“Hand in Hand we’ll dance aroundFor this Place is Fairy Ground.”
“Hand in Hand we’ll dance aroundFor this Place is Fairy Ground.”
“Hand in Hand we’ll dance aroundFor this Place is Fairy Ground.”
“Hand in Hand we’ll dance around
For this Place is Fairy Ground.”
But the book is full of contradictions; nothing in it bears out the promise of those early letters. Master Gentle,at the age of seven, is delivered into the hands of Mr. Birch who, as his name forebodes, believes neither in Reasoning nor mild Discipline; and at ten, Mr. Birch’s pupils become little monsters of virtue and precocity. They are Lilliputians of a larger growth, but they certainly are not boys. This book, moreover, lacks the Newbery touch of comedy. Its humour is mostly unconscious, as in the account of a father who asks permission to read his son’s letters, where the boy confides to a friend that he feels “like the Swain in Shenstone: ‘fearful, but not averse’”.
Among the numberless books for children printed between 1780 and 1810, there were three which, although they discarded the nursery badge of “Flowery and Gilt”, and had little in common with the Newbery miscellanies, followed Lilliputian precedent in form and title.
These were theJuvenile Tatler(1783), theFairy Spectator(1789) and theJuvenile Spectator(1810).[70]The first two are among the earliest books that show the influence of Marmontel and Madame de Beaumont; they therefore are no true Lilliputians: the third mimics Addison’s method with absolute fidelity, and sparkles with the satirical spirit of its original; yet this too breaks loose from Lilliputian convention; it has almost enough sanity and wit to be called a nursery Jane Austen.
These three will be seen to better advantage with others of their kind.
A strong revival of romance in children’s books would have driven out the Lilliputians at the close of the eighteenth century; but the progress of Theory prevented it, and produced, with a fresh crop of moral tales, innumerable reprints.
Canning’s amusing paper in theEton Microcosm(June 11, 1787),[71]did more than mark the vogue of those tiny“16 mo’s” at Mr. Newbery’s and “the Bouncing B, Shoe Lane”: it was also a tempting advertisement; and in the early nineteenth century small Londoners who could not rise to the splendours of “twopence Gilt” might buy their own New Year and Easter Gifts at Catnach’s or the “Toy and Marble Warehouse” in Seven Dials, for a half-penny, or even (with covers of rough blue sugar-paper) for a farthing.[72]
In 1779 Saint, the north-country Newbery, had printed a Newcastle edition ofTommy Trip, and between 1790 and 1812, the entire Lilliputian library was revived in the York chap-books by Wilson and Spence. Other provincial booksellers, following these, began to improve their stocks of school-books and battledores with pirated “Newberys”; and some, like Rusher of Banbury, retouched old rhymes and tales with local colour. It was Rusher who restored the tradition ofGiles Gingerbreadwith theHistory of a Banbury Cake;[73]and in the childhood of Queen Victoria, his little shop was still famous for toy-books.