conveniently be symbolised by the 'new' children's literature of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. There was always some inexactitude when Romantic critics were denouncing this new children's literature. They could draw into their line of fire all those children's books published since the era of pioneers like John Newbery, Mary Cooper and Thomas Boreman in the 1740s, though they aimed mainly at the moral tales and books of instruction which had been produced in the following decades by the authors Mitzi Myers has called 'mentorias': Sarah Trimmer, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth and

17 others. 55 Their targets, in other words, were all of those books which had been produced since children's literature had blossomed into a commercially successful and secure form, and which they regarded as overly didactic, rational, useful, condescending and stifling, as Gradgrindian in both intent and method. In short, they attacked those texts which, they felt, stood in diametrical opposition to the chapbook, and which, they regretted, had superseded it.

This suggestion that 'modern' children's literature had in some way supplanted the chapbook was not new. Even the very first of the new wave of children's books, published by Newbery from the 1740s, were criticised in some quarters for banishing traditional tales. Samuel Johnson condemned his friend Hester Lynch Piozzi for using 'Newbery's books' in the education of her children. Even when she urged in her defence 'the numerous editions and quick sale of Tommy Prudent or Goody Two Shoes', he criticised her for abandoning the chapbooks he had enjoyed as a child. 56 By the turn of the century, the same complaint had ossified into a rhetorical convention. The most eloquent statement of the case was Wordsworth's in The Prelude . The child brought up on a diet of the new children's literature, barred from Fortunatus , Jack the Giant-Killer , Robin Hood , and St. George , would be able to read 'The inside of the earth, and spell the stars', would know 'the policies of foreign lands' and 'names of districts, cities, towns, / The whole world over'. But Wordsworth paints such a child as a sort of tragic wanderer through this knowledge, tormented by the progress he must make, a child in name but not in occupation, one who 'must live / Knowing that he grows wiser every day / Or else not live at all'. 57 In a lecture of 1808, Coleridge expressed the same idea, less lyrically but with a more precise notion of the books he was attacking. He condemned those 'moral tales where a good little boy comes in and says, "Mama, I met a poor beggar man and gave him the sixpence you gave me yesterday. Did I do right?" – "O, yes, my dear, to be sure you did."'. This was not virtue but vanity, he said, not goodness but 'goodyness'. 58 For Lamb the books to be condemned were those which taught 'that a horse is an animal, and Billy is better than a horse, and such like'.59 And William Godwin (soon to become a children’s publisher) loathed books like that proposed to him in 1802: 'A Tour Through Papa's House', which would 'explain all the furniture, how carpets were made, the history and manufacture of iron' and so on. This was 'exactly the sort of writing for children which has lately been in fashion', he wrote to a friend who had asked him his opinions

18 on children's books. Just as Coleridge would speak against 'our system of "cramming" children', Godwin insisted that 'the worst consequences flow from overloading the faculties of children, and a forced maturity'. Such stuff, he wrote, threatened to crush the imagination of its readers, and thereby the development of an ability to empathise, the basis of true morality. Godwin, Coleridge, Lamb and Wordsworth all saw chapbooks as the truest defence against such developments. To the new children's literature Coleridge infinitely preferred 'The Seven Champions of Christendom' and 'Jack the Giant-Killer', 'for at least they make the child forget himself'. Godwin endorsed 'Fortunatus', 'Valentine and Orson', 'The Seven Champions of Christendom', 'Beauty and the Beast' and other such titles. It was these, he insisted, which would produce in the reader ‘an active mind and a warm heart.’ ‘Should children be permitted to read Romances, & Relations of Giants & Magicians & Genii?’ Coleridge asked himself, answering ‘I know all that has been said against it; but I have formed my faith in the affirmative. – I know no other way of giving the mind a love of “the Great,” & “the Whole”’. 60

The question is, do these assertions of an oppositional relationship between chapbooks and children’s literature, however emphatically made, represent the reality? Or, to put it more concisely, was Thomas Boreman correct when he predicted that as a result of his pioneering 1741 Gigantick Histories children’s books, ‘Tom Thumb shall now / be thrown away, / And Jack who did / the Giants slay’? 61 The argument does have an undeniable logic to it. Children's books in the years after Thomas Boreman and John Newbery’s innovations were characteristically informative, socially and morally edifying and, above all, aimed at respectability and politeness.62 Chapbooks were regarded as the opposite: amoral, unruly, unedifying and vulgar. The contents of many moral tales can seem directly to combat the values and tone of the chapbook tales, as if their producers – both shrewd publishers like Newbery and sincerely moral ‘mentorias’ – were carefully shaping their texts to repudiate the chaotic, fantastical and abandoned amorality of Jack the Giant-Killer or The Hen-pecked Husband . Among modern critics, this case for the supersession of the chapbook by the new children's literature has been argued most fully by Andrew O'Malley. His analysis sees the 'new' children's literature as a vehicle of middle-class ideology. As well as being hostile to aristocratic values, he argues, the new children’s literature carefully targeted the values of the lower classes which (the authors of the

19 new children's literature believed) were expressed in chapbook literature. The chapbooks retailed a 'lottery mentality', O'Malley maintains: a conviction that good fortune came out of the blue, rather than as the result of planning and hard work. These were notions which flew in the face of the bourgeois values of industry and thrift, and this was why the new children's literature was designed to confront and replace the chapbook. O'Malley traces the way in which the chapbook tradition of children's books was routed. He argues that it was a process that was more or less complete by the 1790s, but that it had begun with John Newbery's publications half a century earlier. 63

O'Malley develops the argument by attempting to demonstrate that these texts of the 1740s, '50s and '60s show an overlap between the chapbook and what would emerge as the new children's literature at the end of the century. Newbery's, for instance, were transitional texts, hybrids which retained some elements of the chapbook tradition but which simultaneously stressed the importance of education and morality, and espoused a clear bourgeois work-and-reward ethos. They looked broadly similar to the chapbooks, being the same shape and size, and they included certain elements which were deliberately meant to remind readers of popular literature. Newbery's famous A Little Pretty Pocket Book (1744), for instance, placed Jack the Giant-Killer at its beginning to usher readers into the text. Likewise, in The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes (1765) the heroine, otherwise a model of the rational, hard-working, self- helping ethos, is endowed with the much more primeval ability to talk to animals and birds. O'Malley's case is made even more convincingly by another, even earlier book which he does not mention: Mary Cooper's The Child's New Plaything (1743). Advertised as a spelling-book, it contains lists of letters, syllables and words to learn, followed by short lessons, then fables, proverbs and extracts from the bible, all of which leads to a selection of chapbook tales under the heading 'Stories Proper to raise the Attention and excite the Curiosity of Children'. Here we find the chapbook standards The Story of St. George and the Dragon , The Story of Guy Earl of Warwick , The Story of Fortunatus , and The Story of Reynard the Fox . These are even made to resemble chapbooks. Each is between four and eight pages long and is decorated with a woodcut at its head. The affinity with popular literature is further stressed by some typically chapbook 'Songs' which round off the volume: 'The Dumb-Woman cur'd', for instance, and 'Sir Eglamore'. 64

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O'Malley is careful to stress the gradual nature of this supersession. But even so, the development of the new children's literature, and its relationship with chapbook culture, was surely much more untidy than his analysis suggests. The first important caveat is that there were many other sources, besides chapbooks, which played a major role in shaping the new children's literature of the mid-eighteenth century. Educational books, specifically intended for children of course, whether used in schools, churches and at home, were at least as important in influencing the development of modern children's books. So too were religious texts, whether the older Puritan narratives such as James Janeway's A Token for Children (1672) or the much milder verses of Isaac Watts' Divine Songs (1715), along with fables, fairy tales, primers, for adults and many other textual forms. of traditional narratives, carefully repackaged for children, were also available, such as Robert Wharton’s Historiæ Pueriles (1734). It included stories such as ‘Piramus and Thisbe’, ‘The five Sons of Morindus’. ‘King Lear and his three Daughters’ as well as biblical and historical biographies. 65 A second crucial proviso to the supersession argument is that, as we have seen, children were still reading chapbooks in the later eighteenth century and well into the 1800s, both those chapbooks designed for a general audience and those aimed especially at them. What careful scrutiny reveals, in fact, is that rather than any straightforward replacement of chapbooks by children's literature, the two forms overlapped and integrated in many complicated ways.

One form of integration was the hybrid text, partly derived from the chapbook tradition, and partly from the new children's literature. O'Malley persuasively identifies several titles from the Newbery era as taking elements from the two forms, but these kinds of hybrids did not die out. Indeed, they formed a staple of what I have referred to as the ‘children’s chapbook’ of the early nineteenth century. Among his chapbooks of the 1820s and '30s, for instance, Kendrew of York published titles such as The Foundling; or, the History of Lucius Stanhope and The History of Tommy and Harry . Behind these alluring chapbook-style titles were moral tales, the first originally by Richard Johnson (and accompanied here by Isaac Watts' poem 'Against Lying'), the second loosely related to Thomas Day's Sandford and Merton (1783-89). The subtitle of Kendrew’s The House that Jack Built more clearly reveals the way in which a didactic superstructure had been built on traditional chapbook material: To

21 which is added Some Account of Jack Jingle, Showing by what Means he acquired his Learning and in consequence thereof got rich, and built himself a House .66

The opposite arrangement was also common: chapbook texts revised and reformatted to accord with the new proprieties of children's literature and published in more substantial volumes. Particularly interesting examples include an of Guy, Earl of Warwick published in Coventry in about 1808 and The British Champion; or honour rewarded , published in York in around 1797. The former's full title reveals the accommodation which has taken place: The history of the renowned Guy of Warwick. To which is prefixed a short account of Kenilworth Castle. Extracted from Sir. Wm. Dugdale's 'Antiquities of Warwickshire' adapted to the entertainment of Youth. [And] The History of Richard Nevil, the stout Earl of Warwick also called the King Maker . The interpolated educational matter was accompanied by an excising of material objectionable to new proprieties. The preface recommended the book 'to parents and teachers, as a work perfectly free from those ideas and sentiments which too frequently render books of the kind so improper for children'. Reinforcing its identity as a moral tale is the main narrative’s setting within a frame story in which a responsible narrator tells Guy’s story to his pupils over five nights as a reward for their good behaviour – a device popularised by John Aikin and Anna Barbauld’s influential children’s book, Evenings at Home (1792-96). The uneasiness of the producers of the new children's literature with the fantastical associations of the chapbook tradition is clearly indicated by the narrator's announcement that, since the original version of Guy's adventures 'carry with them so much of the air of fable … I shall content myself with relating only that part of his history which is generally believed to be true: and even this is so extraordinary that some historians will not give credit to it, and even question whether there ever lived such a person'. 67

Mixing the two forms rather differently, The British Champion; or honour rewarded begins with a fairly standard, if truncated, version of 'The history of St. George and the Dragon' from The Seven Champions of Christendom , but the tale of his heroism occupies just seven of the book's ninety-five pages and only one of its forty-two . What follows are moral tales, including 'The story of Fanny Friendly and the Merchant', 'The History of Master Wantthought' and 'The Fairy's Present; or, the History of Miss Kitty Gracewell'. As with the tale of St. George, these are narratives

22 of courage, cleverness and virtue, but they celebrate the new, 'domestic' heroism of the moral tale: Fanny Friendly's honourable decision to return the £50 note she has found, or Master Want-Thought's belated, but valiant and self-sacrificing, decision to apply himself to learn to read. These were new national virtues, a new kind of honour to be rewarded. 68

So fully integrated had the chapbook and new children's literature traditions become in the early nineteenth century that the catalogues of the many provincial publishers who specialised in children's chapbooks included them both indiscriminately. One sixteen- page version of The Seven Champions of Christendom , for instance, advertises itself as part of a series of 'Juvenile Books at sixpence each'. Also figuring in the series are such much more obviously children’s titles as 'The Baby's Alphabet', 'Baby Rhymes', 'Mother Hubbard and Her Dog', 'My Mother' and 'Adventures of Paul Pry'. 69 A combination of the two traditions could even occur within the same title. The Young Traveller's Delight; Containing the Lives of Several Noted Characters, Likely to Amuse Children was a 24-page chapbook published by Marsden of Chelmsford for two-pence. It contained stories like 'Little Tom the Traveller and the Lion' (a retelling of the Androcles legend) and 'Nancy Tender' (how Nancy saved a dog from being drowned by cruel boys, and how the dog later protected her from a would-be murderer) and then the chapbook perennial, 'George and the Dragon'. Remarkably, this was followed by 'Tommy Sugar-Plumb's Remarks on the Narrative of St. George and the Dragon', an attempt to rebut those who might claim that there was never such a person. It was also a history lesson. How can St. George not have existed, argues Tommy, since 'if you will but examine the records of London, and other parts,' you will find so 'many provinces, forts, churches, and a royal hospital, are named in honour of that noble martyr'? 70

Another complication of the supersession model is that, just as so many Romantic commentators were proclaiming the death of the chapbook, innovating publishers were placing new versions of the old chapbook favourites at the heart of their strategies. Benjamin Tabart began this trend with a three-volume work entitled Tabart's Collection of Popular Stories for the Nursery which appeared in 1804. Within the year the tales were also being published separately. Titles included chapbook staples like The Seven Champions of Christendom and Valentine and Orson (both 1804), as well as fairy tales. Other publishers quickly followed the example, including John Harris,

23 successor to the Newberys. 71 These were hardly chapbooks in the traditional sense. They were not sold by chapmen, they usually boasted three copper-plate engravings, they cost the not insignificant sum of sixpence, and, though they were usually about 34 printed pages long, they could run to over a hundred pages or to more than one volume. They are, though, certainly symptomatic of a continuing appetite for chapbook material. And they are hardly indicative of the remorseless progress of a Gradgrindian children's literature, about which the Romantics so passionately complained.

Given this history of a continuing integration of the chapbook and children’s book traditions, it is impossible to think that the new children’s literature straightforwardly replaced the traditional chapbook in children’s lives, and almost as difficult to believe that the moral tale was designed as a deliberate attempt to supplant chapbook literature. After all, many producers of the new children’s literature were very evidently anxious to incorporate elements from the chapbooks, both form and content, into their own titles. Indeed, by the early nineteenth century, the chapbook format had become a central part of print provision for children, which hardly indicates that Romantic-era and Victorian children’s literature was founded on any outright hostility to popular culture. Even if we regard efforts to integrate chapbook culture into children's books as an attempt to neutralise, reform or reclaim it, something the CRTs and RTS were attempting to achieve, the profound hybridity of the resulting texts is surely more indicative of publishers', authors' and consumers' respect and appreciation for chapbooks than their disdain.

However, there is another way of construing the relationship between chapbooks and the new children’s literature. The key is to turn it on its head, so that the new children’s literature of the later eighteenth century is seen as a cause of the provision of chapbooks to children, rather than vice versa as O’Malley and so many Romantic critics posited. This readjusted analysis rests on the notion that children’s publishers from John Newbery onwards exploited a new demand for educational, moral, respectable, middle- class children’s texts, generating and then expanding a market which had not previously been catered for. The product they developed (as O’Malley and others have identified) was possessed of a thoroughly bourgeois agenda, and was increasingly targeted at middle-class consumers who could afford to spend a substantial amount on a single book for their children. John Newbery’s earliest publications, for instance, might cost as

24 little as a penny, but the ability of the market to bear more was quickly recognised. His first edition of The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes cost sixpence in 1765; by the 1790s his successor Elizabeth Newbery was charging two shillings for many of her publications, a 173-page abridgement of Sandford and Merton for example, and by the nineteenth century, her successor, John Harris, could charge twice as much. His Agnes, the little girl who promised every thing and performed nothing (c.1813) retailed at 4 shillings for just 56 pages. 72

Few could afford these prices, yet the demand for children’s books continued to grow. By the turn of the century, amongst all but the poorest, it was scarcely disputed that books ought to form part of children’s lives. The centrality of books in most children's experiences was the result of many factors. More extensive educational opportunities were certainly available, even if only at Sunday school level. Equally significant was the relentless spread of a pedagogic ethos which gradually percolated from the middle classes to those above and below them in the social hierarchy. Perhaps more important still were successful marketing campaigns by the producers of children’s literature: the book became an object of desire for children, and a material expression of parental affection and duty. All these factors helped to create an increasing demand for children’s books, but a concurrent up-scaling of mainstream children’s books created a widening gap between demand and affordability. This was the void that the children’s chapbooks were developed to fill. They were instructive and improving enough to fulfil the purposes of the new children’s literature, but they were cheap enough to find buyers at every level of society.

In this way, then, the new children’s literature of the later eighteenth century was responsible for the reinstitution of the chapbook at the heart of many children’s reading experiences. The post-Newbery books stimulated demand, and persuaded entrepreneurial publishers that there was money to be made in respectable children’s books. For the affluent, this demand was satisfied by expensive, original material; for the less wealthy, the children's chapbook was developed. It was surely no coincidence that publication of this kind of book flourished in the provinces. It was in London that reputable children’s books were most available, both in terms of convenient access to purchasing opportunities and the ability to afford the product. In smaller urban centres and the surrounding rural vicinities, the gap may have been wider between the demand

25 for improving and entertaining children’s books and the low level of provision. This could be why places such as York, Edinburgh, Derby, Glasgow, Gainsborough and Banbury developed as centres of the cheap children’s book trade. Of course this is not to say that London did not also have its own wealth inequalities. Chapbooks for poorer children were certainly successfully published there too. Nor is it to say that middle- and upper-class children did not read children’s chapbooks. Nevertheless, it seems likely that the rational and moral children’s literature of the later eighteenth century actually fostered the chapbook, at least in this new, nineteenth-century, specially-for- children form, rather than contributing to the its demise.

What we are left with, then, is a curious and in some ways contradictory conclusion. In some ways, the new, respectable children’s literature which flourished in second half of the eighteenth century and at the start of the nineteenth does exist in an oppositional relationship to the traditional chapbook. It was designed to be different, to provide children from more affluent backgrounds with a materially higher-quality product, and one that their parents and teachers would regard as morally and pedagogically superior. But this new kind of respectable children’s literature certainly did not wipe out the older chapbook tradition. Rather, it help to prolong the chapbook’s life. They were amalgamated together to produce several interesting hybrid forms. Sometimes this was to fulfil specific didactic purposes, in the hands of the RTS or in the CRT scheme for example. But just as often these new children’s chapbooks were published because the material they drew on was available easily and without copyright complications, because the hybrid forms that evolved were actually very appealing, and because these publications satisfied a demand for instructive yet delightful books, such as the affluent were enjoying, but which were also cheap. These early nineteenth-century children’s chapbooks proliferate in most collections of historical children’s books and are remarkable for the wide variety of material they contain: fairy tales and legendary stories, moral tales and instructive lessons, often in curious combinations. But what disrupts the standard history of children’s literature is that the children’s chapbook that flourished in the early nineteenth century owed its existence less to the classic chapbook than to the new wave of serious, respectable children’s books which so many chapbook advocates so heartily professed to despise.

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1 Catharine Macaulay, Letters on education. With observations on religious and metaphysical subjects (London, 1790), p.52. 2 McKay, An Introduction to Chapbooks (Oldham, 2003), p.33-34; Jan Fergus, Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (forthcoming, Oxford, 2007). I am very grateful for Jan Fergus’ willingness to let me see material from this book prior to publication and for providing supplemental information by private correspondence. It should be noted that Fergus acknowledges that the 1747 use of the term ‘Chap:Books’ in the ledgers of a publishing firm, Clays of Daventry, might be an abbreviation of ‘chapmen’s books’, but that this appears not to be the case with the use of the term in the ledgers for 1765 and 1773. See also her ‘Solace in Books: Reading Trifling Adventures at Rugby School’, in Childhood and Children's Literature in Early Modern Europe 1550-1800 , ed. by Andrea Immel and Michael Witmore (New York and London, 2006), pp.243-59. 3 McKay, Introduction to Chapbooks , p.5. 4 Davis, Kendrew of York and his Chapbooks for Children with a Checklist (Wetherby, W. Yorks, 1988), p.8. 5 Neuburg, Chapbooks: a guide to reference material on English, Scottish and American chapbook literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (2nd edn., London, 1972), p.x. 6 Guy of Warwick and Other Chapbook Romances. Six Tales from the Popular Literature of Pre-Industrial England , ed. by John Simons (, 1998), p.4. 7 Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978; rpt. Aldershot, 1994), p.28. 8 Chartier, ‘Culture as Appropriation: Popular Cultural Uses in Early Modern ’, pp.229-53 in Steven L. Kaplan, Understanding Popular Culture. Europe from the to the Nineteenth Century (, 1984), and see also his The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France (Princeton, 1987); Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550-1640 (Cambridge, 1991), pp.1-2. These arguments are summarised and discussed in Jonathan Barry, ‘Literacy and Literature in Popular Culture: Reading and Writing in Historical Perspective’, pp.69-94 in Popular Culture in England, c.1500-1850 , ed. by Tim Harris (, 1995). 9 Davis, Kendrew of York , p.8. Neuburg, The Penny Histories. A Study of Chapbooks for Young Readers Over Two Centuries (London, 1968) , p.18.

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10 Guy of Warwick , p.7; Kelly, 'Introduction' to 'Street Gothic: Female Gothic Chapbooks', vol.2 of Varieties of Female Gothic , gen. ed. Gary Kelly (6 vols., London, 2002), p.xi. 11 Steele, The Tatler , 95 (17 November 1709), rpt. ed. by Donald F. Boyd (3 vols., Oxford, 1987), vol.2, pp.92-93. 12 William Wycherley, The Plain-Dealer , 1677, ed. by James L. Smith (London and New York, 1979), pp.11 and 92 (III, i, 306-311). 13 Thomas Holcroft, The Adventures of Hugh Trevor , ed. by Seamus Deane (1794-97; Oxford, 1978), p.41. 14 Ashley's account was written in in 1614. It survives in the in Sloane MSS. 2131, ff.16-20, and is briefly described by Ronald S. Crane in 'The Reading of an Elizabethan Youth', Modern , 11 (1913-1914), 269-271. 15 Hester Lynch Piozzi, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. during the last twenty years of his life (London, 1786), p.15. Boswell's London Journal, 1762-63 , ed. by F. A. Pottle (London, 1950), p.299n.6. 16 Anon., The History of Robin Hood (London, 1816). See The Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books 1476-1910. A Catalogue , ed. by Judith St. John with Dana Tenny and Hazel I. Mactaggart (Toronto, 1975), vol.2, p.576. 17 Fergus speculates that the eight-pence chapbooks sold by the Clays were published by Henry Kent of the ‘Printing Office’ near the ‘Royal Exchange, Finch Lane’. John Clay’s accounts show that he ordered ‘100 Chap Books’ from Kent in 1743, probably 115-page duodecimos, their wholesale price being 4d each, with four coming gratis. Fergus, Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England and private correspondence. 18 Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories . Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1981), pp.55 and 64 (emphasis added). Similarly, Geoffrey Summerfield has suggested that because so many chapbook tales 'express fantasies of power and wealth', in which a 'small hero, usually of modest or even mean birth, defeats the larger, richer, more politically and socially powerful foe', that they must have been most popular among 'powerless, subordinated audiences' such as children. Fantasy and Reason. Children's Literature in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1984), pp.31-32. 19 Halfpenny Chapbooks by William Davison of Alnwick , ed. by Peter C. G. Isaac (, 1971), p.12.

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20 These feature in the Robert White collection of chapbooks held in the Robinson Library of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. See Desmond Sparling Bland, Chapbooks and Garlands in the Robert White Collection in the Library of King’s College (Newcastle, 1956). 21 William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man , Antwerp 1528, fol.20r; quoted in Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven, 2001), p.288. 22 R.H., The History of Genesis. Being an Account of the Holy Lives and Actions of the Patriarchs; explained with Pious and Edifying Explications, and illustrated with near Forty Figures. Fitted for the Use of Schools, and recommended to Teachers of Children, as a Book very proper for the learning them to read English; and instructing them in the right understanding of these Divine Histories , second edition (London, 1702), pp.vi-vii. There are similar sentiments in John Bunyan A Few Sighs from Hell, or The Groans of a damned Soul (London, 1658), pp.156-57. 23 Ronald Crane has suggested that it was conventional amongst sixteenth-century Protestant writers to insinuate that, before the Reformation, chivalric tales comprised the only commonly read texts, and that these had been written by wanton monks. See 'The Reading of an Elizabethan Youth', p.271n.2. The same sort of claim was still being made in the mid-eighteenth century. Edward Synge’s A sincere Christian and convert from the Church of , exemplified in the life of Daniel Herly, a poor Irish peasant (London, 1742) asserts that since the ‘Popish Laity’ was not allowed to read the scriptures, nor to read books written by Protestants, most Catholic children were trained to read at school using The Seven Wise Masters , the Gesta Romanorum, Fortunatus, Valentine and Orson and The Seven Champions of Christendom (p.7). 24 Henry Crosse, Vertues Common-wealth: or The High-way to Honour. Wherein is discovered, that although by the disguised craft of the this age, vice and hypocrisie may be concealed: yet by Tyme (the triall of truth) it is most plainly revealed (London, 1603), unpaginated but pp.102-103. 25 Frances Meres, Palladis Tamia. Wits Treasury. Being the Seocnd part of Wits Commonwealth (London, 1598), pp.267-68. 26 [Francis Kirkman], The Unlucky Citizen. Experimentally Described in the Various Misfortunes of an Unlucky Londoner (London, 1673), pp.10-12. The Unlucky Citizen is couched as fiction, but recounts Kirkman's own experiences, his fascination with

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chivalric romances being the reason for his entry into the trade, where he thought he might have greater access to them. 27 Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories , p.73. 28 Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67, rpt. ed. by Graham Petrie, Harmondsworth, 1985), p.443 (vol.4, ch.32). 29 Mrs Lovechild (Ellinor Fenn), The art of teaching in sport; designed as a prelude to a set of toys, for enabling ladies to instill the rudiments of spelling reading, grammar, and arithmetic, under the idea of amusement (London, 1785), p.28. 30 Quoted in Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader. A of the Mass Reading Public 1800-1900 (Chicago, 1957), p.54. 31 Some of these Coleridge read at his aunt's shop; others were apparently owned by his father, who burned them when he discovered that they were making Coleridge into a fearful and dreaming child. Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge , ed. by Ernest Hartley Coleridge (2 vols., London, 1895), vol.1, p.11-12. 32 John Clare, 'Autobiography, 1793-1824', in The Prose of John Clare , ed. by J. W. and Anne Tibble (London, 1951), p.19. A full analysis of Clare's chapbook reading, and his references to them in his poetry and prose, is available in David Blamires, 'Chapbook, Fairytales and Children's Books in the Writings of John Clare', parts I and II, John Clare Society Journal , 15 (1996), 27-53, and 16 (1997), 43-70. 33 Harry Stone, 'Dickens's Reading', Unpublished Ph.d. dissertation, University of California at Los Angeles (2 vols., June 1955), vol.1, pp.75-82. 34 John Clare, 'Autobiography', p.19. 35 Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical and Early Days , ed. by Henry Dunckley (2 vols., London, 1893), vol.1, p.87. 36 Poems on Several Occasions, by Mary Collier, Author of The Washerwoman's Labour, With some Remarks on Her Life (Winchester, 1762), p.iii. See David Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom. A Study of Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiography (London, 1981), chs.5 and 6 for many more such accounts. 37 Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), bk.5, ll. 294-95, 364-67 and 373-74 in William Wordsworth. The Oxford Authors , ed. by Stephen Gill (Oxford, 1989), pp.441-43. For a discussion of how autobiographical these passages might be, see Adam Potkay, ‘"A Satire on Myself": Wordsworth and the Infant Prodigy’, Nineteenth-Century Literature , 49 (1994), 149-166. For further discussion of (male) Romantic

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commentators’ views on the new children’s literature see Mary Hilton, ‘Revisioning Romanticism: towards a women’s history of progressive thought 1780-1850’, History of Education , 30 (2001), 471-487, and Janet Bottoms, ‘The Battle of the (Children's) Books’, Romanticism , 12 (2006), 212-222. 38 Alan Richardson, ‘Wordsworth, Fairy Tales, and the Politics of Children’s Reading’, in Romanticism and Children’s Literature in Nineteenth-Century England , ed. by James Holt McGavran (, GA. and London, 1991), pp.34-53 (p.45). 39 Charles Lamb to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 23 October, 1802. Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb , ed. by E. V. Lucas (London, 1935), p.326. 40 Peterborough Museum MS. A42, p.84 (undated). Clare first wrote 'Sampson', before crossing it though and replacing it with 'Hickathrift'. Quoted in George Deacon, John Clare and the Folk Tradition (London, 1983), p.42. 41 Richardson notes, pointedly, that most of the Romantics’ attacks on modern children’s literature and defences of children’s chapbook reading are to be found in private letters rather than in public discourse. Perhaps this indicates a degree of posturing within a particular peer group. ‘Wordsworth, Fairy Tales, and the Politics of Children’s Reading’, p.36. 42 The Christian Spectator , 8 (July 1839), 114-15. Quoted in Bratton, The Impact of Victorian Children's Fiction (London, 1981), p.33. 43 Bratton, Impact of Victorian Children's Fiction , p.39. 44 Porteous to More, 1794, in William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Hannah More (4 vols., London, 1834), vol.2, p.427. 45 More to Zachary Macaulay, 6 January 1796, in Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Hannah More , vol.2, p.458-59. 46 Sue Dipple, Chapbooks: How They Be Collected by Sondrie Madde Persons, and Something of their Trew Historie (Hoddesdon, Herts., 1996), p.4 47 There were no doubt many other such enterprises too, but collections of historical children's books tend to include titles by only a limited range of producers. It might be suggested that these particular tranches of material survive only because, for some reason, they were never released to their intended consumers. They might then have been discovered much later, in mint condition, and been released to a new market of book collectors. Thus, they ended up in the major public and private collections which scholars now use. If this is so, they probably represent only the tip of the iceberg. The

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publications of other similar firms were, it seems likely, released to the public at the time of their production, and were read to tatters, or, once read, were used to wrap food stuffs, light pipes, line pie-dishes and so on. Sir William Cornwallis used chapbooks as 'Bum-Fodder', keeping 'pamphlets and lying-stories and two-penny poets' in his privy to read and then use for a less edifying purpose (Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories , pp.48-9). 48 See Sydney Roscoe, John Newbery and his Successors 1740-1814. A (Wormley, Herts., 1973), cat. nos. J.103, J.267, J.269 and J.356. 49 Neuburg, The Penny Histories , p.31. 50 Humphrey Carpenter and Mari Prichard, The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature (Oxford, 1984), p.106a. 51 Geoffrey Summerfield, Fantasy and Reason. Children’s Literature in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1984). 52 Peterborough Museum MS. A42, p.84 (undated). Quoted in Deacon, John Clare and the Folk Tradition , p.42. 53 Dickens, 'Frauds on Fairies', Household Words , 8 (1 October 1853), 97-100. 54 For a discussion of this tendency see Dianne Dugaw, ‘Chapbook Publishing and the “Lore” or “the Folks”’, in The Other Print Tradition. Essays on Chapbooks, Broadsides, and Related Ephemera , ed. by Cathy Lynne Preston and Michael J. Preston (New York and London, 1995), pp.3-17. 55 Myers, 'Impeccable Governesses, Rational Dames, and Moral Mothers: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Female Tradition in Georgian Children's Books', Children's Literature. The Annual of the Modern Language Association Division on Children's Literature and the Children's Literature Association , 14 (1986), 31-59, p.54. 56 Piozzi, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson , p.16. 57 Wordsworth, Prelude , bk.5, ll.333-36 and 341-43, in William Wordsworth , ed. by Gill, pp.442-43. 58 Coleridge, a lecture on education given on 3 May 1808, as reported by H. C. Robinson in a letter to Mrs. Clarkson (7 May 1808), printed in Coleridge's Shakespearian Criticism , ed. by Thomas Middleton Raysor (2 vols., London, 1930), vol.2, p.13. 59 Lamb to Coleridge, 23 October 1802, Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb , p.326.

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60 Coleridge's Shakespearian Criticism , vol.2, p.13; William Godwin to William Cole, 2 March 1802, in C. Kegan Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries (2 vols., London, 1876), vol.2, pp.118-20; Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge , ed. by Earl Leslie Griggs (6 vols., Oxford, 1956-71), vol.1, no.354. 61 Prefatory verses to volume one of The Curiosities of the Tower of London (1741), quoted in Brian Alderson, ‘New Playthings and Gigantick Heroes. The Nonage of English Children’s Books’, Princeton University Library Chronicle , 60 (1999), 178-95, p.190. Alderson comments that Boreman’s books ‘were designed to draw children’s attention away from the excitements of street literature’. 62 For an account of this drive for respectability see Celestina Wroth, ‘"To Root the Old Woman out of Our Minds": Women Educationists and Plebeian Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Eighteenth-Century Life , 30 (2006), 48-73. 63 O'Malley, The Making of the Modern Child. Children's Literature and Childhood in the Late Eighteenth Century (New York and London, 2003), especially ch.1: 'The Coach and Six: Chapbook Residue in Late Eighteenth-Century Children's Literature'. 64 The Child's New Play-Thing: Being a Spelling-Book Intended To make Learning to Read, a Diversion instead of a Task (London, 1743), pp.92-113 and 114-120. 65 Robert Wharton’s Historiæ Pueriles (London, 1734). 66 Davis, Kendrew of York , pp.91-101. Kendrew also published Wordsworth’s ‘We are seven’ in chapbook form: see Helen Sard Hughes, ‘Two Wordsworthian Chapbooks ’, Modern Philology , 25 (1927), 207-210. 67 The history of the renowned Guy of Warwick (Coventry, 1808: date of preface), pp.6 and 16. Full page images are available on-line on the Hockliffe Project website (: catalogue no.0711). 68 Anon., The British champion; or honour rewarded (York: Wilson, Spence and Mawman, no date but c.1797). Full page images are available on-line on the Hockliffe Project website (: catalogue no.0710). 69 The Seven Champions of Christendom (no publisher or date, but c.1822-32?): part of the Hockliffe Collection in the University of Bedfordshire’s Polhill Library (full page images are available on-line at : catalogue no.0719). 70 The Young Traveller's Delight; Containing the Lives of Several Noted Characters, Likely to Amuse Children (Chelmsford, no date), p.20.

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71 For more details see Marjorie Moon’s, Benjamin Tabart's Juvenile Library. A Bibliography of books for children published, written, edited and sold by Mr. Tabart, 1801-1820 (Winchester, 1990), and her John Harris's books for youth, 1801-1843 (revised edition, Folkestone, 1992). 72 Roscoe, John Newbery and his Successors , pp.135 and 97; Moon, John Harris's books for youth , p.106. Speciality books could cost even more: history books might cost a guinea, and the short toy-book Frank Feignwell's attempts to amuse his friends on Twelfth Night retailed at six shillings, the usual price of a two-volume adult (London, 1811).

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