(Children's Literature and Culture Series) Lissa Paul - The Children's Book Business - Lessons From The Long Eighteenth Century-Taylor & Francis Group (2010)

THE CHILDREN’S
BOOK BUSINESS
Children’s Literature and Culture Apartheid and Racism in South African
Jack Zipes, Series Editor Children’s Literature
by Donnarae MacCann and
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Roni Natov
Empire’s Children
Voices of the Other Empire and Imperialism in Classic British
Children’s Literature and the Children’s Books
Postcolonial Context M. Daphne Kutzer
Edited by Roderick McGillis
Constructing the Canon of
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George Henty and the Fiction of Empire Beyond Library Walls and Ivory Towers
Mawuena Kossi Logan Anne Lundin
Reimagining Shakespeare for Children Youth of Darkest England

and Young Adults Working Class Children at the Heart of
Edited by Naomi J. Miller Victorian Empire
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Representing the Holocaust in Youth Literature
Lydia Kokkola Ursula K. Leguin Beyond Genre
Literature for Children and Adults
Translating for Children Mike Cadden
Riitta Oittinen
Twice-Told Children’s Tales
Beatrix Potter Edited by Betty Greenway
Writing in Code
M. Daphne Kutzer Diana Wynne Jones
The Fantastic Tradition and Children’s
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History, Ideology, Pedagogy, Theory Farah Mendlesohn
Ian Wojcik-Andrews
Childhood and Children’s Books in
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Transcending Boundaries Voracious Children

Writing for a Dual Audience of Who Eats Whom in Children’s Literature
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National Character in South African
The Making of the Modern Child Children’s Literature
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Andrew O’Malley Myth, Symbol, and Meaning in
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How Picturebooks Work The Governess as Provocateur
Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott Georgia Grilli
Brown Gold A Critical History of French Children’s

Milestones of African American Children’s Literature, Vol. 1 & 2
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Michelle H. Martin
Once Upon a Time in a Different World
Russell Hoban/Forty Years Issues and Ideas in African American
Essays on His Writing for Children Children’s Literature
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The Gothic in Children’s Literature Crossover Fiction
Haunting the Borders Global and Historical Perspectives
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The Crossover Novel
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Elizabeth Gargano
Shakespeare in Children’s Literature
Soon Come Home to This Island Gender and Cultural Capital
West Indians in British Children’s Literature Erica Hateley
Karen Sands-O’Connor
Critical Approaches to Food in
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Masculinity, Abjection, and the Scott T. Pollard
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Annette Wannamaker Neo-Imperialism in Children’s Literature
About Africa
Into the Closet A Study of Contemporary Fiction
Cross-dressing and the Gendered Body Yulisa Amadu Maddy and Donnarae
in Children’s Literature MacCann
Victoria Flanagan
Death, Gender and Sexuality in
Russian Children’s Literature and Culture Contemporary Adolescent Literature
Edited by Marina Balina and Kathryn James
Larissa Rudova
Fundamental Concepts of Children’s
The Outside Child In and Out of the Book Literature Research
Christine Wilkie-Stibbs Literary and Sociological Approaches
Hans-Heino Ewers
Representing Africa in Children’s Literature
Old and New Ways of Seeing Children’s Fiction about 9/11
Vivian Yenika-Agbaw Ethnic, Heroic and National Identities
Jo Lampert
The Fantasy of Family
Nineteenth-Century Children’s Literature The Place of Lewis Carroll in Children’s
and the Myth of the Domestic Ideal Literature
Liz Thiel Jan Susina
From Nursery Rhymes to Nationhood Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature

Children’s Literature and the Construction for Young Readers
of Canadian Identity Maria Nikolajeva
Elizabeth A. Galway
“Juvenile” Literature and British Society,
The Family in English Children’s Literature 1850–1950
Ann Alston The Age of Adolescence
Charles Ferrall and Anna Jackson
Enterprising Youth
Social Values and Acculturation in Picturing the Wolf in Children’s Literature
Nineteenth-Century American Debra Mitts-Smith
Children’s Literature
Monika Elbert The Children’s Book Business
Lessons from the Long Eighteenth Century
Constructing Adolescence in Lissa Paul
Fantastic Realism
Alison Waller
THE CHILDREN’S
BOOK BUSINESS
Lessons from the Long Eighteenth Century
L IS SA PAU L
NEW YORK AND LONDON

First published 2011
by Routledge
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
Simultaneously published in the UK

by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2011.
To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.
© 2011 Taylor & Francis
The right of Lissa Paul to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by
her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known
or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
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Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered

trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Paul, Lissa.
The children’s book business : lessons from the long eighteenth century / by Lissa
Paul.
p. cm. — (Children’s literature and culture ; 72)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Children’s literature, English—Publishing—History—18th
century. 2. Publishers and publishing—Great Britain—History—18th
century. 3. Children—Books and reading—Great Britain—History—18th
century. 4. Children—Books and reading. I. Title.
PR990.P38 2011
820.9'92820933—dc22
2010028886
ISBN 0-203-83325-2 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN13: 978-0-415-93789-4 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-203-83325-4 (ebk)
To my husband, Geoff, and our children,
Matt and Jem,
whom we’ve tried to raise with
active minds and warm hearts
I have tried to save from oblivion a minor horror: the vast, contradictory
library, whose vertical deserts of books run the incessant risk of metamorpho-
sis, which affirm everything, deny everything, and confuse everything—like a
raving god.
—Jorge Louis Borges, “The Total Library”

Contents
List of Figures xiii

Permissions xvii
Series Editor’s Foreword xxi
Preface xxiii
Acknowledgments xxv
Introduction And in This Book There Are Many Houses 1
Chapter 1 This Is the House That Ben Built 7
Chapter 2 These Are the Books That Lived in the House That Ben
Built 37
Chapter 3 These Are the Lessons Taught from the Books That Lived
in the House That Ben Built 67
Chapter 4 These Are the Women Who Wrote the Books That Lived
in the House That Ben Built 95
Chapter 5 These Are (Not) the Children Who Read the Books That
Lived in the House That Ben Built 139
Chapter 6 In the End 181
Notes 183
Bibliography 195
Index 201
xi
Figures
1.1 Entrance to Tabart’s Juvenile Library. Frontispiece, Eliza

Fenwick, Visits to the Juvenile Library (Tabart 1805). 7
1.2 “Band Box Seller,” a watercolor by William Marshall

Craig: advertisement commissioned by Sir Richard Phillips
to promote Tabart’s Juvenile Library, depicted in the
background. 9
1.3 Charles Keeping illustration from “Song of the Shapes,”

Jack the Treacle Eater (1987). 11
1.4 New Bond Street and Grafton Street. John Tallis’s London
Street Views 1838–1840. 12
1.5 New Bond Street and Grafton Street, London 2008. 12
1.6 Godwin’s Juvenile Library, with Aesop above the door,

from Eliza Fenwick’s Leçons pour les enfans (1820). 13
1.7 Frontispiece to Isaac Jenner’s Fortune’s Football (1806). 15
1.8 Relative locations of some of the featured publishing

houses as mapped on Smith’s New Plan of London,
Westminster and Southwark (1807). 17
1.9 Statue of Samuel Johnson. St. Clement Danes Church,

The Strand, London. 18
1.10 Shops on the north side of St. Paul’s Churchyard. Thomas

Hornor, 1823. 20
1.11 Shops on the south side of St. Paul’s Churchyard. Thomas

Hornor, 1823. 20
xiii
xiv • Figures
1.12 Skinner Street at Snow Hill. Adapted from Richard
Horwood’s Map and the Face of London, 1799–1819. 21
1.13 Puzzle map. England and Wales. London: E. Wallis, 1826. 26
1.14 Book Case of Instruction. John Wallis, 1813. 27
1.15 An interior view of Tabart’s shop. Visits to the Juvenile

Library (1805). 32
1.16 Interior view from the entrance. Visits to the Juvenile

Library (1805). 33
1.17 Another view of the interior of Tabart’s shop. A Visit to

London (1808). 34
2.1 The “Communications Circuit,” from Robert Darnton’s

“What Is the History of Books?” ( 1982). 38
2.2 “The Whole Socio-Economic Conjuncture,” from “A

New Model for the Study of the Book” (1993) by
Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas Barker. 39
2.3 Titles under the “Biography” heading of the catalogue

pages at the back of Elizabeth Kilner’s A Visit to a
Farm House (1804). 41
2.4 The introductory paragraphs of the catalogue pages bound

into the back of A Visit to a Farm House (1804) proclaim
that they [Tabart’s] “have laid in a new and valuable
assortment of the best Books of Amusement and instruction
that have ever appeared in the English Language.” 43
2.5 These pages, also from the 1804 catalogue, demonstrate

that the Tabart range included everything from fairy tales
to Goldsmith’s Grammar of Geography to Poetry for
Children. 44
2.6 These pages, also from the 1804 catalogue, demonstrate

that the Tabart range included everything from fairy
tales to Goldsmith’s Grammar of Geography to
Poetry for Children. 45
2.7 2009 Oxford Children’s Book catalogue cover, indicating a

range of instructional and non-instructional materials. 46
2.8 A Grammar of General Geography (1824): Spinning

wheel to illustrate time zones. 52
Figures • xv
2.9 Sir Richard Phillips (1767–1840), by James Saxon (1806). 56
3.1 Nora learning to be literate. Visits to the Juvenile Library

(1805). 75
3.2 Frontispiece, William Mavor’s The English Spelling-Book. 78
3.3 Title page, William Mavor’s The English Spelling-Book. 79
4.1 Richard Samuel’s 1778 Portraits in the Characters of the

Muses in the Temple of Apollo (The Nine Living Muses of
Great Britain). 99
4.2 Anna Barbauld by Thomas Holloway; after Unknown

Sculptor. 103
4.3 Woman engraved as Maria Edgeworth by unknown artist. 108
4.4 Joseph Johnson (1738–1809) by William Sharp after

Moses Haughton. With permission of the National
Portrait Gallery. 116
4.5 Frontispiece, Original Stories from Real Life (1788).

Engraving of Mrs. Mason by William Blake. 123
4.6 Couronnement d’Otton II et de Théophano. Musée

de Cluny. 124
4.7 William Godwin. National Portrait Gallery, London. 127
4.8 Ann and Jane Taylor, painted by their father, Isaac Taylor,
circa 1792. 134
5.1 Detail from William Hogarth’s 1732 portrait of the

Cholmondeley family. 140
5. 2 “My Mother” puzzle pieces and cover image

(Routledge 1870). 147
5. 3 “My Mother” puzzle (William Darton Jr., 1811). 148
5.4 Key to Eliza Fenwick, parse-by-color grammar book,

Rays from the Rainbow (1812). 155
5.5 First page of Rays from the Rainbow with parts of speech
colored in. 156
5.6 Print (1789) by Thomas Park of Penelope Boothby by

Joshua Reynolds. 161
xvi • Figures
5.7 Wolf Erlbruch’s illustration for the Ogress desiring her
child in L’Ogresse en Pleurs. 169
5.8 Wolf Erlbruch’s illustration for the moment just after the
Ogress eats him. 171
Permissions
Adams, Thomas R., and Nicolas Barker. “A New Model for the Study of the Book,” A
Poetencie of Life: Books in Society. The Clark Lectures 1986–1987. Ed. Nicolas Barker.
London: The British Library. New Castle: Oak Knoll Press, 1993, 2001. Published
with permission of the British Library.
Barbauld, Anna. Portrait by Thomas Holloway. Published with permission of the
National Portrait Gallery.
Book Case of Instruction. London: John Wallis, 1812 (on case), 1813 (on books). Pub-
lished with permission of the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books, Toronto
Public Library, Canada.
The Cholmondeley Family, 1732 by William Hogarth (1697–1764). Private Collec-
tion/ The Bridgeman Art Library
The Crowning of Otto II (958–991) and Theophano (958–991) from a plaque bind-
ing. C. 982–983 (ivory) by Byzantine (tenth century). Musée national du Moyen Âge
Paris/ Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library.
Craig, William Marshall. Illus. “Band Box Seller.” Modern London; Being the History
and Present State of the British Metropolis. London: Richard Phillips, 1804. Published
with permission of the City of London, London Metropolitan Archives.
Darnton, Robert. “What Is the History of Books.” The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections
in Cultural History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990. Published with permission of W.
W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Edgeworth, Maria. Engraving of woman as Maria Edgeworth. Published with per-
mission of the National Portrait Gallery, London.
England and Wales. Puzzle Map. E. Wallis, 1826. Published with permission of the
Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books, Toronto Public Library, Canada.
Erlbruch, Wolf. Illus. Dayre, V. Die Menschenfresserin. Published with permission of
Peter Hammer Verlag. Wuppertal, 1995.
Fenwick, Eliza. Leçons pour les enfans. London: M. J. Godwin, 1820. Published with
permission of the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books, Toronto Public
Library, Canada.
. Rays from the Rainbow. 2nd Ed. London: M. J. Godwin, 1812. Published with
permission of the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books, Toronto Public
Library, Canada.
xvii
xviii • Permissions
. Visits to the Juvenile Library. 2nd edition. London: Tabart, 1805. Published
with permission of the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books, Toronto Public
Library, Canada.
. Letters to Moffatt family, in The Fenwick Family Papers. The material
appears courtesy of The New-York Historical Society.
Godwin, William. Painting by Miss Roberts. Published with permission of the
National Portrait Gallery, London.
Godwin, William. Letter to Mary Jane Godwin. 9 October 1801. MS. Abinger c. 42,
fols. 1–2. The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.
. Letter to Mary Jane Godwin. 5 June 1806. MS. Abinger c. 42. fols, 23–24. The
Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.
. Letter to Mary Jane Godwin. 24 May 1811. MS. Abinger. c. 42. fols, 53–54.
The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.
. Letter to William Cole. 2 March 1802. MS. Abinger c. 7, fols. 97–98. The
Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.
Hornor, Thomas. Prospectus. View of London and the Surrounding Country, Taken with
Mathematical Accuracy from an Observatory Purposely Erected over the Cross of St. Paul’s
Cathedral. 2nd Edition. London: Published by T. Horner, London: Adelphi 1823. Pub-
lished with permission of the City of London, London Metropolitan Archives.
Jenner, Isaac. Fortune’s Football. London: Tabart, 1806. Published with permis-
sion of the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books, Toronto Public Library,
Canada.
Johnson, Joseph. Portrait by William Sharp. Published with permission of the
Keeping, Charles, Illus. Jack the Treacle Eater, by Charles Causley. London: Mac-
millan, 1987. Illustration by copyright B. L. Kearley Ltd.
Kilner, Elizabeth [commonly catalogued as S. W.]. A Visit to a Farm House. London:
Tabart, 1804. Published with permission of the Osborne Collection of Early Chil-
dren’s Books, Toronto Public Library, Canada.
. [commonly catalogued as S. W.]. A Visit to London. London: Tabart, 1808.
Published with permission of the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books,
Toronto Public Library, Canada.
Mavor, William. The English Spelling-Book. 182nd Ed. London: Longman, Hurst,
Rees, Orme and Brown, 1814. Published with permission of the Osborne Collection
of Early Children’s Books, Toronto Public Library, Canada.
Oxford Children’s Books Catalogue (2009). Cover. Published with permission of
Oxford Children’s Books, Oxford University Press.
Penelope Boothby. Thomas Park’s 1789 print of Joshua Reynolds’ portrait of Penelope
Boothby. Published with permission of the British Museum.
Phillips, Richard. A Grammar of General Geography [commonly known as Gold-
smith’s Grammar of Geography]. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green,
1824. Published with permission of the Collection of Early Children’s Books,
Toronto Public Library, Canada.
Phillips, Sir Richard. Portrait by James Saxon. Published with permission of the
Permissions • xix
Portraits in the Characters of the Muses in the Temple of Apollo (The Nine Living Muses
of Great Britain). Painting by Richard Samuel. Published with permission of the
Smith, C. Smith’s New Plan of London, Westminster and Southwark. London: C.
Smith, 1807. Crace Map Collection VI. 192. British Library. Published with permis-
sion of the British Library.
Tallis, John. John Tallis’s London Street Views 1838–1840. Tallis, John. London: Natta-
lie and Maurice, 1969. Published with permission of the City of London, London
Metropolitan Archives.
Taylor, Ann. My Mother. Puzzle. London: William Darton Jr., 1811. Published with
permission of the Collection of Early Children’s Books.
. My Mother. Puzzle and box. London: George Routledge & Sons, 1870. Pub-
lished with permission of the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books, Toronto
Public Library, Canada. Taylor, Ann, and Jane Taylor. Portrait The Taylor Family by
Isaac Taylor, circa 1792. Published with permission of the National Portrait Gallery,
London.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. Original Stories from Real Life. Illus. William Blake. London:
Johnson, 1788. Published with permission of the Osborne Collection of Early Chil-
dren’s Books, Toronto Public Library, Canada.
Early attempts at negotiating the material of The Children’s Book Busi-

ness appeared in the following publications. With thanks to all editors and
publishers:
“Re-Imagining Eliza Fenwick: Instruction, Delight and Marketing,” Special

issue on Cultures of Childhood edited by Matthew Grenby. British Journal for
Eighteenth Century Studies 29.3 (2006): 427–43.
“Are Children’s Book Publishers Changing the Way Children Read? A Pocket
History,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 28, 3 (Fall 2003): 137–39.
“Consuming Passions: Or Why I’m Obsessed with L’Ogresse en Pleurs,” Signal
100 (August 2003): 173–90. For access to the original essay, contact Nancy
Chambers: http://www.thimblepress.co.uk.
Series Editor’s Foreword
Dedicated to furthering original research in children’s literature and culture,

the Children’s Literature and Culture series includes monographs on individual
authors and illustrators, historical examinations of different periods, literary
analyses of genres, and comparative studies on literature and the mass media.
The series is international in scope and is intended to encourage innovative
research in children’s literature with a focus on interdisciplinary methodology.
Children’s literature and culture are understood in the broadest sense of
the term children to encompass the period of childhood up through adoles-
cence. Owing to the fact that the notion of childhood has changed so much
since the origination of children’s literature, this Routledge series is particu-
larly concerned with transformations in children’s culture and how they have
affected the representation and socialization of children. While the emphasis
of the series is on children’s literature, all types of studies that deal with chil-
dren’s radio, fi lm, television, and art are included in an endeavor to grasp the
aesthetics and values of children’s culture. Not only have there been momen-
tous changes in children’s culture in the last fifty years, but there have been
radical shifts in the scholarship that deals with these changes. In this regard,
the goal of the Children’s Literature and Culture series is to enhance research
in this field and, at the same time, point to new directions that bring together
the best scholarly work throughout the world.
Jack Zipes
xxi
Preface
Very early on in my research for The Children’s Book Business, I methodi-

cally read through as many of the books published by Benjamin Tabart in the
nineteenth century as I could find. Marjorie Moon’s 1990 Benjamin Tabart’s
Juvenile Library: A Bibliography of Books for Children Published, Written, Edited
and Sold by Mr. Tabart, 1801–1820 was my guide. For the most part, I loved the
books, even the ones that were reportedly textbooks, and I often felt I could
sense the authors themselves rejoicing in the pleasures of the knowledge and
understanding they were trying to communicate to their intended audience
of young readers.
As I began writing, however, I found it difficult to choose a term to cap-
ture the spirit of the age. “Georgian” is the term often used to describe the
period between 1714 and 1830 when four King Georges in succession ruled
England, but it didn’t convey anything beyond the historical trace of the
dates. “Enlightenment” as a descriptor for the age, was a term I’d initially
rejected, because I was concerned it covered too long a time period (begin-
ning in the seventeenth century with philosophies of René Descartes), or was
too closely aligned with the scientific discoveries of Isaac Newton (his Prin-
cipia Mathematica was published in 1687). I did settle on it, however, often
qualifying it as “late” Enlightenment especially as some timelines included
the Industrial Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars of the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries in their descriptions of the Enlightenment. I
realized, eventually, that it wasn’t so much a narrow time period I was try-
ing to defi ne, but an ethos. Andrew O’Malley, in his excellent The Making
of the Modern Child, locates the ethos of the age in its emerging awareness
of its middle-classness; distinct from the upper classes “who subsisted by
virtue of unearned privilege” and lower classes who “subsisted day to day”
(O’Malley 2). Many of the authors who wrote the books that lived for a time
on the shelves of Benjamin Tabart’s shop expressed belief in the rights of
children to think, to know, and feel. That struck me as inspiriting and so
true to the ethos of the Age of Enlightenment.
xxiii
Acknowledgments
Book about books and the book business depend on the good stewardship
of libraries and the knowledge and patience of librarians. My first note of
thanks is to my neighborhood rare books library in Toronto, the wonderful
Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books, Toronto Public Libraries. Spe-
cial thanks to all the unfailingly helpful Osborne librarians, Leslie McGrath,
Martha Scott, Lori MacLeod, Elizabeth Derbecker, and Yuka Kajihara-No-
lan. Research for this book has taken me well beyond my neighborhood into
the precincts of many other libraries. I’d like to thank Jennifer Thiessen, the
Education Librarian at Brock University, for her generous help in purchas-
ing material for our university library and for her research help, and Clarke
Bernat at the Niagara Historical Society for his patience and help in finding
the first traces of Eliza Fenwick in Niagara. In New York, I would like to thank
Elizabeth Denlinger at the Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle,
New York Public Library for her helpful research suggestions and unfailing
patience as I attempted to get up to speed. To the New-York Historical Soci-
ety I’m especially grateful, because it is there that I found the magical letters
Eliza Fenwick and her grand-daughter, Elizabeth, wrote in the early nine-
teenth century from what was then Upper Canada to friends in New York.
Special thanks to Michael Joseph, Rare Books Librarian at Rutgers University.
His brilliant 2008 exhibition, “My Infant Head,” provided the inspiration for
the sections in my book on Ann and Jane Taylor. Laura E. Wasowicz, Ameri-
can Antiquarian Society, offered useful suggestions. With thanks to Andrea
Immel, Curator, Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton, who, for many years,
has been constantly encouraging and generous. I owe a lot to her consistent
help as I negotiated unfamiliar territory. In London, England, I recognized
my great good fortune in access to the collections in the British Library,
the Guildhall Library (now the City of London Museum and Library), and
St. Bride’s Printing Library. In these London libraries, I learned about the
changing streetscapes of London in the long eighteenth century and about
the workings of the book trade. With thanks to the National Portrait Gallery
for access to their library. In Oxford, I want to thank Bruce Barker-Benfield,
xxv
xxvi • Acknowledgments
Senior Assistant Librarian, Department of Special Collections & Western
Manuscripts, The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, for his help with
the William Godwin letters. I also wish to acknowledge the Archive of British
Publishing and Printing at the University of Reading in England. As the Long-
mans archive held there includes records acquired in the purchase of the firm
of Sir Richard Phillips, I was able to access those archives. With thanks to all.
Besides archival research in libraries, I am grateful to many, many people
who patiently encouraged me despite several failed attempts at negotiating
this book. With thanks especially to Brian Alderson, Deirdre Baker, Claas
Kazzer, Aidan Chambers, Nancy Chambers, Elizabeth Eger, Richard Flynn,
Matthew Grenby, Isobel Grundy, Veena Gupta, Jo Husband, Barbara Lazar,
William McCarthy, Margaret Meek, Michael Millgate, Carol Percy, Jill She-
frin, Joseph Thomas, Kim Reynolds, Brett Rutherford, Lynne Vallone and Jac-
queline Reid-Walsh. Special thanks to Jack Zipes for having faith and to Erica
Wetter for being endlessly patient with my early failures and for sympathizing
with my need to get the text right. With thanks to Jodi Beder who provided an
early copy-edit and some very helpful suggestions for revision. Many thanks
to Jon Eben Field for his sensitive and meticulous copy-edit at a later stage in
the manuscript preparation. And thanks to Michael Watters for his care and
kind words as he transformed manuscript into book.
I’m also grateful for the support I’ve received through my home institution,
Brock University. It has been my privilege to have the research and technical
assistance of several graduate students, including, Danielle Overy Beckett,
Pam Klassen-Dueck, Laudalina Rodriguez, Jesse Lepp, and Terry McKenzie
Trzecak. I’m grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
of Canada for the grant in support of my work on Eliza Fenwick.
Finally, my thanks to my family, especially to my sons, Matthew Bubbers,
who worked painstakingly on a bookshop map of early nineteenth-century
London for me and who gave me helpful copy-editing suggestions, and Jeremy
Bubbers, who also did some map work and who was often willing to pick up or
return books to University of Toronto Libraries. And to my husband, Geoff Bub-
bers, for his help on the final version of the London map, and for his enduring
support and patience for all those long days and nights I spent at my desk. With
thanks to all. As I know that the production of even one small book requires the
support of an army of frequently invisible people, I wanted to be sure that here,
in the acknowledgements, their names appear in print.
Introduction
And in This Book There Are Many Houses
Once there was a book, Visits to the Juvenile Library, by Eliza Fenwick, pub-
lished in 1805. It was not a successful book; there was only one edition. The
book reads like a novel. It has a plot, about five orphaned children who are sent
from their colonial home in the Caribbean (their parents were white British
plantation owners) to the care of their guardian, the “good Mrs. Clifford,” in
London, England, where they discover the joys of being literate. The book also
has a subplot in which the good Mrs. Clifford and her long lost daughter are
reunited. The plot and subplot are incidental. Visits to the Juvenile Library is
an extended advertisement wrapped up as a novel. The “Juvenile Library” in
the title of Eliza Fenwick’s novel was the name of the bookshop owned and
run by Benjamin Tabart, the publisher and bookseller for whom the book was
produced. The novel showcased books for children sold in his shop. Although
product placement is now typically understood in cinematic terms (think of
Steven Spielberg’s “Extra-Terrestrial” eating Hershey’s Reese’s Pieces in the 1982
film E.T.), it was already familiar in the early nineteenth century, when it was
known as “puffing,” and was used by book publishers to promote their wares.
For more than two hundred years, if mentioned at all, Visits to the Juve-
nile Library has been a marginal book, at best a historical curiosity. Yet it is
the book on which I’ve built The Children’s Book Business, partly because of
another book, a recent book, published in 1990: Benjamin Tabart’s Juvenile
Library: A Bibliography of Books for Children Published, Written, Edited and
Sold by Mr. Tabart, 1801–1820, by Marjorie Moon. Although a meticulous, lov-
ingly detailed annotated account of the books in Tabart’s bookshop, Moon’s
book is not for the general reader as it is not a novel and has no plot. It is a ref-
erence book, intended for librarians or literary scholars with interests in the
fields of children’s book and book-publishing history. Moon’s book, however,
provided the catalyst for mine. The Children’s Book Business was born out of
the union of Fenwick’s 1805 novel, Visits to the Juvenile Library, and Marjorie
1
2 • The Children’s Book Business
Moon’s 1990 bibliography, Benjamin Tabart’s Juvenile Library. Taken together,
the two books allowed me to access to the social and cultural contexts of the
period, and opened up the possibility of examining writers and readers of the
late Enlightenment, as well as the consumer culture and the pedagogical and
political principles that shaped those writers and readers.
The Children’s Book Business, however, isn’t a history of children’s book
publishing, nor is it a history of children’s literature. And it’s not a history of
education nor is it a history of children as a targeted consumer group either.
The underlying agenda emerges from the cultural materialism of Raymond
Williams and the new historicism of Stephen Greenblatt,1 both of whom
engage networks of cultural, social, economic, and political practices to tell
their histories. I’ve used Fenwick’s novel and Moon’s bibliography to ground
my discussions of the related reading, writing, publishing, advertising, buy-
ing, selling, teaching, learning, as well as political and philosophical practices
that informed the children’s book business—which offer insights into how
and why it evolved and where it might go. Perhaps the best genre into which
I might put this book is “book biography”—something that combines good
storytelling with historical fact. I’d also like to acknowledge William McCa-
rthy’s 2009 biography of the Enlightenment author, Anna Letitia Barbauld,
as a model. Though I’m not attempting the scope, range, or sheer scholarship
of McCarthy’s brilliant book, I have tried to tune my study to the same prin-
ciples critic Norma Clarke identifies in her review of McCarthy’s book: “Like
all good historical biographers,” she says, “he has one eye on his own times.”
Clarke goes on to explain how McCarthy recovers the “public intellectual,
cultural pluralist ‘ecofeminist’ and literary innovator” in Anna Barbauld and
how those “concerns speak directly to issues that vex us today” (Clarke, “What
Anna Did,” TLS 29 May 2009: 9). Anna Barbauld figures prominently in my
story of the children’s book business, as do other teaching and writing women
of the late Enlightenment, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth,
Ann and Jane Taylor, Hannah More—and Eliza Fenwick herself—all of
whom wrote, taught, and developed an entire program of maternal pedagogi-
cal practices around 1800 (between about 1780 and 1820, though I’m reluctant
to fi x cut-off dates completely). Their Enlightenment stories, however, weren’t
the ones I initially set out to tell. The genesis of The Children’s Book Business
was quite different.
Although I’ve ended up using Fenwick’s Visits to the Juvenile Library and
Moon’s bibliography to address “issues that vex us today,” that’s not where The
Children’s Book Business began. It was a modern, late-twentieth-century book
that first troubled me—a gift, a picture book from a German friend, Claas
Kazzer, about an ogress who eats her own child: Die Menschenfresserin (Peter
Hammer Verlag, 1996) by Valérie Dayre, illustrated by Wolf Erlbruch. From
the first time I read it, using the provided English translation, I was at once
obsessed and disturbed. Yet I knew instinctively both that it was an important
book and that it could never be published for children in English because it
Introduction • 3
addressed a taboo too far outside what an Anglophone publisher would con-
sider suitable. At one point, I did send it to an American publisher to see if
there was a possible place for it in the Anglophone market for children’s books.
The answer came back, as expected: “No.” That’s when I began to focus on
the particular qualities determining publication for the children’s book mar-
ket, especially as the entire book trade was undergoing such profound change
around 2000. As the twentieth century drew to a close, specialized indepen-
dent bookshops, including children’s bookshops, were being swallowed up by
big box stores (Indigo in Canada, Borders in the United States, and Water-
stones in the United Kingdom). Small publishers were being absorbed by big
publishers and by multimedia conglomerates.2 And the entire school mar-
ket for books was under pressure by state-mandated calls for “accountabil-
ity” through large-scale assessment exercises that would supposedly measure
literacy among schoolchildren—and this was resulting in the emphasis on
books targeted directly to curriculum outcomes. Although I recognized the
turn of the new millennium as a time of radical change, it became increas-
ingly apparent that the answers I sought weren’t in recent history; they were
located in another period of radical change, in the time period soon after the
French and American revolutions of the late eighteenth century.
Though both the technological and business models at the turn of the
twenty-first century are obviously different from those at the turn of the nine-
teenth century, I argue there are relevant connections in the constructions
of children and childhood and in attitudes towards pedagogical practices.
Technological or postmodern children are increasingly configured in terms of
their ability to connect with and participate in the world. That provides them
with a family resemblance to Enlightenment children, who were encouraged,
in that time of emerging democratic states, to see themselves as citizens, as
participants in the world. Born in the two-hundred-year gap between the
Enlightenment children and the postmodern children are the children con-
structed in the Romantic age: children venerated for their innocence and for
their ignorance of adult concerns. These are children separated from the world
by the physical borders of the nursery and the schoolroom, and by intellec-
tual borders constructed through censorship of anything that might corrupt
through intercourse with the outside world. So briefly, the Romantic period of
innocence, ignorance, and separation from the world, is suspended between
two active periods of thinking, knowing, and engagement with the world: the
thinking and knowing children of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and
the twenty-first-century Technological age bracket the ignorant and innocent
children of the Romantic age.
Modern debates about pedagogical practices also have antecedents in the
Enlightenment, as they also depend on whether children are constructed as
“performing monkeys” (to use a phrase suggested by postmodern Anglophone
children in a discussion about Die Menschenfresserin) or as people learning to
think and know. Many late Enlightenment authors who both taught children
and wrote for them repeatedly warned against the mindless “performing
monkey” rote repetition of authorized texts. Some of that debate was carried
out in the context of the relative merits of private (domestic, home-based) as
opposed to public (school-based) education. Partly determined by the econo-
mies of scale, public education generally favors a controlled body of material
which can be repeated, while private education grows out of the interactions
between teacher and student and allows knowledge to develop in relation to
particular interests and experiences. The modern resurgence of interest in
home-schooling echoes the eighteenth-century private/public debate and the
difference in pedagogical purpose: the education of thinking and knowing
children, as opposed to the instruction of performing and obedient children.
It’s the difference between Enlightenment and—as Jack Zipes suggests in a
clever coinage of an opposition—“endumbment” (Zipes 27).3
In my search for the reasons why Die Menschenfresserin was never going to
be published in English, I increasingly realized that the answers were in the
relationship between enlightenment and endumbment—and accordingly that
my story about the children’s book business was located in the eighteenth-
century Enlightenment. T. S. Eliot’s lines about the particular strangeness of
moments teetering precariously on the brink between beginnings and end-
ings began to ring through my mind. “In my beginning is my end,” Eliot says
famously at the beginning of “East Coker” (the second of his 1943 Four Quar-
tets). He reverses the line at the end of the poem: “In my end is my beginning.”
In between though, he offers a caution. “Do not let me hear / Of the wisdom
of old men,” he says, “but rather of their folly.” In my mind, sounding coun-
terpoint to Eliot’s lines were lines from David Lodge’s 1984 academic novel,
Small World, about the “the influence of T. S. Eliot on Shakespeare,” lines
about the influence of “Prufrock” on Hamlet, and of “The Fire Sermon” on
The Tempest (Lodge 51–52). Gradually, I came to understand that my story
about the children’s book business would have to engage symbiotic relation-
ships between the discursive practices of the early nineteenth century and the
early twenty-first.
In an 1802 letter William Godwin,4, an Enlightenment philosopher (and
children’s bookshop proprietor), identifies the goal of education as developing
an “active mind and a warm heart” in children. This line became an impor-
tant touchstone in my discussion of the children’s book business because edu-
cation begins with reading and so the books that build the child are at the
heart of the matter.5
Godwin’s Enlightenment construction of children educated with the inten-
tion of nurturing “an active mind and a warm heart,” however, were not the
children identified as the target audience in the Romantic era. Those Romantic
children, who have come to represent our default understanding of children
and childhood, were defined by the first modern children’s book historian, F.
J. Harvey Darton, in his classic, monumental 1932 study, Children’s Books in
England. As Darton was a descendant of one of the most enduring children’s
Introduction • 5
book business families in England, writing at the end of the Romantic age, his
version reflected the prevailing cultural assumption which figures innocent
childhood as the pinnacle of idealized, modern achievement for children’s lit-
erature. “By ‘children’s books,’” he begins, “I mean printed works produced
ostensibly to give children spontaneous pleasure, and not primarily to teach”
(Darton 1). After Darton, books about the children’s book business followed
the same narrative arc, constructing a historical trace that it would read as a
chronological journey from instruction to entertainment. The construction
of this master narrative involved sweeping up the books written by Enlight-
enment authors (many of them women) and pushing them into dusty, dark
corners—devaluing them as clumsy, boring, and merely didactic precursors
to the flowering of imaginative freedom in the great fantasies by George Mac-
Donald and Lewis Carroll in what has come to be known as the “Golden Age”
of children’s literature in the late nineteenth century.
Throughout my work on The Children’s Book Business, I was deeply con-
scious that bringing the thinking and knowing child of the Enlightenment
out of the Wordsworthian “trailing clouds of glory”6 shadow of the Roman-
tic innocent child involved engaging the social, political, financial, cultural,
practical, and mechanical aspects of the eighteenth-century children’s book
business. That meant I couldn’t write something on the order of the two-vol-
ume comprehensive The Dartons: An Annotated Check-list of Children’s Books
Issued by Two Publishing Houses, 1787–1876 (2004), by Lawrence Darton with
editorial assistance by Brian Alderson, or Be Merry and Wise: Origins of Chil-
dren’s Book Publishing in England, 1650–1850 (2006), by Brian Alderson and
Felix de Marez Oyens, based on their 1991 Pierpont Morgan exhibition of
early children’s books (a deeply informed and lovingly assembled overview
of books, publishers, and authors of the period). I also knew that my book
also couldn’t be like Asa Briggs’s impressive A History of Longmans and Their
Books 1724–1990 (2008)—though I want to acknowledge how helpful all those
books have been.
Briggs’s questions about how the “evolving ‘book trades’” in the eighteenth
century had “dealt with the changing demands for information, education
and entertainment,” were exactly the questions I was asking. I was particu-
larly struck by the way he recognized that the same “sacred trinity” was still
alive and well among “British broadcasters,” although he could equally have
extended his geographic range to include other democratic countries (A. Briggs
1). Over an embarrassingly long number of years, I grappled with ways of tell-
ing a story about the children’s book business that would juggle the questions
about “information, education and entertainment” with questions about the
teaching and writing women of the late Enlightenment who wrote many of
those books and developed a coherent philosophy of maternal pedagogical
practices. I have three different aborted book drafts (running to about 150
pages each) which testify to my failed preliminary attempts to resolve those
questions. The first was titled “Around 1800,” as that seemed a crucial period
in the development of the children’s book business in England. Another draft
focused on the marketing of children’s books and had as a working subtitle,
“The M and Ms (marketing and money) of the Children’s Book Business.”
At least that one put information, education, and entertainment at its cen-
ter, but I couldn’t seem to include the women who wrote the books or their
progressive pedagogies. The third draft, fittingly titled “Stillborn Traditions,”
was about the inspired maternal teaching practices of the women who wrote
for children—but it didn’t accommodate enough about the actual children’s
book business.
Eventually, it almost came as a surprise to find that the structure of The
Children’s Book Business, as it stands now, grew as naturally and apparently
effortlessly as the nursery verse on which the chapters are patterned: “This is
the House that Jack Built.” The house is Ben Tabart’s publishing house: as I’ve
explained, both Eliza Fenwick’s novel and Marjorie Moon’s bibliography pro-
vided the keys to the house—for which I’m very grateful. And so, with their
assistance, I was able to move cumulatively through Benjamin Tabart’s Juvenile
Library. The first chapter, “This Is the House That Ben Built,” begins with the
bookshop itself and the culture of shops, shopping and shoppers. In the sec-
ond chapter, “These Are the Books That Lived in the House That Ben Built,” I
move inside the shop and structure my account of the lives and deaths of books
through insights provided by recent studies in the history of the book. “These
Are the Lessons Taught from the Books That Lived in the House That Ben
Built,” the third chapter, takes the pedagogical practices considered exemplary
in the twenty-first century and explains how they were alive and well in many of
the books on Ben’s shelves in the early nineteenth century. The fourth chapter,
“These Are the Women Who Wrote the Books That Lived in the House That
Ben Built,” allows me to foreground the stories and networks of the remarkable
women who, despite political, social, and class differences, established a distinct
pedagogical and literary identity for themselves. In the final chapter, “These
Are (Not) the Children Who Read the Books That Lived in the House That Ben
Built,” I bring my story of the children’s book business full circle. By putting
the social constructions of the child as the center for my chapter, I’m able to
highlight eighteenth-century Enlightenment desires for a thinking and know-
ing (active) child and situate them against the threats of “endumbment” and
idealized passivity. As the performing innocent children constructed through
nineteenth-century Romanticism and sustained into the twentieth century fade
into the historical distance, I trust that the future holds open the possibility of
revitalizing the thinking and knowing child of the Enlightenment, the child
educated to have “an active mind and a warm heart.”
Chapter One
This Is the House That Ben Built
Figure 1.1 Entrance to Tabart’s Juvenile Library. Frontispiece, Eliza Fenwick,

Visits to the Juvenile Library (Tabart 1805).
The energy is palpable (Figure 1.1). Two children—one with a woman who
appears to be his mother—approach from opposite directions. They move
towards the front door of Tabart’s Juvenile Library at 157 New Bond Street at
the center of the frame. Benjamin Tabart (1767–1833) was the Tabart on the
sign, the “Ben” of my chapter title, and the Ben whose bookshop provides
entry into my book on the children’s book business. Ben’s house was his
7
“juvenile library,” a children’s bookshop, rather than a lending library—
though they existed in the period. The “library” in the shop’s name took its
cue from the implicitly fashionable French term for bookseller, “libraire.”
Although Ben’s house was a children’s bookshop where books addressed to
children were sold, it was also a publishing house where books were cre-
ated. “House,” as Asa Briggs explains in A History of Longmans,1 “was an
old description for a publisher, but one that was not exclusive to publishing:
the House of Commons and the House of Lords place the words within a
constitutional context as did the House of Hanover” (A. Briggs 4). By the
nineteenth century, “[h]ouse,” as Briggs explains, also applied to the “fash-
ion business,” as in “the House of Worth” (A. Briggs 5), or the House of
Chanel.
Ben Tabart dealt with all aspects of the book-making business from his
publishing house at 157 New Bond Street. He commissioned authors and
engravers and decided how much they should be paid. He negotiated with
the people who produced the materials out of which the books were made
(paper, ink, and leather or paper for covers) and those who distributed the
books. Ben had to juggle exactly the same sets of cultural assumptions about
children, books, pedagogy, taste, marketing, costs, and profits as do twenty-
fi rst-century publishers and sellers of children’s books. That’s what makes
the study of Benjamin Tabart’s Juvenile Library (1801–20) such a jewel of a
case study.
Both the innovative children’s books and marketing strategies of Tabart’s
London fi rm (1801–20)2 have telling lessons for the twenty-fi rst century
about constructions of implicit child audiences and implicit adult buyers,
strained relationships between educational agendas and imaginative needs,
and pedagogical constraints and wishes for nurturing environments. In
the early nineteenth century, books produced for children still addressed
the capacities of their young readers for rational thought. The assumptions
about childhood innocence that increasingly characterized books intended
for children in the later decades of the century—indeed, for the following
two hundred years—had not yet become fi rmly fi xed in cultural ideology.
Changing constructions of children and childhood play a large part in the
creation and circulation of books marked as being “for” children. As the
ways in which children are imagined change, the book business changes to
suit these conceptions.
The 1805 engraving (Figure 1.1) of the front of Ben’s shop provides a gram-
mar for the new consumer culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. Each element is a window into the lives and values of the emerging
class of upmarket urban shoppers—exactly the same demographic targeted by
present day children’s book publishers. In order to situate Ben Tabart and his
shop, I’m constructing a running commentary, as a tour guide might, focus-
ing first on the outside of the shop, then its environs, then its neighborhood
(by walking through the streets), before moving inside.
This Is the House That Ben Built • 9
Outside the House That Ben Built
As the act of going to a store to shop was still a relatively new phenomenon in
the nineteenth century, the shop front was an evolving architectural form.3
Before in-store shopping became common in urban areas, smallish consumer
Figure 1.2 “Band Box Seller,” a watercolor by William Marshall Craig: adver-
tisement commissioned by Sir Richard Phillips for Tabart’s Juvenile Library,
depicted in the background.
items were sold either in market stalls or by people carrying their particular
wares (hatboxes, flowers, fish) displayed on trays, in baskets, or strung on
poles. “Indoor spaces,” as Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace explains in Consum-
ing Subjects: Women, Shopping and Business in the Eighteenth Century, “would
have been too dark to allow the customer to scrutinize the goods.” It was only
with the “improved manufacture of glass for windows” and indoor and out-
door lighting that indoor shopping became a viable activity at all (Kowaleski-
Wallace 80). As it happens, there is an image of Tabart’s shop (Figure 1.2) that
captures the transitional moment between the indoor shop and the outdoor
tradesman hawking wares on the street.
The watercolor is by William Marshall Craig—an artist who also pro-
duced illustrations for Tabart and his mentor, publisher Richard Phillips
(1767–1840). It is one of a series of watercolors, commissioned by Phillips,
of street vendors selling their wares in front of famous London landmarks.
The fact that the “Band Box” (also known as a bonnet box or hatbox) seller
is painted in front of Tabart’s shop becomes, in itself, a statement about the
importance of the address. The hatbox seller in the foreground—with only
the “Bibliotheque d’Education” and the street sign “Bond Street” visible in
the background—suggests a scrambled visual link between French fashion
and the bookshop. The marketing message is that books were not only edu-
cational, but also fashionable as accessories. Fenwick exploits the same con-
ceit in Visits to the Juvenile Library. The advertisement itself, incidentally, was
arresting enough to attract the attention of the children’s book artist, Charles
Keeping (1920–88), who used the image, with its strong cubes, to accompany
a poem by Charles Causley, “Song of the Shapes” (Figure 1. 3).
The bonnet box seller walking in the streets of Craig’s early-nineteenth-
century illustration/advertisement for Tabart was a character quickly becom-
ing an historical curiosity, a relic of a disappearing age. Once shops started
to move indoors, says Claire Walsh in “Shop Design and the Display of
Goods in Eighteenth-Century London,” they began to develop distinguishing
characteristics:
As the number of shops increased they developed a distinct architectural for-

mat: fascia boards, hanging signs, projecting or bow windows and a painted
surround which delineated the boundaries of the premises and marked them
out as retail shops. The shop front advertised the business to the passing pub-
lic, proclaiming its fashionable standing and drawing attention to extensive
window displays. (Walsh 160)
The 1805 engraving of Tabart’s shop (Figure 1.1) shows several of those fea-
tures, including the painted surround and large windows (though they do
not appear to be bow windows). As Claire Walsh says they are designed to
do, these features function to attract the attention of the passing, fashionable
public. They also provide additional information (Figure1.1). Over the door,
Figure 1.3 Charles Keeping illustration from “Song of the Shapes,” Jack the
Treacle Eater (1987).
the sign reads “Wholesale and Retail,” while the door posts are inscribed with
some of the genres of the books within. Partly visible are the words “Classics,”
“Biography,” “Geography,” and “History”; subjects as completely familiar to
schoolchildren today as they were in the eighteenth century.
Tabart’s Juvenile Library in the 1805 engraving was on the corner of New
Bond Street and Grafton Street in London, a neighborhood which was emerg-
ing as a fashionable shopping destination (Figure 1.4).
Walk to the same corner today and you will fi nd one of the most glittering
retail precincts in London, fi lled with high-end jewelry stores, their sparkling
wares attractively displayed behind transparent walls of wrap-around plate
glass windows. The goods behind the glass are designed to entice shoppers
inside, and yet, at the same time, are protected by elaborate security systems
and very large guards whose job it is to keep out unsuitable people. Asprey’s,
a jewelry and luxury goods shop, now occupies the corner of New Bond Street
and Grafton Street that used to be Ben’s. The panes of glass that made up Ben’s
display window were smaller—modern plate glass had not yet been invent-
ed—but the lineaments of the building are visible in Asprey’s, especially in
the look of the upper-story windows (Figure 1.5).
Shoppers on New Bond Street today regard big windows fi lled with art-
fully arranged goods as normal, but in Ben’s day they were a novelty, though
Figure 1.4 New Bond Street and Grafton Street. John Tallis’s London Street
Views 1838–1840.
Figure 1.5 New Bond Street and Grafton Street, London, 2008.
designed to the same purpose: to catch the eyes of people who are otherwise
just passing by and entice them to stop and enter the magical world on the
other side of the glass. Because modern shoppers take seductive window dis-
plays in stride, it is difficult to grasp just how innovative they were two hun-
dred years ago. We’ve become so inured to the lure of goods attractively lit and
displayed in shop windows that we’ve lost the memory of the originality and
cleverness of the idea.
A description of the allure of the bookshop windows of one of Tabart’s
famous competitors does exist, however. The Juvenile Library (as it was called)
was that of the political philosopher, William Godwin (1756–1836) and his
second wife Mary Jane Clairmont (Mary Wollstonecraft, Godwin’s famous
first wife, died shortly after giving birth to their eventually more famous
daughter, Mary—later Shelley). Before marrying Godwin, Mary Jane Clair-
mont had worked for Tabart, and she brought her expertise and experience to
the enterprise. By the time Mary Jane and William Godwin started up their
Juvenile Library in 1805, they had five young children at home: their son Wil-
liam (born in 1803), Mary Jane’s two children, Charles and Claire, William’s
daughter Mary, and his step-daughter Fanny (I’ll return to their stories). Peter
Marshall, in his biography of Godwin, describes the bookshop with its “stone
carving of Aesop” (Figure 1.6) over the entrance.
Figure 1.6 Godwin’s Juvenile Library, with Aesop above the door, from Eliza
Fenwick’s Leçons pour les enfans (1820).
“A passer-by” recalls that a former child patron of the shop “could easily
peer through the immense low display windows and see the counters laden
with books, with Mrs. Godwin and her assistants organizing the business in a
back room” (Marshall 274). The young enthusiastic reader remembers “how he
lingered ‘with loving eyes over those fascinating story-books, so rich in gaily-
coloured prints; such careful editions of marvelous old histories’” (Marshall
274).4 This lovely description hints at the desirability of the contents to young
shoppers and also suggests why the passers-by in the engraving of Tabart’s
shop appear arrested by the displays. It is not, then, too far a stretch to assume
that Godwin’s window displays resembled the ones depicted in the frontis-
piece of Visits to the Juvenile Library. The image of the child peeking longingly
into the window of an unnamed bookshop, from the frontispiece to Fortune’s
Football (Figure1.7), a book published by Tabart in 1806, seems to capture the
spirit of the child viewer recorded in Marshall’s biography of Godwin.
Interest in material domestic goods was awakening in a burgeoning
Enlightenment middle class. The job of furnishing a home gradually became
the responsibility of women, and the Bond Street shops started to offer the
goods women sought. Domestic material goods were not the only kinds of
home furnishings women wanted. They were also looking to fi ll their homes
with intellectual material goods, with books and with art—the pedagogical
materials their children would need. The new shoppers of the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries were looking for a new lifestyle, one that would
reflect their interests, sense, sensibility, and their especial concern for educa-
tion. Ben’s shop fit the bill extremely well.
In the 1805 engraving, prominent window displays of books and maps on
either side of the door attract the attention of the passing children. Both boys
are caught mid-stride. The boy on the left—his short jacket and wide pants,
known as a “skeleton suit,”5 mark him as a relatively young child—pulls an
elegantly dressed woman, presumably his mother, by the hand. He points
towards the front door, urging her to enter. The boy on the right is slightly
older, a hat-wearing unaccompanied young gentleman, sporting long trou-
sers, tall boots, a walking stick, and, at a guess, discretionary funds of his own.
He peers intently at the books in the window, while, over the door, in English
and French, is the name of the shop: “The School & Juvenile Library. Tabart &
Co., La Bibliotheque d’Education.” Below the sign, the address, “No. 157 New
Bond Street,” is written in large, elegant script.6
At first glance, the depiction of the well-dressed figures converging on
the door of Tabart’s shop does not appear to need much explanation. The
engraving has the feel of an advertisement: a soft sales pitch for a fashionable,
intellectually attractive bookstore. But this not all it is. In fact, each element—
advertisement, shoppers, shop front, and window displays—reveals some-
thing about Tabart’s that is otherwise inaccessible to twenty-first-century
eyes. As I enter Ben’s early-nineteenth-century world, through his shop, the
books in his shop, his authors, and his intended readers, I’ll continue to medi-
ate between his world and ours.
The new consumer culture was growing at an unprecedented rate at the
beginning of the nineteenth century: a physical, intellectual, and political
growth spurt. In 1801, the population was about eleven million in England,
Wales, and Scotland, but even more dramatic was the rate at which the popu-
lation was increasing, “by anything from 12 to 18 percent each decade” (Fraser
4). The book business was burgeoning in similar fashion. There were over
“300 booksellers in London, almost three times as many as 30 years before”
(Braithwaite 178–79). And in keeping with a new intellectual spirit, as Brian
Alderson and Felix de Marez Oyens explain in Be Merry and Wise: Origins of
Children’s Book Publishing in England, 1650–1850, there was an explosion of
Figure 1.7 Frontispiece to Isaac Jenner’s Fortune’s Football (1806).

new books for use in schools: “a stirring on the part of tradesmen, a growing
awareness that the market was ready to support news ideas about what children
might enjoy” (Alderson and de Marez Oyens 135). Although Alderson and
de Marez Oyens attend to the implicit tensions between instruction (school-
books) and “what children might enjoy” (fairy tale and fantasy), the cultural
and demographic changes occurring around 1800 also require attention.
Children growing up in England were actively instructed to attend to a world
being newly shaped by the relatively recent (late eighteenth century) creations of
democracies in France and the United States. The violent, bloody, revolutionary
births of those democracies were still recent enough to be well within the living
memories of the parents of those children. There was also a gathering will in
England to eliminate first the slave trade (abolished in 1807) and then slavery
itself (abolished in 1833). The authors who published with Ben’s house—and
with other publishing houses in the neighborhood—were living and working
in the crucible of radical London where these new political ideas were debated,
discussed, and put into print. The 1790s opened, in fact, with Thomas Paine’s
Rights of Man (1791) and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of
Woman (1791–92), both envisioning possibilities for the ways in which a demo-
cratic state with an enfranchised, educated population might function.
Although not all the publishing houses would have been there at the same
time, I’ve included the significant addresses of those I’ll discuss. Included
are the houses of: John Newbery at the Bible and Sun, 65 St. Paul’s Church-
yard; Joseph Johnson, 72 St. Paul’s Churchyard; Richard Phillips, 71 St. Paul’s
Churchyard; Benjamin Tabart, 157 New Bond Street; (William Godwin’s)
Juvenile Library, 41 Skinner Street at Snow Hill; and Darton and Harvey, 55
Gracechurch Street.
Ben’s Neighborhood
Some of the London authors and publishers I’m going to introduce here will
recur later in my story, but this is as good a place as any to locate them geograph-
ically. Although many of the streets where the early-nineteenth-century book-
shops stood in London are still laid out and named as they were in Ben’s day, the
numbering of buildings has changed, and most of the physical buildings that
housed the shops have been replaced. Ben’s shop was in the new, up and coming
shopping district around Bond Street, and, therefore, slightly apart from most
of the other publishing houses who feature in my story clustered. They were
situated in the neighborhood where print culture originated in London in the
late sixteenth century, with the arrival of the printing press. A walk around the
area today continues to reveal traces of that culture (Figure 1.8).
Walk from Charing Cross Station along the Strand and find a statue of
Samuel Johnson (Figure 1.9), reading, in front of St. Clement Danes Church (of
“Oranges and Lemons / Say the Bells of St. Clement’s” fame). Of course, Samuel
Figure 1.8 Relative locations of some of the featured publishing houses as

mapped on Smith’s New Plan of London, Westminster and Southwark (1807).
Johnson (1709–84) was a legendary man of letters, a jack-of-all-trades literary
man, a writer of fiction, poetry, drama, a critic, and a journalist—a jobbing
writer, glittering in every genre. He even published a fairy tale, The Fountain, in
1766. The statue is located approximately where his house is supposed to have
been. The fact that Johnson stands reading forever seems eminently fitting.
The statue of Johnson is close to where, at 195 The Strand, William God-
win (1756–1836) had one of his bookshops. Keep wandering along the Strand
and Fleet Street and the modern descendents of the print trade, including the
Guardian newspaper, are in evidence. Fleet Street is so completely associated
with English newspaper culture that the street name alone has become syn-
onymous with journalism. Head towards Christopher Wren’s monumental
Figure 1.9 Statue of Samuel Johnson. St.

Clement Danes Church, The Strand, London.
St. Paul’s Cathedral, as much a landmark in the twenty-first century as it was
in the early eighteenth (construction dates are given as 1675–1710). Eliza Fen-
wick, in one of her stories for children, captures the wonder and magic of the
architectural monument that is St. Paul’s, by calling attention to its sound and
music: “[I]ts fine choir, its lofty dome and cupola, and its curious whispering
gallery, where a whisper breathed to the wall on one side, is carried around by
the echo, and the words are heard distinctly on the opposite side off the gal-
lery” (Fenwick, Lessons 32).
Continue walking. As the Strand flows into Fleet Street, a pedestrian will
stumble across another Wren church, St. Bride’s, constructed 1672, though
churches had existed on that spot from the seventh century. The first print-
ing press in England with movable type was set up at an earlier incarnation
of St. Bride’s church in 1501 by William Caxton’s apprentice, Wynken de
Worde. St. Bride’s was known as the “printer’s cathedral,” and in the small
cluster of seventeenth-century buildings surrounding the church is St.
Bride’s Printing Library.
By the turn of the nineteenth century, the heart of the British book trade was
situated in St. Paul’s Churchyard and immediate environs. The Churchyard
was really a street circling the Cathedral—with one side identified as “north”
and the other as “south.” The buildings on the street were tall and narrow:
shops were at ground level with living quarters above. For people interested in
children’s book history, John Newbery’s shop at 65 St. Paul’s Churchyard, with
its “Bible and Sun” sign over the top, is the most likely to be known, especially
as Newbery’s name lives on in the American Library Association’s annual
Newbery Award.7 For walkers in Newbery’s neighborhood today, the signs
for St. Paul’s Churchyard are exactly where imagined, just behind the Cathe-
dral. There is no churchyard, however, no street, just a paved pedestrian plaza
with coffee shops which cater to local business people and tourists. There is
not even a blue historical plaque to mark the spot of Newbery’s shop—or the
other bookshops that were clustered in St. Paul’s Churchyard.
In the late eighteenth century, the bookshop at 72 St. Paul’s Churchyard
run by Joseph Johnson (1738–1809) was a very busy place. Both in the shop
and in the living quarters above, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97), William
Godwin (1756–1836), William Blake (1757–1827), Thomas Paine (1737–1809),
and other influential intellectuals who were constructing what became the
early modern age, dined, argued, worked out ideas, and generally received
encouragement from Johnson. Besides Wollstonecraft, Johnson also pub-
lished other historically important children’s book authors, who would visit
from out of town, including Anna Barbauld (1743–1825) and Maria Edge-
worth (1768–1849).
The tight concentration of intellectuals and authors working in the chil-
dren’s book business in the radical London of the Enlightenment does have
a twentieth-century counterpart. In Leonard S. Marcus’s history of the
American children’s book business, Minders of Make-Believe, he describes the
Figure 1.10 Shops on the north side of St. Paul’s Churchyard. Thomas Hor-
nor, 1823.
Figure 1.11 Shops on the south side of St. Paul’s Churchyard. Thomas Hornor,
1823.
children’s book authors and illustrators of New York in the 1940s feeling as if
they belonged in an industry “as small as a fairy tale village.” Greenwich Vil-
lage, in particular, Marcus explains was “long a mecca for artists, writers and
political radicals,” many of whom had gravitated there in the 1930s (Marcus
160). The same kinds of intense social, economic, and political pressures that
produced a concentration of radical authors and educators in London around
1800 also contributed to the clustering of a similarly radical and talented
group in New York a century-and-a-half later.8
Despite the fact that the concentration of print culture has vanished from
what was the churchyard around St. Paul’s, it is still possible to stand where it
was, look up at the Cathedral, imagine what it was like in the eighteenth century,
and appreciate its grandeur. Then a city walker in today’s London might still go,
as an eighteenth-century author could have done, from St. Paul’s Churchyard
south towards the Thames and close to Blackfriars Bridge, where at 6-7 New
Bridge Street, Tabart’s mentor Sir Richard Phillips (1767–1840) had his second
shop (his first had been at 71 St. Paul’s Churchyard). Many books were published
with both the names of Tabart and Phillips on the title page. William Godwin’s
second shop was not far away at 41 Skinner Street at Snow Hill. Also in the neigh-
borhood was the firm of Darton and Harvey at 55 Gracechurch Street, which
figures in my story later in connection with Jane Taylor, best known as author of
“The Star” (or “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” as we know it), and her sister Ann,
author of the once well-known, but now forgotten, poem, “My Mother.”9
From the compartmentalized perspective of the publishing industry in the
modern and postmodern eras, the book trade, as it was typically called in
eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century London, seems very fluid. Authors
from a wide range of political, religious, economic, and social backgrounds
Figure 1.12 Skinner Street at Snow Hill. Adapted from Richard Horwood’s
Map and the Face of London, 1799–1819.
could easily share the same publisher. The radical author Mary Wollstonecraft,
for example, published with Joseph Johnson, who also published the ultra-con-
servative Mrs. Trimmer. In the Enlightenment book business world, distinctions
between commissioning editor, publisher, printer, bookseller, and marketer had
not yet calcified into the rigid categories that defined individual jobs in the book-
making business of the twentieth century. Multitasking was also commonplace
among authors who wrote political and philosophical treatises, novels, reviews,
journalistic essays, political pamphlets, verse, dramas, and histories, as well as
pedagogical books for children. No one seemed to worry too much about authors
crossing genre or age borders. Only late in the twentieth century does the idea
of writing for both adults and children become unusual enough to be flagged as
out of the ordinary. The fluidity of the Enlightenment authorial voice becomes
especially interesting in contrast to the twenty-first-century use of the term
“crosswriting”10 (as developed in work by postmodern scholars Sandra Beckett,
Uli Knoepflmacher, and the late Mitzi Myers) to suggest that authors writing for
both children and adults are doing something out of the ordinary.
Cross the Threshold and Enter
In the period around 1800, book publishers were awake to the debates about
maternal domestic education and public schooling. Children growing up in
middle- and upper-class families would be the ones transitioning into the new
world order, after all.11 And the eighteenth-century bookseller was beginning
to see the market potential of the thinking child, to use Mary Wollstonecraft’s
preferred term. Her late-eighteenth-century vision for a model of a national
education strategy was founded on the “cultivation of mind,” which could be
produced only by “teach[ing] young people how to begin to think” (Woll-
stonecraft, Vindication 167). The coming of Romanticism, however, began to
change perceptions of children and childhood: the Rational thinking children
of the eighteenth century were rapidly being replaced by the Romantic inno-
cents of the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries. In the twenty-
first century, the fading images of those Romantic innocents haunt us and
make us uneasy, which is why turning to the thinking and knowing children
of the eighteenth century offers attractive possibilities for renewal.
As scholar Marilyn Butler explains in her eloquent 1972 biography of
Maria Edgeworth, the booksellers entering the market during the Enlight-
enment were catering to a new breed of consumer—a “public that was
increasingly mindful of the arts of domesticity,” and one that “had been edu-
cated, whether by Locke or Rousseau to recognize the importance of early
education” (Butler 156). Butler argues these shoppers were not just on the
lookout for eye candy; they wanted something both intellectually pleasing
and aesthetically attractive. For a twenty-fi rst-century equivalent, consider
how reports of brain research revealing fi rework displays of synaptic activ-
ity in the minds of infants stimulated the market for the hugely successful
Baby Einstein™ franchise.12 In theory, parents of infants are encouraged
to buy a product in order to give their children a competitive edge. In the
eighteenth century, pedagogical theories were promoted in the same way.
Parents intent on giving their children a competitive edge attempted to
implement the philosophies of education that had been recently developed
by John Locke (1632–1704) in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693),
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) in Émile, or On Education (1762), and
Stéphanie Félicité Ducrest de St.-Aubin, comtesse de Genlis (1746–1830)
in Adelaide and Theodore; or Letters on Education (1782 in French, 1783 in
English). These Enlightenment theorists stimulated exactly the same kinds
of desires to produce “better” (more socially acceptable, smarter) children
that brain researchers stimulate in modern parents.
The engraving of the children thrilled by Tabart’s window displays (Figure
1.1) perfectly situates the shop as the potential source for goods likely to create
socially desirable children. The subtitle of Eliza Fenwick’s Visits to the Juve-
nile Library—Knowledge Proved to Be the Source of Happiness—underlines the
intellectual attractiveness of Ben’s shop, which is positioned as a destination
for “young gentlemen and young ladies” who enjoy the ambiance so much that
“they cannot go there too often” (Fenwick, Visits 20). In attending carefully to
the engravings of the outside—and then the inside—of Tabart’s shop, we catch
glimpses of an emerging consumer culture we commonly take for granted.
The verb “to shop” first appears in 1688, according to the Oxford English Dic-
tionary (OED), and the idea of “visiting a shop for the purpose of examining the
contents” enters the lexicon in 1764. A “shopper,” as someone who “frequents a
shop or shops for the purpose of inspecting or buying goods,” doesn’t turn up
until much later, in 1862, according to the OED. By the early nineteenth century,
however, women, as wives and mothers, had become the people doing the shop-
ping. They had taken up the responsibility for purchasing the material objects
associated with urban domestic comfort. These new female shoppers belonged
largely to a growing merchant class who had disposable incomes to be used on
home décor, clothes, education, and travel. They were interested in good design
and furniture, good sense and good education. Appearances matter, as anyone
tuned to twenty-first-century marketing campaigns knows instantly: advertise-
ments are filled with preternaturally beautiful, perfectly groomed people. The
people shown in the engravings of Tabart’s bookshop are fashionable and well-
dressed, demonstrating exactly the demographic being targeted.
In Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping and Business in the Eighteenth Cen-
tury, Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace includes wonderful and intriguing details
about the ways in which new signs of domestic good taste were manifesting
themselves. As an example, the fashion of afternoon tea drinking created a
new need, or at least a new desire, for an array of specialized china accoutre-
ments, including teapots, strainers, saucers, sugar bowls, cream pitchers, and
the like. Aesthetically pleasing tea services became identifying markers of an
emerging consumer class: people of taste with discretionary time and income.
The elaborate tea-drinking paraphernalia required an equally elaborate set of
social conventions around tea-making, tea-serving, and tea-drinking. Kow-
aleski-Wallace includes the provocative detail that the famous pottery maker,
Josiah Wedgwood (who also belonged to the groups of intellectual radicals
in Enlightenment London), even made a series of black teapots—ostensibly
to show off the white hands of women of leisure whose skin had never been
darkened by sun or work. Leisure-class women with discerning taste were the
target market for booksellers who had time and money to devote to creating a
new model of family life. As these women were also becoming the creators of
a particular kind of middle-class life, new shops competed with each other to
attract their attention and their money.
Besides the frontispiece in Fenwick’s Visits to the Juvenile Library, access to
the novelty of the urban shopping experience with its glittering lights and array
of consumer goods can be gained through another book laden with product
placement published by Tabart in 1805 entitled A Visit to London, by Elizabeth
Kilner. Her story centers on a visit to London—including a visit to Tabart’s shop
as a highlight. As the narrator of Kilner’s book explains, “[I]t would be difficult
to express the rapture of the children, on seeing the lamps in the streets, and the
lights in all the shop windows.” The mother of the family, Mrs. Sandby, makes
explicit the relationship between illuminated windows and the enticement to
buy. “Shops,” she observes, “are lighted, that we may be able to see the goods and
perhaps be induced to go in and buy them” (Kilner, A Visit to London 38–39).
Eliza Fenwick, too, gives us a glimpse of how the tempting streetscape appeared.
In one of her stories, “Cousin James and Cousin Thomas,” from her 1813 Les-
sons for Children, Fenwick has the city cousin Thomas describe the sights of
central London to his country cousin James:
He spoke of the spacious paved streets, crowded all day by throngs of people,
and lighted at night by rows, on each side of the way, of glass lamps. He
told him of the fine toy-shops, where all kinds of play-things for children are
sold: such as bats, balls, kites, marbles, tops, drums, trumpets, whips, wheel-
barrows, shuttles, dolls, and baby houses. And of other great shops where
linens, muslins, silks, laces, and ribbons fill the windows, and make quite a
gay picture to attract the passers by. (Fenwick, Lessons 31–32)
Around 1800, displays of consumer goods in shop windows were recognized

as more than just novel curiosities. They had become serious temptations, and
so the subjects of warning examples. A famous cautionary tale from the period
is found in one of Maria Edgeworth’s “Rosamond” stories, “The Purple Jar.”
On a shopping trip for sensible shoes with her mother, young Rosamond is dis-
tracted by the seductive window displays: the “pretty things” in the toy shop,
the “ribands and lace and festoons of artificial flowers” in the milliner’s shop,
and the “pretty baubles” in the jeweler’s shop (Edgeworth 2). The window dis-
play that proves to be the girl’s downfall, however, is in the chemist’s shop.
The glowing, iridescent blue, green, red, yellow, and purple jars in the window
are irresistible. Poor Rosamond deeply covets the beautiful purple jar, and her
mother, in order to teach her daughter a practical lesson, agrees to purchase the
jar instead of shoes. Rosamond, predictably, is distressed to learn that appear-
ances are often deceiving. Her old shoes fall apart, so she is unable to go out,
and the much desired purple jar offers no pleasure as it turns out to be merely
an ordinary clear glass jar filled with nasty smelling dark liquid. The lesson
derived from the apparently valuable object which turns out to be tacky is com-
pletely familiar to children enticed by television advertisements for action fig-
ures, which seem substantial on the screen (often filmed upwards from a low
angle to make them appear taller), but turn out to be small and dull in hand.
Edgeworth’s story poignantly conveys how the new transparent glass shop
windows—which should offer a clear, honest view of the goods inside—can
hide the truth. In “City Scenes,” Katie Trumpener eloquently captures the
complexity of the new relationships developing between shoppers and shops
when she notes that “those who look through the window” were hoping to
find “a mirror of the world as it should be.” That is, there was an implicit
promise that the “rich display of goods” in the windows really were able to
offer “the city’s plenitude and utopian world beyond privation” (Trumpener
353). Edgeworth’s story is a warning about the false promises of the goods
in the shop on the other side of the window. Fenwick’s Visits to the Juvenile
Library, on the other hand, offers an affirmation that the promises offered by
striking window displays can be fulfi lled by the books and educational toys
and materials inside Ben Tabart’s shop.
The tantalizing feature of the engraving of the outside of Tabart’s Juve-
nile Library is that the viewer cannot quite see what has obviously caught
the attention of the passers-by. Inside Fenwick’s story, however, the reader
is given a glimpse of the enchanting treasures on the other side of the glass,
including the:
neat arrangement of an immense quantity of books, handsomely bound

in red or green leather, and lettered on the back with gold letters, together
with globes, maps, and little ornamented bookcases, of various sizes, finely
painted and varnished [and having] a pleasing effect to the eye. (Fenwick,
Visits 20)
The “maps” of this description were probably what were called “dissected
maps,” that is, jigsaw puzzle maps (Figure 1.13). John Spilsbury is credited
with producing the first commercial versions in 1763, and his successful inno-
vations were quickly adopted by other children’s booksellers of the period.13
Puzzle maps teach geography—which was itself an innovative feature of the
eighteenth-century curriculum. In a world in which the political climate was
rapidly changing, a new kind of curriculum—beyond classical knowledge of
Greek and Latin—was becoming recognized for its value in engaging with the
modern world.14
The “little ornamented bookcases” in Fenwick’s description of Tabart’s
shop were likely “miniature libraries,” another of the original enterprises
of the children’s book business in the late eighteenth century (Figure 1.14).
Alderson and de Marez Oyens describe miniature libraries as “sets of tiny
books, planned around themes and housed in wooden boxes whose lids were
made to resemble the front of a bookcase” (Alderson and de Marez Oyens
128). Published in 1962, Maurice Sendak’s Nutshell Library is a good modern
example, and its success functions on the same principle: tiny books for tiny
hands, something miniaturized and adorable.15
Credit for the production of the first commercial miniature library belongs
to the London publisher John Marshall, for his little boxed set The Juvenile
or Child’s Library, brought out in 1799–1800. Implicitly, a child learning to
Figure 1.13 Puzzle map. England and Wales. London: E. Wallis, 1826.
read could play teacher by pretending to teach a doll to read from one of the
books in the miniature library. Pedagogically, the learner charged with the
responsibility of teaching is positioned to learn the material particularly
well. The miniature library was an inspired prop for encouraging a learner-
as-teacher scenario. The child teaching the doll to read is a typical form of
child’s play, and is also typical of a mother’s play with her own child. Although
extant evidence for maternal teaching techniques is limited, the existence of
the “Nursery Library” of Jane Johnson (1706–59), a collection of almost five
hundred tiny cards and books (contained in a hatbox-sized box) she created
for her children in the mid-eighteenth century to aid in learning to read, sug-
gests that a maternal tradition of miniatures already existed. I’ll return to
Jane Johnson and the principles of maternal pedagogy later in the context of
a discussion concerning drawing inexperienced young readers into the intel-
lectual pleasures of the books in Ben’s house—a feature central to the plot of
Fenwick’s Visits to the Juvenile Library.
Though everything about the engraving of Ben’s house that heads this
chapter—the well-dressed enthusiastic people and the prominence of the
shop name—screams advertisement to a modern reader, it is not strictly an
advertisement in the conventional sense. It is not a print advertisement as we
know it, not space bought in a newspaper or magazine by a store to advertise
itself to a likely target audience. The advertisement is not the same kind as the
Figure 1.14 Book Case of Instruction. John Wallis, 1813.

British academic bookshop Blackwell’s, for instance, might buy in The London
Review of Books to reach a target market. The image that heads this chapter is
the frontispiece to Eliza Fenwick’s book about Ben’s shop, Visits to the Juve-
nile Library. Because the novel is a prescient example of product placement,
preceding its more formal use as a marketing term in the twentieth century,
it occupies an ambiguous social and cultural space. Is it realistic? If so, should
we take it as an accurate window on the responses of early-nineteenth-century
children to their books? Or is it just wish-fulfillment? If the latter, then it has
to be read as hyperbole—of the kind used by modern advertisers arguing that
shampoo will turn an ordinary woman into a goddess. Visits to the Juvenile
Library is probably both and neither, which makes it extremely compelling.
Is Visits to the Juvenile Library a novel promising intellectual and emo-
tional pleasure? Or is it merely an advertisement selling a promise of some-
thing that cannot possibly be delivered? Is advertising that masquerades as
enlightenment ethical—especially when children (supposedly innocent and
vulnerable children) are the intended audience? Does something at once
commercial and educational suggest ominous undertones, akin to putting
“free” news television broadcasts into schools along with a “little” advertis-
ing? Some of these unarticulated concerns may well have been beneath the
uniformly negative critical assessments of Visits to the Juvenile Library. In her
1990 bibliography of the books in Ben’s shop, Marjorie Moon categorically
states that the book “must surely have proved a disappointment to young
readers since it is really a large-scale advertisement for Tabart’s publications”
(41). Elsewhere, Moon describes Fenwick’s book as “really blatant, indeed
ridiculous advertising,” and complains that the book “reads more like a cata-
logue than a story” (8). In Children’s Books in England (1932), the first his-
torian of the children’s book business, F. J. Harvey Darton, calls Visits to the
Juvenile Library “an unblushing account of his shop and its contents” (Darton
207). Matthew Grenby, in the online digital archive of early children’s books,
the Hockliffe Project, writes about Visits to the Juvenile Library in introduc-
tory essays to two other books by Fenwick: in one essay he describes Visits to
the Juvenile Library as “an extended and blatant panegyric,” and in another as
“an extended puff for Tabart’s publishing and bookselling business.”16 These
reactions seem a lot of negative press for a book that ran to only a single edi-
tion. Something about the book is clearly important enough to be irritating
to readers attempting to assess its historical importance. In itself, this atten-
tion is telling: if the book wasn’t communicating, no one would have both-
ered making any comments at all.
At the heart of the criticism of Visits to the Juvenile Library is the conflicted
sense—now as then—that advertising and education are mutually exclu-
sive categories that should be kept apart. Embedded in the criticism is also
a sense that targeting children as potential markets, even though parents are
the potential buyers, conflicts with the Romantic construction of innocent
children too pure to be the objects of grubby marketing practices. And there
is the implicit assumption that crass commercialism should not contaminate
pedagogical practice, though there has always been something hypocritical
in that stance: commercial profit has always been part of the equation unless
pedagogical materials are handmade and domestic.
According to the OED, the word “advertise,” meaning “to take note of,
attend, observe” dates from the early seventeenth century. Prior to that, as
book history scholar Elizabeth Eisenstein reminds us, in the late medieval
period “advertisement,” derived from the French “avertissement,” meant “a
warning (or ‘avertissement’) against sale” because the book designated as such
had been copied in a medieval scriptoria during holy days and was especially
sacred (Eisenstein 239).17 The meaning of the word “advertisement” evolved
into the exact inverse of its original incarnation: instead of drawing atten-
tion to warn against commercial sale, it has come to mean drawing attention
to promote commercial sale. The “avertissement” (a note placed in the colo-
phon) distinguished a book that had been copied for the love of God, therefore
not for sale, from those copied for commercial purposes, and so for sale. Once
the printing press made it possible to produce multiple copies of books for
commercial purposes, the act of copying books for predominantly religious
purposes changed. The “avertissement” against sale of the sacred became an
advertisement to promote sale of the commercial.
John Newbery (1713–67), conventionally regarded in children’s book histo-
ries as the “father” of children’s literature, is celebrated for his slogan, “Trade
and Plum-cake Forever, Huzza!” John Rowe Townsend, author and children’s
book historian, uses the slogan as part of the title for his 1994 biography of
Newbery, signifying the link between sweet treats and profit, or perhaps less
explicitly, the link between profit and sugarcoating pedagogical materials:
the idea that learning should be “fun,” as the trope goes even today. Retro-
spectively, it seems a little unfair that Newbery is praised for mixing trade,
profit, and pleasure, while Fenwick’s Visits to the Juvenile Library is criticized
for promoting high fashion and intellectual pleasure. Even though Newbery’s
shop predates Tabart’s shop by about half a century, Newbery is revered as the
bookseller who invented the pleasurable text for children, the one who pro-
moted toys with books. Most famously, Newbery offered a ball for boys and
a pincushion for girls as the toy tie-ins for A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, and so
was regarded as providing a prescient image of the Romantic innocent child
who is rewarded with toys for performing well or being good. In Visits to the
Juvenile Library, on the other hand, a book about a microscope is promoted
for its use in concert with a real microscope. Historically, we’ve come to revere
Newbery’s marketing genius and forget Tabart’s. But I can’t help wondering
how much our value judgments are dictated by what we think children should
be like. It is helpful to remember that the links between profit and pedagogical
materials were still in the early stages of formation in the eighteenth centu-
ry—and that advertisements, “puffs” as they were called, were also still rela-
tively new.
The OED gives 1732 as the date for the first use of the noun “puff” to
mean “undue or inflated commendation: an extravagantly laudatory adver-
tisement or review of a book, a performer or performance, a tradesman’s
goods or the like.” The mid-eighteenth-century date coincides roughly with
the sudden explosion of new magazines and periodicals, including England’s
famous Tatler (1709–11), Spectator (1711–17), Rambler (1750–52), and Idler
(1758–60).
For the first time in history, books were being advertised in newspapers.
Before, there had been a very limited network through which to promote a
new book—for the most part it was by either word of mouth or catalogue.
A book advertised in a newspaper was able to reach a wider public, so by the
1730s, publication—that is, to “make public”—came to mean something new.
As books increasingly became more available, they were regarded as a less
exclusive commodity. Instead of being aimed at the rich, the learned, and the
clergy, they were aimed at a larger demographic. Readers as potential consum-
ers were beginning to be understood as a target market. In the same period,
potential book buyers were also influenced by the expansion of book reviewing
in newspapers and the appearance of dedicated reviewing periodicals. When
Tabart was setting up shop and trying to sell his wares in the early nineteenth
century, new marketing strategies were in the process of being invented for
the book business, advertising that moved beyond a book catalogue listed in
the end pages of published books. Eliza Fenwick’s Visits to the Juvenile Library
emerged in this evolving advertising environment.
Book history scholar Michael Harris (cited by James Tierney) estimates
that by the middle of the eighteenth century “nearly a half million people”
may have been buying newspapers on Saturdays in London (Tierney 105).18
And there were probably even more people reading newspapers than there
were buyers. Coffeehouses, also relatively new to the London landscape, “sub-
scribed to an assortment of newspapers for the use of their customers” (Tier-
ney 111). People read newspapers and caught up on gossip and politics in these
new coffeehouses—very much like the newspaper-reading, coffee-drinking,
twenty-first-century Starbucks customer. The advertisements in eighteenth-
century newspapers were, however, novel enough to be noticed and were sub-
ject to both public concern and debate. Samuel Johnson, in a little 1759 essay
of the Idler, weighed in on “puffing” books in newspapers:
The practice of appending to the narratives of public transactions, more

minute and domestic intelligence, and filling the News-papers with adver-
tisements, has grown up by slow degrees to its present state.
Genius is shewn only by Invention. The man who first took advantage of
the general curiosity that was excited by a siege or battle, to betray the Read-
ers of News into the knowledge of the shop where the best Puffs and Powder
were to be sold, was undoubtedly a man of great sagacity, and profound skill
in the nature of Man. But when he had once shewn the way, it was easy to
follow him; and every man now knows a method of informing the Publick of
all that he desires to buy or sell, whether his wares be material or intellectual
whether he makes Cloaths, or teaches the Mathematics; whether he be a
Tutor that wants a Pupil, or a Pupil that wants a tutor. (Samuel Johnson,
Idler 40.20 [January 1759]: 224)
Johnson feared that the juxtaposition of serious news with frivolous adver-
tisements for shops selling “puffs and powder”—by defi nition, something
light, fluffy, and merely cosmetic—was a culturally dubious innovation. In
the twentieth century, the media critic Neil Postman made a similar argu-
ment in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), when he wrote about the bizarre-
ness of television news broadcasts in which horrific death and destruction
jostle with football scores and commercials. For Johnson as for Postman,
the juxtaposition of the frivolous with the serious is only part of the prob-
lem—the other part is how profits are somehow at odds with the sanctity
of purely intellectual pursuits. That is not strictly the case, of course, but
conventional distinctions between crass commercialism and intellectual
asceticism remain.
Besides worrying about news and advertising sharing space, Johnson also
voiced concern about the ethics of advertising. He worried about the dangers of
inciting unwarranted desires and about discrepancies between what is spoken
and what is promised. “Promise,” said Johnson, “large Promise, is the soul of
an Advertisement” (Johnson 225). The implicit danger is that advertisements
make extravagant promises that cannot be kept, yet if the promise is tempting
enough, we’ll buy the product hoping the promise is within reach. Shampoo,
for instance, will not provide orgasmic pleasure, but an advertisement linking
the two is designed to lure consumers to a specific brand of shampoo by the
promise of large pleasure. Once we start questioning what is promised, we
are instantly stuck in a moral spider’s web. Does Disney promise real magic?
Does Tabart promise enlightenment? As consumers, we must know, at some
level, that we’re being swindled by the advertiser. But pedagogical practice is
intimately connected with the construction of moral, truth-telling citizens,
so the false, or at least exaggerated promises of advertising are particularly
morally questionable.
Today, consumers are bombarded with advertisements (including those for
Baby Einstein) and educational materials promising academic success for their
children. In England, newspapers publish tables documenting the apparent
truth of the success or failure of each school in the country. It is impossible
not to ask if the promise of school success is fundamentally any different than
the promise of Disney magic. In asking the question, however, attention turns
away from the promises made in commercial advertising towards “relations
between taste and education,” as cultural theorist Pierre Bourdieu writes in
Distinction (Bourdieu 11). Education is not above a kind commercial prom-
ise, as it is fundamentally supposed to produce a “better” (somehow new and
improved, more socially acceptable) person. As Bourdieu suggests, “The logic
of transmission of cultural capital and the functioning of the educational sys-
tem” are intimately tied (Bourdieu 23).
Inside the House That Ben Built
If the frontispiece engraving of Visits to the Juvenile Library acts as a tease to

the delights of both the novel and the shop, then the illustration of the interior
(Figure 1.15) offers confirmation. As promised, here is the “neat arrangement of
an immense quantity of books” (20). As Claire Walsh explains in “Shop Design
and the Display of Goods in Eighteenth-Century London,” shopkeepers of the
period “were at pains to express visually the good management of their stock
through its careful and precise organization into appropriate parcels, boxes,
and drawers” (Walsh 164). In Tabart’s shop, there are so many books that when
one of the children in the story says he would like to count them, he is told that
it would be “no easy task,” because “from the cieling [sic] to the floor the shelves
are full; nay the counters are covered with books” (19).
Like the engraving of the outside of the shop, the engraving of the inside
needs explanation to interpret features lost to us, but meaningful to people
in the early nineteenth century. The semiotic coding of the architecture of
the shop, its lighting, furnishings, its goods, and its clientele all convey the
Figure 1.15 An interior view of Tabart’s shop. Visits to the Juvenile Library
(1805).
message that Tabart’s Juvenile Library is a shopping destination, that people of
taste and intelligence go there and buy books.
The interior design of Tabart’s (Figure 1.16), seen from the entrance, defines
the space as a luxury shop rather than as a place of residence or where goods
are manufactured. This detail marks a change from the seventeenth century
when, for example, if you were a silversmith, you would likely live and work in
the same physical space; the display and sale of your wares would not feature
in your workshop. By the eighteenth century, as Claire Walsh explains, “the
specialized activity of selling was kept away from the dirt and noise of manu-
facturing” (Walsh 164). The interior view of Tabart’s suggests it is a high-end
shop, as the space is dedicated exclusively to selling intellectual goods. The
smell of cabbage cooking is unlikely to be competing with the new book smell.
And no one is carrying garbage or chamber pots out the front door.
The three graceful arches central to the image of Tabart’s shop were typical
design features in shops aimed at the luxury market at the time, as were deco-
rative “screens, cornices and mouldings.” They all contributed to the making
of “the grand design statement” that echoed “the grand architectural gestures
of wealthy private homes and lavish public interiors such as assembly halls and
pleasure gardens” (Walsh 161). The arches in the engraving work perfectly to
convey the sense that Tabart’s Juvenile Library offers the same comforts and
intellectual pleasures as a generous library in a stately home.
Other details in the picture—and in the text of Visits to the Juvenile Library—
emphasize the point that the bookshop is a place of comfort, a place to linger.
There is a large elegant chandelier and a large wall clock—suggesting a room
Figure 1.16 Interior view from the entrance. Visits to the Juvenile Library
(1805).
that is as gracious as a well-appointed domestic space. In the center of the
image a fire is visible through the archway. There is a specific line in the text
that draws attention to the welcoming warmth of this fire. We are told, Tabart
himself offers a chair to one of his shoppers so she can sit down near “the good
fire, which on cold days is always burning in the Juvenile Library” (Fenwick,
Visits 65–66). Claire Walsh comments that “chairs and stools for customers,
sometimes upholstered in velvet or leather, are items that appear in nearly all
inventories for shops, contributing to the air of comfort and deference created
to flatter and detain customers” (167). Reading these comments about comfort
is difficult without also considering what Eliza Fenwick wrote two years after
the publication of Visits to the Juvenile Library (5 November 1807), when she was
working for William Godwin in his Juvenile Library. She writes, in a letter to her
friend Mary Hays (also a novelist and children’s author), “I like the employment
well enough but I suffer excessively from cold & long fasting, for as I cant [sic]
have my meals there I go every day without dinner” (Wedd 20). Fenwick even-
tually had to quit her job at Godwin’s bookshop, as she felt the working condi-
tions were intolerable. In contrast, Tabart’s shop looks wonderfully desirable
and hospitable. The woman seated in the engraving is engaged with an atten-
tive shop assistant, perhaps Tabart himself, about some books. The dog curled
comfortably below the chair adds another detail to the general sense of domestic
coziness. The image conveys intellectual warmth and physical comfort, both
desirable commodities for the consuming classes of the period.
A slightly different interior view of Tabart’s appears in Elizabeth Kilner’s
A Visit to London (Figure 1.17). The focus here is on the clientele: the elegant
women, the young girl, and the attentive shopkeeper (again possibly Tabart).
Figure 1.17 Another view of the interior of Tabart’s shop. A Visit to London
(1808).
Each appears focused on a discussion about the books spread on the counter—
itself another relatively new feature of eighteenth-century shops. Behind them,
the window allows natural light to illuminate the goods on the counter, while
outside the shop, on the other side of the glass three male figures, one likely a
boy, peer eagerly through the window displays into the shop. A carriage wheel
at the right of the image provides the sense that someone has just driven up,
jumped out of the carriage, and stopped to look inside. One of the men in the
window points with interest at an item in the shop. The people outside appear to
be a well-dressed crowd eager for a glimpse of the interior delights.
In Visits to London, the clothes worn by the female figures all represent
a new style. The bonnet tied under the brim with a ribbon had gradually
replaced the mob cap of the late eighteenth century. And the women are wear-
ing soft, “empire”-cut dresses, with high waists, set just under the breast. The
name of the style itself derives from Napoleon’s declaration of France as a new
empire. The point is that a viewer of this picture in 1805 would recognize
that the people in it are current and aware in every way. Claire Walsh points
out that creating the right image of the London shop as a “leader in fashion
and high design” was important in the period (157). Tabart’s shop definitely
fulfi lls this requirement.
The number of people in the images signal that Tabart’s was popular—
but not at the expense of service. In Kilner’s Visits to London, Tabart’s book-
shop is recommended from one mother to another. Mrs. Sandby, the visiting
mother, asks her friend, Mrs. Barfield, a London resident, for some guidance
on improving her domestic library of children’s books. Mrs. Barfield con-
fides “that she always dealt at Tabart’s Juvenile Library in New Bond Street
where she was very well served” (Kilner 148). A significant little comment
because it suggests the proprietor is knowledgeable about the books he sells
and good service is a feature of the shop. The idea of service as a valuable
commodity had only recently been recognized. The shopkeeper, presumably
Tabart in both images, is posed perfectly to suggest desirable qualities in a
bookseller. Leaning forward and focused, he is seems slightly deferential,
while engaging the women who are looking at the books. Claire Walsh sug-
gests that consumers were looking for explicit qualities in the shops and
shopkeepers they were choosing to patronize: “[f]inancial security, artistic
sensitivity, sound judgment, trustworthiness and customer care” (Kilner
168). These qualities are on display in the image much like the books in the
window display of Tabart’s shop. The mother-to-mother recommendation is
certainly a strong selling point, but Kilner adds another element: the child-
to-child recommendation. At the end of the shopping day during her visit
to London, the little girl Maria “gave her brother a long account of all that
had passed at the library,” and told him that “she had never been to such a
nice bookshop before” upon her return (158). Here, at Maria’s account of
the enchantments of bookshop, I will end this chapter, as it is a threshold
moment perfectly poised between the material and historical presence of
the shop and the contents of the books within.
Chapter Two
These Are the Books That Lived
in the House That Ben Built
By entering The Children’s Book Business with a walkabout through the neigh-
borhood of Ben Tabart’s Juvenile Library, then stopping to peek through to
its display windows, and crossing the threshold to examine the décor, I was
making tangible its material presence as an upmarket shopping destination.
Ben’s corner of New Bond Street and Grafton still survives and thrives as one
of the most exclusive and fashionable retail locations in London, though its
bookshop incarnation has long since been buried under layers of increasingly
bright and expensive merchandise of other kinds. The problem of tracing the
books that lived in the shop on that corner in Ben’s time, however, presents
another kind of survival story.
Most of the actual (material) books that Ben sold in the early years of the
nineteenth century have disappeared—though the commercial value of the still
desirable ones has increased. If the books have been lucky, they’ve been rescued
and relegated to the cool, dim closed stacks of specialized rare book collections in
libraries throughout the world. Only adult academics and librarians—with very
clean hands and/or very clean white-cotton gloves—are likely to hold and read
them. Besides the books that reside in public collections, some survivors have
found their way into the loving hands and libraries of private, knowledgeable,
and generally well-endowed patrons. Unlike shops or buildings, books, how-
ever, have access to a kind of survival that surpasses their initial material status:
their contents can be reincarnated in new editions with new covers in new print
runs long after they have physically ceased to exist. Old stories can literally be
rejuvenated. In book history, lifespan isn’t just a matter of birth and death dates;
it’s a lot more complicated. Before I tour some of the books that lived on the
shelves of Tabart’s Juvenile Library at the beginning of the nineteenth century,
I’ll segue briefly into an explanation of how studies of “the history of the book”
in the late twentieth century categorize and define book survival.
37
Constructing Book Histories
Sometime in the late 1970s, about the same time children’s literature and
women’s literature were coming into scholarly focus, a new kind of biblio-
graphic study was also beginning to take shape. The phrase “history of the
book” began to circulate as a category used broadly to define the biography
of the book as a material object. A French study, L’Apparition du Livre (1958),
by Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, translated into English in 1976 as
The Coming of the Book, is generally credited as initiating history of the book
studies as a defined research category, and therefore separate from more gen-
eral bibliographic studies. The theoretical approach increased attention on
the relationship between the book as a physical artifact and its influence on
the history of ideas and social change.
One of the most significant early contributors to an understanding of book
biography was the American cultural historian, Robert Darnton—whose pri-
mary field is eighteenth-century French history. In his 1982 essay “What Is
the History of Books?” Darnton proposes a diagram which graphically rep-
resents book history as a “communications circuit” (Figure 2.1).In Darnton’s
circuit diagram, intellectual, economic, and social pressures on texts are in
the center and push outward towards the people in the book-making industry.
A few years later, in one of the Clark lectures delivered in 1986–87, Thomas
Adams and Nicolas Barker presented a reconceptualized version of Darnton’s
diagram, published in their 1993 essay, “A New Model for the Study of the
Book.”
Adams and Barker turned Darnton’s model inside out—putting the book
in the middle and the ideas on the outside (Figure 2.2)—and invited attention
to relationships, they say dryly, they “still do not wholly comprehend” (12).
They are not the only ones. Adams and Barker invite all of us to attempt to
Figure 2.1 The “Communications Circuit,” from Robert Darnton’s “What Is

the History of Books?” (1982).
These Are the Books That Lived in the House That Ben Built • 39
understand how book survival is determined by eddies and currents of social
change. The Adams and Barker model draws attention to the fates of indi-
vidual books, as well as to the hard fact that survival is partly subject to the
vagaries of chance. Like the steadfast tin soldier in Hans Christian Andersen’s
tale, individual books might fall out of windows or into gutters, even survive
being swallowed by fish, only to be consumed by fire in the end. Perhaps, as
in Andersen’s tale, something of the heart of the book survives even when its
material presence does not.1
On the outside of their diagram, Adams and Barker list the social, com-
mercial, and intellectual pressures to which books are vulnerable. At the cen-
ter, they put the “five events in the life of a book—publishing, manufacture,
distribution, reception and survival.” Although I think that following a book
through each of the five events of its life could be a revealing exercise for chil-
dren’s book historians,2 it is beyond the scope of this discussion. However,
Adams and Barker helpfully define “three stages in the life of books that have
survived”:
The first includes its creation and initial reception: this is the period during
which it is used to perform the function for which it was brought into exis-
tence. The second is the period during which it comes to rest without any use
Figure 2.2 “The Whole Socio-Economic Conjuncture,” from “A New Model

for the Study of the Book” (1993) by Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas Barker.
or at least intensive use. It is during this period that it is in the most danger
of disappearing. If circumstances are right then it will survive until the third
period. This is when it is discovered that it is a book desirable as an object,
either in its own right or because of the text it contains. It documents the
age that brought it into existence and thus enters the world of collecting and
scholarly research. (Adams and Barker 32)
When I apply the three-stage survival paradigm created by Adams and Barker
to the books on Tabart’s lists, I have a more nuanced cultural vocabulary for
discussing the survival of those books than I would if I used a more stan-
dard bibliographic vocabulary focusing on the numbers of editions and/or
reviews.
Part of the problem in constructing book history in general—and chil-
dren’s book history in particular—is that the interpretation of the first two
phases (a book’s initial reception and the period of rest in which its reputa-
tion is established) is determined by the third (the discovery of the book as a
desirable object). Because children’s book history from early in the twentieth
century has conventionally been constructed to privilege imaginative litera-
ture, critical discussions of the receptions and reputations of other kinds of
books produced and sold in the early nineteenth century have typically been
eclipsed or simply dismissed.
Creation and Initial Reception
Tabart’s shop seems set up in a way that would enable a modern reader to
navigate the classification system in search of a particular kind of book. The
engraving of the interior (Figure 1.16) from Visits to the Juvenile Library, for
instance, shows a man reaching up for a book in a section clearly labeled
“Biography.” If I turn to the catalogue titled “Useful Books Recently Pub-
lished,” printed at the back of an 1809 edition of Elizabeth Kilner’s A Visit to
a Farm House (Figure 2.3), I find a list of books that might well have been on
that shelf, including The Life of General Washington (1802), Female Biography
(1807), which had been composed by Mary Hays (friend of Eliza Fenwick,
William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft), and The Life and Age of Geoffrey
Chaucer (1803), which had been written by William Godwin, though there are
no authors listed on the catalogue page for either book.
Categorization by subject was not the only way Tabart’s books were orga-
nized. Marjorie Moon reprints Tabart’s 1801 catalogue, which was organized
to emphasize educational progress through the ranks, rather than subject. This
becomes interesting partly because compulsory state-mandated schooling was
still decades in the future in England, arriving only with the Education Act of
1870. The organization of the 1801 catalogue indicates that “class” as a structure
pertaining to “a division of scholars or students receiving the same instruction”
(OED, first use given as 1656) was already a familiar usage to educational pub-
lishers. The “CLASS THE FIRST” section of the 1801 catalogue consists of
alphabet and spelling books for children beginning to read; “CLASS SECOND”
contains “Books for Children from Five to Eight Years of Age” (Moon 164)
Figure 2.3 Titles under the “Biography” heading of the catalogue pages at
the back of Elizabeth Kilner’s A Visit to a Farm House (1804).
and includes books designed to encourage “their acquaintance with objects of
material nature” (Moon 165). The Book of Trades (one of the books discussed
at length in Visits to the Juvenile Library) would be included in this classifica-
tion. “CLASS THIRD” books feel like apprenticeship training for the grown-up
world, for they consist, for example, of “the Keeping of Books of Accounts,” the
“Classical Languages, Antient [sic] and Modern,” as well as mathematics, chem-
istry, “Natural and Civil History,” religion, and other “useful or elegant accom-
plishments [which] have been introduced into our system of education” (Moon
165). Moon doesn’t reproduce the whole catalogue; rather she summarizes the
end of it, focusing on books not specifically designated for school use. At the
top of list, “some lighter food for the mind is supplied by such titles as Le Petit
Grandison” and other books in French. For the upper middle-class child of the
period, French was an expected accomplishment—and as the frontispiece to
Visits to the Juvenile Library illustrates, the signage over Tabart’s shop door was
in both English, “The School & Juvenile Library,” and French, “La Bibliotheque
D’Education.” There were also natural histories and “much lighter literature for
children,” including miniature libraries and “jig-saws, puzzles, colouring boxes,
games, etc.” (Moon 166).
The Tabart catalogue selection looked attractive and wide-ranging to me,
with an array of goods I’d still like to see on a visit to a children’s bookshop.
As I looked at Ben’s catalogues generally, I asked whether I was looking at
books that seemed divided between instruction and amusement in much
the same way as I’d find now, or was my sense of what I was looking at col-
ored by received assumptions about children’s book history that privilege a
move towards the imaginative literature for children favored in the Romantic
period. In order to make a catalogue-to-catalogue comparison across the two
century divide, I set Tabart’s upmarket and intellectually-oriented catalogues
of the first decade of the nineteenth century against catalogues published by
the similarly upmarket and intellectually-oriented Oxford University Press
of the first decade of the twenty-first century and found the breakdown in
content consistent; both catalogues maintained a similar mix of instructional,
leisure, and popular material. The Oxford catalogue cover offers a cleverly
designed snapshot of the range of materials described within.
In both the Tabart list of 1809 and the Oxford list of 2009, there are educa-
tional materials and materials for play and pleasure. On the educational side
there are atlases, science books, as well as books for reading instruction and
some ancillary materials (essentially books containing drills and exercises).
On the entertaining side are fairy tales, myths and legends, biographies,
histories, and science books, including natural histories in the non-fiction
category—and a smattering of verse. Barring obvious differences related to
technology, the only major difference in subject classification between Tabart’s
1809 catalogue and Oxford’s 2009 is the category of religion. I’ll dwell briefly
on religion as it offers a small insight as to what has changed in the children’s
book business in the two hundred years passing the two catalogues.
At a very generalized level, modern Anglophone publishers recognize reli-
gion as a plural category, including mainstream world religions such as Juda-
ism, Hinduism, and Islam. In the nineteenth century, religion in Anglophone
books for children was more or less synonymous with Christianity, center-
ing on Protestant variations, and was an integral part of a school-aged child’s
life. For the most part, in modern Anglophone cultures in which state-funded
Figure 2.4 The introductory paragraphs of the catalogue

pages bound into the back of A Visit to a Farm House (1804)
proclaim that they [Tabart’s] “have laid in a new and valuable
assortment of the best Books of Amusement and instruction
that have ever appeared in the English Language.”
schools are at least officially non-denominational, the publication of explicitly
Christian books for children is no longer mainstream—though it has become
a niche market of its own. Under Oxford Children’s Literature A–Z series
(under the Non-Fiction heading), there is book called World Religions and
there is a featured volume in Story Collections called The Oxford Book of Bible
Stories retold by Berlie Doherty, a well-respected modern author.3 And those
Figures 2.5 and 2.6 These pages, also from the 1804 catalogue,
demonstrate that the Tabart range included everything from fairy
tales to Goldsmith’s Grammar of Geography to Poetry for Children.
stories are set under the heading of Oxford Children’s Myths and Legends—
which also includes a series on stories from the British Isles (so Stories from
England by James Reeves, and Stories from Wales by Gwyn Jones for instance).
In addition, religion appears only under the heading of “Seasonal and Fes-
tive,” though there is a specialized sub-heading on Christmas, but nothing in
this particular catalogue on festivals from other religions.4
Figure 2.6
In the early nineteenth century in England, Christianity was an important
element in educational discourse. In Ben Tabart’s 1801 catalogue, there is an
apology for the lack of religious material for young children: “It is to be regret-
ted,” he says, “that we possess very few books in which RELIGIOUS TRUTH
Figure 2.7 2009 Oxford Children’s Book catalogue cover, indicating a range of
instructional and non-instructional materials.
is skillfully simplified to the Capacity of Children for between FIVE and
EIGHT Years of Age” (Moon 165). Tabart remedied the situation the follow-
ing year, 1802, when he introduced a collection of innovative (and enduring)
Bible stories for children. They were written by William Godwin (1756–1836),
under the pseudonym of William Scolfield, and published in 1802 as Bible
Stories: Memorable Acts of Ancient Patriarchs, Judges and Kings: Extracted from
Their Original Historians. For the Use of Children. The irony is that Godwin,
although trained as a minister, had largely abandoned religion in the 1780s
in favor of philosophy. Moon helpfully includes Godwin’s preface to his Bible
stories in her bibliography of Tabart’s books. Although Godwin argues against
bad writing and for imagination, he doesn’t argue for the kind of Romantic
innocence that became the fashion in nineteenth-century children’s litera-
ture. Instead, he argues that morality is in the stories “which open the heart,
[and] which insensibly initiate the learner in the relations and generous office
of society, and enable him to put himself in imagination into the place of his
neighbour, to feel his feelings and to wish his wishes” (Moon 160). The lines
ring very closely with the endearing phrase Godwin used in his 1802 letter to
William Cole on the need to educate for an “active mind and a warm heart.”
In the preface to the Bible stories, Godwin sounds perfectly humanistic and
compassionate, and his retellings have survived in many editions in England
and the United States. Yet Godwin’s book was not a good candidate for suc-
cess. As Moon tells us, his preface horrified Mrs. Trimmer (the first person to
review children’s books methodically), in her Guardian of Education: “[h]ad
she known that he [Scolfield] was William Godwin, the famous philosopher
and unbeliever, she could not have written a more scathing condemnation
of the book” (Moon 44). Mrs. Trimmer regarded the words of God as sacred
and immutable, so she was particularly scandalized by the way the author
“extracted” stories from the whole.
Fortunately, Mrs. Trimmer wasn’t the only person speaking to the “cre-
ation and initial reception” of the books on Tabart’s list as they journeyed
through the first phase of the Adams and Barker book survival paradigm. Vis-
its to the Juvenile Library functions as a promotional campaign for the books
in the shop, demonstrating, in situ, their ability to “perform the function for
which [they were] brought into existence” (Adams and Barker 32). Fenwick
demonstrates that the books in Tabart’s shop are a source of “knowledge” and
a “source of happiness,” as advertised in the novel’s subtitle.
Though Marjorie Moon praises Ben’s list as favoring the “lighter side of
children’s literature,” my reading of Fenwick’s version of the list as promoted
in Visits to the Juvenile Library indicates the lighter side isn’t favored at all.
She treats both fiction and non-fiction as sources of intellectual pleasure val-
ued for their contribution to the development of a thinking child. I should
also confess that when I tried to categorize the books discussed in Visits to
the Juvenile Library into two neat columns, one “instruction” and the other
“amusement,” I couldn’t do it. The books kept crossing the lines, though I
did start promisingly enough in safe “amusement” territory with four tales
(“Puss in Boots,” “Valentine and Orson,” “Hop o’ my Thumb,” and “Jack the
Giant Killer”) from Tabart’s Popular Fairy Tales: or, A Liliputian [sic] Library:
containing twenty-six choice pieces of fancy and fiction by those renowned per-
sonages King Oberon, Queen Mab, Mother Goose, Mother Bunch, Master Puck,
and other distinguished personages at the court of the Fairies.
Next I tried to categorize books for beginning readers described in Visits to
the Juvenile Library as instruction, but failed. Both Elizabeth Kilner’s Puzzle
for a Curious Girl and Eliza Fenwick’s Mary and Her Cat are perfectly engaging
works of fiction, despite being accessible to new readers with limited vocabu-
laries. Twentieth-century authors like Maurice Sendak in, for instance, The
Nutshell Library (1962) or Mommy! (2006), or Brian Wildsmith in Cat on the
Mat (1982) demonstrate the continuing viability of the genre of books with
few words which are intellectually and emotionally engaging for children.
The biggest category Fenwick highlights from Tabart’s list constitutes what
we now would call realistic fiction. I counted ten examples, including the Book
of Games, the Book of Trades, A Puzzle for a Curious Girl, A Visit to London,
Presents for Good Girls, Presents for Good Boys, A Visit to a Farm House, First
Going to School, Dialogues for Good Children, and Visits to the Menagerie.
In the twenty-first as well as in the nineteenth century, the smallest cat-
egory is verse for children. In Eliza Fenwick’s day, verse for children had typi-
cally been religious, moral, and instructive in the traditions of John Bunyan’s
Country Rhimes for Children (1806) and Isaac Watts’s Divine Songs (1715). So,
in many ways, Lucy Aikin’s Poetry for Children Consisting of Short Pieces to
Be Committed to Memory (1801) was a ground-breaking volume. Elizabeth
Kilner noted it too in her A Visit to London.
As I went on to consider how to categorize biographies (instruction?
amusement?) in Visits to the Juvenile Library, I was conscious that one of the
engravings of the shop interior (Figure 1.16) highlights the biography sec-
tion. Biographies are still difficult to categorize—and are generally lumped
together under non-fiction. Presumably, people deemed worthy as biographi-
cal subjects are supposed to be inspiring role models, so the assumption must
be that biographies are instructive. In Visits to the Juvenile Library, however,
even the category of instructive biography is problematic because there are
two animal biographies, The Life of Carlo, the Famous Dog of Drury-Lane
Theatre, and Memoirs of Dick the Little Poney [sic], both by Eliza Fenwick (a
little extra self-promotion). The biography of the heroes of classical myths
constitutes another problematic category, yet the Dictionary of Polite Litera-
ture: or Fabulous History of the Heathen Gods and Illustrious Heroes features
prominently in Visits to the Juvenile Library. Unfortunately, as Marjorie Moon
informs us, no edition of this book has been found, so there is no way to get a
sense of its narrative style and no way to determine if it fits best as instruction
or amusement. Fenwick also singles out Richard Coeur de Lion on her recom-
mended list of biographical titles.
When I tried to move to science as a clearly instructional category, I was
still uncertain. Fenwick recommends two popular titles, Wonders of the
Microscope and Wonders of the Telescope, in Visits to the Juvenile Library. But
then as now, both the microscope and the telescope retain their status as
toys, albeit educational toys, but both are inspiring instruments with which
to play—and that is how they are constructed. At this point in my attempt
at coherent analysis of the Tabart books, I was beginning to feel as if inside
the library world Jorge Luis Borges creates in his short story, “The Total
Library,” which contains “the accurate catalog of the library, the proof that
the catalog is fallacious” (Borges 96). I’d failed to categorize adequately as
instructive or amusing the books Fenwick promotes. No matter how much
I tried to resist, my reading had been conditioned by the historical pattern
of children’s literature shaped by Darton in Children’s Books in England and
assumed by Moon in her preference for “the fair field of literary flowers” on
Tabart’s list over the “history books and other useful works of reference and
learning” (Moon ix).
When I repeatedly looked at some of the textbooks from Ben’s list, I was
constantly charmed by how alive they felt, especially by the frankness of the
authorial address to the audience. Even though the contents of the geography
books from the first decade of the nineteenth century feel remote, reading
them in the twenty-first century still communicates a vivid sense that authors
spoke to children as individuals being gradually acclimatized to the world
into which they were growing—rather than being addressed in the annoy-
ingly patronizing way modern information books address children.
I read a popular book from Tabart’s list by Louis François Jauffret’s entitled
The Travels of Rolando (1804) and I liked it. As it happens, Eliza Fenwick recom-
mends The Travels of Rolando in Visits to the Juvenile Library. The good Mrs.
Clifford suggests it to one of the children in her care, Arthur Mortimer, and “on
looking at it, he seemed much delighted” (Fenwick, Visits 63). Arthur’s younger
brother Henry selects other Jauffret titles (Visits to the Menagerie and Botanical
Gardens at Paris, and Jaufret’s [sic] Tale of the Little Hermitage). Mrs. Clifford
approves of Henry’s choices because one helps “lay a foundation for the study
of natural history” and the other “would convince him of the pleasure that the
knowledge of useful arts can give to children” (Fenwick, Visits 63–64).
All Jauffret’s books combine history, geography, and adventure, so they have
the strong narrative drive of the best kind of modern travel writing by Paul
Theroux, for example. Lucy Aikin (author in her own right, and editor of Poetry
for Children, the important collection of children’s verse published by Tabart)
provides the English translations of Jauffret’s work. She sets the tone for their
engaging style by explaining how Jauffret invites child readers to imagina-
tively see the world with professional adult eyes. She begins by reminding adult
readers that for a child, a map can appear “a barren waste, a trackless sea, an
unmeaning medley of letters, lines, and flourishes.” However, “to the eye of the
naturalist and philosopher,” she writes, “a map of the world is one of the most
entertaining and interesting of objects.” She then explains how a professional
takes the flat map and “peoples it with towns, cities, empires—the past, the
present, and the future,—the myriad of tribes of earth, air and sea, pay hom-
age to him, and receive their names from the Lord of the Creation, snow-clad
mountains, awful forests, mighty rivers, unmeasured continents, and bound-
less oceans rush on his view. . . . [and] a thousand mingled feelings crowd upon
his mind, and thought succeeds to thought” (Aikin preface, Jauffret, The Travels
of Rolando iii). As a modern reader, the warm invitation to experience the land-
scape imaginatively and to empathize with its people draws us in, and I could
hear Jauffret (via Aikin’s insights) speaking to children as individuals becoming
acclimatized to the world into which they maturing—rather than as children
defined by an age or grade level, or as children who needed to have every real
thing encased in a sugar coating and labeled as fun. Aikin argues that the invita-
tion to the task engages a symbiotic relationship between teacher and pupil, “by
rendering their mutual task easy to one, pleasant to the other.” Aikin elaborates
on the pedagogical strategy:
Every one knows how much assistance the memory derives from the power of
association; it is obvious, therefore, that the easiest, as well as most agreeable,
method of acquiring a knowledge of the various regions of the earth, and the
most interesting circumstances belonging to them, must be by following the
steps of the traveller, and connecting all the information communicated by
him with the narrative of his pains and pleasures, his dangers and escapes,
his good and bad fortune. (Aikin, Preface, Jauffret, Travels iv)
By way of contrast, if I look at the modern descendents of Jauffret’s geogra-

phy book used in schools, I’d be looking at glossy, photograph-heavy “infor-
mation” (or “project” or “topic”) books published by such firms as Crabtree
Publishing (though similar features appear in information books published
by Dorling Kindersley and Eyewitness books).5 The books are often defined
by their uniform format (so they read as a series). All have a family resem-
blance: tall and thin, portrait-sized like picture books. Readers typically leaf
through the pictures, and either ignore the texts or find themselves sedated
by its numbing banality. Instead of narrative coherence, the books consist of
short bursts of text wedged between captioned photographs. The captions run
about a line-and-a-half, or between twenty and twenty-five words.
As an example of a typical history/geography/social studies topic book
published two hundred years after Jauffret’s The Travels of Rolando, I chose
April Fast’s Iraq: The Land, published by Crabtree in 2005. The book includes
a nice glossy photo of Saddam Hussein smiling in the foreground, with cheer-
ing crowds in the background. The caption reads: “Saddam Hussein waves to
his supporters in Baghdad. In the first days of his presidency Hussein had many
political rivals and enemies executed” (7, italics in the original). That’s it. The
difficult, complex, horrific history of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship is glossed
with the comment that he executed his enemies. A few pages farther on, there
is a nice photograph of a cluster of smiling pretty young girls (between about
six and eleven years old) in their native dress. The caption reads: “The tradi-
tional Kurdish female clothing consists of long dresses of brightly colored fabric
and coats embroidered with silver or gold threads” (17, italics in the original).
The execution “of political rivals and enemies” is given almost the identical
emotional weight as the fact that the girls’ clothes are “embroidered with silver
or gold threads.”
Although my preference for Jauffret’s 1804 Travels (and Aikin’s preface)
over Fast’s 2005 Iraq is glaringly obvious, geography was an important cat-
egory in early-nineteenth-century children’s books. There was even what we’d
call a brand of geography books for children: Goldsmith’s Grammar of Geog-
raphy—and a cluster of satellite books made up the Goldsmith brand. Gold-
smith’s Grammar is not recommended in Eliza Fenwick’s Visits to the Juvenile
Library, though it does appear as one of the books purchased for the children
in Elizabeth Kilner’s A Visit to London. Goldsmith’s Grammar of Geography
is historically important as a prototype for the generic geography textbooks
that featured in the lives of Anglophone schoolchildren through the late nine-
teenth century into the twenty-first. Incidentally, there was no real Goldsmith.
The Reverend J. Goldsmith named on the title page appears to have been a
pseudonym first used by the publisher Richard Phillips (1767–1840), then by
Jeremiah Joyce (1763–1816) when the Goldsmith Grammar brand flourished.
Both Phillips and Joyce turn up again in my story.
According to the OED, the word “textbook” first appears in 1779; just at
the moment when children’s book publishers were beginning to identify a
niche market for books produced explicitly for instructional purposes, “text-
book” enters the language. A textbook is defined, says the OED, as “a manual of
instruction in a subject of study.” Despite my inclination to resist textbooks, I
found the narrative detail I read in the two Goldsmith’s Grammar volumes both
compelling and sad. I was emotionally moved, and so conscious that the writing
was much better than found in the modern geography school textbook descen-
dents—or in related information books such as April Fast’s Iraq: The Land.
My personal acquaintance with the two Goldsmith books occurred in the
calm space of the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books in the Toronto
Public Library. I studied a thin-ish leather-covered and well-used 1824 edition
of Goldsmith’s Grammar. The copy I read had been published by the house of
Longman, Rees, Orne, Brown, and Green—as they took over the copyrights
that had originally belonged to Richard Phillips. Because the book had been
used by generations of children by that time, the title had been updated to
Goldsmith’s Grammar: A New Edition Corrected and Modernized. I also read
one of the Goldsmith brand books published (and likely written) by Richard
Phillips, Goldsmith’s Geography on a Popular Plan (1806).
Let me begin with the basic Goldsmith’s Grammar. The Osborne 1824 copy
is formally called A Grammar of General Geography (though I’ve used the
colloquial title, Goldsmith’s Grammar, throughout), and has a little spinning
insert (see Figure 2.8) that moves so the reader can work out the time in dif-
ferent time zones of the world.
The spinning wheel is a good gimmick—exactly the kind still used in the
“edutainment” industry where the toy aspect of an instructional material is
inserted as a hook into the book. For the most part, the text of Goldsmith’s
Grammar has little to do with play. Composed of numbered paragraphs, the
text consists of superficial information, randomly organized and designed for
memorization. In the section on the Americas, for instance, we find this:
213. The chief cities and towns are, Washington, the capital, Philadelphia,
New York, Boston, Baltimore, and Charlestown.
The rivers of the United States are large and numerous. The Mississippi,
Missouri, Chesapeak [sic], Delaware, Hudson and Ohio, are the most con-
siderable. (Goldsmith’s Grammar 68)
At the back of the book, there are questions related to both the numbered texts
and the maps. A child being questioned on information “On the Map of North
America” for instance had factual questions such as: “211. Is North America
celebrated for its lakes?” and “215: Is Newfoundland an island?” (Goldsmith’s
Figure 2.8 A Grammar of General Geography (1824): Spinning wheel to illus-

trate time zones.
Grammar 133). The lack of affect in the prose is so similar to tone in April
Fast’s Iraq that it is hard to construct a simple and direct line of geography
textbook writing.
Geography on a Popular Plan, however, was far more interesting. The par-
ticular volume I read had been part of the original Edgar Osborne collection
and had lived at his home, “The Spinney, Morley, Derbyshire,” as the book-
plate says, before making its way to the Toronto Public Library system as part
of the original 1949 bequest. In knowing the details of Geography on a Popular
Plan, I found myself appreciative of the survival story of this particular book,
as it journeyed from its original use as a geography school book used by a
child, to a collector’s private library, and then to a public library across an
ocean from its initial manufacture.
The Osborne volume is dated 1806, soon after its original publication—
which appears to have been in 1803—though no edition, according to Marjorie
Moon, has ever been found. On the title page, the book is described as a “new
edition” printed for Phillips and “Sold by Tabart at the Juvenile Library.” Its full
title is given as Geography on a Popular Plan, For the Use of Schools and Young
Persons: Being a Sequel to the Grammar of Geography. At 630 pages and filled
with folded-in maps and sixty copperplate engravings, the book is big. And I
could see how readers (not just young readers) would see the straightforward,
declarative prose as bald statements of fact—and so believe the colonial world-
view presented. Americans are described as displaying “an ardour of enterprise,
courage, greediness and an advantageous opinion of themselves” (Geography on
a Popular Plan 460). There is no context, so no explanation that there might be
lingering British feelings of resentment about the American Revolution (1776)
and the consequent loss of the colonies. The engravings in Geography on a Popu-
lar Plan are also meant to convey a sense of the exotic, of “oriental otherness,”
to use Edward Said’s phrase from Orientalism (1978). Nevertheless, the illus-
trations also communicate Enlightenment values, including the liberal push to
abolish the slave trade. In one image a Swiss family cottage seems quaint and
picturesque, but is juxtaposed against images of Arabs huddled on the ground
and “Negros just landed from a slave ship.” The latter two images have the power
to shock a modern reader still and evoke a strong sense of grief—especially in
discussions of the slave trade. Although the details of the workings of the slave
trade are now relatively well documented, their ability to horrify remains undi-
minished. We are told that Africans were kidnapped and sold and that they had
no more room “than a man has in his coffin.” We are also told that slave ship
owners made the prisoners “jump in their irons” for exercise in a game that
was called “making them dance.” The argument against slavery is contained in
reference to “Mr. Pitt,” who is seen arguing that the slave trade is the “greatest
stigma” on the “national character,” and that national honor could be restored
only by abolition.6
I’ve cited these compelling lines from the fat Goldsmith’s Geography on a
Popular Plan because I want them to linger as I move to a long discussion on
the life of the ur-text in the Goldsmith’s Grammar brand as a commodity and a
manufactured item performing “the function”—to return Adam and Barker’s
words used to define the first stage of the life of a book—“for which it was
brought into existence” (Adams and Barker 32). The other reason I want (and
am able) to write extensively about Goldsmith’s Grammar is a meticulously
constructed essay, “The Natural History of a Textbook,” by book history
scholar John Issitt. He traces the trajectory of the life of Goldsmith’s Grammar
from its birth in the house of Richard Phillips and sales in Ben’s house, to
its death more than half a century later in the house of Longmans. Issitt was
able to make extensive use of the Longmans publishing archives housed at
the University of Reading in England. The hand-written accounts and letters
that Longmans acquired from Phillips when they took over his firm reveal
significant details about the journey of Goldsmith’s Grammar through its first
phase of existence.
Goldsmith’s Grammar had an exceptionally long life for a book. After its
reported initial publication in 1803 for the publishing house of Richard Phil-
lips, who supplied Tabart, it continued in one incarnation or another and was
eventually purchased by Longmans, remaining on their lists for an aston-
ishing fifty-six years. This longevity is why Goldsmiths’ Grammar serves as a
model for the kind of manufacturing and marketing practices that made the
educational publishing business such a lucrative industry.
Three major features of what became the generic textbook model worth
summarizing were present in the development of the Goldsmith’s Grammar.
First, it was a generic brand rather than the work of an individual author (Phil-
lips and then Jeremiah Joyce were those who took on the task of composition).
The book was regularly updated as “new and improved,” which meant it could
seem fresh without much additional investment. And third, because the book
was aimed at a stable and constantly renewable audience of schoolchildren, it
was possible to take advantage of the economies of scale. Improved printing
technologies used in newspaper production in the early nineteenth century
made it possible to order large print runs—and so reduce the unit cost and
allow competitive pricing of the book.
Goldsmith’s Grammar was actually the brainchild of the publisher Sir Rich-
ard Phillips. The brand sold successfully in Ben’s bookshop, in other book-
shops throughout England, and eventually in North America. Although my
focus is on Ben Tabart’s bookshop, which was so closely entwined with Rich-
ard Phillips’s business, I’m going to pause in my account of Goldsmith’s Gram-
mar in order to dwell briefly on their relationship. A fictionalized encounter
between Ben Tabart and Richard Phillips exists, as do glimpses of Phillips in
the letters of authors who wrote for him at the time.
Both Ben Tabart and Richard Phillips turn up as characters in Lavengro, an
autobiographical fiction first published in 1851 by George Borrow (1803–81).
In the novel, the young writer (Borrow’s character) knocks on the door of the
house of Richard Phillips seeking publication for his work. Upon entering,
he sees the Phillips character, “a tall stout man, about sixty dressed in a loose
morning gown,” and a “complexion [which] might have been called rubi-
cund but for a considerable tinge of bilious yellow.” The Tabart character
(called Taggart in the book) is described as “a pale shrivelled-looking person
[who] sat at a table apparently engaged with an account book” (Borrow 189).
Descriptions of Phillips in letters by his contemporaries are equally unflatter-
ing. Charles Lamb describes Phillips (Figure 2.9) as having “puddy chops,”
and an anonymous author says he is “a mere plodding, thick-sculled, pros-
ing dunderpate.”7 William Godwin, in a letter to his second wife, Mary Jane
Clairmont, writes: “You cannot imagine how dull it is to travel with such a
man as Phillips.” Then Godwin complains that Phillips is “a snail in his dis-
course, so pompous, so empty. . . . ”8
In Lavengro, Borrow describes a rather unpleasant episode which seems
typical of how Phillips was perceived to exploit the authors he employed.
Phillips begins by pleading fi nancial losses. “A losing trade, I assure you,
sir,” his says to the Borrow character, and then, “literature is a drug.” At the
end of the episode, Phillips instructs Tabart/Taggart to cancel a payment to
an author:
[G]o to the bank, and tell them to dishonour the bill twelve months after
date for thirty pounds which becomes due tomorrow. I am dissatisfied with
that fellow who wrote the fairy tale and intend to give him all the trouble in
my power. (Borrow 191)
Despite the questionable ethics of the unsavory scene, it reveals the Phillips
was interested in his profit margins. And Goldsmith’s Grammar was a money
spinner for a long time, as were some of his other branded generic educational
products. One way Goldsmith’s Grammar was marketed to make it seem rel-
evant to each new generation of children was by being continually advertised
as “corrected, improved and modernized.” More likely, however, the text sold
because of the pictures. As John Issitt explains, Goldsmith’s Grammar did sell
well (often at Tabart’s Juvenile Library) partly because of the lavish graphics:
“The novel inclusion of seven fold-out maps of Africa, Asia, Europe, South
and North America, the British Isles and the world” made it attractive (Issitt
19). The adaptation of the little spinning wheel (of the kind used in move-
able books) to indicate time zones in the 1824 Longmans edition seemed a
brilliant marketing strategy. The modern geography textbook descendents of
Goldsmith’s Grammar appreciate the marketability of information books that
are heavy on pictures and light on texts.
Despite my reservations about the content of Goldsmiths’ Grammar, nev-
ertheless it constitutes a significant phase in the invention of the educational
publishing business. In “The Natural History of a Textbook,” John Issitt praises
Phillips as being “one of the first publishers to develop a connected range of
products aimed at the lower end of the book market” (Issitt 7–8), including
Figure 2.9 Sir Richard Phillips (1767–1840), by James Saxon (1806).
a series of ancillary products such as “associated keys and copybooks which

required minimal preparations and which generated future potential sales”
(Issitt 8). “[I]t was the concern for profit,” Issitt explains, “that was the driv-
ing force in a project that had no authorial vision” (Issitt 9). Superficially, the
rules for profit-making in all businesses are quite simple. Sell enough items to
enough people at a price that’s low enough to attract new buyers while ensur-
ing that production costs are kept low, so that on balance, the manufacturer
makes a profit. Costs have to be kept low relative to the number of units sold,
so that profits are high relative to costs. Phillips seems to have been good at
that equation, at least initially, and his success was built on setting up some
textbook-making practices still in use. Instead of paying for the work of a
single author (and that author’s “authorial vision”), Phillips sidestepped the
need to pay out individual copyrights. No “author,” no copyright.
Eliza Fenwick was one of the writers of generic textbooks employed by
Phillips. She was one of the “Blair” authors, and later in life she wrote about
her work for Phillips from the Niagara region of North America, where she
was living in the 1830s to friends in New York City, the Moffatts:
I had acquaintance with most of the writers of the day & chance of making
me known to Richard Phillips. He engaged my assistance in his many enter-
prises of translations from the French & compilations chiefly of school books.
A class book bearing in the title page of Mr. David Blair, Sir Richard, then
Mr. Phillips, paid me 150 guineas for compiling many others under the name
& enabled me to give a finished & most expensive education to the son I lost
by yellow fever in the West Indies. ( Eliza Fenwick to Mr. and Mrs. Moffatt,
13 June 1832)9
Eliza Fenwick and Jeremiah Joyce were just two of the many authors writing
on a fi xed-fee basis for Phillips—who created eleven pseudonyms to estab-
lish brand name identities for his range of educational products for home and
school use. He was apparently well-known for exploiting writers “desperate
for cash,” as Fenwick clearly was at the time. Issitt quotes Charles Lamb’s
comment that “like Robin Hood’s merry men in Green, Phillips has regular
regiments in his pay. Poor writers are his crablice and suck at his nutriment”
(Lamb 1801, qtd. in Issitt 7).
Part of the animosity towards Phillips shown by authors working under
generic pseudonyms was also partly due to offense to their “literary and
romantic sentiments” (Issitt 7). From a commercial point of view, avoiding
copyright payments was a brilliant strategy which enabled Phillips to keep
his production costs down—something at which he was good. Because of
his affi liation with Tabart, Phillips was also able to sell Goldsmith’s Gram-
mar through his friend’s bookshop and avoid the wholesale discounts usually
payable to other booksellers for stocking the books. In the end, part of the
commercial success of Goldsmith’s Grammar, and the other textbooks Phillips
produced, was due to Phillips keeping his production costs low in two ways:
not having to pay copyrights to individual authors, and not having to pay
wholesale costs to his affiliate, Benjamin Tabart.
Goldsmith’s Grammar grew from an opportunistic upstart youngster into
grotesque old age over the course of its lifespan. In the first few years of the
nineteenth century, the core texts were composed of lists of facts and lists of
questions—so that students could learn facts and then recite them. Phillips
called it an “interrogative system,” though as Issitt comments, “it functioned
more as advertising slogan than genuine educational technology” (Issitt 6). It
was exactly the kind of rote learning Charles Dickens later immortalized in
Hard Times, when the schoolteacher, Thomas Gradgrind, insists that “facts
alone are wanted in life.” “Plant nothing else, he says and root out everything
else” (Dickens 219). And exactly this banal pedagogical practice haunts us today
as we demonstrate a preference for the kind of compulsory, large-scale, state-
approved assessment exercises which are graded using a very narrow and strict
set of criteria. An answer that is easy to define as correct or incorrect is easy to
grade. Anything requiring a more nuanced understanding or interpretation is
harder, making it both more complex and much more expensive to mark.
Goldsmith’s Grammar became one of the profitable mainstays of the
Phillips/Tabart catalogue, and later, of Longmans. It was part of the back-
list—something publishers have long regarded as the backbone of the book
business. Jason Epstein, longtime editorial director of Random House in the
late twentieth century, explains the value of the backlist in his memoir, Book
Business (2001):
Traditionally, Random House and other publishers cultivated their backlists

as their major asset, choosing titles for their permanent value as much as for
their immediate appeal, so that even firms grown somnolent with age and
neglect tottered along for years on their backlist earnings long after their ef-
fective lives were over. (Epstein 16–7)
Goldsmith’s Grammar, according to Issitt, “tottered along for years” as a back-

bone of the backlist, helping Phillips/Tabart and then Longmans with their
bottom lines. Issitt’s study is fascinating to read because of its detailed analysis
of the costs, sales figures, and profits of the book over its lifespan. Issitt’s basic
point is that Goldsmith’s Grammar could not, in the end, sustain ever increas-
ing girth in its attempts to justify the repeated “new and improved claim.”
Even though the book managed to make a profit for most of its life, it couldn’t
continue to grow indefinitely. In the end, Goldsmith’s Grammar could not sus-
tain its improvements, and became too fat to be profitable. As it continued to
expand in size and complexity, increased costs were incurred, sales failed to
compensate, the margin of profit was squeezed dry, and the title eventually
died—of something akin to complications from obesity. Issitt concludes his
study of Goldmsith’s Grammar pragmatically by noting that as long as it was:
in mutually profitable relations with its neighbours it contributed to the gen-

eral wealth of the community. But once its consumption became more than
its yield, it became unable to enter a new reproductive cycle. Once its genetic
blueprint became unable to develop a successful adaptation to new circum-
stances, it could not survive. (Issitt 29)
And so, Goldsmith’s Grammar, like so many of the books on Tabart’s list,
ended the first phase of its existence, no longer able “to perform the function
for which it was brought into existence,” and entered its second phase, “the
period during which it comes to rest without any use or at least intensive use”
(Adams and Barker 32).
The Books Come to Rest
As Adams and Barker point out, the second phase in the life of a book is the
riskiest because “it is in the most danger of disappearing” for good (Adams
and Barker 32). For the books that had graced the shelves of Tabart’s shop
in the early nineteenth century, the “coming to rest” period proved particu-
larly dangerous to their long term possibilities for survival. There were two
reasons. The fi rst was that the rise of Romanticism, privileging imagination
over reason, entailed the decline of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment,
Rationalist values that had grounded the ethos of Ben’s shop. As the great
stars of the Romanticism, particularly William Wordsworth and Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, began to shine with increasing brightness, the generation
of authors and poets who preceded them correspondingly dimmed. The
Romantics created a climate in which childhood innocence was treated as
a highly prized commodity. William Wordsworth’s famous lines from his
ode, “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,”
about the child “trailing clouds of glory” before “[S]hades of the prison-
house begin to close,” came to defi ne the spirit of the age (Wordsworth 460).
The Enlightenment ideals encouraging children to accept responsibility for
their engagement in and contribution to the world were displaced by the
image of perfect childhood innocence. Godwin’s vision of a socially respon-
sible child initiated into “the relations and generous office of society” in
order to “enable him to put himself in imagination into the place of his
neighbour, to feel his feelings and to wish his wishes” (qtd. in Moon 160) fell
out of favor. The second threat to the survival of Enlightenment children’s
books related to the way the history of the genre was recounted. F. J. Harvey
Darton’s 1932 Children’s Books in England, which still stands as an eloquent
authority in the field, was composed at a time when the Romantic values of
the late nineteenth century were in full-bloom and within living memory.
Modernism was only beginning to snap at its heels. The two reasons for the
threat to survival of Enlightenment children’s books—the actual historical
shift and the telling of the story of that shift—combined to create a climate
in which many of the books on Ben’s shelves, particularly those created by
the Enlightenment women interested in educating “thinking” children, to
use Mary Wollstonecraft’s favored term again, seemed destined to perma-
nent oblivion.
Darton’s clear decision in Children’s Books in England to exclude “as a gen-
eral rule, all schoolbooks, all purely moral or didactic treatises, all reflective
or adult-minded descriptions of child-life, and almost all alphabets, prim-
ers, and spelling books” tilted the odds on book survival in favor of works of
imaginative literature (Darton 1). Marjorie Moon follows suit in the preface
to her bibliography of Tabart’s books:
I have found that the many of the booklists headed “Published by Tabart and
Co.” are composed, largely and disappointingly of Phillips’s titles; so, in order
to keep that fair field of literary flowers which was Mr. Tabart’s charming
contribution to the lighter side of children’s literature from being overgrown
by Greek lexicons and Latin grammars, dictionaries and history books and
other useful works of reference and learning, I have assumed an unscholarly
right of selection. (Moon ix)
The “lighter side” for Moon is implicitly the good side, and she praises Ben
for not letting his catalogue become “overgrown by Greek lexicons and Latin
grammars, dictionaries and history books and other useful words of reference
and learning” (Moon ix). Those twentieth-century assumptions effectively
dampened critical interest in and attention to instructional materials in favor
of “lighter,” more entertaining materials.
Instruction and amusement remain the key terms in the publication of
children’s books. Scholastic, the educational publisher most well-known to
North American school children (largely because of their in-school market-
ing practices), used terms on its 2008 website that would have been utterly
familiar to Ben Tabart in the nineteenth century or to John Newbery in
the eighteenth: “Scholastic,” founded in 1920, proclaims on the “People
and History” page of its website that it “creates quality educational and
entertaining materials and products for use in school and home, including
children’s books, technology-based products, teacher materials, television
programming, feature fi lm videos and toys.”10 With the exception of the
television and fi lm options, Ben would have been comfortable with every-
thing in the blurb.
It’s difficult to overestimate the profound influence on the history of chil-
dren’s books of Darton’s classification system of instruction and amusement.
In the preface to his first edition, Darton defines the values that underlie his
binary oppositions as a battle “between restraint and freedom, between hesi-
tant morality and spontaneous happiness” (Darton vii). Although the story
of binary construction is generally well-known to scholars in children’s litera-
ture studies, it is worth repeating in the context of my book survival discus-
sion. Darton took his oppositional terms of instruction and pleasure from
the 18 June 1744 advertisement composed by the bookselling model hero
of the trade, John Newbery (1713–67), to announce his new A Little Pretty
Pocket-Book, “intended,” we are told, “for the Instruction and Amusement
of Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly” (qtd. in Darton 1). Newbery
had taken the opposition of instruction and amusement from An Apology for
Poetry (published in 1595, though written about 1583) by Sir Philip Sidney
(1554–86); to go further back, Sidney had adapted it from the Ars Poetica by
the Roman poet Horace (65–68 BCE). Newbery uses the Latin tag, “Delecta-
ndo momenus” (instruction with delight) on the frontispiece of A Little Pretty
Pocket-Book.
In modern versions of children’s book history, Newbery, via Darton,
received credit for founding the children’s book trade as a niche market dis-
tinguished by its commitment to producing and marketing both instruction
and amusement. In a wonderful essay, “Critical Tradition and Ideological
Positioning,” Charles Sarland reminds us that “the debate . . . has continued
on and off ever since” (Sarland 58).
The focus on the relationships between instruction and pleasure have
dominated discussions of the book business in general and the children’s
book business in particular for over two-hundred-and-fifty years and show
no sign of waning. Asa Briggs recognized this relationship when he opened
his major study of Longmans with questions about how book trades handle
over time what he calls the “particular key words in the trinity—information,
education and entertainment” (A. Briggs 1). Our judgments about good and
bad children’s books, both old and new, are still overwhelmingly informed by
our implicit ideological assumptions about the relative values of instruction
and entertainment in those books. Throughout her bibliography of Tabart’s
books, Marjorie Moon often reflects her preference for what she calls “agree-
able food for imagination” over what must be assumed as disagreeable “more
solid nourishment for the mind” (Moon ix).
In the context of book survival—as grappled with the historical implica-
tions of the ideological assumptions implicit in valuing imagination above
instruction—I was aware of a subtle syntactical shift in the formulation.
What had started as a both/and structure had moved into a from/to struc-
ture: so both instruction and entertainment had become from instruction to
entertainment. Darton elegantly initiated the shift by constructing the chap-
ter headings of his history of children’s literature as a chronological narrative
timeline. He begins with traditional, largely unauthored fables, fairy tales, and
nursery verse with their origins in the late middle ages, then moves (down-
wards, it appears) into the serious philosophical influences of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries on ideas about educating children, emerges in the
Golden Age of the 1860s, in a chapter entitled “‘Alice’ and After,” then con-
cludes in a triumphant chapter called “Freedom,” about the imaginative liter-
ature produced between the 1880s and 1932 when Children’s Books in England
was first published. In her helpful anthology of children’s literature to 1850,
From Instruction to Delight, Patricia Demers emphasizes an implicit historical
shift from boring old books to interesting new ones.11 Following much the
same pattern as Darton, John Rowe Townsend, in Written for Children (first
published in 1965, then revised in 1983 and 1987), moves from instruction to
delight in the first part of his book, but extends his study to include genres
that developed for children in the first half of the twentieth century (includ-
ing realistic fiction and fantasy), and incorporates more work from other
English speaking countries, including the United States and Australia. And
Marjorie Moon, in her introduction to her bibliography of Tabart’s books,
praises as “impressive” the “way in which he challenged the anti-fairy-tale
brigade, those stiflers of imagination and suppressors of fantasy by launching
in 1804 his delightful series of Tales for the Nursery . . . ” (Moon 5). Although
she doesn’t specify, I couldn’t help but hear in Moon’s comment about the
“anti-fairy tale brigade” an unreferenced allusion to a very well-known and
frequently quoted 1802 complaint made by Charles Lamb in a letter to Sam-
uel Taylor Coleridge against the “the cursed Barbauld Crew, those Blights &
Blasts of all that is Human in man & child” (Lamb, i, 326).12
Despite the fact that various critics, including Norma Clarke, William
McCarthy, and Tess Cosslett, have proposed back stories for Lamb’s curse, the
curse continues to stick. In chapter 4, I’ll return to the curse with reference to
the harm it has done to the reputations of women writing for children in the
period. For the moment, however, I’ll just concentrate on the book business
implications in privileging imaginative literature for children over instruc-
tive. Norma Clarke suggests that Lamb’s sister Mary was grumpy about not
being able to find a copy of Goody-Two Shoes in Newbery’s bookshop when
she was looking for it. Tess Cosslett notes that the whole discussion on the
horse, which puts modern readers in mind of Thomas Gradgrind in Charles
Dickens’s 1854 Hard Times, actually alludes to a real story in John Aikin’s
“A Lesson in the Art of Distinguishing,” from Evenings at Home, a story that
resolves much more entertainingly and openly.13
As is often the case in everyday life, comments are nearly impossible to
retract once made. The damage has been done. So the “lighter side” remains
the better side of children’s literature opposed to the “solid nourishment” of
instructional material. And even if it wasn’t only Lamb’s comment about “the
cursed Barbauld crew” that resulted in the writings of Enlightenment women
being relegated, for the most part, to the dust bins of literary studies, his com-
ment certainly has had enormous staying power. The sad thing is that Charles
and Mary Lamb were good friends of many of those “cursed” women authors,
including Eliza Fenwick and Mary Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft’s work for
children, particularly her Original Stories from Real Life (1788), with engrav-
ings by William Blake, was long stigmatized. Darton compares the character
of Wollstonecraft’s protagonist, Mrs. Mason (who will return in my story), to
a terrifying character, the “new mother” with “glass eyes and a wooden tail”
created fifty years later by Lucy Clifford in her Anyhow Stories (Darton 196).14
And John Rowe Townsend, in Written for Children, condemns Original Stories
as “the most repellent piece of English Rousseauism,” while describing Woll-
stonecraft as “an early propagandist for the rights of women” (Townsend 27).
The use of “propagandist,” instead of proponent, to describe Wollstonecraft
makes readers raised through the second wave of feminism wince. Townsend
also constructs a broad category of “lady writers” (as he calls them), including
“Anna Letitia Barbauld, Lady Fenn, Priscilla Wakefield, Dorothy and Mary
Jane Kilner and Mary Elliott.” He makes no distinctions between the little
known Mary Elliott and the widely known, respected, and prolific Anna Bar-
bauld. Instead he patronizingly describes them as ranging “from the mildly
pious to the sternly moralistic,” then broadly dismisses them all as women
“who saw no harm in giving children instruction mixed with a little lukewarm
enjoyment, and perhaps earning themselves an honest guinea in the process”
(Townsend 24). In chapter 4, I’ll reposition these women more positively.
In the end, the influence of Romanticism, with its preference for fantasy,
imagination, and the innocent child in need of protection, successfully sup-
pressed the Enlightenment women and their pedagogical attempts to construct
a thinking and feeling child capable of participating in the world. And so the
books by the “Barbauld crew” stagnated in the second phase of the Adams and
Barker book survival paradigm. And they almost disappeared forever.
Survivor Tales
As Adams and Barker explain, the third phase of a book’s survival story occurs
when it’s discovered or re-discovered as desirable, “either in its own right or
because of the text it contains,” or because “it documents the age that brought
it into existence and thus enters the world of collecting and scholarly research”
(Adams and Barker 32). Effectively, this is the resurrection phase of a book’s
life; the book experiences a renaissance. With regard to the books on Ben’s
list, there are clear survivors in the books whose contents survived in multiple
editions by adapting to cultural change. And then there are books that looked
like they would be survivors, enjoying both multiple editions and wide use
and were, in fact, money spinners in their own time. The irony is that some
ended up, like Goldsmith’s Grammar, as victims of their own initial success,
growing too fat and complacent and so dying long, slow deaths. Conversely,
there were books that appeared to be failures in their initial phases, existing
only in single editions, yet which have survived against the odds into the third
phase of existence. They’ve entered “the world of collecting and scholarly
research,” because their stories are somehow in sync with the zeitgeist.
Here, I’ll simply tell two survivor stories. The first is about the stories that
have survived from the most fragile of all media—breath—as oral stories,
folk and fairy tales. These stories found their way into print and have survived
through translation, bowdlerization, and shifting cultural constructs of what
is suitable for children. My second survivor tale is about the book out of which
The Children’s Book Business was born, Eliza Fenwick’s Visits to the Juvenile
Library. In Darwinian terms of the survival of the fittest, it is an extremely
unlikely winner, especially as it ran to only a single edition—yet that’s what
makes its story so relevant. Fairy tales first.
The most clearly enduring survivors of the books in Tabart’s shop, those
whose contents continued to live on long after the artifacts disintegrated,
are “the delightful series of Tales for the Nursery,” as Moon says, and the
stories from Tabart’s Popular Stories (1804), assembled by Mary Jane Clair-
mont. Clairmont, remember, eventually became William Godwin’s second
wife (after the death of Mary Wollstonecraft), though she originally worked
for Tabart. In the collection of Popular Tales were the fairy tales that Lamb
thought so woefully and strangely missing from modern bookshops: “Little
Red Riding Hood,” “Toads and Diamonds,” “Blue Beard,” “Puss in Boots,”
“The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood,” “Cinderella,” “Ricquet with the Tuft,”
“Hop o’ My Thumb,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Fortunatus,” and others. The
Grimm collections were published in English in 1812 and 1815, so 1804 was
a time when fairy tales were just beginning to be considered as fare for chil-
dren. Jack Zipes comments that even though the fairy tales, including the ones
published by Tabart and ones by Harris in 1802, were appearing in English
in the first decade of the nineteenth century, “they were not considered to be
‘healthy’ for the development of young people’s minds” (Zipes, The Oxford
Companion to Fairy Tales xxv).
The fairy tales modern readers recognize as being the defining genre of the
children’s literature canon were regarded as cutting-edge innovations in the
children’s book business of the early nineteenth century. Tabart was an “early
adopter” of the form (to use a phrase popularized by New Yorker writer Mal-
colm Gladwell in The Tipping Point). His tales were sold both in the expensive
collected bound volumes (six shillings), and in cheap small editions of single
tales where, for example, “The History of Jack the Giant-Killer” (1804) could
be purchased for sixpence. But even here the amusement/instruction opposi-
tion isn’t completely distinct. In the preface to Popular Fairy Tales, Tabart is at
pains to distinguish his new versions of the tales from the ones published in
the previous century (the eighteenth) which were “so obsolete in their style, so
gross in their morals, and so vulgar in their details, as to be altogether unfit for
the purpose to which they seem to have been adapted.” His new and improved
tales were designed “to elevate the language and sentiments to a level with the
refined manners of the present age” (Moon 121). In terms of survival stories,
adaptations of folk and fairy tales stand out as clear examples of success.
My survivor tale of Eliza Fenwick’s Visits to the Juvenile Library (1805) is
interesting because, as Adams and Barker say, it “documents that age that
brought it into existence” (Adams and Barker 32). In its own time, Visits to
the Juvenile Library was regarded as an extended “puff,” merely an advertise-
ment. I wonder if Eliza Fenwick could have imagined that her promotional
book about her day-to-day working environment would prove to interesting
to readers more than two hundred years after its original publication. After
all, how many of us would consider familiar promotional material of our
own time being of possible interest to unborn generations? After all, product-
placement depends on the medium being complicit with the message, as it
is, for example, in the television drama series Mad Men, which debuted in
2007, about an advertising agency in the 1960s. Individual episodes featured
goods in the stories by companies—including Maidenform bras, Clearasil (a
brand of acne treatment), and Heineken beer—who sponsored the show. Eliza
Fenwick was prescient in her use of exactly the same techniques in Visits to
the Juvenile Library. As a book designed for its present, not its future, the very
existence of and interest in the book’s traceable past is worth note.
The first physical copy of Visits to the Juvenile Library I encountered was in
the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books in Toronto. This copy had
an identifiable owner. The inscription reads “Mary Lloyd,” and on the next
line, “her book.” There’s not a lot to glean from that information, except that
the book was possessed by at least one person who felt it significant enough
to claim ownership. Extant copies of Visits to the Juvenile Library are found
in other rare book libraries, including ones in London, Oxford, Cambridge,
Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. Several copies did survive and were regarded
as valuable enough to be preserved and cared for (catalogued, protected, and
deserving of shelf-space) in rare book collections. The book began a second
life in the twentieth century. As Tabart kept going bankrupt, fairly typical
for publishers in the period, the address in the engravings, 157 New Bond
Street, had a very short life—and he left that shop in 1812. Moon lists several
addresses for Tabart’s shop including 12 Clifford Street (1812), Conduit Street
(1816), 85 Piccadilly (also 1816), 165 New Bond Street (1817), and 39 New Bond
Street (1819). So in its original incarnation, it makes sense that the book had
the shelf-life of a print advertisement. Yet after Visits to the Juvenile Library
outlived its usefulness as an advertisement and went into the second phase of
long rest, it did reemerge, when it was considered interesting enough for reis-
sue in a Garland edition in 1977—that’s one-hundred-and-seventy-two years
after its original publication. Even though the book had a long second phase
at rest (using the Adams-Barker paradigm), it emerged again, revived in a fac-
simile edition—with an introduction by well-known modern literary scholar
and biographer Claire Tomalin. The book became interesting for scholars of
the book business in the period because of the affectionate glimpses it offered
into the relationship between education, instruction, women as teachers, and
the book business. And although not directly related to Visits to the Juvenile
Library, when Marjorie Moon published her bibliography in 1990 of the books
that had been in Benjamin Tabart’s Juvenile Library, she features engravings
from Fenwick’s book. In her bibliographic entries on individual books pub-
lished by Tabart, Moon is also careful to acknowledge which ones were men-
tioned by Fenwick in Visits to the Juvenile Library.
The fact that Visits to the Juvenile Library received scholarly attention does
mean that it fared better in the evolutionary scheme of things than those ini-
tially successful books (such as Goldsmith’s Grammar),which ultimately dis-
appeared leaving only a faint trace. Scholarly interest in Visits to the Juvenile
Library is not limited to its function as an advertising tool. Part of its scholarly
value also derives from the pedagogical insight it offers into the links between
children and their books. Fenwick’s Visits to the Juvenile Library is a working
example of “how texts teach what readers learn”—to adapt a title of a book on
literacy education by the twenty-first-century scholar Margaret Meek.
In the general scenario I’ve set for The Children’s Book Business, I’m trying
to demonstrate what modern children (and teachers and booksellers) might
learn from the Enlightenment model—which suddenly seems interesting and
relevant in ways it didn’t when the Romantic image of the child held sway.
William Godwin’s 1802 definition of education as developing “an active mind
and a warm heart” in children seems to suit the technological world in which
a thinking and feeling child is more in tune with the times than was the inno-
cent and obedient child of the Romantic age. Many of the lessons that lived in
the books that lived in the house that Ben built have survived—as I’ll show in
the following chapter.
Chapter Three
These Are the Lessons Taught from the
Books That Lived in the House
That Ben Built
Visits to the Juvenile Library begins with an epigraph warning against the dan-
gers of succumbing to life as a “blockhead”:
To all who own the pow’r of speech,

This useful lesson I would teach:
That nature’s gifts if you employ
The purest pleasures you’ll enjoy;
Whilst ignorance, and sullen pride,
Sense unexerted, misapply’d,
Insure neglect, contempt, and hate,
And the unpity’d blockhead’s fate;
For ah, you’ll fi nd it to your cost
Age can’t regain what youth has lost.
(Fenwick, Visits 17)1
For the record, a blockhead was a wooden, head-shaped form used for block-
ing (or shaping) hats or wigs. By the eighteenth century, blockhead was regu-
larly used as a term of derision implying stupidity. Self-esteem didn’t seem to
have been an issue or concern. Instead, the pedagogical focus centered on the
construction of a thinking and knowing child, a child with an “active mind
and a warm heart” (to quote William Godwin’s 1802 letter again),2 a child
in transit to full adult responsibility. In this chapter, I’ll show how Fenwick
in Visits to the Juvenile Library situates learning to read and being literate at
the heart of liberation politics. I’ll also demonstrate how she articulates what
are currently considered progressive pedagogical practices including experi-
67
ential education, “scaffolding” of new knowledge on old, and recognition of
multiple intelligences. Although credit is usually given to late-nineteenth and
early-twentieth-century, mostly male educational philosophers (John Dewey,
Lev Vygotsky, Paulo Freire, and Howard Gardner) for these practices, they
were in use in the Enlightenment and appear to have been developed, articu-
lated, and put into everyday use by the extraordinary maternal pedagogues of
the period who placed high value on being literate.3
In the Enlightenment, education was the business of philosophers, rather
than bureaucrats and statisticians. As one of the inner circle of people work-
ing with William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and, after Wollstonecraft’s
death, Mary Jane Clairmont, Eliza Fenwick was immersed in the philosophi-
cal dimensions of the children’s book business as well as in writing books for
children and teaching. Her 1795 epistolary adult novel, Secresy, is partly a trea-
tise on the failure of an education that deprives children, particularly girls,
of the right to think. For a short period, around 1807 and 1808, Fenwick ran
Godwin’s Juvenile Library, but she had already been a participant in the Lon-
don book trade network for more than a decade. Some members of the God-
win/Wollstonecraft inner circle were also in the busiest phases of raising and
educating their own children. Eliza Fenwick’s two children, Eliza (born 1789)
and Orlando (born 1798), were young, being just sixteen and seven in 1805,
when Visits to the Juvenile Library was published by Tabart. William Godwin
and Mary Jane Clairmont had five young children at home in the first decade
of the nineteenth century. So there was nothing abstract in their discussions
about education. All were grappling daily with the practical problems of edu-
cating children with varying intellectual abilities, talents, and temperaments.
The risks of raising children doomed to lives as blockheads were very real,
so Fenwick was explicit about developing pedagogical practices to encourage
thinking and so immunize children against this kind of life.
The opening scenes of Visits to the Juvenile Library introduce the five
orphaned Mortimer children—none of whom like reading. “I don’t like books,”
says Arthur, one of the three boys. His brother Richard agrees: “I always grow
low spirited when I am obliged to read” (Fenwick, Visits 9). A younger child,
“little Louisa,” innocently offers an explanation as to why her brothers are
so averse to reading. Louisa explains that their nurse, Nora, instilled fear by
saying their guardian, Mrs. Clifford, would make them “read and write and
work until [they] should all be quite wretched.” Fenwick is explicit that Nora
is not malicious, just unknowing and illiterate as her backstory makes clear:
“Nora loved the children with her whole heart, and that heart was capable of
great kindness towards any human being; but her head was weak, and she had
never learned to read” (Fenwick, Visits 10, 11). As a slave, of course, Nora had
been denied access to education. So Fenwick absolves the children of blame,
but makes it clear that ignorance breeds ignorance.
Nora, then, is responsible for fueling the children’s reluctance about being
educated by casting their English guardian, the good Mrs. Clifford, in the
These Are the Lessons Taught from the Books • 69
mold of the slave master of a Caribbean plantation. Nora told the children
“that their guardians were very cruel to send them from the West Indies,
where they might all have lived happily, to dull disagreeable England, where
they have no slaves to wait on them and where cross Mrs. Clifford would
send them to school to be flogged all day” (Fenwick, Visits 13–14). The older
children`s reluctance to learn had been exacerbated in the Caribbean, when
they had been subjected to “a harsh tutor, from whose instruction they had
been withdrawn by their parents, on account of his extreme severity” (Fen-
wick, Visits 12). So the “good Mrs. Clifford” is cast as both a cruel slave master
and a “harsh tutor.” The mystery of the Mortimer children’s distaste for read-
ing is thus resolved through the construction of their perception of education
as a form of a damaging colonial encounter. School becomes a version of a
Caribbean plantation in which children are slaves subject to punishment by
cruel masters. For children who had only ever known the life of a plantation,
the construction of the comparison between master/slave and schoolmaster/
schoolchild makes perfect sense. The only obedience they have observed is the
kind expected of the slave to the master. As Mary Wollstonecraft explains in
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, children, like women and slaves, suffer
“when obliged to submit to authority blindly their faculties are weakened,
and their tempers rendered imperious or abject” (Wollstonecraft, Rights 158).
That is, they are likely to live unhappy lives as blockheads.
Reading is the corrective to thoughtlessness and an unhappy blockhead’s
fate in Visits to the Juvenile Library, because, as the subtitle claims, “knowledge
prove[s] to be the source of happiness.” Because Fenwick’s novel is partly an
advertising exercise for the books in Tabart’s shop, the ninety-six titles she
features are promoted as excellent sources of knowledge guaranteed to lead to
a life of happiness. And as freedom from ignorance is the governing theme,
the plot successfully moves the five young, orphaned Mortimer children—
and their slave/nanny Nora—from ignorance to knowledge. The books from
Tabart’s shop successfully enable them to escape the “unpity’d blockhead’s
fate.” The children are directed towards those books through the enlightened
pedagogical practices of an enabling adult (their guardian, the “good Mrs.
Clifford”) and a peer/mentor (a young, very literate, well-educated neighbor-
ing child, Frank Howard).
In Visits to the Juvenile Library, warnings against life as a dunce are not
offered first by Mrs. Clifford, but rather by people the Mortimer children wish
to impress: an elderly visitor, and an admired peer who could be a potential
friend. In pedagogical and narrative terms, Fenwick has brought about a clever
maneuver. Real children, as parents and educators know, often jib when given
a direct order or instruction, So instead of having Mrs. Clifford just tell the
reluctant children to get on with their lessons, Fenwick has an elderly visitor to
the Clifford household, Mr. Benson, remind little Louisa of the consequences of
being uneducated. “[Y]ou cannot be children always,” he says, “and therefore
must gain knowledge while you are children, that you may not be despised when
you are men and women” (Fenwick, Visits 26). That phrase strikes me as an
echo of William Godwin admonishing his friend William Cole in an 1802 let-
ter to remember “the object of education is the future man or woman.”4 I’m not
suggesting that Fenwick was quoting Godwin, rather, that the idea was probably
one of the basic tenets of pedagogical theory taken as an implicit assumption by
those in her immediate circle. The second person to figure education as a desir-
able commodity to the skeptical young Mortimers is a neighbor, Frank Howard,
who is one of the exemplary children in Visits to the Juvenile Library. Like Mr.
Benson, Frank offers a clear rationale for desiring instructional texts: “If I do
not attend to my learning,” he explains, “I shall be despised for a blockhead,
when I am a man” (Fenwick, Visits 48).
The tactics Fenwick uses in the novel to pique the children’s desire to read
and to learn are defined by the modern theorist Sara Ruddick as “maternal
thinking.” As Ruddick explains, a mother of a child “in the middle years of
childhood” is governed by a need to shape “natural growth in such a way
that her child becomes the sort of adult that she can appreciate and others
can accept” (Ruddick, “Maternal Thinking” 98). In other words, mothers
don’t want their children to grow up to be blockheads; rather they want their
children to become caring, functioning members of society. Mothers have a
vested interest in the nurturing of socially acceptable, and socially and emo-
tionally responsible children.
My reading of Fenwick, and of many of the other women writing for chil-
dren in the period, is that their stories were grounded in the maternal prin-
ciples of nurturing socially responsible and acceptable children. This is not
the way their works were constructed in histories of children’s literature. F. J.
Harvey Darton in Children’s Books in England, is dismissive of their work. In a
chapter titled, “The Moral Tale: Didactic” (books published roughly between
1790 and 1820—so including the dates Tabart was in business), he defines the
genre as a “semi-artistic literary form, with philosophic purpose subordinated
to the story” (Darton 156). Although he notes that some of the “stronger”
books may “have escaped Time’s scythe” (and so survived into the 1930s when
his history of children’s literature was published), he focuses on the reasons
for the failure of the genre. He sees the characters in the moral tales he dislikes
as “no more than those brats of the movable-head books: the same waxen face
fitted into a succession of stiff bodies”5 (Darton 165). Darton includes Fen-
wick in his list of authors who failed, defining her as one of a list of “writers
of the period and manner [who] must be passed over with the mere mention
of their names” (Darton 168). As I’ll show in the fifth chapter (in which I talk
about children), Fenwick is perfectly tuned to a repertoire of tactics needed
by someone trying to entice reluctant children into learning. The scenario she
constructs for transforming the bored young Mortimer children at the begin-
ning of the novel into enlightened, literate, thinking, and knowing children
at the end, is delicately balanced. The social and pedagogical principles she
espouses in the fictional 1805 Visits to the Juvenile Library, set in London, are
also ones that must have informed her practices as a teacher over the years as
she tried to set up schools in Barbados, the United States, and Canada. There
is a record of the kind of school she set up in the Niagara region of what was
then Upper Canada, at the end of the 1820s.
A local Niagara newspaper, the Farmer’s Journal, announced the opening
of her school, a seminary of education for young ladies with what would now
be called its mission statement: “The great object of an instructor,” the notice
begins, “is to inspire a taste for knowledge and cultivate the power of acquir-
ing it” (Farmer’s Journal 22 April 1829). The acquisition of a “taste for knowl-
edge” is developed in Visits to the Juvenile Library at both the micro and macro
levels. At the micro level, the books Fenwick selects to foreground in Visits to
the Juvenile Library are always set in a teaching context: a particular book for
a particular person to match a particular need at a particular time. And, as
I’ll show, the instructional purposes to which the books are put are identical
with the progressive practices of some of the major twentieth-century edu-
cational theorists, including John Dewey (1859–1952), Lev Vygotsky (1896–
1934), Paulo Freire (1921–97), and Howard Gardner (b. 1943). At the macro
level, her work is situated within the broad context of the liberation politics
of her time: democracy, enfranchisement, opposition to the slave trade, and
access to education, if not for the masses, at least for the majority. In Visits to
the Juvenile Library, not only do the upper-class Mortimer children acquire
books and literacy, but a slave and a poor child do as well. I have to be care-
ful, however, not to overstate Fenwick’s case for liberation politics. Fenwick
was a pragmatist, and the books she wrote for Tabart, Phillips, and Godwin
were all aimed at middle-class (albeit socially conscious) families. As Andrew
O’Malley says in The Making of the Modern Child, “[T]o meet the challenges
of a fast-changing social and economic environment, they [children] had to
learn the techniques of efficient management of its two most prized commod-
ities: time and money” (O’Malley 102).
Liberation Politics
Women, slaves, and children are all linked metonymically in Visits to the Juve-
nile Library; all are oppressed, ignorant, and in need of liberation. Only in the
wake of the French and American revolutions did the connections between
the three groups gradually come into sharp focus. The uneducated state of
women and children was likened to a slave state. As Mary Wollstonecraft
argues in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the “corrupt state of
society” functions to “enslave women by cramping their understandings”
(Wollstonecraft, Vindication 15). Elsewhere she outlines a plan for state spon-
sored co-education that would provide a social corrective. The overarching
point is that the route to liberation is through education and literacy. The
enfranchisement of children, slaves, women, and the poor runs through Visits
to the Juvenile Library as a consistent leitmotiv, supported by the idea that
reading (especially books found at Tabart’s bookshop) provides access to an
enlightened, egalitarian community.
In the 1790s, as the French and American republics began to settle into
shape, and democratic principles became established, the move to abolish
the slave trade became increasingly strong. The hypocrisy of tolerating slav-
ery in states promoting democratic values was becoming uncomfortably
apparent. The slave trade, remember, was not ultimately abolished in Eng-
land until 1807 (slavery itself was not abolished until 1833), but throughout
the 1790s, the issue of slavery was hotly contested. One major event that gal-
vanized support among the intellectuals was the appallingly decisive defeat
(by a margin of two to one) of William Wilberforce’s motion in the British
Parliament to abolish the slave trade in April 1791. Yet the stark clarity of the
defeat roused a community of intellectuals into action. They were against
slavery and for both defi ning and defending freedom, justice, and an edu-
cated population. Anna Letitia Barbauld, one of the most important women
in the literary establishment of the time, wrote an influential contribution
to the debate, “Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq. On the Rejection of the
Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade,” published in mid-June 1791, just two
months after Wilberforce’s motion against the trade had been defeated in
parliament:
Each vice, to minds deprav’d by bondage known,

With sure contagion fastens on his own;
In sickly languors melts his nerveless frame,
And blows to rage impetuous Passion’s flame:
Fermenting swift, the fiery venom gains
The milky innocence of infant veins;
There swells the stubborn will, damps learning’s fi re,
The whirlwind wakes of uncontroul’d desire,
Sears the young heart to images of woe,
And blasts the buds of Virtue as they blow.
(Barbauld, Selected Poetry and Prose 124)
The poem was published by Joseph Johnson (also Mary Wollstonecraft’s pub-
lisher), as a “quarto pamphlet” and “[p]riced at one shilling” (McCarthy 294).
The publication was virtually a call to arms. By 1792, soon after Wilberforce’s
anti-slave trade motion had been defeated, a sugar boycott was established, to
protest the importation of sugar from the slave plantations of the Caribbean.
According to Mike Kaye, in “The Tools of the Abolitionists,” “thousands of
pamphlets were printed which encouraged people to boycott sugar produced
by slaves,” leading up to an estimated “300,000 people” who “abandoned
sugar, with sales dropping by a third to a half.”6 British adults and children
alike gave up sugar in support of the boycott. There is a poignant irony in that
children, typically depicted as craving sweets and as being vulnerable to being
rewarded with sweets in exchange for learning, should be willing to partici-
pate in a sugar boycott in order to protest slavery.
The young Maria Edgeworth was a supporter of what was sometimes called
the “antisacharist” movement. At just twenty-four, she gave up sugar “[i]n
the hope that when there is no longer any demand for sugar, the slave will not
be so cruelly treated to force them to rear the cane” (McCarthy 300). Lucy
Aikin, Barbauld’s niece, as a ten-year-old, had renounced sugar in support of
a sugar boycott. Lucy’s father, the educational theorist John Aikin, wrote in
“admiration” of his young daughter joining the ranks of “the young people,
& even children, who have entirely on their own accord resigned an indul-
gence important to them” (McCarthy 300, italics in the original). Not too
long afterward, as a twenty-year-old, Lucy edited what is regarded as one of
the very first anthologies of children’s verse, Poetry for Children: Consisting of
Short Pieces to Be Committed to Memory.7 This book contains “Against Slav-
ery” by William Cowper (1731–1840), which ends with the lines:
No: dear as freedom is, and in my heart’s

Just estimation prized beyond all price,
I had much rather be myself the slave,
And wear the bonds, than fasten them on him.
(Aikin, Poetry for Children 88)
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, books produced for children

often included a direct call to their responsibility to free both themselves and
slaves from ignorance.8 Eliza Fenwick plays directly on this theme in Visits
to the Juvenile Library, in her linking the illiterate slave/nanny Nora and her
white and rich charges, the Mortimer children, who are all equally reluctant
to read and be educated.
The Mortimer children languish under the gloomy suspicion that educa-
tion is akin to slavery until their guardian, the good Mrs. Clifford, introduces
them to the Enlightenment world of happy knowledge through the books in
Tabart’s Juvenile Library and through progressive educational practices. The
journey was not an easy one, especially as Nora, as their primary caregiver
(even prior to becoming orphans, the father had been busy with his estate and
the mother, ill), had been unable to “shew affection to the children in any other
way, than by flattering their foibles and indulging all their caprices” (Fenwick,
Visits 11–12), which is a sure way of producing only spoiled brats. Mrs. Clifford
knew that she “had a powerful enemy in Nora whom it was equally difficult
to convince or subdue; for Nora no sooner beheld Mrs. Clifford than all the
terrors of rods, canes, dark closets, and stocks, fi lled her imagination” (Fen-
wick, Visits 15). Fenwick’s comments also immediately recall Wollstonecraft’s
discussion of “specious slavery which chains the very soul of woman, keeping
her for ever under the bondage of ignorance” (Wollstonecraft, Vindication
145). The narrative links the ignorance of slaves, to the ignorance of women,
and the ignorance of children, then provides a release from the “bondage of
ignorance” through reading.
The dramatic connections between literacy and freedom in Visits to the Juve-
nile Library bring to mind Paulo Freire’s (1921–77) brilliant phrase the “peda-
gogy of the oppressed,” which is also the title of his famous book on the subject.
Elsewhere, in a collection of epistolary essays published as Pedagogy of Indigna-
tion, Freire argues for the pedagogy of liberation politics via literacy. In his first
letter, “On the Spirit of This Book,” he warns against “the teaching of reading
and writing that disdainfully turns its back on the world” (Freire, Pedagogy of
Indignation 16). In the fictional world of Visits to the Juvenile Library, being liter-
ate carries the political responsibility demonstrated in the real world through
the sugar boycott—exemplifying the kind of literacy Freire proposes:
Critically reading the world is a political-pedagogical doing; it is inseparable

from the pedagogical-political, that is, from political action that involves the
organization of groups and of the popular classes in order to intervene in
reinventing society. (Freire, Pedagogy of Indignation 18)
Reading to Be Free
In Visits to the Juvenile Library, because Nora had been so influential in con-
structing the Mortimer children’s negative attitude to reading, the coherence
of the story pivots on the fact that she becomes a willing convert to reading.
There is a telling scene about three-quarters of the way through the novel
in which Nora learns to read from a staple of Enlightenment secular read-
ing instruction, the spelling book. Two of the Mortimer children, Arthur and
Henry, come upon “Nora with an English Spelling Book in her hand, busily
employed in learning to spell the short easy words of man, can, ran, & c.”
(Fenwick, Visits 71).
In the wonderful engraving in Visits to the Juvenile Library (Figure 3.1),
Nora dominates the scene. Dressed in white, casually relaxed and draped
across a chair, she is reading while the two boys stand in the background, in
a doorway, surprised to find her so engaged. When they ask about her sud-
den change of heart on the merits of reading, she answers, in what Fenwick
describes as “her broken language”:
Well me tell all—you, Massa Henry, was cross boy, proud boy, sometimes
cruel boy to poor Nora—you Massa Arthur, use to call Nora here, send Nora
there; never satisfied if Nora sat down a moment, and you sit still and scold
all day. Since you come to England, you get books, you read books, you talk
together, play together, read again, play again, be happy, be merry, fetch your
own playthings, put them away; no call poor old Nora down stair, up stair,
Figure 3.1 Nora learning to be literate. Visits to the Juvenile Library (1805).
now to pick up a ball, now to tie your shoe—no scold and quarrel with Nora
when you go to bed; all kind and good to Nora now. Nora think you learn it
all out of books, so Nora learn books too. (Fenwick, Visits 71–2)
As befits the political agenda of the novel, Nora’s conversion to literacy is seen
in concert with a change in the master-slave dynamic. The boys no longer
order her about (“now to pick up a ball, now to tie your shoe”): they don’t
adopt a rude, dictatorial, or arrogant tone. And, she notes that not only do the
children no longer quarrel among themselves, they no longer “scold and quar-
rel with Nora.” In constructing the story of Nora’s road to literal literacy—and
metaphorical freedom—Fenwick beautifully puts the intellectual pleasure of
belonging to a literate community at the very center of her tale. Nora becomes
a poster-person for someone who has added sense to sensibility, knowledge to
affection—all because of a book.
Although Fenwick does not specify the particular English spelling book
Nora was reading, Dr. William Fordyce Mavor’s English Spelling-Book Accom-
panied by a Progressive Series of Easy and Familiar Lessons Intended as an Intro-
duction to the First Elements of English Language, printed for Richard Phillips
and sold by Tabart at 157 New Bond Street, seems a likely candidate. Eliza-
beth Kilner, in A Visit to London (also published by Tabart), recommends Dr.
Mavor’s English Spelling-Book. Amazingly enough, an actual record of the
transaction between Dr. Mavor and Richard Phillips for the purchase of a
spelling book has survived in the Longmans archive. A letter dated “Wood-
stock, Sept 9, 1801” records the transaction:
Received of Mr. Richard Phillips the sum of forty pounds by two drafts at
nine and ten months, which when paid will be in full of all demands for the
copy of the Imperial Spelling-Book, or by whatever other names it may be
called or known, and also for all rights, interests and revisions which I legally
possess, or may become entitled to, in regard to the above breakdown.
£40—(Longman Group Archive 24/134)
The Imperial Spelling-Book was published as the English Spelling-Book, as the

dates coincide. The 1814 edition of Mavor’s English Spelling-Book is the material
copy I used at the Osborne Collection in Toronto. This was its 182nd edition
and the copyright had already passed to Longmans. Marjorie Moon, in her
bibliography of Tabart’s books, notes its survival status: “In 1822 Longmans
published the 273rd edition,” she says, “with a note that nearly 2,000,000 cop-
ies had been sold in 19 years” (Moon 83). The forty-pound investment Phillips
made in the book seems to have paid off in terms of profits derived from his
backlist. The book also stands as what must have been a backbone of literacy
education at the time.
The scene of Nora learning to read “man, can, ran, & c.” from a spelling
book rather than a primer, is illuminating in itself as it suggests that her road
to knowledge was through secular rather than strictly religious instruction.
Mavor’s 1803 preface to his English Spelling-Book explicitly identifies the pur-
pose of his volume as an addition to the Bible—which was likely to be the only
other printed text available in poor families. Historically, a “primer” came
to mean any book used for learning to read, and originally, according to the
OED, it was initially intended as a devotional manual for the use of the laity
before and for some time after the Reformation (and so, well into the seven-
teenth century). Although the religious designation loosened over time, it was
still implicit in the early nineteenth century when learning to be literate was
still connected with learning to be Christian.9
According to Jennifer Monaghan, a spelling book “provided long lists of
syllables and words to be spelled out and pronounced” (86), though it also
contained short passages to be read aloud. Throughout the eighteenth century
and well into the nineteenth, “learning to read” and “learning to be Christian”
were related terms in England and North America. By identifying a spelling
book rather than a primer as Nora’s key to literacy and happiness, Eliza Fen-
wick quietly signals that Nora is on the side of the new democracies of France
and the United States, in which church and state are separated.
Mavor’s preface identifies a philosophical shift from a religious to a secular
register: “It was a remark of the Publisher (to whom British youth are under
singular obligations for furnishing them with many valuable opportunities
for improvement), when he pressed the execution and plan of the work on the
Editor, ‘that a Spelling Book frequently constitutes the whole library of a poor
child, unless when charity puts a Bible into his hands; and it ought to contain
as great a variety of useful matter as the price will permit.’” Mavor goes on to
say that he has, indeed, followed through on the agenda set by Phillips (the
quoted publisher):
The compilation has been formed strictly on this principle; and it will be
felt by every candid Reader that the child who may be unable to acquire any
other literary knowledge than what can be learnt even in this elementary
book need never have reason to blush from total ignorance or to err from
want of a foundation of moral and religious principles. (Mavor, “Preface,”
English Spelling-Book, 1814 edition)
Mavor’s Spelling-Book contains that “great variety of useful knowledge” that

would serve to save the fictional Nora, as well as other people with limited
access to printed texts, from having “reason to blush from total ignorance.”
Besides word lists and some catechisms, it also includes little secular stories
about learning to read or not being cruel to animals to accompany the word
and syllable lists. Some of Aesop’s fables, and lessons in natural history, pri-
marily descriptions of animals, wild and domestic, are also included. The sig-
nificance of Mavor’s enlightened stance (embracing a world beyond simply
letters or religion) is largely lost on modern readers, for whom spelling has
largely shed both its religious and political connotations. In the two centuries
following Mavor, spelling has taken on the characteristics of a competitive
game. “Spelling bees,” for instance, developed out of the American “spellers”
(an American usage, replacing “spelling book,” and identified in the OED as
appearing first in 1864) of the nineteenth century; they eventually morphed
into the kinds of international competitions documented in the 2006 popular
fi lm, Akeelah and the Bee.
Fenwick constructs Nora so that she embodies the act of learning to read
as a literal and symbolic act of liberation. Because Visits to the Juvenile Library
was published in 1805, two years prior to the abolition of the slave trade, Nora’s
inclusion sparks all the related stories pertaining to the particular historical
moment of awakening awareness about the criminality of the slave trade. The
irony is that it was illegal for slaves to learn to read and write in many south-
ern American states until well into the nineteenth century. Before I leave the
story of Nora and the liberating implications of her learning to read via her
spelling book, I have to add a little biographical detail about Eliza Fenwick.
In Visits to the Juvenile Library, Nora embodies the ideological assump-
tions held by Eliza Fenwick and her literary and philosophical friends, most
of whom favored abolition of the slave trade in the short term and assumed
that would be the first step towards outlawing slavery completely. In 1814,
however, things changed for Eliza Fenwick. She moved from England to
Bridgetown, Barbados, to join her daughter, son-in-law, and new grandchild.
Even though the slave trade had been abolished, slavery was still very much a
normal part of the colonial order. In a letter to her friend Mary Hays, dated
11 December 1814, Eliza Fenwick describes her experience with the slaves:
Figure 3.2 Frontispiece, William Mavor’s The English Spelling-Book.

Figure 3.3 Title page, William Mavor’s The English Spelling-Book.

“They are a sluggish, inert, self-willed race of people,” she writes, “apparently
inaccessible to gentle & kindly impulses.” Nevertheless, Fenwick also imme-
diately qualifies her feelings and recognizes the conditions that produced
them: “It is a horrid system, that of slavery, & the vices & mischiefs now found
among the Negroes are all to be traced back to that source” (Wedd 163–64).
Retrospectively, though it is possible to appreciate Fenwick’s conflicted sense
of her problem—her awareness of systemic injustice and a personal need for
support—it is still difficult for us to appreciate that slavery had been a debat-
able issue, even among people of good faith and good conscience; it is hard to
reconcile Fenwick’s affectionate portrait of Nora as a slave learning to read as
a way to freedom with later complaints about slaves. Nevertheless, the con-
nections Fenwick makes between reading, freedom, happiness, virtue, and
reward in Visits to the Juvenile Library are all consistent, as I’ll show with the
brand profi le she builds throughout the novel.
A Community of Readers
In Visits to the Juvenile Library, Frank Howard, the model literate child, lends a
book belonging to his sister, A Puzzle for a Curious Girl, to one of the Mortimer
children, Caroline. Poor Caroline, she gets up early the next morning to “study
her charming book,” but finds that she “had not the pleasure of understanding
it, for though she was seven years old, she could scarcely read at all.” Caroline’s
frustration increased as “she looked at the pictures, which made her more eager
to understand the story, but she tried in vain” (Fenwick, Visits 43). For a cyni-
cal modern-day reader, initially it might be easy to dismiss young Caroline as
another misguided illiterate in need of instructional salvation, but anyone who
has been close to a young child’s frustration at not being able to make sense of a
printed text recognizes that Caroline’s experience rings completely true:
When she had spelt a word, she knew not how to divide the syllables and
put them together, so that she made utter nonsense of every line. At length,
quite tired of her fruitless efforts, she burst into tears of disappointment and
shame, and exclaimed, “Oh how happy I should be if I could read.” (Fen-
wick, Visits 43–44)
At this point in the story, the good teacher, Mrs. Clifford, provides poor Caro-
line with two texts suited to her skill level, books that will magically transform
her from non-reader to reader. Mrs. Clifford “kindly soothed” the crying
Caroline and said, encouragingly:
My dear, you shall soon be able to read this or any other book. I have in my
writing desk two little books: the title of one is Presents for good Girls; and
the other is called The Story of Mary and her Cat; both of these I will give
you, they are written purposely for children who cannot yet read well; and
there are no words in them of more than two syllables; and those of two
syllables are divided in such a manner, that you will have no difficulty in
understanding them. (Fenwick, Visits 44–45)
Both Presents for Good Girls and Mary and Her Cat (subtitled In Words Not
Exceeding Two Syllables) were written by Eliza Fenwick.10 In Visits to the Juve-
nile Library, Caroline, proud of her newly, quickly, and easily acquired read-
ing skill, puts it to good use immediately: “[B]efore breakfast she had read a
part of the pretty story of Mary and her cat to her sister Louisa, who was no
less delighted with it than herself” (Fenwick, Visits 45). By situating all three
books for new readers in the context of Caroline’s successful transformation
from non-reader to reader, Fenwick makes the desirability of the Tabart books
(especially her own) seem inevitable. The books demonstrate the effectiveness
of their good pedagogical approach, and their value for money.
In constructing her scene of reading success, Eliza Fenwick employs peda-
gogical strategies considered exemplary today—as well as narrative strategies
that serve to frame each Tabart book being promoted. The individual books,
A Puzzle for a Curious Girl, The Story of Mary and Her Cat, and Presents for
Good Girls, are introduced not so much as instructional materials, but rather
as literary works to be shared and enjoyed. Though all three books have the
conventional qualities of books for beginning readers in the early nineteenth
century (pictures, simple texts, and, as in The Story of Mary and Her Cat,
words pre-cut into syllables), the emphasis is on sharing books, child-to-child,
in exactly the way adults exchange much loved books with each other. Frank
Howard lends his sister’s book, Puzzle for a Curious Girl, to Caroline because
he thinks she’ll like it, and then Caroline reads The Story of Mary and Her
Cat to her sister Louisa, who “was no less delighted with it than [Caroline]
herself” (Fenwick, Visits 45).
As the British literacy scholar Margaret Meek explains in How Texts Teach
What Readers Learn (1988), “[R]eading doesn’t happen in a vacuum.” Read-
ers belong in communities where they share, learn from each other, and are,
as Meek says, “members of networks.” Twenty years after the publication of
Meek’s book, using the language of the twenty-first century, we might call those
communities of readers “social networks” (as in the second generation of Inter-
net groups such as Facebook and Twitter), but the principle remains the same.
Readers become literate as individuals among networks of readers. As Meek
explains, “they know the people who like the books they like, and they also
know the groups they might like to belong to” (Meek, How Texts Teach 6, 20).
British critic and novelist Aidan Chambers uses similar terms to identify “the
sharing of enthusiasms” as one of the core defining features of people identify-
ing as being part of a community of readers. In describing a conversation with
colleagues who met regularly in the 1970s to discuss “literature, children and
teaching,” Chambers explains that the “booktalk” inspired them; “It was the
booktalk,” says Chambers, “that pumped blood into our literary veins and gave
us the energy, the impetus, for exploration beyond our familiar boundaries”
(Chambers, Booktalk 141, 138, 140). Both Chambers and Meek describe what
Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, scholars working in the 1990s in the field of edu-
cational theory, call “situated learning.” Their point is that education originates
in a desire to become “fully participating members” of the community in which
the learners are “situated” (Lave and Wenger).
The idea that learning to read is not a chore or a learning “outcome,” a
term familiar in twenty-fi rst century school discourse, but rather a practice
that develops out of a desire to become a member of a literate community is
not new, yet the historical trace is not clear at all. While talking is a skill typ-
ically regarded as something learned naturally in a warm, loving domestic
setting, reading is regarded as a formal skill that has to be taught. Because
being literate is the fi rst step towards formal education and full membership
in a literate, civilized society, it exists in a blurred borderland between the
pleasure, love, warmth, and celebration associated with children learning
to talk, and the formal instruction of school lessons for teaching children
to read.
The most famous lines on making learning to read a pleasurable occupa-
tion come from John Locke’s 1693 Some Thoughts Concerning Education, in
which he says that “children may be cozen’d into a Knowledge of the Letters;
to be taught to read, without perceiving it to be any thing but a Sport, and
play themselves into that which others are whip’d for” (Locke 209, italics in
the original). Literary scholar Julia Briggs, however, questions the originality
of Locke’s insight, suggesting that by the time he enshrined enticing children
into the pleasures of reading in his treatise, the idea had already been in com-
mon practice. Briggs cites an early text on reading instruction, A Play-book for
Children, published in 1694 by an author named J. G., which contains phrases
that look suspiciously like the ones in Locke. Briggs says J. G. describes her
project to “decoy children into reading” and “to allure them to read as soon as
they can speak plain.” As Briggs dryly suggests, J. G.’s book “either represents
a particularly prompt response to Locke’s proposals or indicates the subject as
already topical in the early 1690s” (J. Briggs 72).
Luckily for those of us imagining what the instructional practices and
materials used in the eighteenth century to decoy children into reading were
like, there are extant examples. We also know that maternal teaching practices
are typically built on the principle that children want to learn—the trick is to
encourage them to do the occasionally tedious work necessary to achieve the
desired aim. That’s where the idea of trying to “decoy” children into read-
ing comes into play. For instance, at the end of the second volume of Tommy
Thumb’s Pretty Song Book, published in 1744 by Mrs. Cooper, and famous as
the oldest surviving book of nursery rhymes, a little verse appears, supposedly
by “Nurse Lovechild,” as an advertisement at the end for an instructional text,
The Child’s Plaything:
The Child’s Plaything
I recommend for Cheating
Children into Learning
Without any Beating
(Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book)
Lady Ellenor Fenn (1743–1813) used the same principle in titling her famous
book about decoying children into reading, Cobwebs to Catch Flies. Also extant
is the miraculously preserved mid-eighteenth-century nursery library of Jane
Johnson, the wife of a Buckinghamshire vicar, which provides examples of
how enticing and beautiful domestic, handmade instructional material could
be. The collection includes meticulously composed and illustrated alphabet
cards, mobiles, and little verses, which I’ll address more explicitly in the next
chapter, though a full account of the collection is in Reading Lessons from the
Eighteenth Century by Evelyn Arizpe, Morag Styles, and Shirley Brice Heath.
These authors note that Jane Johnson recognized intuitively that “learning to
read requires frivolity, storytelling and diversion as well as diligence, rigour
and repetition,” that it has to be “interactive” and “employ the visual and dra-
matic” (Arizpe, Styles, Brice Heath 92). In Visits to the Juvenile Library, Eliza
Fenwick employs all the maternal pedagogical practices designed to encour-
age children to want to learn to read. She provides books that are attractive
and interesting, can be shared among friends, and employ instructional tech-
niques that facilitate the process of learning to read.
Although the history of pedagogical practices associated with reading
instruction for languages based on a phonemic alphabet (i.e., languages that
don’t use a form of pictograms) is long and complicated, there are only two
basic methods: phonetic and whole-word recognition. In order to read a lan-
guage based in the phonemic alphabet, the reader has to be able to make a con-
nection between the mark on the page (the graphemic representation of the
letter) and its sound (the phonemic representation). In the phonetic method
(more properly graphemic/phonemic method), the name and form of each
letter is taught in conjunction with the sound of that letter. The beginning
reader progresses from the letters of the alphabet to the sounds made by vari-
ous vowel and consonant blends, then to single syllables, to words of single
syllables, and on to words of increasing numbers of syllables. The beauty of
the twenty-six letter alphabet used in modern English is that it is possible to
render any word in the language visible, audible, and pronounceable. In terms
of reading instruction, the downside is that children all too frequently learn to
sound out words, but are unable to make sense of them.11
The graphemic/phonemic method of reading instruction was the one that
had been in use since the fifteenth century. That’s when the hornbook, a little
card about the size and shape of a ping-pong paddle, printed with the letters of
the alphabet, introduced with the sign of the cross, followed by a few syllables,
and the Lord’s prayer, came into popular use. The card was covered with a
piece of translucent animal horn (hence the hornbook), and beginning read-
ers would trace their letters with a stylus on the horn. It was a durable, por-
table form of literacy instruction. The paddle often had a hole in the handle
and children could carry it with them. The hornbook was the first step for
what John Locke, in the late seventeenth century, called the “ordinary road”
to literacy education—one which continued through “Primer, Psalter, Testa-
ment and Bible” (Locke 213).
The alternative method of reading instruction relies on “whole-word” rec-
ognition or what is called a “sight” vocabulary. Basically, this method involves
sequencing the introduction of a limited number of commonly used, generally
short English words, a few at a time, to new readers. The premise is that words
will be recognized at a glance, apprehended in the way experienced readers
approach texts, not through the tedious, laborious process of approaching each
word letter to letter, sound to sound, and syllable to syllable. In the twentieth
century, the whole-word technique became the “look-say” method, as children
were taught to “look” at a word, then “say” it. Both methods of instruction
have had their proponents over the last couple of hundred years. In the mid-
nineteenth century, Mrs. Felix Summerly (aka Marian Fairman Cole) produced
The Mother’s Primer (1844) with “short easy sentences” presented (even before
learning the alphabet perfectly) so that a child could learn words in a sentence
“at sight,” and so bring that knowledge forward. Despite its proponents, word-
recognition has struggled with phonics in the instructional sweepstakes.
If I look at one of the books Mrs. Clifford gave to poor Caroline, Mary
and Her Cat, I find that although Fenwick has retained the traditional gra-
phemic/phonemic method of reading instruction (e.g., the words are divided
into syllables in the text), she has also situated the reading instruction in a
cozy, warm, and maternal setting in a way that encourages Mary to become
a member of a literate community. The story begins with “little Mary” and
the “good old wo-man,” nurse Brown, who “lov-ed lit-tle Ma-ry dear-ly”
(Fenwick, Mary 4). Like the “good Mrs. Clifford,” Mary’s nurse initiates her
charge into a community of readers. So when Mary was at nurse Brown’s cot-
tage, “some-times she would read to her nurse, and some-times nurse Brown
would tell sto-ries to her, or sing old songs, such as she had learn-ed from the
books that are sold at Mr. Ta-bart’s shop, in new Bond Street, where all kinds
of books that can a-muse or in-struct child-ren are to be bought” (Fenwick,
Mary 4–5). Although Mary begins as a good child, she is young, self-centered,
irresponsible, or even egotistical. She has not yet learned to think beyond her-
self. When Mary’s pet cat almost starves through neglect, Robert, a poor child
in her neighborhood, gives up his dinner “to feed the starv-ed cat.” The plot
would have been familiar to nineteenth-century readers, especially with the
lesson regarding not being cruel to animals. The plot comes up in both Mary
Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories, and Sarah Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories, for
instance.12 Robert’s kind deed earns him the respect of Mary’s mother, who
then becomes his mentor and sends him to school “that he might learn to
read and write.” She recognizes that he is likely to grow from a “kind boy” to
a “good man.” Taking the lesson from her mother, Mary envelops Robert in
her community of readers: she “lent Ro-bert all her books, as soon as she had
learnt to read, and she u-sed to di-vide her mo-ney with him, that he might
buy o-ther books and o-ther play-things for his lit-tle sis-ters” (Fenwick, Mary
35–36). Like the money, the syllables are divided to maximize the pedagogi-
cal benefit. The last engraving features a happy boy, a fat cat, and a generous
mother encouraging her young smiling daughter as Mary shares her books.
Rich and Poor: What Young Readers Read
In the world Fenwick constructs in Mary and Her Cat, Visits to the Juvenile
Library, and elsewhere in her work, children share their books, with rich
children often circulating their books with poor children. The good Mrs.
Clifford, in Visits to the Juvenile Library, runs a school for poor children in
the neighborhood of her country estates. It’s sometimes difficult for modern
readers to remember that in the early nineteenth century, compulsory, state-
regulated education was a glimmer of an idea—although Mary Wollstone-
craft had famously suggested it in her 1792 essay “On National Education,”
in Vindication of the Rights of Woman (161–84). For lower-class children,
the question of whether any education was necessary at all was still a mat-
ter of public debate. There were an assortment of school models operating
at the time: from Sunday schools run by The Religious Tract Society, to
private charitable schools (like the one Mrs. Clifford runs in the story), to
Dame Schools (supposedly to give children their fi rst lessons in reading, but
often were just babysitting services run by women who needed a little extra
money), and to some factory-model schools developed to educate many
children cheaply using monitors, older students, to take younger students
through their programmed lessons.
The good Mrs. Clifford, however, doesn’t stint on resources for the school
she supports in the country. She supplies “spelling-books, grammars, books
of geography, dictionaries, writing-books and ciphering books” (Fenwick,
Visits 96). To the “best scholar” in her school, Thomas Gibbon, Mrs. Clifford
gives The Book of Trades (1804), so that he might glimpse possible options
for earning a living. One of the Mortimer orphans, Arthur, a character who,
given his privileged colonial upbringing would likely have had little inter-
action with trades, is intrigued by Mrs. Clifford’s choice of a gift book to
her top scholar. Arthur expresses a desire to “read this nice book,” because
he has “never before heard of a Copper-plate Printer, an Iron Founder, or a
Currier” (Fenwick, Visits 53). I should confess that my knowledge of those
trades was equally vague, so I read the three volumes of the Tabart edi-
tion of The Book of Trades with complete and focused attention while in
the reading room of the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books in
Toronto. I can see why, as Marjorie Moon informs me, The Book of Trades
“appears to be have been one of Tabart’s most successful publications,” sur-
viving through several editions (Moon 156, 157). Its popularity encouraged
imitations, including ones by the fi rms of Dean and Munday and the fi rm
of William Darton, though, as Moon says, “[n]either resembles the Tabart/
Phillips production” (Moon 159).
Each job description in The Book of Trades includes a history of the job’s ori-
gin, and a sketch of the moment-to-moment work involved in carrying out the
task at hand. It also contains information, as appropriate, about the strength
required to perform the task, the likelihood of employment, and income
potential. Although the trades that flourished in the early nineteenth century
have disappeared for the most part and rendered the job description func-
tion of these volumes obsolete, the book was marked for me in its immediacy
and a sense of connectedness to the everyday working life of the community.
A “Paviour,” I learned, was the person whose job it was to put stones in the
roads, so that they would not be the “foul, full of pits and sloughs, perilous
and noisome” muddy paths that they had been in the early fifteenth century,
when Henry V attempted to correct the problem by ordering “twenty tons”
of stone to pave the street (Trades 2, 65). The job of “Copper-plate Printer”
is traced back to a goldsmith in Florence in 1460 (Trades 2, 109). The jobs for
women included “Feather-worker” and “Spinner,” both found in the second
The Book of Trades, speak to me the way potsherds from an archaeological dig
speak to an archaeologist; these occupations in this book hold clues from the
past that are helpful in constructing useful ideas for the future. There was no
talking down to readers, no shirking of the importance of work to the com-
munity, and no falsely cheery prose style of the kind typical of twenty-first-
century books of job descriptions aimed at young children.
In the books of reading instruction and the reward book, The Book of
Trades, Fenwick emphasizes the link between what is being read and the way it
is shared, both between adults and children and between children. The books
are embedded in lived and shared experiences which induct new readers into
a community of readers.
A Visit to a Farm House and the Zone of Proximal Development
Although Visits to the Juvenile Library is, as I’ve said, criticized for being an
extended example of product placement, it has strangely never been praised
for embedding exemplary pedagogical practices in the narrative. Yet these
practices are what strike me. Each book Fenwick writes about is situated
so its use in an educational setting is foregrounded. In the third chapter,
“The Use of Knowledge,” for instance, there is a scene in which the model
literate child, Frank Howard, in the context of casual conversation with the
Mortimer children, is able to explain the historical, mythic, and scriptural
subjects depicted in a gallery of “fi ne pictures” hanging in the home of Mrs.
.
Clifford. Although the Mortimer children had looked at the pictures, they
hadn’t known what the paintings meant and so “were more perplexed than
amused by them” (Fenwick, Visits 33–34). When Frank Howard seems so
easily able to talk about the subjects of the pictures, the Mortimer chil-
dren ask him how he “came to know so many things.” When Frank How-
ard answers that he simply acquired his knowledge through reading, the
Mortimer children are suspicious. The scene begins as Frank Howard asks
Arthur Mortimer why he has been so unhappy when engaged in learning
things:
Arthur—“Why because—because when I think I have any thing

to learn, it makes me stupid, and gives me a pain. I know I
could never learn any thing without being unhappy.”
Frank Howard’s response to Arthur’s sad confession of academic failure is

a model of exemplary teaching practice. He encourages Arthur to recognize
what he does know. Here’s the rest of the exchange:
Howard—“You gave me a very distinct account just now, of the

manner in which the slaves worked the plantations in Jamaica.
Did it give you a pain to learn that?”
Arthur—“No; because I wanted to understand that; so I often fol-
lowed the overseer when he gave directions; and looked at the
slaves while they worked.”
Howard—“Very well; should you like, also, to know how the
business of an English farm is conducted?”
Arthur—“Yes, very much.”
Howard—“Then here is a book called A Visit to a Farm House;
which, if you read it with attention, will amuse you exceed-
ingly, and make you as well acquainted with English Farming,
as you already are with the cultivation of rice and sugar canes.
(Fenwick Visits 36–38)
The exchange between Frank Howard and Arthur Mortimer, difficult as it

is to read now, stands as a perfect example of what is now called a “teachable
moment.” Frank encourages Arthur to attend to his natural inclinations and
interests. In the terms used by educational theorist Lev Vygotsky, Arthur is
in the “zone of proximal development,” in that he is being aided by a “more
knowledgeable other,” another of Vygotsky’s terms. And because Arthur
acknowledged his genuine interest in watching the farming practices on the
plantation, he is demonstrating what the educational theorist John Dewey
describes as “learning through experience.” Let me elaborate a little on both
Vygotsky and Dewey, as both are celebrated for their progressive pedagogical
practices, yet, as I’ll show, the practices for which Vygotsky and Dewey receive
credit are the very ones cited for discrediting the women writing instructional
materials and teaching real children in the Enlightenment.
In Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes,
Vygotsky defi nes the “zone of proximal development” as “the distance
between the actual level as determined by independent problem solving and
the level of potential development as determined through problem solving
under adult guidance or in collaboration with capable peers” (Vygotsky 86).
If I use Vygotsky’s terms to analyze the little exchange between Frank and
Arthur, I fi nd that Frank is the character Vygotsky would describe as the
“More Knowledgeable Other,” the person who enables the less experienced
Arthur to recognize the value of the knowledge brought from his experi-
ence on the Caribbean plantation, and further how that experience can be
applied to support a desire to learn about farming in England. The book
that Frank offers, A Visit to a Farm House, “scaffolds” on Arthur’s interests
“in the cultivation of rice and sugar canes,” and piques the reluctant child’s
desire to learn.
By showing how Frank hones in on Arthur’s interests in farming prac-
tices, Fenwick appears prescient in demonstrating what the famous twenti-
eth-century psychologist, philosopher, and educational theorist John Dewey
would frame as “experiential” education. The narrative link Fenwick devel-
ops between farming (Caribbean and English) and A Visit to a Farm House
offers an example which contains the two essential principles of experiential
education: “continuity and interaction” (Dewey, Experience and Education
44). As Dewey explains, continuity and interaction are “the longitudinal
and lateral aspects of experience.” Frank is making what Dewey calls “a
direct vital appeal” (Dewey, Experience and Education 19) to something
Arthur already fi nds interesting and in which he has already demonstrated
an admirable level of expertise. Dewey explains how continuity and interac-
tion work together:
Different situations succeed one another. But because of the principle of con-
tinuity something is carried over from the earlier to the later ones. As an
individual passes from one situation to another, his world, his environment,
expands or contracts. He does not find himself living in another world but in
a different part or aspect of one and the same world. What he has learned
in the way of knowledge and skill in one situation becomes an instrument
of understanding and dealing effectively with the situations that follow.
(Dewey, Experience and Education 44)
When I opened the copy of A Visit to a Farm House in the Osborne, I was
riveted by the graphic portrayal of life on a farm. It was so unlike the kind of
superficial visit-to-the-farm story modern children are likely to see, the kind
where the animals are perfectly clean, and well-groomed if big, or cute and
cuddly if small. In an 1817 review of Visits to a Farm House (cited by Moon),
the critic praises the book for its value as what is essentially an example of
experiential learning: for “exciting the attention of children who live in the
country to the interesting objects to which they are surrounded and of afford-
ing useful information to those who live in the town” (Moon 73).
A Visit to a Farm House (1804), by Elizabeth Kilner, begins conventionally
enough, as she introduces her readers to a cute baby calf. She proceeds quickly,
however, to a graphic account of how calves are turned into veal:
The butcher cuts their throats and lets the blood drain out. Afterwards the
carcass is cut up into different joints and it is called veal, and sold for our
eating. The skin is sold to a tanner who turns it into a beautiful smooth kind
of leather, that those large books which you were looking at last night are
bound. The hair from the hide is used in plaster, the hoofs boiled into jelly,
the horn made into knife handles and combs, the dung used for bleaching
linen and to use in fires. (Kilner, A Visit to a Farm House 7–9)
Although I appreciate that a modern reader might recognize the ecologically

sound practices involved in making complete use of an animal raised for slaugh-
ter, the matter-of-fact account of the butcher cutting the throat of the calf and
letting the blood drain out would likely be flagged as unsuitable for children
constructed in the Romantic innocent mold. This is exactly the sort of detail
a modern editor (or parent or teacher for that matter) would designate as off-
limits to children, consequently viewed as needing protection from the harsh
realities of life. And yet, the irony is that very matter-of-fact account of the life
and death and utility of the baby calf fits perfectly with a twenty-first-century
sensibility, tuned as it is to environmentally sound farming practices.
Book of Games and Kinesthetic Knowledge
The first reference to the Book of Games in Visits to the Juvenile Library comes
up in conversation early in the novel, when Mrs. Clifford tells her friend Mr.
Benson in the presence of Arthur Mortimer that Frank Howard had bought it
as a gift for his young cousin. Initially skeptical about intellectual pleasures,
Arthur thinks a book of games must be an oxymoron, a contradiction in
terms. “I never saw any books,” says Arthur, “[t]hat did not hinder boys from
playing” (Fenwick, Visits 23). Mr. Benson responds, in tones slightly pitying,
slightly chastising, that Arthur is “unfortunate” not to know about books that
“give them the greatest amusement and . . . make them more active, more
lively and more good tempered, and of course, more fit for innocent play”
(Fenwick, Visits 23). As it happens, Mr. Benson’s feelings about the pedagogi-
cal value of exercise and play are in complete accord with Mary Wollstone-
craft’s comments in “On National Education,” in A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman. She suggests in this work that to “improve and amuse the senses,” her
ideal (co-educational) local schoolroom “ought to be surrounded by a large
piece of ground, in which the children might be usefully exercised, for at this
age they should not be confined to any sedentary employment for more than
an hour at a time” (173).
Later in Visits to the Juvenile Library, “the young gentlemen” in fact “played
at trap-ball as it is described in that amusing book. . . . ” (Fenwick, Visits 46).
The full title of “that amusing book” is the Book of Games: Or a History of the
Juvenile Sports Practiced at the Kingston Academy, and was published by Tabart
in 1805. The volume is not, as the title might suggest, just a description of
games and rules, but rather a novel gently bridging the gap between the pro-
tected domestic space of home and the public space of school. In keeping with
Mary Wollstonecraft’s belief that both boys and girls deserved physical exer-
cise, both sexes are represented in the text. The games played are embedded in
a narrative—in much the same way that the books in Tabart’s catalogue are
embedded in the narrative of Visits to the Juvenile Library.
The plot of the Book of Games centers on a boy, Thomas White, educated
through his early years at home. When his father must go abroad on busi-
ness for an extended period, it is decided that it will be best for Thomas to
continue his education with a tutor who teaches a small cohort of boys in
his home. This is a diplomatic narrative solution to the debate of this period
regarding whether children should be educated privately at home, or publicly
in a public school away from home.13 On the journey towards the new home-
school, Thomas and his father watch boys playing field hockey. Thomas is
enticed by the game and wants to try it. Later, on arrival at the home of
the tutor, Thomas is invited to play “trap-ball” (a form of cricket, and the
game played by the boys in Visits to the Juvenile Library) with another child.
Gradually, as the story unfolds, the older boys in the group help Thomas
to rely less on his father and engage in cooperative pursuits with boys in
his peer group. The Book of Games is an epistolary novel, where the let-
ters between father and son narratively negotiating the space between home
and school, between private domestic life and the public life of school. The
letters themselves mediate the distance as Thomas gradually acquires what
Howard Gardner calls “bodily-kinesthetic intelligence.” It’s one of a cluster
of “intelligences”14 Gardner describes as “the ability to solve problems or
fashion products that are the consequence of a particular cultural setting or
community” (Gardner 6).
In the Book of Games, children play “fives” (a game played with a ball)
and leap-frog; they play on swings, fly kites, play blind man’s buff (some-
times “bluff”), swim, and practice archery. They also play with spinning tops,
hoops, shuttlecocks (badminton), and peg-tops which are wooden spinning
tops, and they play team sports such as football (soccer). In the illustrations,
girls are also shown playing some of the games, including blind man’s buff,
but they also skip and play on a seesaw.
Of the theoretical perspectives exemplified in this chapter—situated
learning, experiential education, and the zone of proximal development—
Gardner’s theory of “multiple intelligences” is helpful in its emphasis on how
physical play and games contribute to intellectual development. As a corollary
to the relationship between games, sport, and intellectual growth is the link
between toys and intellectual growth. Although both are broadly character-
ized as aspects of play, the relationship between toys and intellectual growth
has developed into a category of its own: edutainment.
Educational Toys and Edutainment
Early in Visits to the Juvenile Library, Mrs. Clifford tells her visitor, Mr. Ben-
son, about her visit to Tabart’s with Frank Howard. In fact, this is the first
time the reader hears about Frank, though he is not present. The exchange is
an example of a pedagogically clever technique, in that the exchange occurs in
front of the Mortimer children, and so functions partly as a way of arousing
their curiosity and desire. Frank, we are told, purchased both the Wonders of
the Microscope and the Wonders of the Telescope at Tabart’s; they also hear that
they are apparently “two of the most popular books in the shop.” Mrs. Clif-
ford pushes the desirability of the items by saying that both the microscope
and telescope are even better than toys. “Master Howard,” she says, “will find
more amusement and delight from their use, than he would from any play-
thing the toy shop could furnish” (Fenwick, Visits 23). Then, as now, the tele-
scope and the microscope open up a world of wonders, making the ordinary
strange. In Wonders of the Microscope, several engravings reveal the magic of
the close-up view of the everyday world: a fold-out louse, a magnified cheese-
mite, a bottle-fly, and a flea all encourage readers to look closely.
By the time Eliza Fenwick was writing about The Wonders of the Micro-
scope and The Wonders of the Telescope in Visits to the Juvenile Library, these
scientific instruments, though not new, were still relatively novel. Robert
Hooke, an English physicist, had experimented with lenses in 1665 to attempt
to amplify his view of cork. A Dutch businessman, Anton van Leeuwenhoek,
developed an interest in magnifying lenses and his work, beginning about
1673, earned him a place in the history of the development of the microscope.
Further developments occurred throughout the eighteenth century, so that by
the time Eliza Fenwick was promoting the microscope in the early nineteenth
century, it was popular enough to be commercially available for domestic use.
Although not toys, microscopes and telescopes offer educational play that
enables young readers to cross between child’s play and adult’s work.
In Democracy and Education (1916), Dewey notes that the introduction of
the microscope and the telescope meant that it was possible for the first time
“to alter and extend the data of sense perception” and so “arouse new ideas.”
He explains that the new instruments for seeing the world were pedagogically
valuable not simply because they made it possible to see things that had been
hitherto invisible, but because this type of access made it possible to think in
new and exciting ways. And thinking, as opposed to rote learning, was the
operative feature of progressive education for Dewey. The fascination with
the microscope and telescope as educational toys has been sustained over
the centuries. On a spring morning in the twenty-first century, when I typed
“microscope” and “children’s books” into the Amazon search engine, I got
twenty-six hits for books ranging from The Complete Book of the Microscope
(Usborne 2005) to Inventions That Shaped the World: The Microscope (Frank-
lin Watts 2006) to A World in a Drop of Water: Exploring with a Microscope
(Dover 1998).
Fenwick does not dismiss the value of toys, games, and other “childish”
pleasures in Visits to the Juvenile Library. Instead, she situates her discussion of
the Wonders of the Microscope in the immediate vicinity of the Book of Games,
thus implying the links between play and pedagogy. What interests me is the
connection between the books about the microscope and telescope and how
the scientific instruments are constructed as educational toys. This categori-
zation clearly separates them from the simple designation of toys as reward or
prize of the type used by Newbery when he sold a ball for boys and a pincush-
ion for girls in conjunction with A Little Pretty Pocket-Book. In the history of
children’s book publishing and marketing, the microscope and telescope do
not belong to the same category. Instead they are what would now be called
“edutainment”; that is, they are in a category of educational, and preferably
interactive toys. In our digital age, we’ve come to apply edutainment to edu-
cational computer games, though David Buckingham, in Beyond Technology:
Children’s Learning in the Age of Digital Culture, reminds us that the term is
really a portmanteau word, “a hybrid mix of education and entertainment that
relies heavily on visual material, on narrative or game-like formats, and on
more informal, less didactic styles of address” (Buckingham 122). He reminds
us that the hybrid has long been a technique for playing on parental anxi-
ety about the need to produce successful children. Buckingham also quotes a
1989 study by Valerie Walkerdine and Helen Lucey, in which they refer to the
“‘curricularization’ of family life—that is, as a way of transforming children’s
leisure and everyday interactions into a form of educational ‘work’” (Buck-
ingham 120).
At Tabart’s bookshop, as well as at other children’s bookshops in the period,
other educational toys were offered in conjunction with books. For instance,
there were miniature libraries, packaged so that young children could teach
their dolls to read. Maps were prepared as jigsaw puzzles and were used in
concert with instruction on geography. Eliza Fenwick wrote a very successful
interactive grammar book, Rays from the Rainbow (discussed fully in chapter
5) for William Godwin’s bookshop. It was a paint-by-number (or parse by
color) book composed of a printed text with blank oblong lozenges under-
neath each word. In reading the book, the child was to use a color-coded guide
to parts of speech and watercolor paint to fill in blank lozenges with the color
that matched the part of speech. The microscope and the telescope, however,
are distinguished within the educational toy category as having explicit scien-
tific function in the world, outside their instructional value.
This chapter has emphasized the pedagogical value of knowingness, as
opposed to performance. Dewey, Vygotsky, and Gardner are all recognized
in the twenty-first century as pioneers in philosophies of progressive educa-
tional practices. To see progressive practices—including ideas about devel-
oping communities of readers, attention to pedagogies of the oppressed,
experiential education, the value of the zone of proximal development, mul-
tiple intelligences, and edutainment—all embedded in the narrative of Visits
to the Juvenile Library gives a sense of how familiar those practices must have
been to the teachers using the featured texts. In the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, many of the women using those books were also the
women writing them. In the next chapter, I’ll tell stories about a few of the
extraordinary women who wrote the books that taught the lessons that lived
in the house that Ben built. Their backstories, their life stories, their stories
of raising, teaching, and writing for children make riveting reading—and are
well worth knowing and remembering.
Chapter Four
These Are the Women Who Wrote the Books
That Lived in the House That Ben Built
“Didactic” is a word that comes up a lot in the context of the women who
wrote the books that lived on Ben’s shelves. With its short staccato bursts of
hard d’s, c’s, and t’s the word sounds like gunfire. When spoken, “didactic” has
a bitter taste, and is typically used as a term of derision. The OED, however,
defines “didactic” rather neutrally as “having the character or manner of a
teacher,” and dates it from 1644. There is irony in the fact that the reputations
of the Enlightenment women who developed books engaging the progressive
educational practices discussed in the last chapter should have suffered for
their prescience.
In Children’s Books in England, Darton uses “didactic” almost apologetically
when he discusses the “delicate didactic art” of the author Maria Edgeworth
(1768–1849). When he published his history in 1932, her books for children and
adults were still in print, though in dwindling circulation, and as he diplomati-
cally says, “possibly not read so widely or so often as they deserve.” Yet, of the
early twentieth-century response to her books, he says that “when they are read,
it is not for their purpose” (meaning their instructional or didactic purpose),
but “because they are really good stories told in simple and delightful English,
with frequent humour” (Darton 140, italics in the original). In the same vein,
though less generously, writing in the 1960s, John Rowe Townsend portrays
Edgeworth patronizingly as “the author of many determinedly didactic sto-
ries for children and young people—often with a utilitarian emphasis which
clearly derives from Rousseau” (Townsend 27). Edgeworth is not the only late
Enlightenment woman writing for children I’m going to discuss in this chapter,
but I wanted to convey at the outset how explicitly the adjective “didactic” is
yoked to her name and work, as it is to other women writing for children in the
period. Darton’s chapter about these women is titled, “The Moral Tale: Didac-
tic,” and this is also where he situates his account of Anna Barbauld.
95
Although I’ve begun with Edgeworth, I appreciate that she isn’t named
in Visits to the Juvenile Library, so I feel I have to justify her large presence
in this chapter. Marjorie Moon indicates there is even some doubt as to
whether her books did live on Tabart’s shelves at all in the early nineteenth
century, though he certainly advertised that he sold some of her famous
ones.1 My chapter on the women who wrote the lessons that lived in the
books that lived in the house that Ben built begins with Edgeworth because
she is emblematic of the network of teaching and writing women in the
period who were engaged in the creation of the progressive texts and peda-
gogical practices discussed in the previous chapter. Further she exemplifies
how these women writers were negatively branded as merely didactic in the
twentieth century. I’ve conceived this chapter as a way of telling “other”
stories about these women, the good and interesting stories, the ones that
engage their intelligence, kindness, originality, humanity, pedagogical pre-
science, and generosity of spirit. Their lives, loves, losses, sorrows, and suc-
cesses, as well as the network of family, professional, and ethical ties that
bound them, all make stories worth telling and keeping at the heart of con-
temporary understandings of the origins of the children’s book business. By
attending to the valiant attempts these women made to create and dissemi-
nate progressive pedagogical practices and texts, I’ll show they were engaged
in the kinds of maternal teaching practices directed towards encouraging
children to become thinking and knowing adults.
Broadly, there are two overarching stories in this chapter. The fi rst story
is about the networking, not all of it successful, among these women and
their publishers. The publisher Joseph Johnson is a key player. Anna Bar-
bauld, Mary Wollstonecraft, Sarah Trimmer, and Maria Edgeworth all
worked for and with him. Johnson also figures in the context of William
Godwin’s publishing enterprise for children. In this chapter, I’m also going
to consider Ann Taylor and Jane Taylor (who published with Tabart and
with the Gracechurch Street fi rm of Harvey and Darton), the daughters of
Isaac Taylor, an engraver, who like William Blake was engaged in the day-
to-day business of making books. The second story concerns the matrilineal
tradition of women writing for children in the late Enlightenment. Real and
surrogate grandmothers, mothers, and daughters weave together dense net-
works of fictional and real characters who develop a maternal pedagogical
identity and style of their own.
Listed in chronological order by date of birth, the women featured in this
chapter are: Catharine Macaulay (1731–91), Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743–
1825), Hannah More (1745–1833), Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97), Mary
Hays (1759–1843), Eliza Fenwick (1766–1840), Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849),
Margaret Mount Cashell (1772–1835), Ann Taylor (1782–1866), Jane Tay-
lor (1783–1824), and Mary Godwin Shelley (1797–1851). They won’t receive
equal treatment, but they frequently turn up in each other’s stories. If I could
pose them all for a portrait, I might call it, “Literary Women Writing for the
These Are the Women Who Wrote the Books • 97
Young.” All the women about whom I write are linked in a six-degrees-of-
separation way, rather than in terms of fame or influence or even in terms of
contributions to the field. I emphasize the connections between them and on
the slippage between their real lives as maternal teachers and their fictional
characters who are teachers or governesses. The “Mrs. Mason” story I’ll relate
at the end of the chapter is a perfect example and I will sketch it briefly
Mrs. Mason, the stern governess in Mary Wollstonecraft’s fi rst children’s
book, Original Stories (1788), was likely based on a real woman who had
taught previously with Mary Wollstonecraft and her sisters in a school they
had started in Newington Green, just outside London. Mrs. Mason became
the pseudonym used by Margaret (King) Mount Cashell for the children’s
books she wrote for William Godwin. Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter, Mary
Godwin Shelley, eventually wrote a story for the child of the real Margaret
Mount Cashell (aka Mrs. Mason), thereby completing a complicated series
of mother/child, teacher/student, author/reader relationships. A thumbnail
recap of the initial set of relationships in the “Mrs. Mason” story reads like
this: a real teacher, Mrs. Mason, transforms into a fictional character, then
becomes the pseudonym for one of the real child characters in the same
story, creating a prototype of a series of matrilineal fictional and real role
models. The grandmothers, mothers, and daughters who engaged in the
development of that kind of distinct maternal pedagogical tradition are the
subjects of this chapter. In order to sing their praises, however, their “didac-
tic” characteristics require “rebranding.”
Rebranding Didactic as Brilliant
Rebranding is tricky, partly because it is contingent not only on the subject

of the exercise, but also on the network of conditions that hold it in place.
The difficulty with rebranding “didactic” as a positive term is that it rings
discordant when set in the context of conceptions of fun, play, and inno-
cence which insist on stubbornly sticking to implicit ideological construc-
tion of children’s literature. Even though modern children’s literature is rife
with realistic novels dealing with a wide range of contemporary social prob-
lems, the stigma of didacticism still stains the reputations of the children’s
books created by the maternal teachers of the late Enlightenment. Despite
the fact that feminist and children’s literature scholars (including Marilyn
Butler, Julia Briggs, Mary Hilton, William McCarthy, Mitzi Myers, and
Lynne Vallone)2 have been working for decades now to disengage the derog-
atory aspects of the adjective “didactic” from discussions of Enlightenment
women, a general popular shift has been more difficult to achieve. This is
why the hugely popular exhibition curated by Elizabeth Eger and Lucy Peltz
at the National Portrait Gallery in London entitled Brilliant Women: 18th
Century Bluestockings (13 March to 15 June 2008) is so important.
The Brilliant Women exhibition was recommended by British newspapers
as one of the best shows to see in London in the spring of 2008. While suc-
cessful exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery are hardly rare, this one
was special because of its focus on women who had been largely sidelined
by history. The term “Bluestocking” still has the whiff of a joke about it and
carries negative connotations similar to the ones associated with “didactic.”
“Bluestocking” conjures up the features of a harridan and suggests an oxy-
moronic ridiculousness in the figure of an intellectual woman. As Eger and
Peltz relate, Bluestocking had come to denote “a certain type of bookish and
dowdy woman” in the popular imagination. Part of the success of the exhibi-
tion, as well as of the accompanying book of the same title, is that Eger and
Peltz really did contribute to the recovery or rediscovery of the Bluestocking
women featured in the exhibition. In a sense, they shook off the dusty and
dowdy attributes of these women and restored their reputations as “brilliant”
intellectual and even cool trendsetters. The Bluestockings were rebranded as
brilliant, but it wasn’t an easy sell.
To begin, Eger and Peltz had to reconstruct a historical reminder of just how
innovative and intellectually radical the Bluestockings had originally been.
Though “Bluestocking” came to be a disparagingly used term, it had a benign,
even positive beginning. In their historical trace of the term, Eger and Peltz
explain that it had been coined “to describe a male botanist, Benjamin Stilling-
fleet, who wore blue worsted [a coarser, hard-wearing wool] stockings (rather
than the more formal white silk) to one of [Elizabeth] Montagu’s evening par-
ties” (Eger and Peltz 16).3 The coarse blue stockings were a semiotic signal of
non-conformity to social class conventions: fashionable rich people wore white
(or black) silk; working people wore blue worsted. The term Bluestocking even-
tually was applied to the group of both men and women who met, often at the
home of Elizabeth Montagu (1720–1800), for evenings of intellectual conversa-
tion. Evening card playing was the fashion at the time (beginning around 1750),
so intellectual conversation was a significant departure.
Because the women identified as Bluestockings were either contemporaries
with, or a bit older than, the children’s authors described as “didactic” by
Darton and other children’s book historians, the connections between them
are important. Bluestockings and didactic women are linked by shared appre-
ciation of the desirability of intellectual life, as opposed to a popular belief
in their preference for lives characterized by superficial “fun” (as expressed
in card or game playing). Anna Barbauld stands as the author with the high-
est profi le whose reputation suffered as a Bluestocking and also as one of the
didactic women writing for children.
Eger and Peltz successfully built their exhibition of Brilliant Women in a
way that simultaneously attracted wide public acclaim and refocused atten-
tion on the originality and attractiveness of the Bluestocking women. They
reclaimed the negative “Bluestocking” signifier as a positive term, and engaged
its “counter-cultural edge that is connected to a tradition of feminist pioneers”
(Eger and Peltz 16). At the heart of the Brilliant Women exhibition was Rich-
ard Samuel’s 1778 portrait of nine remarkable women of the late eighteenth
century—scholars, authors, musicians, artists, and translators—a sisterhood
of intellectual women. The formal title, Portraits in the Characters of the Muses
in the Temple of Apollo, shows all the women costumed in clothing that drapes
and looks like eighteenth-century variations on classical Roman robes. The
painting is conventionally known by its subtitle, The Nine Living Muses of
Great Britain, with the accomplishments of the female subjects identified in
relation to their contributions to British culture.4
Although the women were not particularly enamored of their likenesses
in the portrait, all would have been familiar names in intellectual circles. On
the left in Samuel’s portrait (Figure 4.1), the women are: Elizabeth Carter
(1717–1806), classical scholar, poet, and translator; Anna Letitia Barbauld
(1743–1825), described as “poet and writer” in the exhibition catalogue, but
in children’s book histories renowned as the author of Early Lessons, a pro-
totype of the modern primer, as well as Hymns in Prose; Angelica Kauffman
(1741–1807), painter; Elizabeth Sheridan (1754–92), singer; Charlotte Len-
nox (1730?–1804), author and poet whose popular novel, The Female Quixote
Figure 4.1 Richard Samuel’s 1778 Portraits in the Characters of the Muses in
the Temple of Apollo (The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain).
(1752), is likely to have had an adolescent as well as adult readership; Han-
nah More (1745–1833), playwright and Evangelist children’s author; Elizabeth
Montagu, (1718–1800), literary critic; Elizabeth Griffith (1727–1793), novelist
and playwright; and Catharine Macaulay (1731–91), historian and author of
an important book on educating girls. In the portrait, these nine women were
recognized for their contribution to eighteenth-century English culture, for
their “cultural capital,” to use Pierre Bourdieu’s resonant term from “Cultural
Reproduction and Social Reproduction.”
Four of the nine women in the portrait—Barbauld, More, Macaulay, and
likely Lennox—were recognized for their contributions to the burgeoning field
of children’s literature in the late eighteenth century despite their very different
social, political, and religious views. This sets them in the same category as the
“cursed Barbauld crew,” who were reviled in an (in)famous letter Charles Lamb
sent to Samuel Taylor Coleridge on 23 October 1802. His letter defined the teach-
ing and writing women of the Enlightenment as didactic and set their reputations
on a similar course of suffering as the sad and bad one of the Bluestockings.
Interestingly, one of the OED definitions of “Bluestocking” women describes
them as “having or affecting literary tastes”—which seems odd as “having”
literary taste would seem a good thing while “affecting” literary taste would
seem bad. There is a sense in which the Bluestockings and the teaching and
writing women of the same period veer between what was perceived as genu-
ine intellectual life and having pretensions to intellectual life. Like the Blue-
stockings, the “Barbauld crew” have had trouble escaping their bad press.
Didactic as a Dirty Word
Because the sticky negative connotations of the word “didactic” that have
tarred Anna Barbauld and the other teaching and writing women of her age
for two hundred years can be traced to repeated references of a letter from
author and critic Charles Lamb (1775–1834) to his friend, poet, and critic,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), it’s worth quoting the relevant portion
of that letter here:
“Goody Two Shoes” is almost out of print. Mrs. Barbauld’s stuff has ban-
ished all the old classics of the nursery; and the shopman at Newbery’s hardly
deigned to reach them off an old exploded corner of a shelf, when Mary asked
for them. Mrs. B’s and Mrs. Trimmer’s nonsense lay in piles about. Knowl-
edge insignificant & vapid as Mrs. B’s books convey, it seems, must come to a
child in the shape of knowledge, and his empty noddle must be turned with
conceit of his own powers when he has learnt that a Horse is an animal,&
Billy is better than a Horse, and such like; instead of that beautiful Interest
in wild tales, which made the child a man, while all the time he suspected
himself to be no bigger than a child. Science has succeeded to Poetry no less in
the little walks of Children than with Men—Is there no possibility of avert-
ing this sore evil? Think what you would have been now, if instead of being
fed with Tales and old wives’ fables in childhood, you had been crammed
with geography and natural history!
Damn them!—I mean the cursed Barbauld Crew, those Blights and Blasts
of all that is Human in man & child. (Lamb, i, 326)
Of course, it’s the “cursed Barbauld crew” line that stuck fast. The irony is that
Lamb moved in the same circles and was friends with some of those women,
including Barbauld herself (at least initially), Eliza Fenwick, and Mary Woll-
stonecraft. William McCarthy tries to contextualize the tirade by explaining
that Lamb was “a volatile man, prone to irrational outbursts,” so likely had no
inkling that his momentary outburst would have such long term consequences
(McCarthy 446). He also reminds us that Coleridge (to whom the letter was
addressed) was feeling increasingly irritated by Anna Barbauld, despite his ini-
tial admiration for her and her work, because he was dealing with unresolved
“‘issues’ about his mother,” as well as other political and religious changes in
affiliation. On the very first page of his 750-page biography of Barbauld, McCa-
rthy points out that when Coleridge had been just twenty-five, he had so admired
Barbauld that he had “traveled forty miles—a long day’s journey—to meet her”
(McCarthy ix). Later, painstakingly, and with great sympathy, McCarthy traces
the sequence of events that contributed to the sullying of Barbauld’s reputation
and the decline in her literary status. McCarthy suggests that a series of lectures
Coleridge gave in May 1808 represented “the opening shot in the Romantic
nineteenth century’s public attack on her” (McCarthy 445). Then McCarthy
details the complex web of internal jealousies and changes that turned both
Coleridge and Lamb from friends of Barbauld to foes. The cruel joke on Bar-
bauld’s name (“Barebald”), McCarthy attributes to another of the Romantic
poets fighting for aesthetic dominance, Robert Southey (McCarthy 447). The
attacks were successful, and value of Barbauld’s pedagogical and literary stock
declined accordingly for the next two hundred years—which is why the recov-
ery of her reputation now takes such a long time.
Because I’m making a connection in this section between the Bluestockings
and the maternal pedagogues condemned by Charles Lamb, I’m going to allude
to a curious semiotic co-incidence. I fully appreciate the risks in trying to draw
attention to connotations that might well have not existed in the period, but
the link is too tempting to omit. In the letter Lamb writes to Coleridge con-
demning Barbauld and her “crew,” he mentions an engagement he must attend
the following day. “The annual meeting of the Blues is to-morrow,” he says, “at
the London Tavern, where poor Sammy dined with them two years ago, and
attracted the notice of all by the singular foppishness of his dress.” Sammy was
apparently Sam le Grice, a schoolmate from Christ’s Hospital School in Sussex—
the school Lamb, Coleridge, and Sammy attended. The “Blues” is a reference to
the fact that the boys at the school were identified by their blue coats—in fact,
the school was also known as the “Bluecoat” school. Although I know that the
Bluecoats and the Bluestockings signify completely different groups of people,
and even though I know that Lamb is not referring directly to the Bluestock-
ings in his famous curse, the explicit naming of Anna Barbauld links the two
through the allusion to what constitutes literary (and sartorial) good taste. Men
who had worn bluecoats as boys shared a formal education and so were officially
“learned.” Women who wore bluestockings had been haphazardly educated for
the most part and were regarded as dilettantes. The Bluecoats signify affection-
ate links between members of an old boys’ club, while the Bluestockings signify
women “having or affecting literary taste.”
Part of the backlash against the female writers of the Enlightenment—
including Catharine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Barbauld, and
Maria Edgeworth—was that they were constantly having to define themselves
in terms of what it meant to be educated, especially if they were going to be in
the business of educating.
William McCarthy’s biography of Anna Barbauld illuminates the cultural
obstacles faced by “women who aspired to write in an age when literary com-
petence was defined, usually by reviewers, who were almost always men, in
terms of ‘Learning,’ and ‘Learning’ was defined as conversance with Latin if
not Greek.” As McCarthy points out, a woman who was “Learned” in the clas-
sical sense was regarded “as a gender impropriety,” that is, a kind of freak, or
an “unsex’d female,” to use the term popularized in Richard Polwhele’s 1798
satirical critique of literary women (McCarthy 359). Though women writing
for children were scorned for their philisophical and classical erudition, no
one seemed to worry very much about philosophers who didn’t know much
about children. Rousseau’s Emile reads as a particularly wooden (a blockhead,
perhaps?) character. In her biography of Maria Edgeworth, Marilyn Butler
dryly comments on the phenomenon by explaining that when “cultivated
men applied themselves to the subject of education, they did so at the theoreti-
cal level, and addressed themselves to the parents” (Butler 163). That seems
to have been the case with Rousseau who famously abandoned his own (ille-
gitimate) children to a local foundling home, an orphanage, yet was lionized
for what became the founding text of child-rearing manuals, Emile. By way of
contrast, in the preface to The Parent’s Assistant (1796), Edgeworth addresses
the complexity of the job of writing for children: “Those only who have been
interested in the education of a family, who have patiently followed children
through the first processes of reasoning, who have daily watched over their
thoughts and feelings; those only who know with what ease and rapidity the
early associations of ideas are formed, on which the future taste, character and
happiness depend, can feel the dangers and difficulties of such an undertak-
ing” (Edgeworth, Parent’s Assistant iv).
For a women to be both learned and literary in the late eighteenth century
seemed something of an oxymoron, though no one was worried about the creden-
tials of a man with no child-rearing experience writing a child-rearing manual.
There is a certain irony in the fact that literary women writing for children did
seem to be both learned and experienced. McCarthy cites Maria Edgeworth mak-
ing a lovely tribute to the “ease, frequency, and felicity” of the classical allusions
in Anna Barbauld’s prose (qtd. in McCarthy 356). Only a “Learned” person, that
is someone in possession of a classical education, would notice and praise the
classical allusions. The image I’ve selected of Barbauld (Figure 4.2) shows her
crowned with laurel leaves, signaling her classical, intellectual strengths.5
Figure 4.2 Anna Barbauld by Thomas Holloway; after Unknown Sculptor.

As Eger and Peltz demonstrate, nineteenth-century Romantic writers
were keen to displace the intellectual women of the previous generation. For
instance, in 1813, Coleridge complains about how he did “lather in stom-
ach, and deprecate in Judgement, all, all Bluestockings.” Critic and scholar
William Hazlitt ranted about a Bluestocking woman as “the most odious
character in society; . . . she sinks, wherever she is placed, like the yolk of
an egg, to the bottom, and carries the fi lth . . . with her” (qtd. in Eger and
Peltz 130).6 In a similar vein, in a letter to Hannah More, Horace Walpole
famously called Mary Wollstonecraft a “hyena in petticoats” (26 January
1795). As the suffragettes of the nineteenth century and feminists of the
twentieth found out, the backlash against intellectual women could be very
ugly. Although intellectual women could be respected for their work, they
were also feared and reviled, as they appeared to threaten the confirmed
social (masculine, hierarchical) order. Bluestocking women, like “didactic”
women, suffered from society’s passive-aggressive anxiety about the presence
of intelligent women. Norma Clarke, in her insightful “‘The Cursed Barbauld
Crew,’” explains this conflicted response by noting that “any woman enter-
ing the public sphere—as many did—negotiated a complicated environment
of mixed welcome, enablement, prejudice and closed doors which coloured
their public pronouncements” (Clarke 93). By rebranding the formerly
scorned Bluestockings as “brilliant” women, Eger and Peltz did a great deal
to restore their images as innovative, creative women in the popular imagi-
nation. Their successful tactic constitutes a major new step in an arduous
scholarly process of reclamation of Enlightenment intellectual women that
has been under way since the 1970s and the beginning of the reclamation of
a feminine tradition.
In her prescient 1986 essay, “Impeccable Governesses, Rational Dames and
Moral Mothers,” Mitzi Myers begins her reclamation project by acknowledg-
ing that “Georgian writing for the young still suffers something like the criti-
cal equivalent of urban blight.” She cites Percy Muir, a children’s book scholar
from the 1950s, who characterized those women as a “monstrous regiment”
(Myers 31). As a corrective, Myers argues that the Enlightenment women were
attempting to create a literature and a form of maternal pedagogy that would
support the construction of responsible, thinking, and knowing children. She
argues that “late eighteenth century children’s literature is a genre shaped
by gender” and that “[i]t comprehends an undervalued and almost unrec-
ognized female literary tradition, the more revelatory precisely because it is
didactic, because it accepts and emphasizes the instructional and intellectual
potential of narrative” (Myers 33). This thrilling idea reverses the negative
implications of didacticism, reclaims it, and turns it into a good, in that it
positions women as not just teaching received wisdom, but rather as autono-
mous individuals exploiting the power of narrative to develop the mental and
emotional resources of their intended young readers. The maternal mentors
of the texts aimed high in their pedagogical goals by shooting for “rationality,
self-command, and moral autonomy” (Myers 34). Myers attempts to revive the
term “Mentoria” to describe the Georgian women who were creating enlight-
ened pedagogical texts and practices for children, reclaiming the term from
the title of an 1807 text by Ann Murry, Mentoria: Or the Young Ladies Instruc-
tor, though she also looks to Elizabeth Helm’s Maternal Instruction; or Family
Conversations (1802) for reclaiming a maternal pedagogical tradition.7
The problem with a maternal tradition, or a feminist tradition for that mat-
ter, is that it is not just one thing. Maternal teachers, like feminists generally,
range across the political spectrum (from conservative to radical) and the
religious spectrum (from fundamentalist to agnostic). Some are mothers, like
Sarah Trimmer (1742–1810), who had twelve children of her own and set up
the first formal critical guide to children’s books, the Guardian of Education
(1802–06), and Maria Edgeworth, who never married but was actively involved
in the raising and teaching of her step-brothers and sisters (Maria was one of
twenty-two children fathered by Richard Lovell Edgeworth). And there were
maternal teachers driven by their own intellectual gifts who pursued literary
and pedagogical goals, despite the ridicule. The one who stands the most reso-
lute is Catharine Macaulay (1731–91). Her status is confirmed partly by her
position as one of the women immortalized by Richardson as one of the nine
living muses and also partly because of her status as one of the first sources of
inspiration for the young Mary Wollstonecraft. Though the two women never
met, Macaulay appears to have been one of the models of a Mentoria for Woll-
stonecraft, perhaps even providing hints of the new kind of “genus” that Woll-
stonecraft told her sister she wanted to become. Because Catharine Macaulay
serves as precursor to the women who wrote the books that taught the lessons
that lived in the house that Ben built, she figures in my discussion here.
Catharine Macaulay (1731–91)
By the time Catharine Macaulay published her eight-volume Letters on Educa-

tion: With Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects in 1790, she had
been celebrated and admired for her major contribution to historical studies,
History of England (1763), and in the year 1778 immortalized in painting by
Richardson and in sculpture by J. E. Moore, as well as lampooned. Town and
Country Magazine ridiculed her for her December-May marriage to the twen-
ty-one-year-old William Graham. Macaulay was forty-seven at the time and
had previously been living unconventionally with a (much older) admirer, the
Reverend Thomas Wilson. He had commissioned the statue, owned a good
library, and was thirty years her senior.
In November 1790, Mary Wollstonecraft published an extensive review (in
Joseph Johnson’s critical magazine, Analytical Review) of Macaulay’s eight-
volume treatise on education. Wollstonecraft was well-qualified to write the
review, as she had written her own conduct book on the same subject, Thoughts
on the Education of Daughters: With Reflections on Female Conduct, in the More
Important Duties of Life; Wollstonecraft’s book was her first published work
and it had been brought out by Joseph Johnson in 1787. Wollstonecraft’s review
is particularly interesting because she appears to be working out, almost for
herself, the relationships between progressive pedagogy, gender equity, and a
vision for a democratic community. The text of the review is a palimpsestic
template for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
Wollstonecraft’s review begins with praise of the “very superior powers”
of mind Macaulay brings to the subject, then she focuses on the fundamental
importance of linking thinking with feeling, and quotes the opening line of
Macaulay’s “Preface” to her Letters on Education: “‘Of all the arts of life,’ Mrs.
M. observes, ‘that of giving useful instruction to the human mind, and of ren-
dering it the master of its affections, is the most important’” (Wollstonecraft,
Works 7: 309).8 Wollstonecraft continues the review by attending to ideas that
will become central to her own work; ideas such as the value of educating
both girls and boys to “the great advantage of inducing habits of indepen-
dence” (Wollstonecraft, Works 7: 311). Throughout her reading of Macaulay,
Wollstonecraft attends to the value of teaching children to think and to feel,
to understand their actions have consequences, and to recognize emotional
responsiveness as a key to teaching children to become humane and responsi-
ble adults. In the end, she stresses the importance of “the influence of motives
on human conduct, and the necessity of informing the understanding, that
it may regulate the will, is the grand spur to industry, in every attempt to
promote domestic and national education” (Wollstonecraft, Works 7: 315) . In
a lovely essay about Wollstonecraft’s literary reviews, Mitzi Myers addresses
the dominant characteristics and worldviews which color all her work, and
certainly apply to the review of Macaulay. Myers argues that “Wollstonecraft
explicitly urges women readers to think and feel for themselves; implicitly, she
shows them how in a critical discourse that is also a mode of self-definition”
(Myers, “Mary Wollstonecraft’s Literary Reviews” 93–94). Here, as I argue
throughout, the construction of a citizen of the Enlightenment as a citizen
able to both think and feel dominates.
After Macaulay’s death, Mary Wollstonecraft pays tribute to her in the Vin-
dication of the Rights of Woman, praising her contributions to culture, marked
and unmarked by gender:
The very word respect brings Mrs. Macaulay to my remembrance. The

woman of the greatest abilities, undoubtedly, that this county has ever pro-
duced; and yet this woman has been suffered to die without sufficient respect
being paid to her memory.
Posterity, however, will be more just, and remember that Catherine
Macaulay was an example of intellectual acquirements supposed to be in-
compatible with the weakness of her sex. In her style of writing, indeed, no
sex appears, for it is like the sense it conveys, strong and clear. (Wollstone-
craft, Vindication 102).
For Wollstonecraft, Macaulay’s great achievement was her ability to construct
a template for an egalitarian society; something that could be accomplished
by educating, then integrating, intellectual women into the public sphere.
Macaulay and Wollstonecraft are sometimes identified as proto-femi-
nists, in the sense that they couldn’t manage to galvanize a movement as
an identifiable force of social change, at least not in the way the suffragettes
did in their quest for enfranchisement for women in the late nineteenth
century, or the feminist movement had in striving for gender equity in the
late twentieth.9 Yet, around 1800, the women who were publishing actively
were aware of the need to support each other’s works, to both advertise and
recommend their shared ethos. They had formed a critical mass and had
managed to create a viable network to disseminate and promote their ideas.
Mary Wollstonecraft does that directly in The Female Reader (1789), when
she foregrounds excerpts by Anna Barbauld and Catharine Macaulay. Fen-
wick too participates in the same process in Visits to the Juvenile Library,
when she recommends books by Elizabeth Kilner (though only the title
rather than the name of the author appears in the text). There were other
attempts to galvanize the literary talent and energy of the women writing
in the period, including a famous attempt by Maria Edgeworth. She tried to
assemble a proto-feminist periodical, to be authored by a formal network of
“literary ladies,” as she called them.
Mentorias and Other Literary Ladies
On 22 July 1804, Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849), already well-established as

an author for children and adults, invited the venerable Anna Letitia Barbauld
(1743–1825) to join in the establishment of a new literary journal, “a periodi-
cal paper to be written entirely by ladies” (Le Breton 84).10 Included in the let-
ter is a warm invitation to visit the Edgeworth family home, in Ireland:
We do not pretend to diminish the terrors of sea-sickness, but we could hope

to balance a few hours of pain by some months of pleasure. We are vain
enough to feel tolerably certain that you would be happy in the midst of a
family, united amongst themselves, who have from their childhood, heard
the name of Mrs. Barbauld with respect, and who, as they have grown up,
have learnt better and better to appreciate her merit. (Le Breton 84–85)
The warmth and sincerity of the invitation to join the lively Edgeworth family
comes through. I’ve chosen the image (Figure 4.3) from the collection held in
the National Portrait Gallery in London despite the fact that the image itself
is described as “unknown woman engraved as Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849)
by unknown artist.”11 I like the fact that the engraving shows the woman por-
trayed as Edgeworth smiling, and propped up by books.
Despite the fact that many of the Edgeworth family’s political and peda-
gogical views were shared by Barbauld, she took some time to consider her
reply. In a letter dated 30 August 1804, Anna Barbauld is careful to include
generous praise of Maria Edgeworth’s literary accomplishments: “How much
have we all to thank for you for of [sic] entertainment and instruction, how
admirably have you contrived to join fancy, interest, knowledge of the world,
Figure 4.3 Woman engraved as Maria Edgeworth by unknown artist.

sound sense, useful morality in various pieces which with so rich and flow-
ing vein of instruction you have poured out before us” (Le Breton 90). Yet the
invitation to join the editorial board of what Barbauld (Figure 4.2) describes as
a “lady’s paper” (italics in the original) is politely declined. In Family Author-
ship and Romantic Print Culture, Michelle Levy speaks to the courage of Bar-
bauld’s stance generally as an outsider in the move to consolidate a feminine
voice in print culture of the time. “By refusing to write solely as a sister, wife,
or mother, and in refusing to claim that women had moral authority by vir-
tue of their feminine roles,” says Levy, “she [Barbauld] did not participate in
the paradox that, to some degree, defined female authorship in the period.”
Instead, as Levy explains, of opting for either the male or female options, Bar-
bauld opts for the “rational, concerned citizen” (Levy 29)
The grounds on which Anna Barbauld rejected the invitation to publish
with Maria Edgeworth would have been completely familiar to the second
wave of feminists writing in the 1970s and 1980s, who argued the relative mer-
its of establishing venues of their own (as in, for instance, women’s studies
departments in universities) and integrating feminist values of equity into
existing structures (so, including women’s issues in, say history or literature
departments).12 Barbauld explains:
There is no bond of union among literary women, any more than among
literary men; different sentiments and different connections separate them
much more than the joint interest of their sex would unite them. Mrs. Han-
nah More would not write along with you or me, and we should probably
hesitate at joining Miss Hays, or if she were living, Mrs. Godwin. (Le Breton
86–87)
This is a curious list, and it invites speculation on the ideological issues that
would have rendered the women on it uneasy companions if bound together
in a periodical. Maria Edgeworth would have instantly glimpsed the spec-
trum of differences to which Barbauld alludes. The writings of the devout and
prolific Mrs. More would not sit easily next to the awakening feminist prose
of Mary Hays and the scandalous political celebrity of the late Mary Woll-
stonecraft Godwin. Generational differences are likely implied too. More and
Barbauld would have been a generation older than Hays and Wollstonecraft,
while Edgeworth would have been the youngest of the group.
The date of Edgeworth’s proposed journal of literary ladies is interesting
too. When she issued her invitation in 1804, the up and coming generation
of Romantic authors, including Coleridge and Robert Southey, had started to
articulate their demonization of “literary ladies.” Lamb’s “cursed Barbauld
crew” letter had been written in 1802 and was just one element in a gather-
ing campaign to establish their difference from the generation of literati that
had preceded them, as McCarthy explains in his biography of Barbauld. Even
though the letters between Southey, Lamb, and Coleridge were private at that
time, they contained the outlines of the “cursed Barbauld crew” sentiments
that would make up their public comments, which would tarnish the reputa-
tions of Enlightenment women for the better part of the next two centuries.
It’s hard not to wonder if the historical record would have been different if
Maria Edgeworth had convinced the “literary ladies” she approached to pro-
duce what might have been a prototype for something like the Virago Press
or Ms. magazine.13 There is something fitting about the fact that authors and
critics influenced by feminist studies of the late twentieth century have been
so active in re-imagining—in rebranding—the reputations of the Enlighten-
ment women who were foremothers. In this section on “Mentorias,” my focus
is on the connections between the “literary ladies” Edgeworth envisions as
being able to share an agenda, despite Barbauld’s rejection of the idea. Han-
nah More is one of the women well-served by the re-visioning process, and
as I’ll show, she is connected with Edgeworth, Barbauld, and Wollstonecraft
through a common pedagogical ethos.
Hannah More (1745–1833)
Historical discussions about Hannah More (1745–1833) typically focus on

her status as an Evangelical Christian, the sort of person considered now as a
Christian fundamentalist, or a right-wing religious fanatic. To be fair, Darton
is a little gentler, describing her work diplomatically as “plainly didactic fic-
tion which at once taught the most ingenuous, least subversive arts and soft-
ened the morals” (Darton 267). He is referring to the hugely successful series
of stories More wrote between 1795 and 1798, her Cheap Repository Tracts. As
she wrote about fifty of these stories in that brief three-year period, she must
have had an incredibly fluent imaginative life. Designed to look like the secu-
lar, popular chapbooks that circulated in England at the time, More’s small
books had an explicit religious message, though it wasn’t nearly as shrill or
hard line as perceptions of her might suggest. More explains that her pur-
pose was “not to make fanatics,” but “to train up the lower classes in habits
of industry and piety” (Roberts 2: 72). While More’s upper-class belief that
poor people should embrace religion so that they’ll accept their hard lot in
life happily, sits uncomfortably with modern readers, her commitment to the
achievement of a completely literate community had a positive on the general
acceptance of the idea in England. Although the Christian fundamentalist
focus was present in More’s work, this view seems too constricted, simplistic,
and even unfair. In a wonderful essay, “Evangelicalism and Enlightenment:
The Educational Agenda of Hannah More,” Anne Stott uses a wide-angle lens
to situate her subject within the context of the scientific, literary, and social
reforms of the period.14 Stott argues convincingly for More’s contribution to
the development, in a very literal way, of a more enlightened and fair society.
Despite the fact that More is remembered as an Evangelical Christian, she
was actually a late convert. She was in her forties, in the late 1780s, when she
took up active participation in the sect. Prior to that, she had been a teacher
and a playwright, actively interested in the science of Isaac Newton and the
philosophies of John Locke. In Samuel’s 1778 painting, The Nine Living Muses
of Great Britain, she is portrayed as the muse of tragedy, Melpomene, as a
tribute to the successful play Percy, which had been produced the previous
year (Stott 41). More was just two years younger than Barbauld (also in the
painting, remember)—and they were friends. William Wilberforce, the driv-
ing force behind the bill to ban the slave trade, was a friend too. There is a
letter (dated July 1791) from More praising Barbauld’s famous poem to Wil-
berforce written after the rejection of his bill to abolish the slave trade. More
conveys her heartfelt commitment to the cause and to Mrs. Barbauld’s ability
to address the issue: “I thank you,” says More, “for writing so well, for writing
on a subject so near my heart, and for addressing it to one so very worthy of
your highest esteem” (Le Breton 67–68).
More’s commitment to the movement to abolish the slave trade is what
drew her to Evangelical Christianity in the first place, and as Stott says, a
“search for a new purpose in life” (Stott 41). Willberforce was the one who
encouraged More to set up a series of charity schools, Sunday schools, and to
teach reading to poor children. The schools were instrumental in the spread
of literacy among the poor in England. Attentive to the pedagogical principles
that favored enticement and reward over fear and punishment, More appar-
ently used to encourage reluctant students with bribes of gooseberry tarts
(Stott 54). In her re-visioning of Hannah More, Stott shifts attention from
the narrow focus on the Cheap Repository Tract stories to her “fusion of Evan-
gelical theology and Lockean psychology” designed to discourage the attain-
ment of superficial accomplishments (such as dancing, as was the fashion),
and attend to the development of active thought (Stott 49). The principles, as
Stott explains them, are in harmony with the principles of maternal pedago-
gies which recognize “that in order to enable children to learn, teachers must
work with their natures, not against them” (Stott 54).
Though it is true, as Eger and Peltz point out, that Hannah More’s Evan-
gelical agenda was at odds with Mary Wollstonecraft’s radical agenda, both
women shared a common understanding of maternal pedagogical practices.
For instance, both believed children who wanted to learn would learn, and
that it was the teacher’s responsibility to create an environment in which that
kind of education could take place. Like Locke, they also both understood
that when teachers focused on enabling children to internalize good habits of
mind, there was a better chance they would maintain those habits into their
adult lives. They did differ, interestingly, on what those habits should be, with
More encouraging patience and delayed gratification while Wollstonecraft
drew attention to recognizing the reasons for valuing particular forms of
behavior.15 Wollstonecraft’s comment in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,
regarding the inculcation of habits of mind works, matters. She reminds us
that though it is easier to simply tell children what to do than to encourage
them with affection, we should keep in mind that children can be enticed by
love. Wollstonecraft explains that:
from a steady adherence to a few simple principles of conduct flows that

salutary power which a judicious parent gradually gains over a child’s mind.
And this power becomes strong indeed, if tempered by an even display of
affection brought home to the child’s heart. For, I believe, as a general rule,
it must be allowed that the affection which we inspire always resembles that
we cultivate; so that natural affections, which have been supposed almost
distinct from reason, may be found more nearly connected than is commonly
allowed. (Wollstonecraft, Vindication 158–59)
Wollstonecraft’s connection between reason and affection chimes with More’s,

Barbauld’s, and as I’ll show, with Mary Hays’s, and though not specifically
mentioned by Barbauld or Edgeworth, also with Eliza Fenwick’s conceptions.
Fenwick herself is also linked directly with both Wollstonecraft and Hays.
Here’s how the network of relations worked.
Mary Hays (1760–83), Eliza Fenwick (1766–1840), and Mary Wollstonecraft

(1759–97)
In her rejection of Maria Edgeworth’s invitation to be a “literary lady,” Anna

Barbauld explains that both she and Hannah More would also not want to be
linked with “Miss [Mary] Hays, or if she were living, Mrs. [Mary Wollstone-
craft ] Godwin” (Le Breton 86–87). Barbauld names the two Marys as she
knew that they were close friends; Eliza Fenwick was also part of their close
circle. William Godwin’s diaries attest to the fact that all three women were in
each other’s company in the late 1790s (until Mary Wollstonecraft’s death in
1797), as was one other of their radical friends, Mary Robinson (1758–1800).
The lives of the four women, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Eliza Fenwick,
and Mary Robinson, seem the British late-eighteenth-century equivalents to
the ones played by the four women characters who starred in the Sex and
the City16 episodes at the turn to the twenty-first century: the New York City
women attempt to support each other in a dynamic urban environment while
negotiating complicated love and independent working lives. Like the New
York of the late twentieth century, the radical London of the 1790s was alive
with possibilities for innovation, a place to experiment with new kinds of lives
for women. So when Anna Barbauld linked Mary Hays and Mary Wollstone-
craft in her rejection letter, she knew that Maria Edgeworth would recognize
the reputations of both women as scandalous radicals—and so morally anti-
thetical to the Evangelical Hannah More and to Barbauld’s own status as an
aging grand dame of literary London.
By the time Maria Edgeworth wrote her letter of invitation to Anna Bar-
bauld in 1804, Mary Wollstonecraft had been dead for seven years, though her
reputation had been harmed, unfortunately and unintentionally, by William
Godwin’s 1798 Memoir of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
Though Godwin had intended it to pay tribute to Mary Wollstonecraft, who
had died tragically of septicemia, just days after giving birth to their daughter,
Mary (later Shelley), his frank revelations of his late wife’s suicide attempts
and the fact that she hadn’t been married to the father (Gilbert Imlay) of her
first child Fanny, contributed to the decline in her popularity in the years
following her death. Mary Hays had been an intimate friend of the Godwins,
though there had apparently some kind of falling out in the days between the
baby Mary’s birth and Mary Wollstonecraft’s death. Mary Hays had brought
William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft together (they had met before
casually, but that meeting had not gone well). She had invited both friends
to her house with the explicit intention of providing an opportunity for them
to get to know each other better. Hays was, however, a little surprised at how
quickly the relationship developed between Mary Wollstonecraft and Wil-
liam Godwin.
In her own right, Mary Hays was an author and had sought Godwin’s
advice on a novel she was writing, Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796). It was
the story of her own true romance—ending tragically when the love of her
life, John Eccles, died suddenly before they could be married. Hays remained
single, but she went on to become a major chronicler of the lives of famous
women. Her six-volume dictionary of illustrious women, Female Biography;
or Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, Of All Ages and Countries,
Alphabetically Arranged (1806), was published by Richard Phillips and sold by
Tabart—and it is still cited as a good source of information about many of the
women who lived in the period, including Catharine Macaulay.
When Mary Hays read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman when it first
came out, she was impressed and wrote to Mary Wollstonecraft soon after—
establishing the friendship between the two women. Eliza Fenwick also
describes being enamored with Wollstonecraft’s Vindication and also dates
her inclusion in literary London to her reading of the book. Wollstonecraft,
it appears, mentored both women. Mary Wollstonecraft later critiqued Hays’s
manuscript for Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous—eventually
published in 1793. The preface included a tribute to Wollstonecraft’s edito-
rial advice, especially with regard to sharpening the tone and reducing the
apologetic register of the manuscript. Wollstonecraft’s lessons regarding the
possibilities of intellectual life stayed with Mary Hays and continued to per-
meate her work. In his introduction to a facsimile of Mary Hays’s 1799 novel,
Victims of Prejudice, modern scholar Terence Hoagwood notes affinities with
Wollstonecraft in her attention to “the conjunction between material history
and intellectual forms, and especially the conjunction between social rela-
tions (including the oppression of women) and ‘education’ in the broad, cul-
tural eighteenth-century sense of mental formation” (Hoagwood 8). So in her
sixties, when Hays published her final work, Memoirs of Queens: Illustrious
and Celebrated, her tribute to Mary Wollstonecraft is clear as her comments
in the preface show:
The powers and capacity of woman for rational and moral advancement are,
at this day, no longer a question; still her general training . . . is for adorn-
ment rather than for use; for exhibition rather than for moral and mental
improvement; for the delights of the harem, rather than to render her the
friend, the companion, the assistant, the counselor of man, the former of
his infant habits, the instructor of his early years, the source from which his
character takes his bias, his principles their rise. The education of woman is
yet directed only towards the embellishment of the transient season of youth.
(Hays, Memoirs of Queens vi–vii)
Hays acknowledges here that although women are on the brink of enfran-
chised life, their roles are still defined as teachers and nurturers of men. Yet
she still glimpses the viability of a literary life.
Besides becoming a successful author, a “literary lady,” in her own right,
Mary Hays is important in relation to Eliza Fenwick, as the letters I’ve cited
so far indicate. The published collection of those letters, The Fate of the Fen-
wicks (1927), constitutes the most complete chronology of Fenwick’s life, open-
ing with her life in literary London, then in Barbados, and finally in America.
Published by one of Hays’s descendents, her great-great-niece, A. F. Wedd, Fen-
wick’s letters date from 1798 ( soon after the birth of her second child, her son,
Orlando, and the death of Mary Wollstonecraft) to 1828, when Eliza was in New
York City, after her daughter had just died (her son died in Barbados), and she
had sole responsibility of raising her four orphaned grandchildren. The letters
are most compelling in their account of the entwined stories of Mary Hays and
Eliza Fenwick after the death of Mary Wollstonecraft. The manuscript origi-
nals of the letters are now in the New-York Historical Society. It appears they
were purchased for £100.00 by a descendent of Eliza Fenwick’s, her great-grand-
daughter, Jessie Duncan Savage Cole (1858–1940).
To begin the account of the entwined literary lives of Wollstonecraft, Hays,
and Fenwick, I’ll situate this part of my argument in London around 1800.
As I tried to show in the first chapter, at the time London was beginning to
define its modern shape. The street lights, the shop window displays, St. Paul’s
Cathedral, the Tower of London, the ships on the river, and the palaces, all
made London of the early nineteenth century a magical place. Fenwick brings
the lived experience of London to one of her stories from her 1813 Lessons for
Children, published by Godwin.
In “Cousin Thomas and Cousin James” from Lessons for Children, Fenwick
brings a picture of a throbbing, cosmopolitan metropolis to life through the
narrative voice of city cousin Thomas’s description of London to his country
cousin James:
He described also the noble buildings, and the great river Thames, with its
fine arched bridges, built of stone. He spoke of the immense number of boats,
barges, and vessels that sail and row upon the Thames, and of the great ships
that lie at anchor there, which bring stores of goods from all parts of the
world. He told him of the King’s palace and the Queen’s palace, of the park,
and the canal, with the stately swans that are seen swimming on it. . . .
He told James likewise of the Tower of London which is always guarded by
soldiers, and in one part of which he had seen lions, tigers, a wolf, a spotted
panther, a white Greenland bear, and all other wild beasts, with many sorts
of monkies [sic]. (Fenwick, Lessons 33).
In the story, Fenwick sketches a brilliant sequence of images which provide a

sense of the scene which served as the backdrop for the long eighteenth-cen-
tury lives of Fenwick, Wollstonecraft, and Hays, much as New York City does
for the Sex and the City characters at the turn to the twenty-first century.
Though it would be a long stretch to say that Wollstonecraft, Hays, and
Fenwick were celebrities in the 1790s, they were certainly working professional
women. By the mid-1790s, Mary Wollstonecraft was probably closest to being
a star as she was the celebrated author of Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(1792), though she was also a single mother at the time.17 Eliza Fenwick had
received some recognition for her epistolary novel, Secresy (1795). Her daugh-
ter, Eliza Anne, and Mary’s daughter Fanny, apparently had playdates together.
Eliza’s husband, John Fenwick, though from a wealthy and well-connected fam-
ily, ultimately proved financially irresponsible, leaving Eliza, by around 1800,
to figure out how to earn enough money to support herself and their children.
John Fenwick was actually William Godwin’s first biographer, and the two cou-
ples, Mary and William, Eliza and John, appear to have been very close, despite
the difficult times.18 Godwin’s diaries reveal that John and/or Eliza Fenwick fre-
quently dined with William Godwin. Mary Hays was a single woman trying to
make a living through her writing. Mary Robinson, an actress and a poet, had
been the lover of the Prince of Wales. She published a poem in celebration of
Eliza Fenwick’s second child, Orlando, born in 1798.
Joseph Johnson and the Making of Literary Ladies
So far, my story about the women included in Edgeworth’s invitation to Bar-

bauld to contribute to a journal of “literary ladies” (and Barbauld’s careful
rejection of the idea), has implicated six authors of varying celebrity status of
the period: Maria Edgeworth, Anna Barbauld, Eliza Fenwick, Hannah More,
Mary Hays, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Although as Barbauld points out in her
reply to Edgeworth, they’re all very different and so would be unlikely com-
panions in a lady’s journal, all of the women (with the exception of Fenwick)
are bound together by their publisher, Joseph Johnson (Figure 4.4). In fact, it was
Joseph Johnson (1738–1809) who had a hand in making them all literary ladies.
Edgeworth’s first publication for Joseph Johnson was Letters to Literary
Ladies, which appeared in 1795—although it had been withheld for ten years,
Figure 4.4 Joseph Johnson (1738–1809) by William Sharp after Moses

Haughton. With permission of the National Portrait Gallery.
in deference to the opinions of another famous author of children’s books,
Thomas Day, who had been a friend of Maria’s father. It wasn’t until long after
Day’s death in 1789 that Maria’s book finally came into print.
A bookseller’s or publisher’s real capital, says history of the book scholar
Henri-Jean Martin, “is not money but rather relationships and abilities that
inspire confidence” (Martin 50). By all accounts, Joseph Johnson was exactly
that kind of publisher: a prescient, eclectic, generous man, whose capacity for
networking and nurturing genius served him well. “[T]he value of such rela-
tionships and talents,” says Martin, “only becomes clear in periods when inno-
vation is possible” (Martin 50). Johnson was the right man in the right place
at the right time. The whole period in the late eighteenth century around both
the American and French revolutions served as a catalyst for his enterprise.
Johnson’s shop and home at 72 St. Paul’s Churchyard became a focal point for
many of the intellectual radical luminaries of the period. They met and dined at
Johnson’s table and developed some of the important ideas contributing to the
founding of a modern democratic society: enfranchisement, access to educa-
tion, and the abolition of the slave trade, among others. Since the 1970s, three
books have been published on Johnson, two calling attention to his contribu-
tions to modern democracies: Gerald Tyson’s 1976 biography, Joseph Johnson: A
Liberal Publisher, and Helen Braithwaite’s 2003 study, Romanticism, Publishing
and Dissent: Joseph Johnson and the Cause of Liberty. A third biography by Peter
Haywood is titled simply Joseph Johnson, Publisher 1738–1809.
It was Joseph Johnson, for instance, who encouraged Thomas Paine (1737–
1809) to engage in the composition of what was to become one of the key texts
of American Democracy, Rights of Man (1791, 1792). The book—written in
the aftermath of the French Revolution, in response to a pamphlet written by
Edmund Burke (1729–97) opposing the revolution—was literally too hot to
handle. The text was so inflammatory that Johnson managed to publish only a
few copies of the first part, selling over one hundred copies within four hours
of the text’s release. After that, the unbound copies had to “handed over to
another publisher, Jeremiah Jordon of Fleet Street” (Braithwaite 106).19 Mary
Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), also in response
to Burke’s pamphlet, and composed with Johnson’s encouragement, came out
at almost exactly the same time. In thinking about Paine’s Rights of Man and
Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (which still stand among
the most significant texts defining modern democracies), I tried to imagine
what it must have been like for both of them to have their visions coaxed into
existence by and through the conversations around Johnson’s dining room
table, which by 1791 as Gerald Tyson says, “had become a meeting place for
radicals” (121). Johnson’s network, as Tyson reveals, was an eclectic mix and
included “Anglican churchmen like James Hurdis and John Hewlett” min-
gling with the radicals like Paine, Wollstonecraft, and Godwin as well as
“renowned physicians such as George Fordyce.” Tyson also lists the “more
familiar visitors,” including:
John Aikin, George Anderson, Anna Barbauld, Thomas Belsham, John
Bonnycastle, Thomas Christie, Thomas Cooper, Erasmus Darwin, John
Disney, George Dyer, R. L. Edgeworth, Thomas Erskine, John Frost, Henry
Fuseli, George Fordyce, William Frend, Alexander Gedes, William God-
win, George Gregory, Mary Hays, James Hurdis, John Horne Took, Thomas
Holcroft, John Hewlett, Thomas Henry, Theophilus Lindsey, John Newton,
Thomas Paine, Joseph Priestley, Richard Price, Samuel Parr, Anthony Rob-
inson, Samuel Heywood, James Foart Simmons, the Wedgwoods, Benjamin
and Samuel Vaughn, George Walker and Mary Wollstonecraft. Later visi-
tors were to include William Wordsworth, Henry Crabb Robinson, William
Hazlitt, Maria Edgeworth, Humphrey Davy, and T. R. Malthus, to name
only the more prominent. (Tyson 121)
To specialists in eighteenth-century studies, even the partial list represents

a broad cross-section of the most significant names of the age in politics,
medicine, art, literature, and business. Some of those names, including
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and (Josiah) Wedgwood, continue to resonate even
for casual readers. Yet it is the integration of the teaching/writing women
(Babauld, Edgeworth, and Wollstonecraft) that makes the list so interest-
ing because it demonstrates the connections between educational publishing
and publishing unmarked as educational or as having a separate audience of
teachers, parents, or children. Pedagogical and public spaces were not separate
in Johnson’s community. Political, religious, and geographic distances didn’t
divide his authors either. In Johnson’s publishing house, the religious Mrs.
Trimmer was able to mingle with literary Anna Barbauld and the Anglo-Irish
Maria Edgeworth and the shining Mary Wollstonecraft.
Johnson’s liberal ethos developed at least partly in conjunction with his
interests in the kinds of progressive educational philosophies in use in what
were called “Dissenting” academies. These were schools that arose in the
eighteenth century largely as a result of the 1662 “Act of Conformity,” which
required everyone teaching or studying at the great established schools and
universities to belong to the Church of England. Dissenters, or “religious
non-conformists” as they were also called after the Restorations of the Stu-
art monarchy in England, were essentially forced to start their own academic
institutions, being as they were barred from the established ones. Their out-
sider status contributed to the push for social and political reform. Johnson’s
publishing house provided the conduit through which their views could be
disseminated. So the “literary ladies” who published with Johnson in that
period inspired by the twin impulses of maternal pedagogy and democracy,
became a powerful and inspiriting force for change.
As C. John Sommerville explains in The Discovery of Childhood in Prot-
estant England, that’s because, as the creators of the non-conformist sects
knew well, “the children of the sect were the only hope for its survival”
(Sommerville 10). Historically significant among the dissenting academies
were the ones at Warrington, a town in Lancashire (the school ran between
1756 and 1786 and is also where Anna Barbauld’s father, John Aikin, taught
language), Newington Green, just outside London (where Richard Price and
Joseph Priestly were among the notable radicals, and also where the young
Mary Wollstonecraft set up a school), and Palgrave in Suffolk (which ran
between 1774 and 1785 and also where Anna Barbauld taught with her hus-
band Rochemont)—all of these schools placed new emphasis on science,
politics, and languages and founded the basis of what was to become a mod-
ern curriculum.20 The people creating the curriculum in those schools and
writing the textbooks were the people who were also sitting at Joseph John-
son’s dinner table—including Joseph Priestly and Anna Barbauld’s father,
John Aikin. As Helen Braithwaite notes, by 1790, Joseph Johnson was pub-
lishing so many books by authors written by Dissenters that he was able to
publish “A Catalogue of Books Composed for Young Persons and Generally
Used in Principal Schools and Academies in England.” Johnson’s entwined
political and pedagogical agendas were visible in the catalogue, which
included works by Anna Barbauld, Sarah Trimmer, and Maria Edgeworth,
as well as works by John Aikin and Joseph Priestly.
Johnson perfectly manifested Henri-Jean Martin’s insight into how the
publisher’s “real capital” resides in “relationships and abilities that inspire
confidence.” He could act as a kind of super-connector, putting people in
touch with each other, and then by putting into print (and so fi xing) the mate-
rial product resulting from that connection, he would make it concrete.
It was through Johnson’s connections with the Dissenting Academy at
Newington Green that he was introduced to the young Mary Wollstonecraft,
who had just come through a stint as a teacher and governess. Johnson occa-
sionally let her stay at his house when she was in difficulty and was able to
put her in touch with two of his successful, though very different, authors
for children, the intellectual Anna Barbauld and the religious Sarah Trim-
mer. According to Helen Braithwaite, he also encouraged them to give her a
little “motherly advice” (Braithwaite 71). He nurtured Mary Wollstonecraft
professionally also, encouraging her writing and supporting her both emo-
tionally and financially, doing everything he could to ensure her success. In
1796 Johnson wrote a letter to Mary’s brother Charles Wollstonecraft where
he acknowledges that Mary has had a difficult time (an unmarried, single
mother), and has been ill (though Johnson withholds the fact that she’d tried
to commit suicide). Johnson wrote that:
[S]he has been deserted by Mr. Imlay whose affairs are in a very deranged
state; she has herself and child to support by her literary expectations you
will not be surprised to learn has occasion to apply to me long before her pro-
ductions can be made productions, beside you know that she deserves more
than most women, & cannot live upon a trifle; she has suffered much from
the infamous behaviour of Imlay both in her health and spirits but she has a
strong mind and has in great measure got the better of it. (Joseph Johnson
to Charles Wollstonecraft, 1796)21
Johnson also published Anna Barbauld’s anti-slave trade poem “Epistle to

William Wilberforce” (1791). This publication contributed to the sugar boy-
cott in which the young Lucy Aikin and her father participated, as did Maria
Edgeworth. Besides encouraging radical positions from various sides of the
political and religious spectrum (right, left, religious, and agnostic), one of
Johnson’s greatest contributions was his ability as a facilitator who could put
people in touch with each other and so develop their skills through connec-
tions and exposure to different ideas. Part of Edgeworth’s success was directly
related to the fact that she was a participant in Johnson’s network of literary
women.
Edgeworth’s novels were money spinners for Johnson and “passed
through several editions reaping substantial profits for both her and her
bookseller and justifying advances running to hundreds of thousands of
pounds” (Braithwaite 173). In 1797 Johnson planned a new illustrated edi-
tion of The Parent’s Assistant because, Edgeworth’s biographer Marilyn But-
ler says he “thought that people would buy it in the more expensive form to
give away as presents” (Butler 130). At Johnson’s death in 1809, Edgeworth
wrote a eulogy, unpublished at the time, but which was included in Gerald
Tyson’s biography of Johnson:
Wretches there are, their lucky stars who bless,

Whene’er they find a genius in distress;
Who starve the bard, and stunt his growing Fame
Lest they should pay the value for his name.
But JOHNSON raid’s the drooping bard from Earth
And fostered rising Genius from his birth;
His lib’ral spirit a Profession made
Of what with vulgar souls is vulgar Trade
(Tyson, epigraph, unpaged)
Maria Edgeworth’s appreciation of Johnson’s contribution to the shift from

“vulgar Trade” to “Profession” is significant in defining the change that occurs
in the book business at the turn of the nineteenth century. Both real capital (as
profit) and cultural capital were being generated by the teaching and writing
women of the period for the publishers who employed them. Because it was a
revolutionary period—so “innovation was possible,” to cite Henri-Jean Mar-
tin again—a new business model emerged in which the categories of “public”
and “private,” as well as “domestic” and “commercial” were being developed
and defined. As Brian Alderson and Felix de Marez Oyens say in the introduc-
tion to Be Merry and Wise, there was a “harnessing of authorial talent” (64),
with the new teaching/writing women providing both the material and peda-
gogical principles. The teaching materials that middle-class women had been
making at home for use at home with their own children, were being stan-
dardized, mass-produced, and sold commercially for the domestic market.
Anna Barbauld’s Lessons for her adopted son Charles fall into the category,
and appear to be sui generis.
The process of taking the private lesson and putting it into the public
sphere was essentially the industrialization of a cottage industry. The cards,
games, little books, toys, and mobiles (of the kind now in the Jane Johnson
nursery library) that were constructed and used by mothers for their own
children, were transformed into products developed by as experts or profes-
sionals, for purchase by the new class of shopping women—just like the well-
dressed women portrayed in the Visits to the Juvenile Library engravings. So
the pedagogical practices that initially occurred within the closed circuit
of domestic life were transformed by becoming commercial and mass-pro-
duced products marketed as “designed by experts” to be taken home. In an
elegant essay, “Johnson’s Lessons for Men,” critic Laura Mandell describes
this new category as “professional domesticity” (Mandell 108).
The professional domesticity promoted by Johnson in the primers and read-
ers he published by children became the standard model. As Mandell demon-
strates, Barbauld’s original Lessons, first published in 1778–79, spawned an
entire genre, though the most interesting ones included Sarah Trimmer’s Easy
Lessons for Young Children (1786); Mary Wollstonecraft’s heartbreakingly
unfinished, posthumously published Lessons (1798); and Maria Edgeworth’s
Early Lessons (including the famous Harry and Lucy stories as well as the sto-
ries of “Rosamund” and “Frank”), which began appearing in 1801. The tradi-
tion of “early lesson” books celebrating “professional domesticity” established
by Johnson’s authors was inherited by an overlapping generation of authors
writing for similarly liberal publishers. Eliza Fenwick’s Lessons for Children,
published by William Godwin in 1813, is the prime example. The book was
successful and was published in French as well as Leçons Pour Les Enfants in
1820. Mandell synthesizes what the “lessons” about writing for children and
about publishing that the literary women taught men indicated as the need to
“look for and find the open ended possibility of readerly participation among
readers and writers with various contradictory political agendas. . . . ” (Man-
dell 112).
In the context of the network of professionally domestic women (the
Bluestocking and the didactic women) and their publishers operating in the
late eighteenth century, I can now turn to the other major networking story
of this chapter, the “Mrs. Mason” story, as it attends to the slip between real
teaching/writing women and their fictional alter-egos.
Will the Real Mrs. Mason Please Stand Up
For children’s book scholars, “Mrs. Mason” is a character in Mary Woll-

stonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life, with Conversations Calculated to
Regulate the Affections and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness, first pub-
lished by Joseph Johnson in 1788, with engravings by William Blake. John
Rowe Townsend calls it “the most repellent piece of English Rousseauism”
(Townsend 27). In her biography of Mary Wollstonecraft (published in 2000),
Janet Todd calls Original Stories “a sort of governess fantasy in which chil-
dren are rescued from sophisticated aristocrats by a discerning surrogate,
Mrs. Mason” (Todd 126). In the introduction to the stories, Mrs. Mason is
described as “a woman of tenderness and discernment, a near relation, who
was induced to take on herself the important charge through motives of com-
passion (Wollstonecraft, 4: 361). The negative allusions are to Mrs. Mason’s
apparently super-severe personality, of the kind that hints at sado-masochistic
punishment scenarios. In the first story, for instance, “The Treatment of Ani-
mals,” Mrs. Mason tries to teach a lesson about not being cruel to animals, so
upon finding a pair of larks wounded by “An idle boy,” who had wounded the
birds with his “borrowed” gun, Mrs. Mason plays God. She binds up the wing
of one “so that it might heal, but the other one is too far gone,” so instead of
leaving it to die, Mrs. Mason “put her foot on the bird’s head, turning her own
another way” (Wollstonecraft Works 4: 368–69). This Mrs. Mason is the one
who appears in William Blake’s famous frontispiece engraving: a nurturing
figure, capable of protection, yet strong enough and with sufficient authority
to order destruction too (Figure 4.5).
Johnson matched Blake with Mary Wollstonecraft, as the illustrator for
her first children’s book, Original Stories (1788). Blake’s images contributed
to the depiction of Mrs. Mason as an authoritative figure who still manages
to convey a maternal protectiveness of her charges. The image of Mrs. Mason,
standing with arms extended, Christlike, protecting, and sheltering her two
charges (their hats encircling their heads like angelic halos), recalls a strik-
ingly similar image from the tenth century, “Couronnement d’Otton II et de
Théophano” (982–83), on display at the Musée de Cluny (CL 392).
Despite the historical scorn showered on the fictional Mrs. Mason, Mary
Wollstonecraft’s own expression of pedagogical principles still read as humane,
eloquent, and true. In the Preface to Original Stories, Wollstonecraft writes
that “knowledge should be gradually imparted, and flow more from example
than teaching.” She also acknowledges that “every child requires a different
mode of treatment,” though “a writer can only choose one.” She concludes
beautifully with beliefs that still hold—with the desire “to fi x principles of
truth and humanity on a solid and simple foundation” (Wollstonecraft, Works
4: 359–60). As Mary Wollstonecraft’s alter-ego in the stories, Mrs. Mason
does inspire her charges, and it is difficulty not to feel the intellectual thrill in
imagining enfranchised educational possibilities.
Wollstonecraft apparently took Mrs. Mason’s name from a real person, a
teacher in the school she created in the mid-1780s with her sister and their friend,
Fanny Blood. In a 1785 letter to George Blood (Fanny’s brother), Mary writes
Figure 4.5 Frontispiece, Original Stories from Real Life (1788). Engrav-
ing of Mrs. Mason by William Blake.
that they “have lost Miss Mason” at the school. Mary describes her as a “good
girl” and says she was “sorry to loose [sic] her” (Wollstonecraft, Letters 56). Miss
Mason pops up in a few other references, but all similarly glancing. Perhaps the
Figure 4.6 Couronnement d’Otton II et de Théophano. Musée de Cluny.

only telling reference in the letters is in a comparison with Ann Gabell, wife of
a Wiltshire schoolmaster. Mary says that sometimes Ann makes her think “of
Mason—her voice is hard and a blunt laugh often disconcerts me—in [other]
words, she has tenderness without sensibility clearness of judgment without
comprehension of thought” (Wollstonecraft, Letters 176–77). Although the ref-
erence is to Ann, it is probably as close as it is possible to get at what the “real”
Miss Mason might have been like—and it suggests a slightly troubling charac-
ter, one who doesn’t quite understand why she behaves as she does. Janet Todd
suggests that “Miss Mason seems to have made a deep impression on Wollstone-
craft” (Wollstonecraft, Letters, n. 124, 56), and speculates that she might have
been related to William Mason, who was one of a group of poets Mary may
have known early in her life in Beverley, a town in Yorkshire (Wollstonecraft,
Letters n. 16, 4). In this first phase of my “Mrs. Mason” game, all I’ve managed
to do is establish that the fictional character Mary Wollstonecraft created from
her first book of children’s literature (published in 1788) shared her name with
a real Miss Mason with whom she’d taught in Newington Green around 1784
and 1785, when the letter confirms that Miss Mason was lost from the school.
Although shadowy, I also think that a sisterhood of teaching/writing women is
visible even here, though, as I’ll show, the influence quickly extends to the way
the two fictional pupils respond to their fictional teacher, Mrs. Mason. But that’s
just the first play in the game.
The fictional Mrs. Mason taught two fictional girls, Mary and Caroline,
described as “the children of wealthy parents,” though “shamefully ignorant,
considering that Mary had been fourteen, and Caroline twelve years in the
world” (Wollstonecraft Works 361). The fictional girls, Mary and Caroline,
were based on two real girls, “tall, plain fourteen-year-old Margaret” and
her sister Caroline. Mary Wollstonecraft was also in charge of another sister,
Mary, eight. Wollstonecraft’s three real pupils were all daughters of the Irish
Lord and Lady Kingsborough. To keep the story relatively simple, I’ll focus
on the fictional character Mary, who was modeled on Margaret King (1772–
1840), the “tall, plain fourteen-year old” Mary Wollstonecraft first encoun-
tered as a pupil. Margaret King loved, admired, and was deeply influenced
by Mary Wollstonecraft, who worked as her governess for only about a year
(1786–87) before falling out with Margaret’s mother, Lady Kingsborough.
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote the following to her friend Eliza Bishop in 1786
about Margaret:
the eldest fourteen—by no means handsome—yet a sweet girl—she has a

wonderful capacity but she has such a multiplicity of employments it has
not room to expand itself—and in all probability will be lost in a heap of
rubbish miscalled accomplishments. I am grieved at being obliged to con-
tinue so wrong a system. She is very much afraid of her mother—that such a
creature should be ruled with a rod of iron, when tenderness would lead her
anywhere. (Wollstonecraft, Letters 123–24)
Fast forward then to Margaret as a grown-up. In 1791, Margaret King, just
nineteen, entered into an early and conventionally successful marriage to Ste-
phen Moore, 2nd Earl of Mount Cashell (sometimes spelled Mountcashell).
I’ll tell Margaret’s story now, though much of the following information
comes from Claire Tomalin’s introduction to a children’s story, Maurice, Or
the Fisher’s Cot, written for Margaret’s daughter, Laurette, by Mary Godwin
Shelley around 1820, but not discovered until 1997. Other parts of the story
come from Janet Todd’s Rebel Daughters: Ireland in Conflict 1798, a study of
some of the King family women. But as I’m ahead of myself, I’ll return to the
Margaret Mount Cashell story.
By 1801, about the time Eliza Fenwick was considering leaving her hus-
band, Margaret Mount Cashell had given birth to six children, though the
one born in 1800 had died in infancy. At this point in her privileged, upper-
class life, Margaret wanted to expand her horizons. As things were settling
down slightly in post-revolutionary Europe, Margaret convinced her husband
it was time for the family to embark on a Grand Tour. They “set off,” as Claire
Tomalin says, “in the style required of their rank and fortune, with a couple
of coaches, a woman friend to keep the Countess company, four servants and
five children, tutor and governess” (Tomalin, Maurice 20). London was their
first stop, and Margaret met her late former governess’s husband, William
Godwin, as well as Wollstonecraft’s two daughters, Mary (4) and Fanny (7).
Mary Wollstonecraft, of course, had died of septicemia, just days after giving
birth to Mary—and so never knew her daughter. Eliza Fenwick had been pres-
ent at the birth of the daughter and the death of the mother. In 1801, William
Godwin (Figure 4.7) and Margaret Mount Cashell met for the first time. They
liked each other, and she took “pride in claiming that her ideas on education
were based on the practical and kindly teachings of Mary Wollstonecraft”
(Seymour 24).
Things then changed rather dramatically for Margaret while she was in
Paris with her family. She fell in love with an Anglo-Irish commoner George
Tighe, who had initially been her husband’s friend. There was a long, drawn
out separation and custody battle, spanning several European countries
and many years (between about 1804 and 1807), with Lord Mount Cashell
returning to Ireland with the children, and Margaret staying in Europe with
the baby (born in 1804). For a time, while in Germany clandestinely with
Tighe, Margaret dressed as a man and attended classes in medicine , as she
later recounted to her daughters by George Tighe. Eventually Margaret had
to return to Ireland to hand over her baby to her husband. Much to her
distress, that was the last time she saw any of the children she had born to
Lord Mount Cashell, though he would not divorce her. Margaret and George
Tighe eventually went to Italy. In 1807, in London, Margaret, using the
pseudonym Mrs. Mason, published Stories of Old Daniel with William God-
win’s new Juvenile Library. It was a successful book of tales in which moral
responsibility takes center stage—with “old Daniel” as the wise storyteller.
During this period, as Margaret was not divorced from Mount Cashell, she
could not marry George Tighe, and so she and her husband were known as
“Mr. and Mrs. Mason.” In 1809, Margaret bore George a daughter, “Anna
Laura Georgina [who] was always known as Laurette or Laura.”22 To recap
the second stage of the Mrs. Mason game: Mary Wollstonecraft’s real pupil,
Margaret, who had been the prototype for the fictional “Mary” in Original
Stories, takes up the name of the fictional governess, Mrs. Mason, and adopts
it as a nom de plume and as a name to lend some semblance of conventional
Figure 4.7 William Godwin. National Portrait Gallery, London.

acceptability to her unconventional relationship with George Tighe. Mar-
garet Mount Cashell’s choice of Mrs. Mason as the name under which she
would write her stories honors the influence of both her real tutor, Mary
Wollstonecraft, and her fictional counterpart, Mrs. Mason. So, let me fast
forward again.
Margaret and George Tighe settled in Pisa and their second daughter,
Nerina, was born in 1815. In 1819, Mary Godwin Shelley, pregnant for the
fourth time (her fi rst three children had died in infancy), and Percy stopped
in Pisa on their way to Florence and saw Lady Mount Cashell, aka “Mrs.
Mason.” They had taken “a letter of introduction from William Godwin,”
and in this way, says Claire Tomalin, “Mary Wollstonecraft’s pupil became
the friend of the daughter Mary Wollstonecraft never knew” (Tomalin 32).
In 1820, the families spent time together in Pisa, and that’s when Mary Shel-
ley wrote Maurice; or The Fisher’s Cot as a belated eleventh birthday gift for
“Mrs. Mason’s” daughter, Laurette. Tomalin indicates that “Mrs. Mason”
sent the story to William Godwin, who wrote back to say that he thought it
too short for publication. The story, Maurice, was thought lost, until it turned
up in Italy, found by the now thoroughly Italian descendents of Margaret
and George Tighe in circumstances that Tomalin describes as being suspi-
cious. Tomalin seems to have been skeptical about the manuscript’s authen-
ticity because the story looked like it belonged to the genre of Romantic,
imaginative literature for children, so, Tomalin initially believed, it could
not possibly have been like the earlier “moral and educational tales popular
with publishers and parents of that date and the staple of her father’s pub-
lishing fi rm” (Tomalin, Introduction to Maurice 15). In making that kind
of statement about “moral and educational tales” opposed to Romantic and
imaginative tales, Tomalin is accepting the implicit historical assumption
that that imaginative is necessarily opposed to the assumed didacticism of
the early nineteenth century. Tomalin cites as evidence the flowers and other
natural elements which connected it to the landscapes of Shelley, Keats, and
Byron and to the way the “triple-decker” structure of Maurice mimics, in
miniature, the three-part structure of Romantic era novels of the period.
Tomalin was also initially concerned that the narrative focalizer, Maurice,
was a triply “lost” child: stolen from parents, forced to leave the woman who
stole him because of her abusive husband, and ultimately left destitute by
the fisherman who had unofficially adopted him.
In Maurice, the separated father and son are reunited, each testifying to
the moral worth of the other. Although the boy Maurice has grown up in
poverty, he is shown as worthy, hard-working, and industrious. The recogni-
tion scene reads as a wish-fulfi llment dream—analogous to the recognition
scene in Eliza Fenwick’s Visits to the Juvenile Library, in which the long-lost
daughter (living and working poverty) had been stolen by a jealous rival to
the good Mrs. Clifford. The daughter, demonstrating the value of her good
genes, especially obedience and industry, is reunited with her mother.
Although there is only slight documentary evidence, Mary Wollstonecraft’s
letter indicates that her daughter Fanny and Eliza’s daughter Eliza Anne were
playmates, it is not inconceivable that the family histories of lost mothers, lost
fathers, and lost children would have been entwined. Fanny committed sui-
cide in 1816, at twenty-two, and would have been another of the lost children
within the extended families. The fictional found children, Ellen in Visits to
the Juvenile Library and Maurice in Maurice: The Fischer’s Cot, seem to reso-
nate through similar emotional and maternal truths. In Visits to the Juvenile
Library, Eliza Fenwick has Mr. Benson recount the story of the loss of Mrs.
Clifford’s child:
She had a little girl, lovely as a cherub, and promising to be all that a moth-
er’s fond hopes could desire. This sweet blossom was snatched away—not
by death, for then her parents could have consoled themselves by the hope
of meeting her in Heaven. Had she died in their arms, they had bowed in
resignation; but the lovely babe was stolen from their protecting roof—it was
supposed—by a gang of gypsies; and the wretched parents were left without
one ray of consolation, one hope of their darling possessing either happiness
or virtue. (Fenwick, Visits 88–89)
The sense of loss Fenwick describes has the genuine feeling of a bereaved
mother. The fact that Fenwick’s two children were born ten years apart points
to the likelihood that Fenwick herself experienced miscarriages and/or the
loss of children in their infancies. She alludes to the losses in a letter dated
22 March 1831 to the Moffatts, her American friends in New York. Fenwick
commiserates: “Poor Mrs. Moffatt,” she writes, “has all the suffering without
the sweet reward of rearing her infants. This I think is the third she has lost
successively. I partook of the same misfortune. May she never know what it is
to lose those who have grown up into friends & companions.”23
The lost child story in Maurice had clear parallels in the lost children of the
Shelley family circle. Mary Shelley had borne and lost three babies by the time
she was twenty-two in 1819, though that was the year her own surviving child,
Percy Florence Shelley, was born. Mary Jane Clairmont (Mary Shelley’s step-
sister) had borne a daughter, Allegra, to Lord Byron, but he was determined
to keep his daughter away from the murky family background of her mother
(though William Godwin was Mary Jane Clairmont’s step-father, the identity
of her biological father was uncertain). Mary Shelley had lost her own mother,
Mary Wollstonecraft, at birth, and both Mary Jane Clairmont and Mary Shel-
ley were more or less estranged from William Godwin. Percy Bysshe Shelley
was lost to his children by Harriet Westbrook (who had committed suicide
when Shelley left her for Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin). Margaret Mount
Cashell has lost all of the children born to her legal husband. The Romantic
elements of Maurice aren’t the only ones with which it is possible to develop
an interpretation of the novel. The whole sequence of male family recovery
stories in the text works as a perfect paradigm for the female recovery stories
that link Mary Wollstonecraft, Margaret Mount Cashell, and Mary Shelley via
the teacher Mrs. Mason.
The third phase in the Mrs. Mason story ends with Maurice as the gift of a
story from the daughter of the teacher to the daughter of the pupil. But there is
one more little story about the reach of the maternal influence. Laurette, says
Claire Tomalin, began to write as she grew up and “later she asked advice and
help of Mary Shelley, whose example and success as a writer, alongside that
of her mother encouraged her to follow the same path” (Tomalin 37). And
so ends the story of the “real” Mrs. Mason: a woman who slipped from real
teacher to fictional character, to a “real” pseudonym for someone who was
the real student of the fictional Mrs. Mason, who was the alter-ego of the real
Mary Wollstonecraft, whose real daughter Mary Shelley became a Mentoria to
the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft’s real pupil and fictional character. This
story of mothers and daughters, teachers and pupils, authors and characters
began in 1786 when Mary Wollstonecraft was governess to Margaret King in
Ireland, and continues to 1820, when Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter Mary
Shelley writes a story for Margaret’s (Mrs. Mason’s) daughter Laurette and
becomes Laurette’s Mentoria.
My “Mrs. Mason” story traverses a fifty-year period, beginning as the real
teacher (in about 1786), transforming into the fictional character of a gov-
erness (1788), to the real prototype of a fictional pupil who takes as a pseud-
onym the fictional name of her real governess whose real daughter then writes
in 1820 a story, Maurice, for her real daughter. This little thread of maternal
pedagogies covering half a century is a single example of the support and net-
working strategies practiced by the teaching and writing women of the late
Enlightenment.
As this chapter has attended explicitly to the maternal traditions of women
who wrote for children in the Enlightenment, it seems fitting that, at the end,
I should talk about Ann and Jane Taylor.
Ann Taylor (1782–1866) and Jane Taylor (1783–1824)
Of all the literary women writing for children on my list, Jane Taylor stands as
the only one whose work is still popularly known in the twenty-first century.
In the literary survival sweepstakes, she’s a winner, at least in terms of what she
wrote. “The Star,” more commonly known as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,”
has been lisped by generations of children since it first hit print in Ann and
Jane’s second volume of poems, Rhymes for the Nursery, published by Darton
and Harvey in 1806. Unfortunately, Jane’s name has largely been disconnected
from the poem, and it circulates largely as an anonymous nursery verse. In
her youth, Jane’s sister Ann was an equally bright poetic star as the author of a
poem called “My Mother,” which was (to use an anachronistic term) the “hit
single” from the first collection of children’s verse, Original Poems for Infant
Minds, published by the Taylor sisters in 1804. It was “the book that awoke
the nurseries of England,” according to F. J. Harvey Darton (181)—though he
might have harbored particular affection for the volume, as it had been pub-
lished by the family firm from which he descended, the “Gracechurch Street
Dartons” of Darton and Harvey.24 Ann was twenty-two and Jane twenty-one
when Original Poems came out. The collection was important because it was
one of the very first secular volumes of authored poetry published for chil-
dren. Retrospectively, a conscious effort is required to appreciate how fresh
and interesting Original Poems must have been. Poetry produced explicitly
for an audience of children was still a novel idea. In the first years of the nine-
teenth century, poetry for children was primarily moral, like Isaac Watts’s
Divine Songs (1715), or religious, like John Bunyan’s Country Rhimes for Chil-
dren (1686). The only comparable book on the market to Original Poems was
by Anna Barbauld’s niece, Lucy Aikin. Her Poetry for Children had been pub-
lished in 1801.
Ann and Jane knew that they were on the verge of something new, some-
thing born out of the crucible of cultural change in the period. At one point,
Ann comments that she and Jane had been “almost the first in the field,” as
the others, particularly Anna Barbauld, had written only in prose. Since Dr.
Watts, Ann explains, “there has scarcely been, I will not say, a Poet, but a
Rhymster on the ground, and therefore the road was open to humble popular-
ity” (Gilbert 124).
Darton and Harvey commissioned Original Poems because they’d loved
the little poems and puzzles the girls had been submitting to their annual
magazine for children, Minor’s Pocket Book, since 1798, when Ann was about
sixteen. On 1 June 1803, Darton (on behalf of Harvey) wrote to Isaac, Ann and
Jane’s father, requesting that the girls provide “some specimens of easy poetry
for children,” something “in the way of moral songs (though not songs) or
short talks turned in verse, or”—then the sentence breaks off charmingly,
and Darton and Harvey say they “need not dictate” because, they say, “what
would be most likely to please little minds must be well known to every one of
those who have written such pieces as we have already seen from thy family”
(Gilbert 119).
The publishing business was the family business for Ann and Jane. Their
father, Isaac Taylor, was an engraver by trade, and a printer, as was their uncle,
Charles. Later, Isaac’s wife Ann (1757–1830) began to publish as did their
sons, Isaac (1787–1830) and Jeffreys (1792–1853). The Taylors, however, were
divided from the secular, radical sympathizers of the French Revolution (like
the Edgeworths, Wollstonecrafts, and Godwins). Instead, they belonged to the
conservative right of Hannah More. In The Family Pen, a memoir edited by
Ann and Jane’s brother, Isaac, Isaac identifies the ideological divide between
the literary ladies of his (and his parents’) generation. He sets Hannah More
as the “chief” among writing women, “a protégée” he says “of Dr. Johnson”
and “antagonistic to Maria Edgeworth and to those who were then tainted
with the French Revolution.” Isaac Taylor also notes his mother’s “pungent
dislike of certain of the female sympathizers with the French Revolution,
inclusive of Mary Wollstonecraft” (Isaac Taylor, The Family Pen 1: 29, 18).
Yet despite political differences, Ann Taylor and Jane Taylor both qualified as
highly successful authors in their time. Sixty years after the publication of the
Ann and Jane’s first book, their brother notes that new editions keep appear-
ing and speculates on the reasons for their continued resonance as being a
result of both the original “vitality” of the books as well as a “substance—a
moral force” which sustained them over the years (Isaac Taylor The Family
Pen 1: 23).
Like many female writers, then and now, writing was something that
had to be slipped into scraps of the day when the opportunity arose. Isaac
recalls that the verses that eventually made up Original Poems were written
“in minutes of half hour reclaimed” either “before the occupations of the
day had begun or after they had been concluded” (Taylor 1:42). Moreover,
besides the fact that the poems had been composed in the margins of the
day, they were also composed on the margins of texts—actually the margins
of engraved plans of fortified towns, plans that had been prepared by their
father, Isaac, to teach his children the nomenclature associated with the sub-
ject. There is something wonderfully fitting that the poems written by Ann
and Jane should be completely tied to the domestic pedagogical practices
that produced them. The exercise Isaac had set them was designed to give
them practice in preparing the plates used in his engraving business. The
children learned the family business by apprenticing to the work of their
father. Ann understood the value of practical work, real work as opposed to
fancy work, and comments in her memoir that the girls had the rare privi-
lege of being able to work for money in a way that was also fortuitously
suited to their gender and class.
As is the case in the stories of some of my other maternal teachers (Maria
Edgeworth, for instance), education was a family affair. In the Taylor family,
if their father, Isaac, focused on the practical and the material, their mother
focused increasingly on their store of literate material. Mrs. Taylor read out
loud to her family every day at breakfast and tea, a practice she started when
she found herself driven crazy by the relentless focus on house and children
as a young mother. She knew she needed an intellectual life. In her memoir,
she explains that daily reading out loud revived her “dormant taste, cultivated
a mind rapidly degenerating to its former state of ignorance, and in need of
diverting itself from the ‘harrassing cares,’” which had “beset her at every side”
(Gilbert 7). The practice of reading out loud twice a day apparently went on
religiously for forty years, therefore long, long after the children had grown.
The whole of the Taylor family seemed organized to promote both thinking
and feeling, both in practical domestic life and in cerebral intellectual life—a
perfect, nurturing combination for apprenticing writers.
In this relatively well-known portrait (Figure 4.8), painted in 1788 by their
father, Isaac, Ann and Jane are in the foreground looking adorable in their
matching dresses. The other children are just visible in the background. The
location is the family home in Lavenham, England. The girls lean affectionately
towards each other in the painting, literally putting their heads together. When
Ann and Jane’s brother Isaac recalled the painting years later, he suggests that
they are portrayed at “nine years old and seven—and are supposed to be recit-
ing, as was their wont, some couplets of their joint composition—anticipatory
of their united authorship in later years” (Isaac Taylor, The Family Pen 17).
After their first three hit books, Original Poems for Infant Minds (1804),
Rhymes for the Nursery (1806), and Hymns for Infant Minds (1810), Ann and
Jane achieved a kind of literary stardom while still in their twenties. All three
books counted as success stories in book survival terms. In their creation
and reception phases, they all received good reviews, made profits for the
authors and for their publishers, Darton and Harvey, and were frequently
reissued in new editions for many years after their initial publications. In the
next chapter, when I talk about child readers, I’ll begin with a story about the
impact of one of Ann’s poems on a real child at the time. To end this chapter,
however, I’m turning to a book called Signor Topsy-Turvy’s Wonderful Magic
Lantern; or the World Turned Upside Down, that Ann and Jane Taylor com-
posed for Tabart. It was published in 1810, the same year as Hymns for Infant
Minds but failed utterly compared to the three successful books for Darton
and Harvey.
Ann and Jane Taylor’s Signor Topsy-Turvy’s Wonderful Magic Lantern; or the
World Turned Upside Down (1810 ) is the sort of book that seems so interest-
ing and compelling to a modern reader, that it is hard to imagine why it’s not a
classic in the children’s literature canon. The Taylor sisters based their version
on stories of the “world turned upside down” that, as the “advertisement” at
the front of the book explains, had been popular in “nursery learning” half a
century earlier, in the mid-eighteenth century. The pre-text for their version
appears to have been a book “printed for Edward Ryland” around 1765 making
the dating about right: The World Turned Up-side Down; Or the Comical Meta-
morphoses: A Work Entirely Calculated to Excite Laughter in Grown Persons, and
Promote Moralily [sic] in the Young Ones, of Both Sexes.25 Jane and Ann cleverly
framed their update in terms of the new technology of the “magic lantern.”
For readers born in a digital age, it is probably necessary to explain that a
“magic lantern” was a kind of slide show. Anyone who used a slide projector
in the twentieth century knows that images had to be placed upside down
and backwards in order to be seen right side up and forwards when project-
ed.26 The “magic lantern” was a perfect vehicle for updating the “world upside
down” as it had been represented in popular rituals, at fairs, and, by the six-
teenth century, in woodcuts. In “world upside down” stories, the weak wreak
revenge on the powerful and strong, the oppressed become the oppressors, a
cook is roasted by a hare, and a butcher butchered by an ox. In the jittery post-
revolutionary climate of late-eighteenth-century England, the possibility of a
book in which oppressed victims take revenge on predators must have looked
like a potential winner. Marjorie Moon, however, seems uneasy in her reac-
tion to the book, saying that “there is a crudity—even cruelty—about some
others of the themes,” and suggests that the inversions “express dissatisfaction
with the general state of society” (Moon 127). In “The Hogs Court of Inquiry,”
for instance, the Taylor sisters take liberties with the ironies of the French
Revolution. The hogs speak:
Figure 4.8 Ann and Jane Taylor, painted by their father, Isaac Taylor, circa
1792.
“But who, fellow-hogs of our glorious sty!
“Most noble!—born only to fatten and die!
“Say, who the great nation shall dare to defame,
“By calling our race and the human the same!
“Behold them in idleness wasting their days,

“As if the best honour they had were to laze,
“A sottish, a selfish, an indolent train,
“Who do but encumber our royal domain.
“Mere gluttons!—contented to grovel in mire,

“To feast and to revel, to sleep and expire;
“Say, citizen pigs, can it ever be true,
“Such wretches as these were related to you?
“No, No! was repeated with sudden acclaim,

“We are not, we could not be ever the same;
“Our honour is clear from the scandalous blot,
“Long live the republic!—No, no we are not.
“When order again was a little restor’d,

“Twas pass’d by unanimous grunt at the board,
“To celebrate yearly a national feast,
“On two or three fricasseed butchers at least.
(Taylor, Signor Topsy-Turvy 58–59)
To a modern reader, the satire looks perfectly honed and delicious, though its
public failure indicates that the book was somehow too risqué for its time.
That the book was published in only a single edition, despite the fact that
it came after a string of hits, indicates that something must have appeared
too risky, too politically incorrect, to warrant repeating. As Allon White and
Peter Stallybrass argue in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986),
“[I]nversion addresses the social classification of values, distinctions and
judgements that underpin practical reason and systematically inverts the
relations of subject and object, agent and instrument, husband and wife, old
and young, animal and human, master and slave” (Stallybrass and White
56). Those kinds of inversions are at the heart of Signor Topsy-Turvy. By
1810, when Signor-Topsy-Turvy was published, the dust from both the Amer-
ican and French revolutions had settled, so the book’s appearance doesn’t
seem to speak to the need for metaphorical escape from repression that
underpins Mikhail Bakhtin’s discussion of the carnivalesque in Rabelais
and His World—published in Russian in 1965 in the depths of the Cold War.
As Stallybrass and White argue in their extension of Bakhtin’s discussion
on the carnivalesque, perhaps the value of the cathartic laughter inherent
in visions of a world upside down nevertheless affi rms “the acceptance of
the existing binary categories of high and low” (Stallybrass and White 57).
But perhaps even the whiff of mocking of the social order was too risky
to sustain in Ben’s shop. Still, my point remains that even though Signor
Topsy-Turvy lived in only a single edition, critical interest in its ideas have
sustained it far beyond its early-nineteenth-century shelf-life. The upside-
down world of Signor Topsy-Turvy appeals to modern readers both cultur-
ally, as a Bakhtinian carnivalesque inversion, and as an early slide towards
a technological age. The book stands as an anomaly, and I’ve put it at the
end of the chapter on the women who wrote the books that lived in the
house that Ben built, partly because it speaks to a modern sensibility, and
so appears in need of reproduction, and also partly because it stands in con-
trast to the strong reputation enjoyed by the Taylor sisters through much of
the nineteenth century.
Although the Taylor sisters were politically distinct from Mary Wollstone-
craft or Maria Edgeworth, and spiritually close to Hannah More, like all the
women in this chapter, they shared a common faith in maternal pedagogies,
in a desire to speak to real children, a desire to work and to communicate
faith in the possibilities of pedagogical practices. As teaching and writing
women they were, as maternal theorist Sara Ruddick explains, committed to
the “preservation, growth and social acceptability” of children. And they were
linked through the publishing houses in Ben’s neighborhood: Joseph Johnson,
Benjamin Tabart, Richard Phillips, and Harvey and Darton.
History is fickle when it comes to conferring the gift of cultural memory.
In our own time, we know how difficult it is to predict who will be remem-
bered and for what contributions and who will be forgotten. At any particular
historical moment, popularity doesn’t seem to offer many clues. If I look back
at the literary women on my list, all productive, active members of thriving
intellectual circles, historical tricks of memory become immediately visible
in considering who is remembered, forgotten—and in what specific contexts.
In the twenty-first century, only Mary Shelley is likely to be recognizable to
the non-specialist reader, and even that identification depends on the reader
being aware of not just the character of the monster popularly known as
Frankenstein, but of the fact that Mary Shelley created Dr. Frankenstein as
the monster’s maker in Frankenstein; Or the Modern Prometheus (1818). Jane
Taylor is another of the women in the pantheon whose name is not likely rec-
ognizable to non-specialists, but her most famous poem, “Twinkle, Twinkle,
Little Star,” first published in Rhymes for the Nursery (1806), remains instantly
recognizable. Although Jane’s older sister, Ann Taylor, was hugely famous in
much of the nineteenth century for a best-selling poem, “My Mother,” first
published in Original Poems for Infant Minds (1804), by the mid-twentieth
century, her fame had faded, as had Jane’s. Ann and Jane weren’t exactly the
Olson Twins of their day, but they were definitely household names. Of the
other literary women in my list, Catharine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft
would have been, at once, famous and infamous (for their political views and
their unconventional relationships with men). Only Wollstonecraft remains
in the popular imagination, though I appreciate that “popularity” is a rela-
tive term—so it is not the kind of instant recognition enjoyed by the phrase
“twinkle, twinkle, little star” or the name “Frankenstein.” Anna Barbauld and
Hannah More would have been recognized in their own time, but their name
recognition is scholarly rather than popular. Mary Hays was often ridiculed
for wearing her emotions on her sleeve, and she too is remembered only by
scholars. And though Eliza Fenwick has inspired my work, in most general
accounts of Enlightenment women, she figures as the kind of character who
appears in fi lms as the star’s less glamorous best friend. That status translates
as the woman tending Mary Wollstonecraft through her fi nal days and then
caring for the newborn Mary Shelley. As my brief introduction to the nine
women on my list, history does not seem to have treated them affectionately.
And though the women who wrote the books have grown hard to imagine, the
real children who read them are even harder to perceive.
Chapter Five
These Are (Not) the Children Who Read
the Books That Lived in the House That
Ben Built
The two boys in this detail from William Hogarth’s 1732 portrait of the Chol-
mondeley family (Figure 5.1)1 are playing with their books. The younger boy
on the right has constructed a tower of books on a chair and appears to be
balancing precariously on top of it. The slightly older boy to the left is posed
as a mirror image of his young brother, with his hand fi rmly on the pile of
books on the table, hoping perhaps to protect them. These long-dead real
children are caught eternally in this perfect moment of balancing the books.
The real children who read the books that lived in the house that Ben built
have long since grown up and grown old, had children, grandchildren, and
great-grandchildren of their own; these children have had many generations
of descendents. So much time has elapsed that no one alive now could even
have had memories of memories of people who knew the real children who
were the fi rst readers when those books came hot off the presses, crisp and
fresh, and still smelling of ink and paper. And unless the children who read
the books from Ben’s shop grew up to be famous themselves, and records
of their juvenile reading and writing survived by chance, very few of the
fresh fi rst impressions of those stories are available for us now. Surviving
artifacts are largely limited to fragments, at best, small snatches of conver-
sation or discussion recorded in memoirs or surviving letters, recounting
interactions between a particular child and a particular text in a specific
context.2 So while recapturing glimpses of those long lost children seems to
offer almost magical moments of insight into the past, these insights aren’t
enough on their own to justify their retelling. As modern readers, what’s
important are the lessons that we can learn from those long-dead children,
as we try to imagine and construct our own futures. So here in my account
139
of the children’s book business, I bridge the two hundred years which trans-
pired between those Enlightenment families and us. Because I ended the
last chapter with a story about the failure of Ann and Jane Taylor’s Signor
Figure 5.1 Detail from William Hogarth’s 1732 portrait of the Chol-
mondeley family.
These Are (Not) the Children Who Read the Books • 141
Topsy-Turvy to fi nd an audience in its own time (and so its failure to survive
the fi rst phase of the life of a book), this chapter on real children begins with
a success story about one of Ann Taylor’s poems. The poem, “My Mother,”
was published when she was just out of her teens and it put her on the liter-
ary map; the poem is taken from the Taylor sisters’ fi rst collection, Original
Poems for Infant Minds,3 “the book,” says Darton, as you may remember,
“that awoke the nurseries of England” (Darton 181). Glimpses of Ann and
Jane Taylor’s real lives as real children remain available partly because they
grew up in a “book business” family of engravers, and because their fi rst
best sellers were for children. And even though I’m telling the story of one of
Ann’s poems, I want to repeat again that it is one of Jane’s poems, “Twinkle,
Twinkle, Little Star,” that is still said and sung by real children. The chapter
continues with other glimpses of Enlightenment children, real and fictional,
thinking and reading, and moves on to the thinking and knowing children
of the new millennium.
The Rise and Fall of “My Mother”
Ann and Jane Taylor were barely into their twenties when they published the
book, they were very young writers. The narrative arc of my story demonstrates
the impact of Ann’s poem, “My Mother,” on a young reader who read the poem
when Original Poems was a brand new book.
The title of the volume, Original Poems, suggests something beyond the
sense of previously unpublished—it suggests something verging on a new
genre. The book endured. As Morag Styles says, in her historical survey of
children’s verse, From the Garden to the Street, Original Poems was “the most
influential poetry book for children of the first half of the nineteenth century”
(Styles 71).
Retrospectively, I think it is difficult for modern readers to imagine what
“most influential” would look like in the early nineteenth century. Two hun-
dred years ago, “My Mother” was as well-known as the lyrics to the famous
Coca-Cola commercial—“I want to teach the world to sing in perfect
har-mon-y”4 —is today. One hundred years ago, “My Mother” would still
have been familiar—though probably as one of the multitude of parodies
mocking the sentiments of the original. A modern equivalent might be the
anti-Barney theme song: “I hate you / you hate me / we’re a dysfunctional
fa-mi-ly”—which my own children used to sing when they were young.5 In
2009, when I tried to google the full text of “My Mother,” on any of the web-
sites offering online complete lyrics—it proved quite difficult.6 The fact that
“My Mother” was so well-known for so much of the nineteenth and twenti-
eth centuries makes its story worth telling. Because “My Mother” has been
out of circulation for a very long time (probably since the mid-twentieth
century), I’m including several verses from the poem as it tracks a life cycle
from a mother’s tender care for her newborn to an elderly, ailing mother
cared for by a dutiful grateful child. The mingling of emotional truth and
maudlin sentiment induces a confl icted response in my post-post modern-
ist ears:
Who fed me from her gentle breast,

And hush’d me in her arms to rest,
And on my cheeks sweet kisses prest?
My Mother!
When sleep forsook my open eye,

Who was it sang sweet hush-a-by,
And rock’d me that I should not cry?
My Mother!
Who taught my infant lips to pray,

And love God’s holy book and day,
And walk in wisdom’s pleasant way?
My Mother!
And can I ever cease to be

Affectionate and kind to thee,
Who was so very kind to me,
My Mother! (Taylor, Original Poems)
In its own time, the genuine feeling in the poem protected it from the cynical
responses that followed. By chance, I found a letter from when the poem was
new that offers intimate details about the influence of this particular poem
on a child reader. Both writer and reader are linked to the children’s book
business and other participants in my story—all of which makes their story
more telling.
On 5 June 1806, two years after the first publication of “My Mother,” Wil-
liam Godwin sent a letter to his second wife, Mary Jane Clairmont, who was out
of town. She was understood to have been notoriously bad tempered, though
William Godwin begins most of his letters to her with the phrase, “My dearest
Love.” Charles Lamb reportedly refers to Mary Jane as a “bad baby,” and some
of William Godwin’s surviving letters indicate that he was frequently trying to
soothe her anger. In one letter he asks her to “economize” her temper because
“it is at bottom most excellent; do not let it be sour or spoiled” (William God-
win to Mary Jane Godwin, 9 October 1801. MS. Abinger c. 42, fols. 1–2. The
Bodleian Library, University of Oxford).7 In another, he writes:
You part from the best of husbands, the most anxious to console you, the best
qualified to forbear and be patient towards one of the worst tempers. I have
every qualification & every wish to make you happy. . . . (William Godwin,
Friday 28 October 1823. MS. Abinger c. 42, fol. 5. The Bodleian Library,
University of Oxford)
In the context of the children’s book business, Mary Jane, remember, is

important because she worked for Benjamin Tabart prior to her marriage,
and is credited with having translated and edited Tabart’s Collection of
Popular Stories for the Nursery (1804), from French and Italian. And it was
partly on the strength of her experience in the children’s book business that
she and William Godwin set up their Juvenile Library in 1805, as a rival to
Tabart’s. It must have been difficult to raise a blended family of five young
children and to attempt to run a book business at the same time.
On 5 June 1806 when Godwin wrote his letter, he had been left at home in
charge of the five kids: Fanny, the eldest (the late Mary Wollstonecraft’s fi rst
daughter, by Gilbert Imlay), would have been twelve; Charles Clairmont,
Mary Jane’s son, would have been eleven; Mary (daughter of Mary Woll-
stonecraft and William Godwin) would have been nine; Mary Jane Clair-
mont (Mary Jane’s daughter) would have been eight; and William (William
Godwin and Mary Jane’s son) would have been three. Godwin’s note to
Mary Jane is about Charles—who seems to have resisted all the good, philo-
sophical, well-intentioned, and informed instruction by his famous step-
father. In the letter, William Godwin begins with a discussion of why news
about Charles begins the letter. “Why, you will say,” asks William Godwin
rhetorically, “do I put this tale at the top of my letter?” And he answers
himself: “For a very natural & cogent reason. Because they staid supper &
bequeathed me a head-ache.” Charles, the letter suggests, has been awkward
and difficult. Godwin, in reviewing the events of the day, says that he “set all
the children to write letters,” but that “mainly by his awkwardness the occa-
sion was lost,” for Charles. Nevertheless, Godwin continued to work with
his step-son: “The letter he then wrote,” says Godwin, “though I took some
pains previously to work on his feelings, was the poorest & most soulless
thing you ever saw” (William Godwin to Mary Jane Godwin, 5 June 1806).
The scene comes instantly alive in the reading, and is completely familiar
to anyone who has ever attempted to coax an unwilling child into writing a
thank-you note (or to anyone who has been that unwilling child). Godwin,
however, because he was committed to both pedagogical theory and provid-
ing literature for children, doesn’t give up despite Charles’s pathetic attempt.
He explains to Mary Jane that he had tried a different tactic:
I then set him [Charles] to learn the poem of My Mother in Darton’s

Original Poetry: your letter to him came but most opportunely to rein-
force that whole, & at last he has produced what I now send you. (5 June
1806)
Charles managed to get the point and write something more acceptable. The
pedagogical success of the exercise was apparently demonstrated by the much
improved letter from Charles to his mother. Godwin writes that he enclosed
it, though if it survives I didn’t see it. By providing Charles with “My Mother”
the purpose was to impress the sacredness of the mother-child bond upon
him. By way of explanation, Godwin tells Mary Jane about some of the events
that had led up to Charles being encouraged to read the poem and write the
letter:
I went upstairs to his [Charles’s] bedside the night before you left us that I
might impress upon him the importance of not suffering you to depart in
anger. But instead of understanding the point, he, like a child, thought I was
come to whip him & with great fervor and agitation begged that I forgive
him. He is very anxious that you should now see his letter for yourself as I
have promised to inform you of his efforts. (5 June 1806)
What struck me about the significance of the letter was William Godwin’s
sense that he could effectively utilize Ann Taylor’s poem to communicate a
sentiment—affection—he had otherwise found impossible to impress on
Charles. This particular pedagogical use of poetry is completely in keeping
with Godwin’s theories of raising and educating real children. In a letter dated
2 March 1802, while responding to a philosophical and pedagogical query sent
to him by William Cole about books “for the education of female children
from the age of two to twelve,” Godwin explains his understanding regarding
pedagogical methods and materials.
In sympathy with Mary Wollstonecraft’s belief in co-education, Godwin
begins his response to Cole’s question by saying that he “should make no dif-
ference between children male and female.” Nevertheless, Godwin does fol-
low with a book list for beginning readers and suggests “Mrs. Barbauld’s little
books, four in number, admirably adapted opon the whole to the capacity &
amusement of young children.” He then recommends that these be followed
by “The Infant’s Friend by Mrs. Lovechild” (aka Lady Fenn).8 Godwin also
engages the debate about reason and imagination in books for children. He
suggests fairy tales by Charles Perrault, and folk tales, including “Beauty and
the Beast” and “Valentine & Orson”—tales that were published by Tabart in
his collection of Tales for the Nursery and which his wife Mary Jane likely had
a hand in translating and editing. He also suggests Robinson Crusoe and the
kind of educational books promoted by the Dissenting Academies, so books
of geography, history, and science. The books cited by Godwin, however, are
at the beginning and end of his letter, and form a kind of bracket, beginning
with books for those learning to read and ending with a list of books that
embrace both reason and imagination. Godwin does not, however, in his let-
ter to Cole construct a program of reading. Instead, at the center of the letter is
a philosophical and pedagogical argument about how the “object of education
is the future man or woman.” That is, Godwin constructs children not as
a breed apart, but as apprentice adults, and therefore in need of cultivating
both reason and imagination, thought and feeling, heart and mind. He warns
against banal and superficial books for children and against rote learning.
To illustrate his argument against banal, superficial books, Godwin
describes an encounter at a bookshop on the very day he writes to Cole. The
proprietor of the shop, Godwin observes, was trying to promote the idea
of the “delightful book for children” that could be called “A Tour Through
Papa’s House” and would “explain all the furniture.” “This is exactly the sort
of writing for children,” says Godwin, “which has lately been in fashion.”
Godwin’s comments against fashionable banality in children’s books pre-
figure similar comments which the British poet Ted Hughes made over a
century-and-a-half later.
In Poetry in the Making, Ted Hughes describes being in the United
States in the late 1950s and seeing “a series of children’s books which just
recounted very simply a child’s visit to the supermarket, the post office and
the station,” and which “read like primers for men from outer space, men
who didn’t know how to put one foot in front of another” (Hughes, Poetry
in the Making 62). Hughes had reason to be acutely conscious of the rela-
tionship between the books being marketed for children and their effect
on the emotional and intellectual lives of readers. At the time, in the late
1950s, Ted Hughes and his wife, the American poet Sylvia Plath, were living
in Massachusetts. Hughes was teaching at the University of Massachusetts
in Amherst and Plath was teaching at Smith College in Northampton. Both
were also at the time trying to become professional writers, and as part of
their strategy, they were also trying to write for the children’s book mar-
ket. In several letters to his brother Gerald during that period, Ted Hughes
describes the neurosis and the “incredible boredom & mental vacuity of
vast tracts of the American and English younger generation,” and attributes
some of the lack of affect in the students he was seeing to the “mechanical
trash” that flooded the children’s book market at the time (Ted Hughes to
Gerald Hughes, August 1959). Hughes’s observations about “boredom” and
“vacuity” in students deprived of texts which encourage them to think and
feel, resonate with the observations made by both Mary Wollstonecraft and
William Godwin.
In his letter to Cole, Godwin cautions against “overloading of the faculties of
children and a forced maturity,” by participating in conventional rote learning
of conventional wisdom. Godwin cautions, “it is a miserable vanity that would
sacrifice the wholesome & gradual development of the mind to the desire of
exhibiting little monsters of curiosity.” The line exactly parallels Mary Woll-
stonecraft’s injunction against rote learning in A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman, where she rails against the “parrot-like prattle” favored by schoolmas-
ters to show off their students. “Such exhibitions,” she says, “only serve to strike
the spreading fibres of vanity through the whole mind; for they neither teach
children to speak fluently, nor behave gracefully” (Wollstonecraft, Vindication
167). Godwin’s reference to “miserable vanity” echoes Wollstonecraft’s warn-
ing against “vanity.” At the end of the letter, Godwin offers the most resonant
phrase to describe the object of educational philosophy. By encouraging reason
and imagination, thinking and feeling, Godwin sees the goal of education as
“an active mind & a warm heart.” With those words, he signs off his letter to
William Cole. In my mind, I hear the echo of Mary Wollstonecraft who simi-
larly promotes an educational philosophy aimed towards “a cultivated under-
standing, and an affectionate heart” (Wollstonecraft, Vindication 95).
I began the “My Mother” story by situating it in its own time and place, in
its reception soon after its publication in a reading by the parent-(step)child
dyad of William Godwin and Charles Clairmont, and in the broader context
of the cultural conditions and pedagogical principles that informed that read-
ing, as demonstrated through Godwin’s letter to Cole. I’ve also tried to show
that Godwin’s letter, with its emphasis on “an active mind and a warm heart,”
on thinking and feeling, simultaneously informs the educational context in
which that reading took place in its own time, and also the way that reading
reflects backward to Mary Wollstonecraft and forward to Ted Hughes. The
next part of the “My Mother” story takes that initial response and shows the
effects of time and cultural change on both text and response.
“My Mother”: Adaptations
Like a hit single in the pop music world, “My Mother” received a lot of play
becoming instantly recognizable at the time. It was also, to continue to use
a pop song analogy, “covered” by other artists. Repetition, however, doesn’t
ensure everlasting life. In A Theory of Adaptation, literary critic Linda Hutch-
eon argues that when a work of art is adapted for another use (story to fi lm or
ballet or opera) its credibility rating goes up. The work is attractive simulta-
neously for both its familiarity and its strangeness (Hutcheon 3). The adap-
tation is “upwardly mobile,” as Hutcheon says, and it represents “one way
to gain respectability or increase cultural capital.” That’s what happened to
“My Mother.” In its original context, it was nestled amongst a group of poems
written by Ann and Jane in their first collection, Original Poems for Infant
Minds. The cultural capital of “My Mother” increased when it was published
as a stand-alone poem, in single volume editions, and illustrated by various
important picture book artists, including Kate Greenaway, well into the nine-
teenth century. The circulation of the poem increased even more when images
associated with it were reproduced in other media. For instance, one of the
illustrations from a picture book version of “My Mother” was used as a cover
for a decorative box.
Inside the box, the image had been mounted, then cut up and made into a
“My Mother” puzzle (Figure 5.2). The box would have been sold as a mother’s
day card is sold today, as something that instantly registers an emotional
truth. Another puzzle version of “My Mother” (Figure 5.3) constructed each
scene as an individual piece. Both versions are designed to trigger positive
responses from the players, responses that translate from one medium (the
puzzle pieces) to the words of the poem. As the popularity of “My Mother”
Figure 5.2 “My Mother” puzzle pieces and cover image (Routledge 1870).
grew, its cultural capital increased through translation and adaption. The
poem was set to music shortly after its original publication and then con-
tinued long into the nineteenth century. Because Ann Taylor was in her
eighties when she died, she was able to witness the ways in which the poem
written in her youth took on a life of its own over a sixty-year period. In her
memoir, she suggests that the frequency with which her poems were set to
music testifies to their popularity—though she modestly notes that their
success was due “less to their poetical merits or pellucid diction . . . than to
their concernment chiefly with home life and their lively dialogue” (155).
I found four different nineteenth-century settings of “My Mother” in the
British Library.9 The music would have been for people, especially women,
who would have played it in the parlor as demonstrations of their musical
accomplishments.
Success has a curious way of turning into sentimentality, however, and
so into an object of disdain. For example, in their 2006 history of children’s
book publishing, Be Merry and Wise, Alderson and de Marez Oyens are
more than a little embarrassed by the success of “My Mother,” complain-
ing that “this single mawkish poem had become the foundation for a minor
industry” and that it was unscrupulously “‘borrowed’ to be reprinted in
magazines and anthologies, and an immense number of imitations were
written celebrating every conceivable member of the family circle,” and that
“William Darton II of Holborn Hill” had in fact been most ready “to exploit
the craze” (76). Of course, I know exactly what Alderson is talking about.
Figure 5. 3 “My Mother” puzzle (William Darton Jr., 1811).

Literary readers read “My Mother” and want to scream “SENTIMENTAL”
or “YUCK.” We’re wise to being manipulated—we don’t like it, and yet we’re
still caught. Against my better judgment, I’m still moved, as I am by other
emotional moments—the death of Beth, for example, in Little Women or
the death of “Little Nell” in The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens.
Despite the fact that literary readers know they are being manipulated—
they’re being manipulated. Genuine emotions, genuine feelings for one’s
mother can easily turn, if not to hate, then to something that it is easy to
diminish through mockery. And that’s what happened to “My Mother.” The
poem that was genuinely moving in the early part of the nineteenth century
became a joke by the time the century came to a close.
Success breeds imitation but it also breeds, of course, contempt. In the
“Familiarity and Contempt” section of her book on theories of adaptation,
Linda Hutcheon suggests, “If an adaptation is perceived as ‘lowering’ a story
(according to some imagined hierarchy of medium or genre), response is likely
to be negative” (Hutcheon 3). As I’ve suggested, sentimentality is embarrass-
ing, and the way to escape, especially for children clamoring to escape from
domestic apron strings, is through parody. “My Mother” was instantly paro-
died and so entered a period of decline through the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Instead of the brand recognition “My Mother” enjoyed
when it was adapted for pictures and songs, its cultural capital declined as it
was transformed through parody, as in this version (cited by Morag Styles in
From the Garden to the Street) by Thomas Hood:
Who let me starve, to buy her gin

Till all my bones came through my skin,
Then called me ‘ugly little sin?’
My Mother. (Hood, qtd. in Styles 110)
In a parody by R. M. Ballantyne (best known as the author of boys’ adventure

stories), the comedy arises out of constructing the mother and child as cats
and kittens:
Who trembled much with anxious fear

When danger really drew near,
And did in shape of dog appear
My mother!
Who gave a frightful caterwaul

On seeing that the dog was small,
And did not seem afraid at all?
My mother! (Ballantyne unpaged)
As the parodies demonstrate, “My Mother” moved from the respectability

of the parlor or drawing room (a protected maternal, domestic space) into
the rough and tumble world of the playground. Genuine emotional bonds
become the subject of ridicule and parody.
Joseph T. Thomas describes the seismic shift that occurs when the genuine
love that informs the poetry parents share with their children moves out of
doors to the child-to-child world. Although Thomas writes about the indoor/
outdoor distinctions between school poetry and playground poetry, the dis-
tinctions apply equally well to the tensions between domestic and backyard
(or laneway) poetry: “If official school poetry is a museum piece, archived
in air-conditioned anthologies for students, then playground poetry is the
graffiti on the museum walls, the notes penned on the anthology’s cover”
(Thomas 41). By looking at the history of “My Mother,” the narrative arc of a
domestic poem celebrating maternal care and love moves outdoors, into the
street and descends into a parody of its former self. And yet, the sentiments of
“My Mother” linger even through its disgrace. By way of comparison, a book
that follows the same trajectory as “My Mother”—from mother loving her
infant to the grown-up child caring for an infirm and dying mother—is Rob-
ert Munsch’s 1986 Love You Forever. It’s exactly the sort of book I’m supposed
to hate. It should make me cringe with embarrassment and gag at the mere
mention of the title. Munsch’s own publisher apparently rejected it initially
on the grounds that it wasn’t a children’s book. My literary self does just that,
but I have to confess, almost shamefully, that when I listened to a recording of
Robert Munsch singing the lullaby verse, there were tears in my eyes, as there
were when I looked through some of the early-nineteenth-century illustra-
tions of “My Mother.”
The trajectory of “My Mother,” from its origins as a “hit single” from a
collection of poems by beginning poets, to its decline as a parody, to its vir-
tual disappearance from the canon of children’s verse demonstrates how dif-
ficult it is to conjure the real readers of children’s texts. Like childhood itself,
the glimpses of these readers are fleeting at best. The positive public embrace
quickly turned to public ridicule. When the poem was first published it
expressed, candidly, genuine feelings between mother and child. As my story
about William Godwin’s use of the poem with his step-son, Charles Clair-
mont, demonstrates, “My Mother” was regarded as genuinely moving in its
own time and was celebrated for that reason. It didn’t take long for this genu-
ine flowering of emotion to fade to cynical sentimentalism, and from there it
was a quick decline into parody and, ultimately, oblivion. In the end, living
child readers are always growing up too quickly to be fi xed in a particular way.
Children are as we construct them, and those constructions are constantly
changing, as they are vulnerable to our changing wishes for what we want
children to be. The narrative I’ve been developing in The Children’s Book Busi-
ness has been about putting an end to the historical construction of Romantic
innocent children and constructing instead the thinking and knowing child
of the Enlightenment as the model for the child who thinks and knows in our
own time.
Eliza Fenwick: Teaching Real Children to Think and to Know
Because this chapter began with the story of William Godwin trying to
entice Charles Clairmont into thinking and feeling by reading “My Mother,”
it seemed appropriate to return to him later when he is sixteen and see how
he was getting on with his program of instruction. On 24 May 1811, William
Godwin wrote to Mary Jane Godwin, addressing her as “Dear Mamma.”
Charles, it seems, is still difficult and still jibs, but William Godwin doesn’t
give up. He continues to work at fi nding texts and pedagogical practices
that will work with his reluctant step-son. “I want to win his heart,” says
Godwin. “Whether I shall succeed or no, I know not.”10 Godwin continues
the letter debating the relative merits of particular books—as the point of
the exercise is to make sure that book and child are matched—to ensure
that the child desires the book rather than suffers at being forced to read it.
Godwin explains to Mary Jane that “a book read when it is desired is worth
fi fty of a book forced on the reader without seasons & occasions.” Then
he weighs the options that might suit Charles, considering, for instance,
John Locke and Thomas Paine’s 1794 The Age of Reason. The immediate
responses would have been interesting—especially whether these proved
to be worth “fi fty” books forced on Charles—but Godwin changes the
direction of the letter by moving from literature to music, and says that he
has “called on Eliza Fenwick, who has undertaken to procure me a list of
musical composers for the theatre, . . . ” Godwin knew that Fenwick was
interested in music and theater and wanted to access her knowledge for the
benefit of his step-son.
In beginning this section with a reference to Eliza Fenwick, I wanted to
draw attention to the links between the two families, the Godwins and Fen-
wicks. The relationship began in the mid-1790s when Mary Wollstonecraft
and Eliza Fenwick were both young mothers, continued after Wollstone-
craft’s death in 1797 and then into the first decades of the nineteenth century,
through both Mary Jane’s Clairmont’s work for Tabart, and her employment
at the Juvenile Library which Clairmont ran with William Godwin, after their
marriage. Eliza’s husband John Fenwick was a friend of Godwin’s and his first
biographer.11 Eliza Fenwick worked both for Tabart, then unhappily for God-
win before leaving England for Barbados and North America. Through this
period, there are more glimpses of children and their books, and of the adults
trying hard to nurture and educate the children under their care.
On 28 September 1832, from what is now Niagara-on-the Lake in Ontario,
Canada, Eliza Fenwick wrote to her friend Mr. J. Moffatt, a silversmith in New
York City, about her literary life in the crucible of radical London of the 1790s.
Fenwick is self-deprecatingly critical, even a little sardonic, in her assessment
of the London book business when she says that it is not so much about “lit-
erature” as it “a trade to live by as the making of Vests and Pantaloons.”12 The
sewing-as-piece-work seems appropriate.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the book publishing business
was in the process of transitioning from what was regarded as a slightly grubby
lower middle-class technical trade (focused on the making and selling of books
as material objects) into an intellectual profession (focused on selling ideas).
Fenwick’s letter is a fragment, the beginning cleanly cut off by someone who
didn’t want anyone to know what it was about—yet clearly wanted to preserve
something of Eliza’s account of her literary life in an extremely important
period of the children’s book history in London around 1800. In the letter, Eliza
explains her entrance to the London scene, likely in the late 1780s or very early
1790s: It was a time when I was very young,” she explains, “& my brain a little
turned by reading Godwin’s Political Justice & Mrs. Wollstonecraft’s Rights
of Woman I wrote a work of fiction wild enough & under an odd title.” The
book in question was an epistolary novel, Secresy, published in 1795. It received
generally favorable reviews and brought Eliza and her husband John to a circle
that included Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Hays, Charles and
Mary Lamb, and the publishers, Richard Phillips and Benjamin Tabart—and
ultimately Godwin and Mary Jane Clairmont’s Juvenile Library. Eliza’s hus-
band John figures as the rather dubious character of “Ralph Bigod” in Charles
Lamb’s Two Races of Men, though A. F. Wedd, in her introduction to the letters
Eliza wrote to Mary Hays, speaks disparagingly of John’s descent into “habitual
drunkenness, debt and disaster.” Yet John was erudite and a good enough man
to be with William Godwin as Mary Wollstonecraft lay dying.
There is a brief glimpse of the circle of young mothers and their children
which Mary Wollstonecraft must have encouraged that I particularly liked.
In the spring of 1797, she wrote to another mother, Maria Revealy, when Eliza
and John Fenwick’s daughter Eliza Anne (1789–1827) was eight, and Fanny
Imlay (1794–1816), the illegitimate daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and
George Imlay, was three. “Dear Madam,” writes Mary Wollstonecraft, “Little
Eliza has been here two or three hours; and appears so horrified at not seeing
her playmates that I send to remind you of your promise” (Wollstonecraft,
Letters 426).
By July 1800, Eliza Fenwick had become so distressed by her husband’s
fecklessness that she took the brave step of trying to raise her two children
without him. She wrote to Mary Hays on 4 and 5 July to tell her so:
I am determined, Mary, if possible, to consider myself & children totally sep-

arated from his bad or good fortunes. If I should be able to contribute to his
repose & comfort I shall rejoice, but never, never, will I again, if the means
are to be had by my industry of supporting my children, involve myself in
such miseries & perplexities as I have endured. (Wedd 9)
Eliza Fenwick continued to receive support from the sisterhood of working

women to whom she belonged. In an undated letter (though probably from
around 1800), Eliza Fenwick wrote to Mary Hays from the home of another
of their friends, Mary Robinson, actress, poet, journalist, author, and lover of
the Prince of Wales. Eliza had sought temporary refuge there. Mary Robin-
son wrote, in a letter of 31 August 1800, “I have had Mrs. Fenwick, the elegant
authoress of Secresy and her daughter here, this past month.” Eliza’s toddler son
Orlando had so impressed Mary Robinson that she wrote “Lines Addressed to a
Beautiful Infant” which appeared in the Morning Post of 29 July 1800. Fenwick
was delighted and wrote to Mary Hays to tell her about the “charming little
poem [that] was in the Morning Post last Tuesday” (Wedd 11)
The two fleeting glimpses I’ve cited of Eliza Fenwick and her children are
important because they situate her so intimately in a community of women
both caring for children and working. Fenwick becomes not just a proto-fem-
inist, but a proto-working mother. And it is to the work I now turn. As in
my Mrs. Mason story from the last chapter, my Fenwick story relating to the
working mother flickers between fact and fiction. I’ll begin with fiction, in a
scene from Visits to the Juvenile Library.
In a letter to Mary Hays, dated 17 December 1802—soon after Eliza Fen-
wick makes the decision to leave her husband and attempts to support herself
and her children on her own—she envisions a time when she and her daugh-
ter Eliza might support themselves “by colouring prints together for a living
in some cheap lodging” (Wedd 14). In Visits to the Juvenile Library, the subplot
concerning the selfless child who supports herself and her poor sick mother by
hand-coloring prints forms the most affecting (or melodramatic and clichéd,
depending on your point of view) episode in the book. Mrs. Clifford happens
to be there one day when “a girl apparently about twelve or thirteen years of
age, very plainly and even meanly dressed, but yet perfectly neat and clean,”
presents Mr. Tabart with “some pictures that he had employed her to colour.”
Tabart finds the coloring “remarkably well done,” so gives her “another hun-
dred to colour” (Fenwick, Visits 66). It was a time, remember, before mechan-
ical color-printing, so in order to make a book with colored images, each
illustrated plate had to be painted individually, by hand. It was often a job for
young children—with good eyesight and steady, small hands, able to handle
the small brushes. As hand-coloring prints was piece work of the same kind as
sewing, it was a source of income for people with few other prospects. When
Mrs. Clifford asks about the industrious child, Tabart explains that she is a
“good little girl” who “helps to support her mother, who is in bad health, by
her industry” (Fenwick, Visits 67).
In Visits to the Juvenile Library, the plight of the caring, industrious, and
deserving child attracts the attention of Mrs. Clifford, who offers to assist.
Mrs. Clifford, we are told, is particularly sensitive to the situation because
her own daughter had been abducted while an infant and Mr. Clifford had
subsequently died of a broken heart. The story, as you might guess, resolves
in a classic scene of anagnorisis. In fact, the devoted child, Ellen, is the long-
lost daughter of Mrs. Clifford, the very child who had been stolen by a jeal-
ous woman displaced from the Clifford household named Fanny Lawson,
who had subsequently represented herself as the child’s mother. Mother and
child are happily reunited. Fanny Lawson sincerely repents and dies. Ellen
is returned to the good Mrs. Clifford and, although “she could already read,
write, work, and colour prints,” she still had a lot to learn, but, “her rapid
progress in whatever she undertook, stimulated the Mortimers, to the greatest
exertions” (Fenwick, Visits 107).
The ability to color prints, in fiction and in fact, featured in Eliza Fenwick’s
pedagogical practice. She believed in interactive learning and capitalized on
it in Rays from the Rainbow: Being an Easy Method for Perfecting Children in
the Principles of Grammar (Figure 5.4 and Figure 5.5), an interactive paint-
by-numbers or parse-by-color book, if you prefer. The legend at the begin-
ning of the book outlines the color-coding for the parts of speech. Nouns, for
instance, are blue, and pronouns sky-blue. Prepositions are green while con-
junctions are pea-green. Interjections are straw-colored. As Fenwick observes,
pragmatically in the introduction, all children like to paint and that desire
can be exploited:
The book, besides its obvious utility in schools, may be made the source of a
very agreeable amusement in play-hours and holidays. Every child is fond
of the use of paints, and will therefore, with the least degree of skill, in the
introduction of the amusement, very gladly employ his industry in colouring
a copy for himself. He may first colour a plain copy from a coloured copy be-
fore him. It will be another step clearly gained in the ladder of improvement,
when he is able to colour a copy from his own memory and observations only,
without a model. (Fenwick, Introduction to Rays from the Rainbow)
It is difficult to know if children really did like the interactive nature of the
educational toy, but the copy of Rays from the Rainbow held by the British
Library (listed as a second edition from 1812) suggests that the child who
owned it got fed up rather quickly with the grammar exercise, no matter how
attractive the idea of painting with watercolors may initially have been. Per-
haps the relentless invocations to industry and obedience got in the way of
enjoying fi lling in each blank lozenge with the color matched to the appropri-
ate part of speech. The pedagogical principle she employs is sound enough in
that she is working on the premise that knowledge (in this case, knowledge
of the parts of speech) is most easily acquired through a series of mnemonic
tricks rather than through brute-force rote memorization. The “infant mind,”
says Fenwick in the introduction, “will no longer be confounded by the obli-
gation to consider and analyze ten parts of speech in a single half hour, but
will be led on by my most natural human process, from the knowledge of one
part of speech to that of two, and so on onward, till insensibly, he finds himself
able to give himself an account of them all” (Fenwick, Introduction to Rays
from the Rainbow).
As a teacher, writer, mother, and grandmother, Eliza Fenwick cared deeply
about pedagogical principles and practices. She also had a perfect ear and per-
fect eye for real children negotiating their educational and social apprentice-
ships into the adult world. In Visits to the Juvenile Library, for instance, her
observations of the Mortimer children focus precisely on the details of behavior
that still read with complete truth and accuracy. One of the Mortimer boys is
“pacing the floor backward and forward, taking care to place his feet in suc-
cession upon every flower in the carpet,” and the eldest girl, Caroline, we later
learn, was “pulling a window blind up and down” (Fenwick, Visits 7). And even
though Visits to the Juvenile Library saw only a single edition, Fenwick’s perfect
characterizations of children survived into the late nineteenth century.
In 1898, the prolific late Victorian author and editor, E. V. Lucas, reissued
Fenwick’s “Bad Family” stories (from her Early Lessons collection), as part
Figure 5.4 Key to Eliza Fenwick, parse-by-color

grammar book, Rays from the Rainbow (1812).
of his “Dumpy Books” series. The books themselves were literally dumpy—
both short and squat. Lucas recognizes that although Fenwick liked the “exag-
geration” in favor with storytellers of her era, she was acutely tuned to the
quirks of real children, especially those who resisted learning. “Idle Richard,”
for instance, “instead of looking at his book, he is gazing all round the room
or cutting bits of stick with a knife.” He “looks like a clown and speaks like
blockhead”; that is, he’s exactly the sort of character Fenwick warns against
at the beginning of the second chapter of Visits to the Juvenile Library, the
child likely to suffer the “unpity’d blockhead’s fate.” Elsewhere a greedy child
“crams great pieces into his mouth until he is almost choked,” and “picks edges
of tarts and pies,” and when guests leave, “he sips up all the drops of wine that
are left in the glasses.” Only someone living intimately in the company of
Figure 5.5 First page of Rays from the Rainbow with

parts of speech colored in.
children, observing them as an anthropologist might, could focus on these
perfectly accurate details. And only a gifted author could choose the appro-
priate detail to instantly convey the character of a particular child. Fenwick
does just that.
As an educator, Fenwick seems to have repeatedly tried to put into prac-
tice the pedagogical principles she had learned by not just reading Locke and
Rousseau, but also in conversation with Mary Wollstonecraft and William
Godwin, and with the other mothers, teachers, and governesses with whom
she spent time. Fenwick’s 1795 epistolary novel, Secresy, contains her most
sustained critique of pedagogical practices based on isolationist policies that
keep children in a separate sphere, removed from the right to both think and
know. Like Mary Wollstonecraft, Fenwick periodically tried working as a gov-
erness and tried running a school. The very first letter in The Fate of the Fen-
wicks (A. F. Wedd’s edition of letters from Eliza Fenwick to Mary Hays) begins
with Eliza’s resolve to open a school. “I will attempt the school” (italics in the
original), she writes. Her own children are still young, her daughter, Eliza
Anne (born 1789), is nine, and Orlando, her son, still a baby at five months.
It is not long after Mary Wollstonecraft’s death. Eliza explains her resolution:
I know the modes & manners of a school. I am not averse to the species of
labour. Supposing I get very few scholars. I can as well give the time to them
that I must & do devote to the children with me. (Wedd 1)
Things don’t appear to go very well, and in a letter dated 28 January 1799, Fen-
wick writes about her school with “6 scholars . . . the eldest 5 years old & one
[she] was fool enough to admit at 2 years old who all last week roared without
ceasing” (Wedd 4). This school did not succeed, though it didn’t stop Fenwick
from trying other schools in other locations like Barbados, New Haven, Con-
necticut, and, fi nally, in Niagara-on-the-Lake in the early 1830s in the then
British colony of Upper Canada and what is now Ontario. As the success or
failure of schools in the period depended both on the stability, knowledge, and
integrity of the community as well as on the funding, stability, and resources
of the parents, success was a hit or miss affair.
Throughout the extant letters Eliza Fenwick wrote to Mary Hays in Eng-
land and then to the Moffatt family in New York, it is possible to see glimpses
of her children, grandchildren, as well as the children she taught. When Fen-
wick died an old woman of seventy-three in Rhode Island in 1840, she’d had a
long life in the company of children, especially as she was largely responsible
for raising her four grandchildren (through the 1820s and 1830s), as their
mother (Eliza’s daughter) had died, and their father had more or less aban-
doned the family in Barbados. Throughout this period, she attempted to sup-
port them through teaching.
In the slip between real and fictional children, it is difficult not to see
the five Mocatta children, for whom Fenwick was a governess around 1811,
as mirroring retrospectively the five fictional spoiled children she creates
in Visits to the Juvenile Library. Be warned, the real children don’t come off
very well in the letter, though to be fair, it was intended as a private letter to
Mary Hays:
The eldest boy is Dullness & frivolity personified; he wearies me in the

extreme; the second boy is quick but idle, has a kind heart & not an
ungenerous temper, but requires unceasing vigilance to keep him in his
proper place & prevent his extending the mastery he aims at. On the
whole I like him very much. He is capable of receiving benefit. The little
girl is a dull drudge who learns from want of vivacity & forgets again for
want of intellect to comprehend. Tractable yet totally devoid of energy &
fancy she sticks as close to me as a burr, without engaging my affection or
stimulating in any way my temper, unless indeed when I grow petulant
at the nine hundred & ninety-ninth repetition of this history of her last
year’s fit of sickness, or the dance her Mama gave last winter. The third
boy is a complete dunce & the fourth a lively, promising, spoiled but
good-humoured little pickle with an inordinate propensity to mischief &
telling lies. (Wedd 30)
What makes Fenwick such a good chronicler of real children is her atten-
tion to the precise details that speak across the centuries. Because a child’s
“nine-hundred-and-ninety-ninth repetition” of the same story resonates
authentically with a modern parent—who might also well respond by being
“petulant”—the detail reads as an accurate portrait of that long ago child. The
pedagogical approach Fenwick brings to the education of each child also reso-
nates accurately and authentically to a modern reader, despite the fact that she
later calls them “clods” in the letter. But she recognizes that no single meth-
odology will suit the different temperaments of these children. “These are my
cases,” she says, “each of whom requires a different treatment. The spirit &
enterprise I would encourage in the second & fourth boys are opposite to the
timid system of the father” (Wedd 30). Fenwick insists that it is “morality”
that she will “enforce to all.” This is consistent with her faith, expressed even
in her epistolary novel, Secresy, that truth and morality are central to educa-
tion and that education is an expression of a child’s right to knowledge.
Real eighteenth- and nineteenth-century children flicker briefly before us,
and the best we can do is attend to the moments that speak to us. Lynne Val-
lone’s intimate study of the young Princess Victoria, Becoming Victoria—with
its focus on early education and training to be a queen—is telling because it
offers the most sustained, though rarefied, picture of a child’s reading, along-
side the purpose and direction of that reading. Because Victoria was born in
1819, she was exactly the right age to have been a child reader at a time when
the revolutionary developments of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries were in full force, though, obviously, before the qualities that came
to be associated as “Victorian” had come into being. In a particularly telling
episode, Vallone writes about the young Victoria in relation to Hannah More’s
1805 Hints Towards Forming the Character of a Young Princess. More’s book,
as Vallone makes explicit, had not been originally composed for Victoria, but
for a previous heiress presumptive, Princess Charlotte, who had been born in
1796. She died in 1817, giving birth to a stillborn son. Vallone quotes More’s
instruction to cultivate “a constant but imperceptible habit of turning the
mind to a love of TRUTH in all its forms and aspects” (More qtd. in Vallone
43). That honesty came to be seen as a hallmark of Victoria’s own character
and ultimately symbolic of a British national character. Truth and integrity, as
Vallone argues, are important as a focus for a particular construction of child-
hood in the period. The focus on moral responsibility in childhood stands in
contrast to the Romantic constructions which followed, with their emphasis
on naiveté, or less politely, on ignorance and the desire to keep children inno-
cent, or “childlike.”
Lack of access to real children does present a problem in my construc-
tion of The Children’s Book Business. All the day-to-day cultural markers that
would have helped understand what those real children were like have disap-
peared too, so many of the codes of behavior and references that would have
been transparently familiar to them are completely foreign to me. I can access
them only through study, research, and attention to the fleeting glimpses.
Gradually, I’ve attempted to fit the people and the places together, trying to
find their ghostly images as I follow their footsteps. That’s why I’ve been using
a New Historicist approach to the past via particular material artifacts to tell
my story.
So far, I’ve attempted to offer depth, dimension, warmth, and geographical
context to the physical space of Ben’s shop; material presence to the books;
pedagogical context to the contents of the books that were on the shelves; and
the sounds of the maternal voices of the women who wrote the books. When I
listened to the conversations of children who appeared in the books of Maria
Edgeworth or Eliza Fenwick or any of the writing women of the Kilner family
or the Taylor sisters, I found myself falling instinctively into the documentary
fi lmmaker’s trick of using voice-over narration with a still portrait. In prac-
tice, I found myself animating the faces and bodies of the young, vital children
in the pictures and making them speak the words I was hearing in stories and
manuscript material. The pictures I furnished for this game were generally
famous ones of children from the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century.
The 1792 portrait of Jane and Ann Taylor (Figure 4.8), holding hands, lean-
ing towards each other affectionately, appearing on the verge of whispering
shared secrets, was a favorite.
In Pictures of Innocence, Anne Higonnet writes that the “new vision of
the child” brought to life in the portraits of children in the eighteenth cen-
tury introduced “a set of visual signals brilliantly embedded in individual
pictures, and so basic that they could inform all future pictures” (Higonnet
9). The image of the child constructed in those pictures has come to charac-
terize a Romantic innocent, both vulnerable and in need of protection. The
visual association is accomplished, Higonnet explains, by emphasizing the
child’s body, so as “to diminish its corporeality,” that is, to make it appear
physically soft and small. She constructs five general categories to cover the
ways in which this visual trick is accomplished: children in costumes (as
in Gainsborough’s Blue Boy for instance, painted around 1770), who then
appear timeless; children with pets, who appear at one with nature; naked
children presented “as a cross between an angel and a cupid”; baby in its
mother’s arms (so a small body nestled in a big one) and children “uncon-
sciously prefiguring adult gender roles.” Joshua Reynold’s 1788 portrait of
Penelope Boothby (Figure 5.6) in oversized grown-up clothes is an example
(Higonnet 33–35).
Those Romantic innocent children are the ones we’ve come to regard as
defining what children, qua children, are. Their visual vulnerability functions
as a kind of rationale for the adult desire to control and protect. Higonnet
juxtaposes those images against images of children, especially photographs,
taken of children at the turn of the twenty-first century. In contrast to the
innocent children of the eighteenth century, Higonnet describes the direct
gaze and frankly sexualized bodies of the postmodern child as a “Knowing”
child, endowed with “psychological and physical individuality,” and with
“bodies and passions of their own” (Higonnet 12, 207).
It occurs to me, however, that the “Knowing” child described by Higon-
net has a lot in common with the kind of child that can be heard in the
late Enlightenment, though not necessarily the one that can be seen in the
portraits. The children we hear in texts ranging from Visits to the Juvenile
Library to those in Maria Edgeworth’s Rosamond stories, to the children
whose voices are heard briefly in letters, quarrelling, complaining, fighting,
learning, and refusing to learn in Fenwick, and in conversations in letters,
seem much more akin to Higonnet’s knowing child than to her Romantic
innocent child.
Mary Wollstonecraft was a strong advocate for teaching children to both
think and feel, and to develop both sense and sensibility. As early as her
Preface to The Female Reader (1789) she warns against fi lling children’s
heads with prescribed texts and so falsely protecting them from “ever learn-
ing to think.” By the time Vindication of the Rights of Woman was published
in 1792, Wollstonecraft had articulated a complete program that involved
an injunction to both “exercise the affections” and create “cultivation of the
mind, which teaches young people how to begin to think” (Wollstonecraft,
Vindication 166, 167). By early in the nineteenth century, the ideal charac-
ter type displayed both sense and sensibility. In his 2 March 1802 letter to
William Cole, William Godwin captures the sense of a knowing child as
someone possessing “an active mind and a warm heart,” that is, both sense
and sensibility.
For those of us living in the twenty-first century, sense and sensibility have
become terms associated with Jane Austen and her 1811 novel of the same title.
In the novel, you might remember, Marianne, in being physically pained by
Edward’s soulless reading of poetry, complains to her mother about hearing
“those beautiful lines which have almost driven me wild, pronounced with
such impenetrable calmness, such dreadful indifference” (17–18). What’s
arresting for a modern reader is that so much importance could be given to
the ability to read with understanding and feeling (imagine putting “ability to
read poetry with feeling” as a prerequisite on an Internet dating profi le).
The problem of how to access real eighteenth-century children who are
exploring sense and sensibility, thinking and feeling, mind and heart, alas,
Figure 5.6 Print (1789) by Thomas Park of Penelope Boothby by Joshua Reynolds.
remains impossible, although the debate between the rising new trend of
the Romantic innocent child in need of protection and the Enlightenment
thinking and feeling child can be glimpsed. Some verses in Ann and Jane
Taylor’s 1804 Original Poems, for instance, were criticized, by Sara Coleridge
(1802–52) (daughter of the great Romantic poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
for their “revolting pictures of mental depravity, bodily torture and adult sor-
row” (Gilbert 159). Ann rejects the criticism and explains, in keeping with the
Enlightenment spirit of educating for thought and feeling, that children “do
not actually live in a fairy world” and that they are not really little angels. “It
is part of their [children’s] education,” Ann continues, “for the world as it is,
that spectacles of all sorts should pass before their eyes, and that thus, while
to a great extent, shielded by their imaginative natures and light-heartedness
from what is hard and ugly and sorrowful, they should be gradually pre-
pared for dealing with such things when the inevitable time comes” (Gilbert
159–60). The “hard and ugly and sorrowful” elements in Original Poems did
not prevent the collection from achieving major success—but the Enlight-
enment sentiment eventually lost out to the Romantic sentiment concerning
what is suitable for children and what is not.
The Knowing Child: Enlightenment versus Endumbment
The book business, marked or unmarked as being “for” children, has always
depended on publishers making assumptions about what will sell and what
won’t. Because the target (child) reader is not the target (adult) purchaser,
the publisher of books for children is always second guessing the particular
social construction of children (and childhood) at any given moment. In
Fantasy and Reason: Children’s Literature in the Eighteenth Century, Geof-
frey Summerfield carefully recounts a telling exchange between William
Godwin (in his role as a publisher of children’s books) and Charles Lamb
(who had been commissioned by Godwin to produce a translation of Ulysses
suitable for the children’s book market).13 Lamb wanted to include the gory
details, the cannibalism, the poking out of the cyclops’s eye, and the vomit.
As Summerfield says, Godwin pleaded with Lamb to “tone it down.” God-
win writes:
It is strange with what different feelings an author and a bookseller looks

at the same manuscript. I know this by experience: I was an author, I am a
bookseller. The author thinks what will conduce to his honour: the bookseller
what will cause commodities to sell.
You, or some other wise man, I have heard to say, It is children that read
children’s books, when they are read, but it is parents that choose them. The
critical thought of the tradesman put itself therefore into the place of the par-
ent, and what the parent will condemn.
We live in squeamish days. (William Godwin to Charles Lamb, 11 March
1808, qtd in Kegan Paul, Godwin His Friends and Contemporaries 163–4).
Although Summerfield positions Godwin as a bit of a wimp in the exchange

and supports Lamb’s artistic integrity, it’s probably worth pointing out that
Godwin was at least attempting to attend to his assumed target market. The
“squeamish” concerns of parents who are anxious to control their children’s
access to the world are still very much with us, as I’ve explained in my intro-
duction. My voyage into The Children’s Book Business was set in motion by
exactly the kind of “squeamish” concern that Godwin discussed with Lamb.
Although I’m going to delay revealing the exact source of my squeamishness
until I’ve introduced some background about the book, Die Menschenfresserin
(published in 1996, the declining years of the twentieth century), my immedi-
ate and intuitive knowledge that it would not likely be ever published in Eng-
lish, was linked simultaneously to my desire to understand why it would never
see light of day as a children’s book in North America. The story of that book
and the real thinking and feeling children growing up through the turn of the
twenty-first century who responded to it, led me to recognize what they could
tell me about the thinking and feeling children of the turn to the nineteenth
century. I realize that I can’t make one-to-one analogies between the eigh-
teenth and the twenty-first centuries, but I think that my story of real children
reading Die Menschenfresserin offers insights into exactly the constructions of
child readers that particularly troubled Godwin.
Although histories generally work so that the events of the past are used
to interpret present conditions, it is possible to reverse the process—and use
the present to interpret the past, with illuminating results. As David Lodge
puts it in one of his academic novels, Small Words, Shakespeare’s influence on
Eliot isn’t as interesting a research subject as Eliot’s influence on Shakespeare.
Lodge has one of his characters comment rhetorically on the impossibility
of reading “Hamlet today without thinking of ‘Prufrock’” or the “speeches
of Ferdinand in The Tempest without being reminded of ‘The Fire Sermon’
section of The Waste Land’” (Lodge 52). I’m using a similar narrative strat-
egy: the influence of twenty-first-century children on the constructions of late
Enlightenment children.
Reading Die Menschenfresserin
I’d received Die Menschenfresserin as a gift from a German friend, Claas

Kazzer, a fine Ted Hughes scholar who was especially interested in both the
books Ted Hughes wrote for children and the poet’s own childhood. Because
of our shared admiration for the intellectual and emotional honesty (the
thinking and feeling) of Ted Hughes’s work for children, Claas knew the book
would resonate with me, so he sent me the hard copy in German (although
my German is minimal), along with an English translation. I found Die Men-
schenfresserin utterly compelling in the ways a horror movie is often com-
pelling, something that must be watched, and, at the same time, is both too
scary and painful to be watched. I hadn’t known either the French author,
Valérie Dayre, or the German illustrator, Wolf Erlbruch. I couldn’t figure out
my attraction/revulsion, yet I couldn’t dismiss the book and I couldn’t get it
out of my mind, so I bought the French edition, L’Ogresse en Pleurs, to see if
I could make better sense of the text. I couldn’t, but I was even more certain
that the chances of the book ever being published in English were remote—as
I was reasonably sure that publishers would not trust Anglophone children to
negotiate imaginatively the treacherous fears and desires in the stories. To test
my theory that the book would not get to English children, I tried it out (using
slide images and a voiced English translation) with children’s literature spe-
cialists in several countries (Canada, the United States, and England). Their
initial responses were identical to mine. Every adult reader was completely
attentive to the book, but shivered, flinched, and declared the book unsuitable
for children.
Die Menschenfresserin did, however, live on into the twenty-first century.
In 2001, it was made into a puppet play which toured Austria, Lichtenstein,
and Switzerland, utilizing a frame narrative in which the child focalizer was
required to provide “nerves of steel” to approach the story. When I looked
the book up again in 2010, I found that even the French and German refer-
ences recommended the book only for the fourteen plus age group—that is,
for children who were in their early teenage years.14 I know I’ve spent a long
time detailing the book’s apparent unsuitability for children, without actu-
ally explaining what’s unsuitable. The title—especially in German—offers
the clue. Die Menschenfresserin, literally, “The Child Eater,” is about a mother
who accidentally eats her own son—then cries about her loss. The French
title, L’Ogresse en Pleurs, offers a little more insight on the horrific content, by
aligning the child-eating mother with child-eating ogres of folklore and fairy
tale, though other than the witch in Hansel and Gretel, there aren’t that many
female ogres.
Familiar male ogres include the one in Tom Thumb (tricked into killing
his own daughters, instead of Tom Thumb and his brothers) and the ogre in
Jack-and-the-Beanstalk (tricked by Jack out of the goose that lays the golden
eggs). Male ogres are, as Marina Warner, explains in No Go the Bogeyman
generally dumb and can be deceived by a smart child (so Jack or Tom). Female
ogres are more treacherous and somehow sadder. Marina Warner explains the
conflicted status of the Ogress, as she embodies blurred boundaries between
giving birth and being eaten:
The cannibal motif conveys a threefold incorporation: sexual union, by

which a form of reciprocal devouring takes place, pregnancy, by which the
womb encloses the growing child, and paternity, which takes over the in-
fant after birth in one way or another. The metaphors are enchained, one to
another—sex, obliteration, food—as language strains to convey the tension
between union and separation, individuality and connection, autonomy
and possession. (Warner, “Fe, Fie, Fo, Fum” 165).
The tension between the desire to eat and the fear of being eaten as it appears
in “Hansel and Gretel” is at the psychological heart of the story: the step-
mother with nothing to eat fears that her husband’s children might eat too
much. The edible house in the forest becomes the object of a child’s oral fan-
tasy: the tempting house made of good things to eat becomes the house in
which the eater is cast as the food being eaten. Cannibalism is one of the most
universally held taboos. And as Jack Zipes tells us—with ominous accura-
cy—in Why Fairy Tales Stick, those tales tell us something we don’t like to
know about ourselves: “we eat our young, and if we don’t succeed, we confront
them with the question, to be or not to be eaten” (Zipes, Why Fairy Tales Stick
226). Zipes argues that stories of parents eating their young serve as meta-
phors for the psychological ways in which we try to internalize our children,
to transform them into us.
In the history of Anglophone literature for children, I can think of only
one story that even approaches the taboo on child-eating, Lucy Jane Clifford’s
1882 story of child-abandonment, “The New Mother”: a good mother who
reminds her children that if they are bad, she will leave them to the unloving
“new mother” with her “glass eyes and wooden tail.” The good children are
tempted into being bad by the false promises of a mysterious girl met on the
road. The children had been warned, but the temptation is too strong, so good
mother leaves and the terrifying new mother arrives. Within a hypothetical
list of social taboos, being a bad mother is high on the list. An abandoning
mother is bad enough, but, as is the case of L’Ogresse en Pleurs, the worst
mother is one who commits the double transgression of consuming the body
of the child produced from the body of the mother. When I first read L’Ogresse
en Pleurs, I did vaguely understand that at the heart of the book’s unsuitability
was how it spoke to a dark undercurrent of parent-child relations: there is a
socially approved adult desire to produce and protect perfect children held in
tension with a desire to consume those children, to take them back into us, to
make them so like us that they are us.
Because I remained so intrigued by L’Ogresse en Pleurs and the adult
responses it had generated, I eventually and, I admit, reluctantly tried it
with children, though I had to acknowledge my own fears fi rst. When other
children’s book specialists asked about my fi rst attempts to understand it,
I was often queried regarding whether I’d talked about it with children. I
hadn’t and, as an excuse, I lamely offered that it was because I had copies
of the book only in French and German. And I did feel a twinge of guilt
because the professional children’s book scholars and critics had been uni-
form in their judgment that the book wasn’t for children. My own children,
both boys, were still young-ish at the time, around nine and eleven. As a
parent, instinctively, I wanted to protect them, just as the parents in the
book, I realized, want to protect their children from the Ogress’s demands
for a child to eat.
In 1998, I summoned the “nerves of steel” needed to try the books with
children, a class of ten- and eleven-year-olds in a split grade five-six class in
an urban school in Toronto. I checked with the teacher first and knew her as
both brilliant and brave. She had once brought the brain of a calf into class so
the children could have lessons on anatomy. In 2003, I published the account
of sharing the book with children in an essay called, “Consuming Passions:
Or Why I’m Obsessed with L’Ogresse en Pleurs,” in the final issue of the British
journal Signal. Even at the time of publication, years after I’d first encoun-
tered the book and years after I’d talked about it with children, I was wor-
ried about the conflicted agenda both in the book and in my essay. There was
something in the way that we imagined ourselves in relation to children that
disturbed me, something I recognized as at the heart of the tensions between
the constructions of the Romantic innocent child and the thinking and feel-
ing Enlightenment child, as well as the knowing child. I also knew that there
was something running like an electrical current through each of these con-
structions of childhood that related to performance in some way and, signifi-
cantly, performance anxiety.
When I look back at that 2003 essay, I am surprised that even then I’d
glimpsed, but not quite grasped, the kinship between the eighteenth-century
and twenty-first-century children. By focusing in the essay on the thinking
and feeling child, I was able to counteract what Norma Clarke describes as the
“legacy” we’ve inherited from post-Romantic views of children literature: that
“instruction is opposed to amusement, morality to fun, and the ‘real’ world
to fantasy, as if those categories were guarded by impermeable boundaries”
(Clarke 91–92). In the Signal essay, I went on to suggest that the reading I was
constructing with the help of real children (with whom I could interact in real
time) would be helpful in rethinking the critical terms necessary to revise the
constructions of children in the children’s books in the late Enlightenment
years of the children’s book business. I also had the prescient good sense to
refer to Peter Hollindale’s definition of “childness” as something “composed
of the developing sense of self in interaction with the images of childhood
encountered in the world (including adult expectations, standards of behav-
iour, grants of privilege and independence, taboos, goals, and offerings of
pleasure)” (Hollindale 49).
What I didn’t know at the time of publication of the original essay was
how the pieces of this puzzle fit together. I didn’t understand that the struc-
ture of the children’s book business, like the construction of childhood, was
determined by descriptions of “childness,” including interactions with the
world, taboos, and pleasures. Increasingly, as the twenty-first century gathers
strength, shape, and character, I’m conscious of how much the thinking and
feeling child, the knowing child, imagined by eighteenth-century maternal
teachers, is the child of the future.
The ups and downs of the children’s book business are grafted onto our con-
structions of children, so it is particularly fitting that the lessons on the distinc-
tions between the performing child and the thinking child, the innocent child
and the knowing child, were taught to me by the class of very thoughtful ten-
and eleven-year-olds with whom I discussed L’Ogresse en Pleurs—despite expert
advice against the exercise. Unlike the adults with whom I shared L’Ogresse en
Pleurs, the children (about twenty-five of them) showed no sense of horror nor
shock nor fear. I’d introduced the story in exactly the same way I had done with
the expert adults. I read the translation, voicing over the images. The children
didn’t flinch. Very simply, they got down to the business of making sense of the
text. From the outset of the conversation, it was clear to me that making sense
was what the children wanted to do before anything else. While the adults with
whom I’d shared the text focused on the unspeakable evil of the Ogress hungry
for the perfect child, the children in the class focused with genuine curiosity
on the children in the story instead. Unlike adults who would likely search for
sense among the adult characters (the Ogress and the parents), the children
focused on the potential victims of the Ogress’s desires, the children, but not in
ways that suggested the story might cause them fear or anxiety. I was intrigued
by the way the children focused on the adult-child relations. As I’ll show, they
directed me to see the story as the Ogress’s problem, not as a story that was
threatening to them as child readers in any way. They read the book as a kind
of warning for children about the gross failings of adults—exactly what adult
readers conventionally don’t want children to know. Marina Warner helpfully
recognizes the conflicted status of the Ogress, recognizing the “glassy-eyed, rav-
ening and ancient hag embodies contemporary anguish about infertility and
violence towards children in the same way as fairy tales like ‘Donkeyskin’ tell
of father-daughter incest, concealed under the deep disguise of ‘Once upon a
time’” (Warner, No Go the Bogeyman 28). The children in the class seemed to
understand perfectly that the forbidden story in L’Ogresse en Pleurs was that
adults can be “fucked up”—to use the colloquial diction of the schoolyard.
That’s really the knowledge that parents want to prevent children from know-
ing, because it undermines parental authority.
In the class discussion, the children increasingly turned their attention to a
four-page sequence towards the end of the book. They talked about the image
of the Ogress, who had become thin over the course of the story. At the begin-
ning, the children noticed she had been very fat, spilling out over a two-page
spread, in what I knew in Mikhail Bakhtin’s terms as a carnivalesque gro-
tesque body of the kind typified by the fat woman in a circus freak show. In
Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin shows how she is a doubled creature. On the
positive side, she is fertile, suggestive of pregnancy, birth, and renewal, while
on the negative side, she exists beyond the boundaries of the norm, so freakish
and decaying.15
The children noticed the Ogress (Figure 5.7) was still wearing the crown
of dieffenbachia leaves she had been wearing at the beginning. The children
drew my attention to this fact. None of the adult expert readers had noticed.
Later I learned that dieffenbachia is also called “Devil’s Ivy,” that the Latin
genus is “monstera,” and that the plant can be poisonous. On the right-hand
page, the children were drawn to the picture of the pretty boy standing on a
table, playing the concertina, a squeeze-box, the sort of miniature accordion
used for street performance by an organ-grinder’s monkey or a busker. The
table is the same one depicted in the first spread, the table empty save for the
ripe pea pod, split, revealing the nestled peas within. The schoolchildren also
noticed the monkey sitting at the edge of the right-hand page looking mild
and peacefully pleased to watch this beautiful child happily amusing himself.
They were intrigued by the fact that he was in a sailor costume with a white,
broad-collared shirt of the kind popular in the later part of the nineteenth
and early part of the twentieth centuries. As Anne Higonnet had pointed out,
children in costume look “timeless”; that is they eternally appear to be playing
dress-up. The sailor costume the Ogress’s child wears is an updated version of
the dress-up suit worn by Gainsborough’s Blue Boy or John Everett Millais’s
1886 Bubbles (the painting of his grandson in a green velvet suit, blowing bub-
bles—and later used to advertise Pears soap).16
The costumed child, as Higonnet points out, is literally “clothed in signs
both of not being like an adult and not belonging to adult time,” with the
overall effect creating an impression that “the child appears to exist before
time began, before experience can begin. (Higonnet 49)” L’Ogresse en Pleurs
has the quality of an illustrated fairy tale, so child readers are able to handle
the emotional trauma as it is removed from the day-to-day reality of everyday
life. By associating the child in the picture with historical portraits of chil-
dren, the suggestion that the child is speechless and voiceless, like the other
children in the book, fi xes the child as two-dimensional, rather than three-
dimensional.
The children with whom I worked also attended to the Ogress’s desire for
a ripe child, both desirable and forbidden. The child is, after all, standing on
a table next to a small pot of dieffenbachia. As it happens, in the eighteenth
century, small children were sometimes set onto a table at a party to perform,
sing, or recite. They were the live entertainment set amidst the food.
The children in the class focused intently on the narrative structure of the
adult-child relations in the book. For instance, they noticed, that the Ogress
didn’t seem to recognize her own child, yet describes him, as he stands on
the table, in terms conventionally associated with food, with apples (the most
archetypal of forbidden fruits), to convey her pleasure in his person. The boy,
she says, has skin that is not too red: “Sa peau n’était pas trop rose.” His eyes
are like apple jelly: “de la gelée de pomme” (Dayre unpaged). Next, the chil-
dren in the class focused on the page turn, the single dieffenbachia leaf on the
left-hand side of the page and the spare comment, “Elle le croqua”; that is, she
Figure 5.7 Wolf Erlbruch’s illustration for the Ogress desiring her child in L’Ogresse en Pleurs.
ate him, or as the word “croqua” suggests, she crunched him, like an apple. For
French readers, I know that the word “croqua” would instantly raise a cluster
of related terms, the French nursery bogeys of “M et Mme Croquemitaine,”
their darkly comic surnames linked assonantly to the “croque-mort” (the
undertaker) and the “croque-monsieur” (a ham-and-cheese sandwich). On
the right-hand page, the facing page of the double spread, the monkey screams,
open-mouthed, and plays a drum roll on a tambourine or small snare-like
drum (both associated with instruments used in street performances).
The soundscape in the double-spread (Figure 5.8) is painful to listen to:
bones crunching, the concertina breathing its last, and the monkey beating
the drum/tambourine, while screaming open-mouthed. The noise, especially
the screaming, contrasts with the peaceful scene in the previous spread, as the
children noted. The open-mouthed scream of the monkey recalls the scream-
ing women traditionally pictured in the biblical scenes of the Massacre of the
Innocents, as Marina Warner explains in No Go the Bogeyman. “Rarely,” she
says, “in Western art have there been so many mouths open, cursing and then
keening” (Warner 215).
In L’Ogresse en Pleurs, however, the child consumed is the child well-loved,
a child desired, but the desire has gone horribly wrong. Nevertheless, the
desire rings true in the language of affection used between lovers, and between
parents and children. We say that someone looks “good enough to eat.” Or,
famously, in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, the wild things
with their big teeth don’t want Max to go. “We’ll eat you up, we love you so,”
they say, a phrase Sendak attributes to his Jewish relatives. In the same vein,
Marina Warner, in No Go the Bogeyman, recalls a family game in which she
repeatedly begs her mother to pretend to bake her in a cake and eat her up.
Warner tells the story in order to demonstrate that the tension between the
desire to consume and the fear of being consumed occurs routinely in play-
ful interactions between parents and the infants the love. Nursery verses also
abound with similar examples. “Baby and I / Were baked in a pie,” is one;
another is “Baby, baby, naughty baby,” which ends with “and he’ll eat you, eat
you, eat you, / Every morsel snap, snap, snap” (Opie 66, 67).
Because the children talking about L’Ogresse en Pleurs in class realized that
they had been drawn to the relationship between the Ogress and her child,
they continued to think long and hard about how to connect that parent-
child dyad with the other parent-child relations in the story. And so next they
turned to the images of the children rejected by the Ogress, the ones dismissed
for being too fat or too thin or too intellectual or too imperfect (missing an
arm) to suit the Ogress’s desire for a perfect child to eat. All the children in the
story rejected by the Ogress and protected by their parents were dressed, like
the Ogress’s own child, in costumes: as circus performers, a girl reading while
riding bareback on a horse, buskers on stilts, the harlequin from commedia
dell arte (though they didn’t know the costume). That’s when the real children
with whom I worked made the metonymic link, recognizing that the monkey,
Figure 5.8 Wolf Erlbruch’s illustration for the moment just after the Ogress eats him.
the Ogress’s child, and the other children in the story were all “performing
monkeys” of some kind.
The theme of children performing for the pleasure of their parents runs
like a dark current through the text. The Ogress is stymied in her search for
a child because all the parents in the community refuse to give up their chil-
dren to her. That’s what good parents do: they love and protect their children.
And yet, the Ogress’s child and the children who do not speak in the text, the
children protected by their parents, share features. All the children fit into
one of Higonnet’s five categories, which she recaps as “miniature adult, babe
in mother’s arms, winged tyke, kid with pet, dress-up fun” (Higonnet 36).
One rejected child is wearing a boater hat and fishing; another appears to be
what used to be called a (gasoline) “pump jockey”—he’s black and missing an
arm. Both fit into the dress-up fun category and/or miniature adult. Other
children are hidden in adult clothes and so rendered invisible to the Ogress
who appears to walk right past them, mistaking them for grown-ups. A little
girl is in dress-up with her white collar and Mary Jane shoes setting her as the
female equivalent of the Ogress’s child in his sailor suit. The fat child in the
harlequin and the child in what looks like a jester suit with a matching hat
are in costume. In Higonnet’s terms, the clothes draw attention to the child’s
body, making the child appear vulnerable. The children in the class noticed
that all the children in the book, the child victim as well as the saved children,
were performers of one kind or another. The schoolchildren also noticed that
the organ-grinder’s monkey was wearing a conical hat in the same style and
shape as a hat worn by one of the silent children saved by his parents. In the
story, when the Ogress’s child is eaten, the monkey is the only one who bears
witness. He becomes the stand-in for the lost child.
The Toronto children weren’t at all disturbed or frightened by the story;
in fact they were able to explain coherently their reasons for being able to
keep a cool, analytical distance. They recognized that children in the book
were stylized, distant, and slightly archaic. As readers, the modern children
were interested in those “other” children, but knew those children weren’t
realistic, and treated them as analogues. What they did recognize as a shared
characteristic was the sense that children are valued because of their ability
to perform (whether academically, in sport, in music, as workers, or for their
beauty). The Ogress’s child playing the concertina recalls the wonder associ-
ated with watching tiny child prodigies perform for the consumption of oth-
ers: the child Mozart, famously, or the child Yehudi Menuhin. There seems an
atavistic yearning for the perfect, perfectly talented, and attractive child. At
this intersection, the children in the twenty-first century and the children of
the late eighteenth collide. Remember that Mary Wollstonecraft warns against
performing children: “How much time is lost in teaching them to recite what
they do not understand? whilst, seated on benches, all in their best array, the
mammas listen with astonishment to the parrot-like prattle, uttered in sol-
emn cadences, with all the pomp of ignorance and folly” (Wollstonecraft,
Vindication 167). William Godwin warns in a similar vein in his 1802 letter
to William Cole, of the dangers of “exhibiting little monsters of curiosity.”
In constructing an analogous situation between the performing children in
L’Ogresse en Pleurs, and the “parrot-like prattle,” as Mary Wollstonecraft calls
the practice of children being paraded “with all the pomp of ignorance and
folly” in front of their parents, I’m drawing attention to children constructed
as performing monkeys both in the eighteenth century and in the twenty-first
to demonstrate how children are commodified.
Because the child readers of L’Ogresse en Pleurs had focused so closely on
the relationships between the monkey, the Ogress’s child, and the other chil-
dren in the book, I followed up regarding some questions and concerns that had
arisen in discussion, especially about the costumes and the link with the organ
grinder’s monkey. In the Little Slaves of the Harp, John E. Zucchi traces the rise
and fall of the child street musicians of the Georgian and Victorian periods,
most of whom were from Italy. They had been indentured, as many as ten at
a time, to Italian peasants, men known as “padrones” (a variation on fathers
or patrons). Each padrone would take a small group of children to the big cit-
ies of Europe or America—New York, Chicago, London, and Paris. While the
padrone played the hurdy-gurdy or crank-organ (or perhaps the concertina, as
does the monkey in L’Ogresse en Pleurs), the children would display or dance
with small animals: monkeys, white mice, or dogs. The children might also
play concertinas or tambourines. And then they would pass the hat, exactly
as twenty-first-century street musicians and buskers do. In L’Ogresse en Pleurs,
the children the Ogress wants to eat are addressed in a variety of synonyms
for “child”: “un marmot,” “ces loupiots,” “ce marmouset.” “Un marmot” car-
ries the meaning of “brat,” and “marmouset” is an archaic form of “marmot,”
though the notion of grotesque is sometimes included in its historical defini-
tion. I should say, however, that in modern French all those terms are simply
synonyms for “kids,” and there are no derogatory undertones. The reference to
“un marmot” interested me particularly because from the fifteenth century on,
French peasants, known as Savoyards, would come down from the mountains
to perform while playing strange instruments. They would have been accompa-
nied by a dancing marmot, a kind of groundhog, and the loose hoods worn by
the little girls who participated in those performances were called “marmottes.”
At the beginning of the story, the Ogress expresses her desire to crunch a brat,
“croquer un marmot.” And when she does actually crunch a child, her own
child, Dayre uses the same verb, “elle le croqua,” rather than, “elle le mange”;
that is, “she ate him.” The crunching of her own apple-delicious child echoes
her desire to crunch a marmot, a brat.
In Erlbruch’s final picture in the book, the Ogress sits on the shore, lumpen,
fat again, looking back towards the inside of the book and longing for her lost
child. Her forlorn posture suggests something of the kind of conflicted story
held in the child-eating narrative, something that is affirmed, says Warner,
“in the topsy-turvy social imperatives of procreation” (Warner, No Go the
Bogeyman 77). Eating children and bearing them become entwined terms.
The Ogress becomes fat, becomes thin, and grows fat again. Myths and fairy
tales also work that way, as Warner demonstrates throughout in contempo-
rary society, by dissolving the biological into the mythic. A woman with a
big-belly might be fat or pregnant, or she might do both: give birth to and eat
her own child.
As the nineteenth century unfolded, child street musicians were increas-
ingly regarded as public nuisances, somewhere between mendicants and
thieves; that is, the music was regarded as incidental to their undesirable
behaviors. Oliver Twist, first published by Charles Dickens in 1838 (his sec-
ond novel), has become the dominant portrait for thieving gangs of children
and Oliver Twist the poster child for the type. Dickens himself was a social
reformer and was connected with the “Ragged” Schools for poor children in
mid-nineteenth-century England.17
By the end of the nineteenth century, child street musicians had mostly
disappeared, leaving only the organ-grinder and his monkey. Two key pieces
of legislation got children off the streets of London: child labor laws and the
Education Act of 1870. In France, a similar act was passed in 1882 that made
it compulsory for all children to receive civic instruction. So by the late nine-
teenth century, schooling was becoming increasingly mandatory and increas-
ingly controlled by legislation. It became illegal for pre-pubescent children to
be on the street or in the factories, so the hurdy-gurdy man with his pack of
dirty animals and dirty children all but disappeared. These details may seem
remote from my argument about performing children, but they’re not as I
would like to delineate the continuity between children controlled by adults
to perform for money and children expected to perform for grades. Children
become currency in an economic/social/cultural transaction, in which their
performance, that is their value, as measured in economic terms.
The transgression in L’Ogresse en Pleurs isn’t just that the Ogress becomes
a cannibal. The book itself transgresses the first principle of children’s litera-
ture: “instruct and entertain,” a modern rendition of the eighteenth-century
marketing slogan, “instruct and delight.” The implicit ideological assumption
in the slogan is that adults have an unquestioned authority over the texts to
which children have access—and further that adults instruct children in the
paths of truth, justice, happiness, and the joy of living. The unspoken corol-
lary is that books which instruct and entertain in unconventional ways, in
ways not approved for the construction of desirable children can’t be good for
children. This is why I suspect L’Ogresse en Pleurs was universally rejected as a
children’s book by all the adults with whom I initially shared it. Although all
the specialists were adamant in their belief that the book should be kept away
from children, no one could explain exactly why. L’Ogresse en Pleurs belongs
to the genre of modern fairy tale, and none of the experts had any objec-
tion to that, especially as there are other child-eating monsters in other tales,
the witch from Hansel and Gretel being the closest example. Ultimately, the
classroom children offered the strongest hint regarding the reasons for the
book’s reception by adults as unsuitable: adults are the ones prone to treating
children as performing monkeys. That’s the unspeakable thing; the sugges-
tion that our care for children is not completely altruistic, that it is connected
instead to an imperative to measure up.
L’Ogresse en Pleurs, like Jane and Ann Taylor’s Signor Topsy-Turvy (dis-
cussed in the previous chapter), disturbs the assumption of authority of who
is on top and who is not. World turned upside-down scenarios depict other
ways normal hierarchical orders are tipped on their heads: beggars put money
into the outstretched top hats of rich men, sick men tend to doctors lying in
beds, infants rock mothers in cradles, and pigs truss men up to take to market.
L’Ogresse en Pleurs, like Signor Topsy-Turvy, trespasses against the conventional
notion that children’s books should entertain and instruct, especially if the
instruction trespasses against the adult-approved form and content of what
is being instructed. L’Ogresse en Pleurs transgresses by instructing about the
dangers of the loving adult (they can consume those they love) which seems a
disturbingly apt metaphor for a consumer culture and economy.
In “Consumerism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Cannibalism,” postmod-
ern critic Crystal Bartolovich explores the wave of interest in cannibals in
popular culture. Though she doesn’t explicitly discuss vampires in contem-
porary culture, they fall into the same category, and would include Buffy
the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) and its spin-offs, including comics, video
games, and merchandise as well as the Anne Rice Vampire Chronicles (first
published in 1976) and the “Twilight” series of novels by Stephanie Meyer
and their movie spin-offs. Bartolovich focuses on the 1989 Peter Greenaway
fi lm, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, though she also could have
included Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs (1991). In the twenty-first
century, we could also include the strange spectacle of the skinned preserved
bodies reshaped and shipped out to museums in Bodies: The Exhibition. In the
early modern period, Bartolovich argues, cannibals were constructed as the
antithesis of civilization, “the farthest extreme of savagery, to which the civil-
ity of Europe was made to stand as (superior) contrast.” On the other hand,
she points out, “contemporary cannibals are sited by Western subjects among
themselves rather than in a distant ‘other’ world” (Bartolovich 234). That’s
what happens in L’Ogresse en Pleurs. There is no indication that the Ogress
is remote from the community; she’s not a foreign ogre or witch lurking on
the fringes threatening children who stumble on her lair unexpected. She’s
not one of them. She’s one of us, and so she turns our normal world upside
down. Though there are no explicit references in L’Ogresse en Pleurs to explain
why the Ogress does not recognize her own child, especially as he seems to be
standing on her own table, appears to have been well-groomed and fed and
left in the care of the monkey, the implicit assumption is that she has done
what the other parents have done; she’s hidden him for safe-keeping, much as
the ogre in Tom Thumb attempts to protect his own children while desiring
other people’s children. What’s scary about the Ogress is that she is one of us
and in her proximity to us she turns the everyday upside down.
The compelling response I experienced with the Toronto children indi-
cated to me that I’d stumbled on the kind of cultural shift that happens on
the verge of social change. Bartolovich cites a poignant line from Antonio
Gramsci’s Selections from the Prison Notebooks: “[T]he old ways are dying and
the new cannot yet be born” (Bartolovich 234). The knowing children are the
ones waiting to be reborn after being ingested by a cannibal culture keen-
ing its losses. Jack Zipes convincingly argues, in Relentless Progress, that con-
figuring children as victims of a consumer industry deflects attention away
from media-savvy children who have grown up in a technological age and
are demonstrably able to manipulate the socio-cultural forces that attempt to
control them. My experience with the Toronto children focusing on the dan-
gers of adults who construct them as performing monkeys is a case in point:
the adults who would have forbidden access to L’Ogresse en Pleurs were the
problem. The children were able to appreciate how they were being manipu-
lated by adults. And it is here that we can see where eighteenth-century and
the twenty-first-century ideologies collide: in the distinctions between think-
ing and feeling children and the performing monkeys fed on rote instruction
and figured as Romantic innocents.
Mary Wollstonecraft, repeatedly, in Vindication and in “Education of
Daughters,” condemned rote learning, in favor, as she saw of “a cultivated
understating, and an affectionate heart” (Wollstonecraft, Vindication 95), a
sentiment echoed by Godwin in his comment about the purpose of education
being directed towards “an active mind and a warm heart.” The performing
child, mimicking words, but unable to make sense, the child condemned by
maternal teachers from Wollstonecraft onwards, as the product of bad teach-
ing, have something important to say to us about the construction of the
twenty-first-century children. It is in our dominant model of large-scale lit-
eracy assessment tests that our performance indicator world is becoming vis-
ible as a creaky relic of a Romantic past. In “Misreading Children and the Fate
of the Book,” the second essay in his Relentless Progress collection, Jack Zipes
argues that it is not consumer culture that is harmful to children, it is school
culture as implemented in fanatical state-controlled emphasis on literacy as
a measurable, quantifiable standardized commodity, designed aggressively to
discourage thought and feeling. Zipes is direct and justifiably harsh in his
criticism:
By teaching children how not to read, to inhibit their expert reading, or to

read vacuous books and diverse screens with words and images advertising
some sort of seemingly magical commodity, we have succeeded in transform-
ing children into functional literates, nonliterates and alliterates, who lack
any sense of civic responsibility and to become consumers in a society gone
amuck. (Zipes 27).
In a brilliant dark play on the eighteenth-century ideal of the “enlightenment”
of children, Zipes suggests that our current fi xation with quantifying chil-
dren’s literacy be called the “‘endumbment of children’” (Zipes 27).
Because my example from L’Ogresse en Pleurs involved encounters with real
children in Toronto, Ontario, where I live, I wanted to use a final example
of “endumbment,” as constructed by the ideological state apparatus of the
school system. As anyone who reads the headlines now (no need to read much
beyond) knows all too well, literacy is determined by scores produced by
large-scale, state-mandated assessment exercises, otherwise known as stan-
dardized tests. The problem with attempting a critique is that it is difficult
to do it in a generalized way. Only by tracking, step-by-step, the individual
elements in the system is it possible to see exactly how the “endumbment” of
children is accomplished, how literature is murdered in the context of literacy,
and how it functions as an example of the kind of mindless repetition Woll-
stonecraft warned against in the Vindication in 1792. In Canada, education
is a provincial responsibility, so Toronto children are subject to the Ontario
tests constructed by the ominously named (it has an Orwellian 1984-ish ring)
Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) , which constructs itself
as operating at arm’s length from the provincial Ministry of Education. Yet
the statistics gathered by the EQAO are obviously central to the Ministry’s
sense of itself. In the “What We Do” section of its website, the Ontario Minis-
try of Education boasts that its goals are “high levels of student achievement;
reduced gaps in student achievement; [and] high levels of public confidence in
public education.”18 It seems to me that the Ministry is saying that it’s proud of
its goal of producing performing monkeys on a grand scale.
What scared me when I began to look at the tests themselves to discover
what constituted a definition of literacy in Ontario, was that I found that lit-
eracy was the antithesis of the development of an “active mind and a warm
heart.” Although I was tempted to simply end on the general specter of inter-
national large-scale assessment exercises producing Godwin’s “little monsters
of curiosity,” I decided that a specific example, detailing real responses from
real children would serve as a more frightening example of endumbment.
Performing Monkeys and Educational Accountability
Because the large-scale literacy assessment exercises beloved by provincial

governments in Canada and state governments in the United States share
a genetic resemblance, the particular exercise under review doesn’t matter
very much. For the most part, the passages which determine children’s liter-
ary competencies are defi ned by their blandness, their neutrality, though
the EQAO claims that it “provides accurate, objective and clear information
about student achievement and the quality of publicly funded education in
Ontario.”19 My reading of the actual assessment exercises, administered to
children in the third, sixth, and tenth grades over the year, would suggest
that the claim is anything but true. And I’m also upset that in a province that
prides itself on its open, diverse democratic principles, the EQAO exercises
are mandatory. In my own research, I frequently found that when I opened
up any page of a test, I’d fi nd something that would horrify me: texts so
banal that, despite holding a PhD in English literature (so presumably moti-
vated to read just about anything), I couldn’t do more than scan; or ques-
tions that were so narrowly defi ned as to be utterly meaningless. And when
I checked some of the scoring materials provided for teachers, I frequently
found that students were rewarded for repeating the question and for what
I’d call “spin” (the repetition of a single idea in slightly altered words). In
the fi rst decade of the twenty-fi rst century, the reports of inadequacies of
factory model marking (hotel ballrooms full of teachers scoring EQAO tests
in order to earn a little extra cash) have also been fi ltering out.20 Instead of
statistics and articles, I’ve taken just one small example to demonstrate a
typical example of how literacy is measured at the beginning of the twenty-
fi rst century in Ontario.
I looked at the Grade 3 Assessment of Reading, Writing and Mathemat-
ics from the Spring 2006 EQAO exercise in Ontario. There I found that the
“Reading” text on which the children were tested was not, in fact, a literary
text of any kind. It was a poster designed to advertise a “school talent show.”
In the center of the poster was a bordered text containing information about
time, location, and an invitation to “students, teachers, family and friends.”
The poster contained little images of a drum, a guitar, and, interestingly, the
masks of tragedy and comedy. Bordering the information there were scraps of
information set in little side bubbles. One said, “Come and see your friends in
action!” Another said, “Come out and support a great cause.” A third said, “It’s
a fundraiser for new library books!” There were four words (Music, Drama,
Dance, and Gymnastics), set like spokes angled out of the central panel. The
poster had no narrative line, no emotional content, and neither feeling nor
thinking were required to interpret it at all.
In order to test literacy competence, children were asked a series of ques-
tions and scored from one to four. One question addressed the “purpose” of
the poster. The child who received the highest score answered this way: “The
purpose of the poster is so people can come to the talent show and so people
no [sic] were [sic] to go, what is in it and all sorts of thing.” The Rationale on
the “Scoring Guide” for giving this student top marks for literacy is that the
“response explains the purpose of the poster and uses specific and accurate
information from the poster to support explanation.” While I appreciate that
the child who has written this is likely to have been just eight or nine years old
in 2006, the thing that struck me was the emptiness of the response, its total
lack of affect. That child knows how to “do” school: how to provide a perfect
empty answer to an empty question. Spelling and grammar are obviously of
no interest to the markers.
In contrast to the child who received the highest score for her response
to the question about the purpose of the poster, was the child who received
the lowest score. That child answered, haltingly (a foreign child perhaps?):
“The purpose are that—she doesn’t fell [sic] well.” While I appreciate that
this answer isn’t scored either on spelling or grammar, I was caught by the fact
that the child had tried to respond by addressing the one puzzling item on the
poster page: the masks of tragedy and comedy. The child had been moved by
the sad face, the mask expressing sadness: “she doesn’t fell [feel] well.” When
I read that, I couldn’t help but feel that the child who empathized with the
emotion in the mask, who tried to make sense of the puzzling element, was
the child closest to demonstrating literate behavior. There is nothing in the
whole EQAO enterprise that allows for interaction with a response which
indicates that a child has been thinking (trying to figure out how to interpret
the masks of tragedy and comedy) and feeling (the sense of a character not
“fe[e]ling well.” It’s here, in the contrast between the child who scores well as
the “performing monkey,” the child who parrots on demand, who stands in
opposition to the child who thinks and feels. At this juncture in the history
of children’s literature, we’re teetering on the brink between the two possible
routes for the children’s book business. On one side, there is a huge market
for “diagnostic assessment tools,” such as CASI (Comprehension, Attitude,
Skills, Interest), designed to support the EQAO tests.21 On the other side, there
is the internet and the whole range of web-based texts which link children
directly to the world outside the classroom gate. As I end, I wonder which way
we’ll go: towards endumbment and the performing monkeys of CASI and the
EQAO? Or towards a new Enlightenment, and the possibility of nurturing
thinking, knowing, and feeling children? The last words go to Yale professor
David Bromwich, contributing to a forum on “Reading at Risk”:
The greatest loss that comes from the weakening influence of books is the loss
of an incitement to thinking. Can we even distinguish thinking from grasping
the fable or the consecutive argument of a book? The attention that forms the
mental element of reading is favorable to patience and patience is the condi-
tion of all thought. (Bromwich 14)
Chapter Six
In the End
On my desk, Darton’s Children’s Books in England stands within easy reach.

Darton’s story about the children’s book business, with its overarching nar-
rative on the move from the lows of Rationalist moral tales to the highs of
Romantic freedom, has served its purpose for almost a century. His valoriza-
tion of imaginative literature as the culminating achievement of the children’s
book business worked very well for a very long time. It was in accord with the
construction as an ideal type that the purity of the Romantic innocent child
could be isolated from the corruptions of the adult society. That child, how-
ever, is no longer present and is being replaced with a technologically savvy
child both willing and able to connect instantly with the world.
The digital age continues to transform both the book and the child. As
the innocent child begins to fade from view, the thinking and knowing chil-
dren imagined by Barbauld, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Edgeworth, Fenwick,
and others begins to look more interesting, and to offer potential precedents
for the kinds of children growing into an uncertain future. With luck and
care, they will, as Godwin hopes, grow up as thinking and knowing children
encouraged to have active minds and warm hearts. They will be children who
have survived the kinds of institutional endumbment that threaten to keep
them innocent and ignorant ,and will embrace a new Enlightenment: the book
business mantra “instruct and delight,” re-imagined as “think and feel.”
There are so many interesting stories to tell, including those about some
of the authors who wrote the books that lived in the house that Ben built.
Who was Elizabeth Kilner, the person behind the S. W. who wrote A Visit to
London and other books in Ben’s shop? In closing my book on the children’s
book business, I know I’ve told only one small story. In appreciation of the fact
that I owe my story to Eliza Fenwick and her story about Visits to the Juvenile
Library, my next story is about her. My ending marks my entry into her story.
Now I begin to trace her journey from the crucible of the radical London of the
181
1790s, from the deathbed of Mary Wollstonecraft to life behind the counter at
Godwin’s bookshop, to her career as a teacher in Barbados, the United States,
and Canada, and as guardian of her four orphaned grandchildren. There are
lessons to be learned and I’m eager to learn them.
Notes
Introduction
1 See, for example, Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (New York:
Columbia UP, 1983), and Stephen Greenblatt, ed., Power and Forms in the
English Renaissance (Norman: Pilgrim Books, 1982). Greenblatt is cred-
ited with first using the term. Also see H. Aram Veseer, The New Histori-
cism (New York: Routledge, 1989).
2 See Dan Hade, “Storyselling: Are Publishers Changing the Way Children
Read?” Horn Book Magazine 78.5 (Sept./Oct. 2002): 509–17.
3 See Jack Zipes, Relentless Progress: The Reconfiguration of Children’s Litera-
ture, Fairy Tales and Storytelling (New York: Routledge, 2009), especially
the second essay, “Misreading Children and the Fate of the Book.”
4 The phrase appears in a letter Godwin wrote to William Cole, dated 2
March 1802, MS. Abinger c.7, fols. 97–98. A full discussion appears in my
fifth chapter.
5 I am indebted here to Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built: A
Memoir of Childhood and Reading (London: Faber, 2002).
6 From William Wordsworth’s famous ode, “Intimations of Immortality
from Recollections of Early Childhood,” the phrase came to embody the
idea of Romantic childhood innocence.
Chapter 1
1 In A History of Longmans and Their Books 1724–1990: Longevity in Pub-

lishing, Asa Briggs refers to the firm as Longmans, in the plural, though
the archive at the University of Reading is called the Longman Group,
because the original eighteenth-century firm survived partly because of
its ability to partner with other firms, and so better manage its costs as
well as shifting market conditions. I’m retaining Briggs’s Longmans.
2 Tabart, like many of the other children’s book publishers of his age, kept
going bankrupt, and so often relocated. Besides the shop at 157 New Bond
183
184 • Notes
Street, he had other shops in the neighborhood, including ones at 165 New
Bond Street, 12 Chalfont Street, 85 Piccadilly, and 39 New Bond Street.
3 People living in rural isolation were served by traveling “packmen” or
“chapmen” who carried a variety of goods with them in the equivalent of
backpacks or rucksacks. Chapbooks were generally cheap books made out
of one single large sheet of paper, folded and cut to form small booklets.
They were often sensational stories of the kind now associated with tab-
loids. Although there were cheap books in Tabart’s shop, the target market
was in the higher income bracket.
4 Marshall takes the reference from W. Thornbury and E Walford, Old and
New London (1873) II, 490.
5 For an illustration of a skeleton suit, and the more formal, manly attire of
an older child, see Pictures of Innocence: Portraits of Children from Hogarth
to Lawrence, catalogue of an exhibition at the Holburne Museum of Art,
Bath, England (22 March to 19 June 2005), and Abbot Hall Art Gallery,
Kendal (12 July to 8 October 2005) (Holburne Museum of Art and Lake-
land Art, 2005). See especially The Lamb Children, c. 1783, by Sir Joshua
Reynolds (1723–92). The child, identified as “William (later the Prime
Minister Lord Melbourne),” is described as being “dressed in a skeleton
suit, the loose-trousered outfit inspired by the comfortable hard-wearing
clothes of sailors and labourers and adapted for the comfort and conve-
nience of lively little boys” (56).
6 The street numbers have changed since Tabart’s day. Asprey’s is at 167 New
Bond Street, though it is the same street corner.
7 John Newbery opened the shop at the Bible and Sun, 65 St. Paul’s Church-
yard, in 1745. The business continued more or less consistently through
the end of the century at that address. See Darton, Children’s Books in
England: Five Centuries of Social Life (1932), 3rd ed., rev. B. Alderson
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982) 332, for a chronology of the firm. The
Newbery Award was established in 1921 by the American Library Associa-
tion (ALA) to annually honor distinguished children’s books.
8 Among the group creating what Marcus calls a “picture-book bohemia”
in Greenwich Village “in 1942 were [Ursula] Nordstrom, Margaret Wise
Brown, Hans and Margaret Rey, Leonard Weisigard, Charlotte Zolo-
tow, Robert McCloskey, Marc Simont, Munro Leaf, Marjorie Flack, Kurt
Wiese, Esther Avrill, Mae Maessee, William R. Scott, Vernon Ives, Anne
Carol Moore and Lucy Sprague Mitchell.”
9 Ann Taylor and Jane Taylor published Original Poems for Infant Minds in
1804, with the firm of Harvey and Darton of Gracechurch Street. Ann’s “My
Mother” was the hit poem from that collection. The sequel, Rhymes for the
Nursery, containing Jane’s hit single, “The Star,” was published in 1806.
10 For a full discussion on “crossover” literature, see Beckett’s Crossover Fic-
tion: Global and Historical Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2009).
Notes • 185
11 At the turn of the nineteenth century, discussions about lower-class chil-
dren really focused only on the possibility of educating them at all. There
was no sense that they would grow up and inhabit what we might now call
positions of leadership.
12 See, for example, Constance Bumgarner Gee, “Spirit, Mind and Body: Art
Education and Redeemer,” Handbook of Research and Policy in Art Educa-
tion, ed. Elliot W. Eisner and Michael D. Day (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erl-
baum Associates, 2004) 118. The discussion centers on the way the Baby
Einstein franchise (owned by the Disney Corporation) preys on popular
views that early stimulation equals development of a future Einstein, or
Mozart, or equivalent.
13 See Jill Shefrin, “Neatly Dissected for the Instruction of Young Ladies and
Gentlemen in the Knowledge of Geography: John Spilsbury and Early Dis-
sected Puzzles” (Los Angeles: Cotsen Occasional Press, 1999); and Megan
Norica, “Puzzling Empire: Early Puzzles and Dissected Maps as Imperial
Heuristics,” Children’s Literature 37 (2009): 1–32.
14 The curriculum being developed in what were called “Dissenting Acad-
emies” (academic institutions that were founded in the eighteenth
century by non-Anglicans, who were barred by law from entering the
Church of England institutions such as Oxford and Cambridge) is the
important feature here. As many of the authors who were writing for the
new children’s book market in the eighteenth century were products of
these Academies, the new attention to modern languages, history, and
geography is significant.
15 Sendak’s Nutshell Library (New York: HarperCollins, 1962) con-
sists of four miniature books (Chicken Soup with Rice, Alligators All
Around, One Was Johnny, Pierre) neatly tucked into a cardboard box
bookcase.
16 The first reference appears in his introductory essay on Fenwick’s The Life
of the Famous Dog Carlo, the second in his introductory essay on Mary and
Her Cat. Both essays are on the Hockliffe Project website, which includes
digitized page images of several works by Fenwick, 26 May 2007 <http://
www.cts.dmu.ac.uk>.
17 or a larger discussion on the shift from sacred to commercial reproduc-
tion of books, Elizabeth Eisenstein directs readers to Rudolf Hirsch,
Printing, Selling and Reading 1450–1550 (Weisbaden, 1967, Rev. ed.
1974).
18 James Tierney, in “Book Advertisements in Mid-18th-Century Newspa-
pers: The Example of Robert Dodsley,” A Genius of Letters: Booksellers and
Bookselling from the 16th to the 20th Century, ed. Robin Myers and Michael
Harris (Winchester: St. Paul’s Bibliographies, 1995), cites his source as
Michael Harris, London Newspapers in the Age of Walpole (Teaneck: Fair-
leigh Dickinson UP, 1987) 190.
186 • Notes
Chapter 2
1 In “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” Andersen’s toy hero is pushed out of the
nursery window and launched into the wide world. He lands eventually
in a paper boat, from there goes to the inside of a fish, and ultimately to
the house in which he started life. But the story ends with his tragic death,
melting in a fire. Hans Christian Andersen, Hans Christian Andersen: The
Complete Fairy Tales and Stories, trans. Erick Christian Haugaard (New
York: Anchor, Doubleday, 1983) 112–16.
2 Besides “The Natural History of a Textbook,” Publishing History 47 (2000):
5–30, John Issitt has produced a monograph on one of the Goldsmith
“brand” writers, Jeremiah Joyce. See John Issitt, Jeremiah Joyce: Radical,
Dissenter, and Writer (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).
3 References are from the 2009 catalogue published by Oxford Children’s
Books (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009).
4 The Religious Tract Society, founded in 1799, was a prolific producer and
supplier of evangelical reading material for children, though such stories
had been in circulation earlier. Hannah More (1745–1833) and her sisters
were producing Cheap Repository Tracts at the rate of three a month in
the late eighteenth century.
5 As David Buckingham points out in Beyond Technology, the “informa-
tion book” market is gradually being subsumed into the “educational
software” industry. He points out that Dorling Kindersley crippled itself
fi nancially when it placed the equivalent of a losing bet on a Star Wars
series. The company was taken over by Pearson. The other leading mul-
tinational educational software companies in the UK, he says, are TLC
(which used to be The Learning Company), Vivendi, and Disney (Buck-
ingham 125).
6 William Pitt, the Younger (1759–1806) was a British politician. The ref-
erence is to his advocacy for the banning of the slave trade—eventually
enacted in 1807.
7 The reference from Charles Lamb is from The Letters of Charles and Mary
Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas (1935) 1: 282. The anonymous reference is from Wil-
liam Axon, “Sir Richard Phillips,” in Stray Chapters in Archaeology (Hey-
wood 1888) 249.
8 William Godwin to Mary Jane Clairmont. 9 October 1801. MS. Abiniger
c. 42, fols. 1–2. The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.
9 The letter, a fragment, is in the second box of Fenwick material at the New
York Historical Society.
10 From the “People and History page” of the Scholastic website (26 Jan.
2008) <http://www.scholastic.com/aboutscholastic/people/index.html>.
11 There are three editions of From Instruction to Delight, and Patricia
Demers is very conscious of the ideological shifts since she published the
fi rst edition, edited with Gordon Moyles in 1982, to the second 2004 edi-
Notes • 187
tion, and to the third (the one I use) published in 2008. As more work by
women, especially mothers, has been recovered by scholars, Demers was
able to include it in later editions. In so doing, she was able to reclaim
women writing for children in the eighteenth century from the taint of
the claim that they were responsible for boring, didactic material.
12 See The Letters of Charles to Which are Added Thos of His Sister Mary Lamb,
Vol. 1. Ed. E. V. Lucas. London: Methuen, 1935.
13 Increasingly, rather than demonstrating the “bad” inf luence of Enlight-
enment women writing for children, it has been used to demonstrate
how a chance remark can have a profound, lasting negative inf luence.
Several critics have written about the contexts of the letter—and the
way in which it was used to undermine the value of women, including
Anna Barbauld, who had been admired by both Coleridge and Lamb.
See, for instance, Norma Clarke, “‘The Cursed Barbauld Crew’: Women
Writers and Writing for Children in the Late Eighteenth Century,”
Opening the Nursery Door: Reading, Writing and Childhood 1600–1900,
ed. Mary Hilton Morag Styles and Victor Watson (London: Routledge,
1997) 91–103; William McCarthy, Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the
Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2008) 445–47; and Tess
Cosslett, Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction (Aldershot: Ash-
gate, 2006).
14 In The New Mother, two little girls are enticed into being bad, and when
they do so, their good mother keeps her word, leaves them, and sends the
“new mother” with “glass eyes and a wooden tail” in her place.
Chapter 3
1 As it happens, it appears that Eliza Fenwick adapted her blockhead verse

from a 1797 children’s book by Althea Fanshawe, Easter Holidays; or
Domestic Conversations, designed for the Instruction, and it is hoped, for the
Amusement of Young People, in which there is a little warning fable about
a dog. The verse was reprinted in the Monthly Review of June 1798:
Had Rover own’d the pow’r of speech

This useful lesson he might teach;
That nature’s gifts, if you employ,
All pleasures you may free enjoy
Whilst self-conceit, and sullen pride,
Sense unexerted, misapply’d
Insure neglect, contempt and hate,
And the unpity’d puppy’s fate!
For ah! you’ll find it to your cost
Age can’t regains what Youth has lost. (Monthly Review, June 1798 223)
188 • Notes
The Monthly Review was published by Tabart, and it is likely that Eliza
Fenwick wrote for it.
2 William Godwin to William Cole. 2 March 1802. MS. Abinger c. 7, fols.
97–98. The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.
3 The belief that literacy was next to godliness had strong roots in the his-
tory of teaching children to learn to read English. In fact The New Eng-
land Primer (first published around 1689) was likely the most popular and
widely used instructional text for teaching reading in the early modern
period. In the “Lessons for Children” section, the admonition to learn
follows immediately after the admonition to love, fear, and serve God—or
face the consequences:
Love your School

Mind your Book
Strive to Learn
Be Not a Dunce
(New England Primer, reprinted in Norton Anthology of Children’s Lit-
erature 93)
4 The remark occurs in the long 2 March 1802 letter from William God-
win to William Cole. MS. Abinger c. 7, fols. 97–98. Because the letter is a
response to a question about the education of girls, there are many useful
and relevant passages in it. A full discussion of the letter is in chapter 5.
5 The “movable-head books” would have consisted of a paper-doll head
which could be fitted against costumes and hats to tell a story. The Osborne
Collection holds, for example, The History of Little Fanny (London: S. and
J. Fuller, 1810). This is supposed to be the first commercial version of the
genre.
6 Mike Kaye, “The Tools of the Abolitionists,” from the British History in-
depth site, updated 5 Nov. 2009, retrieved 15 Nov. 2009 <http://www.bbc.
co.uk/history/british/abolition/abolition_tools_gallery_07.shtml>.
7 The other very early collection is by Ann Taylor and Jane Taylor, Original
Poems for Infant Minds (Darton and Harvey 1804).
8 Darton includes opposition to slavery as one of several subjects to “occur
with some frequency” in the didactic moral tales for children. Opposition
to cruelty to animals was another (Darton 156).
9 Mrs. Barbauld’s secular Early Lessons had been in print for a generation or
so, but the connection between learning to read and learning to be Chris-
tian was deeply embedded in teaching children to read English.
10 Although Fenwick calls the books The Story of Mary and Her Cat, the title
varied over time. Moon cites the Tabart 1804 edition as Mary and Her Cat,
though the title page for the versions found online vary. The Hockliffe Proj-
ect book data lists Mary and Her Cat for an 1808 version published by Tabart.
The Hockliffe Project lists two versions published by Darton and gives the
Notes • 189
dates as c. 1830. Both are called The Story of Little Mary and Her Cat. The
book seems to have been popular enough to have been taken over by Dar-
ton and to have survived for several decades in multiple editions. Matthew
Grenby explains in his Hockliffe notes that “[t]he title-page of Tabart’s first
edition of Mary and her Cat is dated 1804, but the cover actually bears the
date 1805. It is probable that the book was issued towards the end of 1804,
and that the 1805 date was printed to make the book seem new for a few
months longer. Even by the 1808 edition in the Hockliffe Collection, the
1804 date remains on the title-page.” 24 June 2009 <http://www.cts.dmu.
ac.uk/AnaServer?hockliffe+46577+hoccview.anv>. According to Marjorie
Moon, Mary and Her Cat had a long life in several British editions. The title
was taken over by William Darton in 1814, and, as Moon says, “frequently
reprinted” several times, “up to at least c. 1855” (Moon 38). An American
edition was published by Jacob Johnson of Philadelphia in 1806.
11 See Peter Traves, “Reading: The Entitlement to Be Properly Literate,” New
Readings: Contributions to an Understanding of Literacy, ed. Keith Kimber-
ley, Margaret Meek, and Jane Miller (London: A & C Black, 1992) 77–85.
The classic critique of the “look say” method of reading instruction was
published originally in 1955, and is in Rudolf Flesch’s Why Johnny Can’t
Read: And What You Can Do About It (New York: Harper, 1986). It was
the impetus for what became known as the “back-to-basics” movement,
which promoted a return to “phonics” instruction.
12 In Original Stories Mary Wollstonecraft actually begins by invoking Sarah
Trimmer. The second chapter of Wollstonecraft’s book begins: “After break-
fast, Mrs. Mason gave the children Mrs. Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories; and
the subject still turned on animals, and the wanton cruelty of those who
treated them improperly” (Wollstonecraft, Original Stories 11).
13 In eighteenth-century England, “private” education meant education at
home and “public” meant education at a school. All schools were fee-
paying. Compulsory, state-sponsored schooling for children arrived in
England only after the Education Act of 1870. In North America, “public
school” came to mean “state-sponsored” and “private” came to mean “fee-
paying.” Children educated at home are described as “home-schooled.”
14 The other intelligences identified by Gardner, each speaking to a separate
cluster of attributes necessary for functioning in the world, include “musi-
cal intelligence,” “logical intelligence,” “linguistic intelligence,” “spatial
intelligence,” “interpersonal intelligence,” and “intrapersonal intelli-
gence” (Gardner 6–18).
Chapter 4
1 Moon writes that a notice, a kind of disclaimer, appeared “in Bent’s

Monthly Literary Advertiser, saying that any of her books “not printed
190 • Notes
for her Bookseller, J. Johnson, in St Paul’s Churchyard, is spurious.” The
books Moon cites that were listed in the 1807 catalogue were well-known:
Frank; Harry and Lucy; The Little Dog Trusty, the Orange Man, and the
Cherry Orchard, and Rosamund (Moon 144).
2 See, for example, Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972); Julia Briggs, “‘Delightful Task!’: Women,
Children and Reading in the Mid-Eighteenth Century,” Culturing the
Child: 1640–1914, ed. Donelle Ruwe (Lanham: Scarecrow, 2005) 67–82;
Mary Hilton, Women and the Shaping of the Nation’s Young: Education and
Public Doctrine in Britain 1750–1850 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); William
McCarthy, Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins UP, 2008); Mitzi Myers, “Impeccable Governesses, Rational
Dames, and Moral Mothers: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Female Tradition
in Georgian Children’s Books,” Children’s Literature 14 (1986): 31–59; and
Lynne Vallone, Becoming Victoria (New Hven: Yale UP, 2001).
3 The OED says that “black silk” stockings were the ones habitually worn
for formal occasions by the upper classes. Fashionable people wore black
or white expensive, fine silk stockings while poor people made do with
coarse blue worsted.
4 Elizabeth Eger had written eloquently about the portrait in an earlier
essay, “Representing Culture: The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain
(1799),” Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700–1830, ed. Elizabeth
Eger, Charlotte Grant, Clíona Ó’Gallchoir, and Penny Warburton (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge UP) 75–103.
5 The image seems to be the same one (though reversed) that was on a
plaque made by Josiah Wedgwood. The date given by Eger and Peltz in
Brilliant Women for the plaque is 1775–76 (Eger and Peltz 66).
6 Eger and Peltz give the original source as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The
Collected Letters, ed. L. Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford 1756–71) III: 459; and Wil-
liam Hazlitt, “Of Great and Little Things” (1821), in The Complete Words,
ed. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London 1931–34) VIII: 236.
7 In “Impeccable Governesses, Rational Dames, and Moral Mothers: Mary
Wollstonecraft and the Female Tradition in Georgian Children’s Books,”
Mitzi Myers is one of the first critics to suggest a possible alternative to
the negative “didactic.” Children’s Literature 14 (1986): 31–59. “Mentoria”
both picks up the Georgian term as used by Ann Murry in her 1778 book,
but presents the positive associations with teaching by linking it to the
more apparently honorable masculine form, “mentor.”
8 The embedded quotation appears in the original as it is here.
9 For a modern historical account of Macaulay, see Bridget Hill, The Repub-
lican Virago. The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1992).
10 The project had apparently been initiated by Maria’s father, Richard Lovell
Edgeworth (1744–1817), an Anglo-Irish educational theorist and author.
Notes • 191
He was, incidentally, just a year younger than Anna Barbauld. Richard
Edgeworth was also the father of a total of twenty-two children, by four
wives. Maria was the second child of his first wife. As the family increased,
she participated extensively in the raising, educating, and observing of
those children. She collaborated with her father and, with his encour-
agement, began to publish independently. One of her early publications
was, in fact, called Letters to Literary Ladies (1795). In the 22 July 1804
letter to Barbauld, Maria Edgeworth explains that her father thinks that
such a publication “would succeed.” She explains that all papers would
be accepted and that each paper would “be signed by the initial of the
author’s name,” which, although not an unknown practice at the time,
was not typical (Le Breton 84).
11 The engraving (catalogued as D36046) appears in the Maria Edgeworth
box in the National Portrait Gallery. As the National Portrait Gallery
has strict rules with regard to identity and provenance, there is no way of
determining that it is Maria Edgeworth—only that it is fi led with other
pictures of her. I’ve selected this one because she is resting against a stack
of book and she’s smiling. Although Maria Edgeworth was supposed to
have been very tiny, almost childlike in life, this image depicts a mischie-
vous, happy woman, and that seemed to me close to the way she comes
across in the her writing.
12 Jill Ker Conway writes eloquently in True North: A Memoir (New York:
Knopf, 1994) about the historical moment in the mid-1970s when the
debates about feminist studies in the academy were in progress. Conway
discusses the debate between those who wanted a separate women’s studies
department and those who feared it would ghettoize women and so exac-
erbate exclusion from existing institutional structures. In the mid-1970s,
Conway, a historian, was the first female vice-president of the University
of Toronto, where she worked with another early feminist historian, Nata-
lie Zemon Davis. Conway later became the first female president of Smith
College in Massachusetts (1975–85).
13 Ms. magazine was founded in 1971 by Gloria Steinem and Letty Cottin
Pogrebin. Virago Press, a feminist press, was founded in 1973 by Carmen
Callil, Rosie Boycott, and Marsha Rowe.
14 See also Anne Stott, Hannah More: The First Victorian (Oxford: Oxford
UP, 2003). The reference to the “First Victorian” alludes obliquely to the
conduct book Hannah More addressed to the young Princess Charlotte
(1796–1817), Hints Towards Forming the Character of a Young Princess, 2
vols. (London: T. Cadell and W. David, 1805). Princess Charlotte died a
few hours after giving birth to a stillborn son (who would have been heir
to the throne). The book was owned by Princess Victoria. Lynne Vallone
argues that the recommendations in More’s book are “remarkably in tune
with the training Victoria received and the girl she became” (Vallone,
Becoming Victoria 41).
192 • Notes
15 Locke’s line in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, in section 94, is that
the teacher’s role is to “settle in his Pupil good habits, and the Principles of
Vertue and Wisdom” (Locke 156).
16 Sex and the City was an HBO television series that ran for six seasons
(1998–2004). It was based on columns Candace Bushnell wrote for the
New York Observer in 1994. A collection of columns appeared as a book in
1997.
17 Wollstonecraft had not been married to Fanny’s father, Gilbert Imlay,
though that fact wasn’t explicit, so when Wollstonecraft married William
Godwin, there was something of a scandal.
18 In a letter to Mary Hays dated 4 and 5 July 1800 about her status with John,
Eliza Fenwick says: “I am determined, Mary, if it be possible, to consider
myself & my children totally separated from his bad or good fortunes.”
19 Payne had actually given Johnson the manuscript for The Rights of Man,
and it was scheduled for publication in February of 1791, but the threats
were so extensive that the rest of the text was published by J. S. Jordon.
20 The new curriculum was a radical departure from the classical curriculum
which had consisted of the “trivium” (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and
the “quadrivium” (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy). That
curriculum had come out of the classical Greek and Roman traditions and
was adapted in the late medieval period as the basis of higher education.
21 The letter survives in Joseph Johnson’s “Letter Book” 1795–1810. Letter
books contained copies of the business correspondence of a publisher.
Some letters are in Johnson’s own hand; others were made by clerks. There
are about 240 letters in the bound collection, including letters to Maria
Edgeworth and to her father, as well as to various publishers. The bound
volume is in the Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, New
York Public Library, New York, NY.
22 In the introduction to Maurice, Claire Tomalin suggests that the name was
an allusion to the Petrarchan poems her father wrote for her mother—as
Laura is the Latin version of Margaret (27).
23 Eliza Fenwick to Mrs. Moffatt. 22 March 1831. New-York Historical Soci-
ety, Fenwick boxes, letter 5.
24 See The Dartons : An Annotated Check-list of Children’s Books Issued by Two
Publishing Houses, 1787–1876, Lawrence Darton with editorial assistance
and a preface by Brian Alderson (London: British Library; New Castle,
DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2004).
25 Although Moon suggests that the “ur-text” for Signor Topsy-Turvy is Riley
in the bibliographic entry, there is an “erratum” note at the beginning of
her book that corrects to Rylands. My reading of that volume in the British
Library accords with that suggestion.
26 The history of the magic lantern probably begins with the “camera
obscura,” though develops with the introduction of optics by Christian
Huygens (1529–1695), and then the telescope by Robert Hooke.
Notes • 193
Chapter 5
1 Chomondeley Family is an example of the portrait of a “polite” fam-

ily, using the eighteenth-century form. I’ve not reproduced the entire
picture, the family portrait celebrates virtues of intellectual and physi-
cal pursuits. Although the 1732 date of the portrait puts it about fifty
years prior to the earliest dates of my study, the boys playing with books
speaks to my general discussion about real children and their books, so
I’ve included it.
2 See for instance Child of the Enlightenment: Revolutionary Europe Reflected
in a Boyhood Diary, ed. Arianne Baggerman and Rudolf Dekker, trans.
Diane Webb (Leiden: Brill, 2009).
3 Besides Ann and Jane Taylor, Original Poems was listed as having been
composed by “other young persons.” Those other persons included Ade-
laide O’Keeffe (1776–1865) and Isaac Taylor (Ann and Jane’s brother).
4 The song was created as part of an advertising campaign for Coca-Cola
in 1971. Collaborators on its composition include Bill Backer, Billy Davis,
Roger Cook, and Roger Greenaway.
5 Barney and Friends, a television program for young children, was created
by Sheryl Leach. It debuted in 1992 on PBS. The parody is one my own
sons gleefully used to sing when they were in the primary grades of ele-
mentary school in the mid- to late 1990s.
6 Several attempts at finding full texts on the internet turned up only partial
texts—which seems to demonstrate how far the poem that was once so
popular has gone out of fashion.
7 The letter excerpts are taken from the Abinger Collection in The Bodleian
Library, University of Oxford. The group identified as MS. Abinger c. 42 con-
tains eighty-nine letters between Mary Jane Godwin and William Godwin.
8 Probably Little Tales for the Nursery, by Ellenor Fenn, published under her
pseudonym, “Solomon Lovechild.” The copy in the Osborne Collection is
an 1848 edition published in London by Dean and Son.
9 The settings are John Watlen, My Mother (London: Printed for the Com-
poser, c. 1805); Joseph Dale, My Mother (London [1805]); Miss L. Mime,
My Mother, a song taken from Original Poems for Infant Minds set to Music
with an accompaniment for the harp or piano forte by Miss. L-H of Liver-
pool (Liverpool: Hime & Son [1805]); R. M. Ballantyne, [An adaptation of
the poem by Ann Taylor, with a prose version and two musical settings],
with plates (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1857).
10 This is another of the group of eighty-nine letters between William Godwin
and Mary Jane Godwin in the MS. Abinger c. 42 collection at The Bodleian
Library, University of Oxford. This letter is MS. Abinger c. 42, fol. 5.
11 John Fenwick is regarded as William Godwin’s first biographer. His essay
on Godwin was published in Public Characters of 1799–1800 (London:
Richard Phillips, 1799) 368–85.
194 • Notes
12 Letters from Eliza Fenwick and her grand-daughter, Elizabeth Rutherford,
to the Moffatt family of New York. New York Historical Society. There are
three boxes of letters and photographs there, including a box containing
the manuscript letters used by Annie Wedd for her published collection
of letters from Eliza Fenwick to Mary Hays. The collection is called the
“Fenwick Family Papers,” and material is used courtesy of The New York
Historical Society.
13 One of Godwin’s most inspired commissions for Charles Lamb was a sug-
gestion to adapt Shakespeare’s plays as a series of prose “tales” for chil-
dren. The result, Tales from Shakespeare, first published in 1807, proved
to be an enduring success from Godwin’s tenure as a proprietor of his
Juvenile Library.
14 The puppet theater performance of Die Menschenfresserin was directed
by Susanne Olbrich. Internationales Theaterfestival Puppen Spiel Leipzig,
10 Nov. 2001. The internet reference to the book’s suitability for children
fourteen plus was accessed 30 Jan. 2010 <http://childrenslibrary.org/serv-
let/WhiteRavens?searchText=val%C3%A9rie>.
15 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cam-
bridge: MIT P, 1968.
16 Thomas J. Barratt saw Millais’s painting of his grandson, and bought it, as
well as the rights to use it in advertising.
17 Prior to the Education Act of 1870, which made state schooling compul-
sory for children, there were ad hoc attempts at educating children, includ-
ing what were called “Ragged Schools.” Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol
was prompted by a visit to a “Ragged School” in 1843.
18 <http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/about/>. The “What We Do” page of the
website was accessed on 19 Mar. 2010.
19 <http://www.eqao.com/AboutEQAO/GeneralQuestions.aspx?Lang=E>.
The most recent “mission statement” was accessed on 10 Jan. 2010.
20 See Carlo Ricci, “Breaking the Silence,” accessed 30 Jan. 2010 <http://
www.headspaceproject.ca/a_breakingthesilence.html>. Ricci has written
extensively on the dubious marking of large-scale assessment tests.
21 In Ontario, many school boards mandate the use of CASI (Comprehen-
sion, Attitude, Strategies, Interest), a series of “diagnostic assessment
tools” designed to prepare children for the EQAO tests. These “assessment
tools” are compulsory in some school boards, and the ancillary materials
(workbooks and the like) are required.
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Index
Adams, Thomas R. and Nicolas Barker, Beckett, Sandra, 22, 184, 195
xiv, xvii, 38–40, 47, 54, 59, 63–64, Bible, 76, 84
195 Blake, William, xv, xix, 19, 62, 96, 122–23
adaptation, 146, 149, 197 Bluestocking women, 98, 100–102, 104, 121
advertisement, xiii, 6, 8–10, 14, 23, 27–31, Bodleian Library, xviii, 143, 186, 188,
60–61, 64–65, 82, 92, 133, 176, 193, 197
194; Baby Einstein, 31; derived book business, 15, 30, 58, 61, 65, 120, 143,
from avertissement, 29; newspa- 152, 162
pers, 27, 30–31; puffing, 1, 29–30, Book of Games, The, 48, 89–90, 92
64, 199 Book of Trades, The, 42, 48, 85–86, 195
Aikin, John, 62, 118–19 booksellers, 1, 8, 15, 22, 24, 29, 35, 57, 66,
Aikin, Lucy, 49–51, 73, 131, 195; Poetry 117, 120, 162, 185, 199
for Children, xiv, 49, 73, 131, 195 bookshop, 1, 6, 8, 10, 13, 18–19, 33, 35,
Alderson, Brian and Felix de Marez 42, 92, 145
Oyens, 5, 15–16, 26, 121, 148, 195, Boothby, Penelope, xv, xviii, 160–61
196 Borges, Jorge Louis, 49, 195
American Revolution, The, 3, 16, 117 Borrow, George, 54–55, 195; Lavengro,
amusement, xiv, 42–43, 47–48, 60–61, 91, 54–55, 195
144, 154, 166. See also entertain- Bourdieu, Pierre, 31–32, 100, 120, 146,
ment; instruction 148–49, 195
Andersen, Hans Christian, 39, 186, 195 Braithwaite, Helen, 15, 117, 119–20, 195
animals, treatment of, 77, 84, 88–89, 100, Brice Heath, Shirley, 83, 195
122, 188–89 Briggs, Asa, 5, 8, 61, 82, 183, 195
Arizpe, Evelyn, 83, 195 Briggs, Julia, 82, 97, 190, 195
Brilliant Women Exhibition, The. See
backlist, 40, 42, 47, 54, 58, 76. See also Eger, Elizabeth and Peltz, Lucy
catalogue of books British Library, xvii, xix, 148, 154
Baggerman, Arianne, 193, 195 Bromwich, David, 179, 195
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 136, 167, 194–95 Buckingham, David, 92, 195
Ballantyne, R. M., 149, 193, 195 Butler, Marilyn, 22, 102, 120, 190, 196,
Barbados, 71, 77, 114, 151, 157, 182 200
Barbauld, Anna Letitia, xv, xvii, 2, 62,
72, 95–96, 98–103, 107–12, 115, Canada, 3, 71, 151, 164, 177, 182; Niagara,
118–19, 121, 131, 137, 190–91, 57, 71, 151, 157
195–96, 198 cannibalism, 162, 165, 174–75, 195, 200
Barker, Nicolas. See Adams, Thomas R. Carter, Elizabeth, 99
and Barker, Nicolas Cashell, Lord Mount (Stephen Moore),
Bartolovich, Crystal, 175–76, 195 97, 126–27
201
202 • Index
Cashell, Margaret Mount, 97, 125–28 Enlightenment; twenty-first-
catalogue of books, xiv, 28, 30, 40–44, century, 160, 166, 176
46, 60, 119, 186, 190; subjects. See children’s book business, 2, 4–7, 19, 22,
children’s literature, subjects 26, 28, 42, 54–55, 61, 64, 68, 96,
Causley, Charles, xviii, 10, 196, 198; Song 140, 142–43, 166–67, 181; market,
of the Shapes, xiii, 10–11, 196 3, 16, 22, 55, 76, 131, 145, 162,
Chambers, Aidan, 82, 196 185; production costs, 56–58, 183;
childness, 166, 197 profits, 8, 29, 31, 56, 58, 76, 120,
child-rearing manuals, 102 133
children: and abolitionism, 71–73; as children’s books, survival of, 37, 39–40,
blockheads, 67–70, 102, 156; con- 59, 61, 63–64
structions of childhood, 3–4, 6, children’s literature, 29, 47, 49, 60–62, 97,
8, 22, 150, 159, 162, 166–67, 199; 100, 125, 174; canon of, 64, 133;
educational materials for (see fiction, 47–48, 61, 153; “Golden
also literacy), 14, 23, 25, 27, 29, Age,” 5, 61; history of, 70, 179;
31, 42, 55, 57, 76–77, 81–84, 121, imaginative ( Romantic), 40, 42,
154; educational materials for, 60–62, 128, 181; non-fiction,
hornbook, 83–84; educational 47–48; poetry, 42, 48–49, 73,
materials for, primers, 59, 76, 84, 82–83, 130–32, 141–42, 144, 146,
121, 145; educational materi- 148–50, 161–62, 184, 187, 193;
als for, textbooks, xxiii, 49, 51, religion, 42–48, 76–77, 110, 186,
54–55, 119, 186, 197; education 188; subjects, 11, 40, 42, 48, 51,
of, 4, 61, 68, 194; Enlightenment, 82, 132, 188
3–6, 16, 22, 59, 63, 66–68, 70, Cholmondeley family, xv, 139–40
92, 141, 146, 151, 162–63, 166, Clairmont, Charles, 143–44, 146, 150–51
176, 178–79, 181; Enlightenment Clairmont, Claire (Mary Jane), 13, 129,
citizens, 3, 106; games for, 42, 143
89–92, 121; games for. See also Clairmont, Mary Jane (Godwin), xviii,
Book of Games, The; ignorance, 13, 55, 68, 129, 142–44, 151, 186,
73–74; knowing, 3–4, 22, 70, 104, 193, 197
141, 160, 162, 166–67, 176, 181; Clarke, Norma, 2, 62, 104, 166, 187, 196
literate, 80, 86; and marketing, Clifford, Lucy Jane, 62
28–29; modern, 66, 88, 172; as Close, Anne, 196
performing monkeys, 3, 167, Cole, William, xviii, 47, 144, 146, 160,
172–76, 179; poor, 71, 76, 84–85, 173, 183, 188, 197
111, 174, 185; postmodern, 3, Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 59, 62, 100–
160; as pupils and students, 4, 31, 101, 109, 118, 162, 187, 190
40, 50, 57, 85, 111, 125, 127, 130, consumer goods and culture (see also
145–46, 150, 178, 192; as read- shops), 1–2, 10–11, 13–14, 22–25,
ers, 49, 133, 142, 150, 158, 163, 30–33, 35, 42, 65, 115, 175–76,
167–68, 173; real, 69, 88, 136–37, 184, 200; shopwindows, 8, 10–11,
139, 141, 144, 156, 158–59, 163, 14, 24–25, 28, 35, 39
166, 170, 177, 193; Romantic, contemporary children’s books, captions,
3–5, 8, 22, 28–29, 59, 63, 66, 89, 50–51
150, 159–60, 162, 166–67, 181; Cosslett, Tess, 62, 187
as slaves, 71; street musicians, Craig, William Marshall, xiii, 9–10
173–74; teaching to read, 82, 176, cultural capital, 32, 100, 120, 146, 148–49
188; teaching to read. See also cursed Barbauld crew. See Lamb, Charles,
literacy; as thinking and feeling, “cursed Barbauld crew”
63, 66, 162, 166–67; as thinking
and feeling. See also children, Darnton, Robert, xiv, xvii, 38, 196
Enlightenment; as thinking Darton, F.J. Harvey, 5, 28, 49, 59–62, 70,
and knowing, xxiii, 3–6, 22, 67, 95, 98, 110, 141, 184, 188, 196;
96, 141, 151, 181; as thinking Children’s Books in England, 4, 28,
and knowing. See also children, 49, 59, 61, 70, 95, 181, 184, 196
Index • 203
Darton, Lawrence, 196 Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 29, 185, 196
Darton and Harvey, booksellers, 16, 21, Eliot, T.S., 4, 163, 196
96, 130–31, 133, 136, 184, 188, Elliott, Mary, 63
199 endumbment, 4, 6, 162, 177, 179
daughters, 25, 77, 96–97, 105, 113–15, Enlightenment, xxiii, 3–6, 19, 59, 68, 88,
125–30, 143, 153, 157, 162, 164; 102, 151, 162; book business. See
education of, 105, 176 children’s book business; children.
Dayre, Valérie. See Die Menschenfresserin See children, Enlightenment;
Decker, Rudolf, 193, 195 eighteenth-century, 3, 11, 16,
Demers, Patricia, 61, 186–87, 196 19, 21–23, 26, 29–30, 33, 61, 67,
democracy, 71, 118 76, 82, 91, 117–18, 159–60, 185;
Dewey, John, 68, 87–88, 91–93, 196 ethos, xxiii, 59; new, 179, 181;
Dickens, Charles, 62, 149, 174, 196 women. See women, Enlighten-
dictionary, 60, 85 ment authors
didacticism, 95–98, 100, 104, 188, 190 enlightenment vs. endumbment, 4, 162,
Die Menschenfresserin, ix, xvi–xvii, 2–4, 177
163–77, 194, 196, 198; and child- entertainment, 5–6, 61, 92, 108, 174–75.
eating taboos, 3, 164–66, 173; See also amusement; instruction
Ogress, ix, xvi, 164–70, 172–77, Epstein, Jason, 58, 196
196, 198; Ogress, and child, 168, Erlbruch, Wolf. See Die Menschenfresserin
172–73; Ogress and parents,
166–67, 170, 172, 175; relations, fairy tales, xiv, 42, 44, 61, 63–64, 144, 167,
parent-child, 165, 167–68, 170 174
dissenters, 118–19, 186 Fast, April, 50–51, 53
dissenting academies, 118–19, 144, 185 feminists, 97–98, 104–5, 107, 109–10,
dolls, 24, 27, 92 153, 191
domesticity, professional, 121 Fenwick, Eliza, 1–2, 23–26, 28, 34, 47–49,
57, 64–65, 67–71, 73–77, 80–81,
Edgeworth, Maria, xv, xvii, 2, 22, 24–25, 83–92, 112–15, 129, 151–60,
95–96, 102–3, 105, 107–10, 112, 187–88, 196–97; Bad Family and
115–16, 118–21, 131–32, 136, Other Stories, The, 156, 196;
190–92, 196; Letters to Liter- Leçons pour les enfans, xiii, xvii,
ary Ladies, 116, 191; Rosamond, 13; Lessons for Children, 19, 24,
24–25, 121, 160, 196 114–15, 121, 188, 196; Letters
education, 4–6, 14, 23, 31, 42, 65–66, to Mr. and Mrs. Moffatt, xvii,
68–71, 88, 90–92, 102, 105–6, 57, 157, 192; Mary and Her Cat,
113–14, 158, 177, 188–89, 195–99; 81, 84–85, 185, 188–89, 196–97;
access to, 71, 117; and advertising, Rays from the Rainbow, xv, xvii,
28, 31; and class, 85; Education 92, 154–56, 196; Secresy, 68, 115,
Act of 1870, 40, 174, 189, 194; 152–53, 157–58, 196; Visits to the
and entertainment, 5–6, 61, 92; Juvenile Library, xiii–xv, 1, 10,
experiential, 88, 91, 93; formal, 23–25, 27–30, 32–34, 42, 47–49,
82, 102; as liberation. See literacy, 51, 63–65, 67–75, 80–81, 83–87,
and freedom; and pedagogical 89–93, 128–29, 153–56; Visits
principles, 70, 111, 121–22, 146, to the Juvenile Library, Arthur
154–55, 157; private vs. public, 4, Mortimer, 49, 68, 74, 85, 87–89;
90, 177, 189; progressive practices, Visits to the Juvenile Library,
73, 93, 95, 118; and reading. See Caroline Mortimer, 80–81, 84,
literacy; rote learning, 92, 145–46 125, 155; Visits to the Juvenile
Education Quality and Accountability Library, Fanny Lawson, 154; Visits
Office (EQAO), 177, 179 to the Juvenile Library, Howard,
edutainment, 91–93 Frank, 7–8, 10, 14, 16, 26, 33,
Eger, Elizabeth, 190 69–70, 80–81, 86–89, 91, 121,
Eger, Elizabeth and Peltz, Lucy, 97–99, 133, 145, 173, 190, 197; Visits to
104, 111, 190, 196 the Juvenile Library, Mortimer
204 • Index
children, 69, 73–74, 80, 87, 91; governess, 97, 119, 125–26, 130, 157–58
Visits to the Juvenile Library, Mr. Greenblatt, Stephen, 2, 183, 197
Benson, 69–70, 89, 91; Visits to Grenby, M.O., 28, 189, 197
the Juvenile Library, Mrs. Clifford, Griffith, Elizabeth, 100
1, 49, 68–69, 73, 80, 84–85, 87, 89,
91, 128–29, 153–54; Visits to the Hade, Dan, 183, 197
Juvenile Library, Nora, xv, 68–69, Hansel and Gretel, 164–65, 174
73–77, 80 harlequin, 170, 172
Fenwick, Eliza Anne, 115, 129, 152, 157 Hays, Mary, 34, 40, 96, 109, 112–15, 118,
Fenwick, John, 115, 151–52, 192–93 137, 152–53, 157–58, 192, 194,
Fenwick, Orlando, 68, 114–15, 157 197, 200
fiction, 48, 61, 154 Haywood, Peter, 117, 197
Flesch, Rudolf, 189, 196 Hewlett, John, 117–18
Fordyce, George, 117–18 Higonnet, Anne, 159–60, 168, 172, 197
Fraser, W. Hamish, 15 Hill, Bridget, 190, 197
Freire, Paulo, 68, 71, 74, 196 Hilton, Mary, 97, 187, 190, 196–97, 199
French Revolution, The, 3, 16, 117, historicism, new, 2
131–32, 134, 197 history: children’s books, 6, 19, 29, 37,
40, 42, 59, 61, 70, 95, 99, 152; as
games for children. See children, games for subject, 11, 22, 42, 49, 144, 185; as
Gardner, Howard, 68, 71, 90–91, 189 subject. See also children’s litera-
Gee, Constance B., 185, 197 ture, subjects
geography, xiv, xviii, 44, 51–55, 57–58, 63, history of the book, 38, 40, 117, 196
65, 85, 92, 101, 144, 185, 197–99; Hoagwood, Terence Allan, 113, 197
Geography on a Popular Plan, 51, Hogarth, William, xv, 139–40
53, 198; Goldsmith’s Grammar of Hollindale, Peter, 166, 197
Geography, xiv, xviii, 44, 51–55, Holloway, Thomas, xv, xvii, 103
57–58, 63, 65, 197–98; A Gram- home, 14, 53, 57, 60, 68, 87, 90, 112, 121, 189
mar of General Geography, xiv, Hornor, Thomas, xiii, xviii, 20, 197
xviii, 44, 51–53, 197 Horwood, Richard, xiv, 21, 197
Gilbert, Ann (formerly Taylor), 131–32, house, as publisher, 8, 16, 51, 54, 66, 93,
135, 141, 162, 197. See also Taylor, 96, 105, 136, 139, 181
Ann Hughes, Ted, 145–46, 163, 197
Gladwell, Malcolm, 64, 197 Hurdis, James, 117–18
Godwin, Charles, 13, 143–44, 151 Hutcheon, Linda, 146, 149, 197
Godwin, Mary Jane. See Clairmont, Mary
Jane Idler, The, 30–31, 198
Godwin, William, xviii, 13, 18–19, 40, 47, ignorance, 3, 67–68, 74, 132, 159; bond-
66–68, 70–71, 112–15, 117–18, age of, 73–74; freedom from, 69,
126–29, 142–46, 150–52, 162–63, 73; pomp of, 172–73; as slavery.
181, 188, 193–94; “an active mind See literacy, and freedom
& a warm heart,” 4, 6, 47, 66–67, imagination, 47, 59, 61–63, 73, 144–46
146, 160, 176–77, 181; Bible Imlay, Frances “Fanny,” 119–20
stories, 47; Juvenile Library, The, instruction (see also amusement; enter-
xiii, 13, 16, 34, 68, 143, 151–52, tainment), 5, 16, 40, 42–43, 47–48,
194; Letter to Mary Jane Godwin, 51, 60–61, 65, 69, 84, 92, 108–9,
1801, xviii, 142, 144–46, 186, 197; 151, 166, 187
Letter to Mary Jane Godwin, 1806, Ireland, 107, 126, 130, 199
xviii, 142–44, 197; Letter to Mary Issitt, John, 54–58, 186, 197
Jane Godwin, 1811, xviii, 151, 197; Italy, 126, 128, 173
Letter to William Cole, 47, 146,
160, 173, 183, 188, 197 Jauffret, Louis François, 49–51, 198; The
Goldsmith’s Grammar of Geography. See Travels of Rolando, 49–50, 198
geography, Goldsmith’s Grammar Jenner, Isaac, xviii
of Geography Johnson, Jane, 27, 83, 121
Index • 205
Johnson, Joseph, xv, xviii, 16, 19, 22, 72, Locke, John, 23, 198
96, 105–6, 115–22, 136, 190, 192, Lodge, David, 4, 163, 198
195–98, 200; publishing house, L’Ogresse en Pleurs. See Die Menschenfresserin
51, 54, 57, 118, 186 London, xiii–xiv, 1, 11–12, 15–16, 21,
Johnson, Samuel, xiii, 16, 18, 30–31, 198 24, 26, 30, 35, 37, 65, 68, 70, 114,
juvenile library, as children’s bookshop, 8 126, 152; Bond Street, 10, 14,
16; early nineteenth-century, 21;
Kauffman, Angelica, 99 Fleet Street, 18–19, 117; literary,
Keeping, Charles, xiii, xviii, 10–11, 196, 198 112–14; National Portrait Gallery,
Kilner, Elizabeth, xviii, 24, 35, 48, 75, 89, xv, xvii–xix, 97–98, 107, 116, 127,
107, 181, 198; A Puzzle for a Curi- 191; New Bond Street, xiii, 7–8,
ous Girl, 48, 80–81; A Visit to a 11–12, 14, 16, 37, 65, 75, 84, 184;
Farm House, xiv, xviii, 40–41, 43, radical, 16, 19, 112, 151, 181;
48, 51, 86–89; A Visit to London, Strand, The, xiii, 16, 18
xiv, xviii, 24, 34–35, 40, 48, 51, 75, Longmans, 5, 8, 51, 54, 58, 61, 76, 183,
181, 198 195
King, Margaret, 125–26, 130 Lucas, E.V., 156, 186, 196
Knowing child, the, 160, 162, 166–67
knowledge, 4, 50, 68–69, 71, 73, 88, 100, Macaulay, Catharine, 96, 100, 102, 105–7,
108, 122, 167; and happiness, 23, 137, 190, 197–98; Letters on Edu-
47, 69; and ignorance, 69; and cation, 23, 105–6, 198
reading, 76, 82, 84, 87, 154; and magic lantern. See Taylor, Jane and Ann,
reading. See also literacy; right Signor Topsy-Turvy’s Wonderful
to, 158 Magical Lantern
Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth, 10, 23–24, Mandell, Laura, 121, 198
198 maps, 14, 25, 49, 52, 92
Marcus, Leonard, 21, 184, 198
Lamb, Charles, 55, 57, 62, 101–2, 109, Marshall, John, 26
142, 152, 162–63, 186–87, 194; Marshall, Peter, 13–14, 184, 198
“cursed Barbauld crew,” 62, Martin, Henri-Jean, 117, 198
100–101, 104, 109–10, 187, 196; maternal pedagogies, 2, 5–6, 22, 27, 68,
“cursed Barbauld crew,” text of 70, 82–83, 96–97, 101, 104–5, 111,
letter, 100–101 118, 130, 132, 136, 167; teachers,
Lamb, Mary, 62, 152, 186–87 97, 105, 132, 176
Lave, Jean, 82, 198 Mavor, William, English Spelling-Book,
learning, 49, 60, 73, 160; Classical, 102; as The, xv, xviii, 75–79, 198
fun, 29, 87 McCarthy, William, 2, 62, 72–73, 97,
learning to be Christian, 76, 188 101–3, 109, 187, 190, 195–96, 198
learning to read. See literacy Meek, Margaret, 81–82, 189, 198, 199
Le Breton, Anna Letitia (Aikin), 107, 109, mentorias, 105, 107, 110, 130, 190
111–12, 191, 198 microscope, 29, 49, 91–93
Lennox, Charlotte, 99 miniature libraries, 26–27, 92, 196
Levy, Michelle, 109, 198 Moffatts, The, 57, 129, 151, 192
liberation politics, 67, 71, 74, 77 Montagu, Elizabeth, 98, 100
lifespan of books, 37, 57–58 Monthly Review, The, 187–88
literacy, 4, 27, 67, 74, 76–77, 82–84, 111, Moon, Marjorie, xxiii, 1–2, 6, 28, 40–42,
145, 176–77, 188; alphabet books, 47–49, 53, 59–62, 64–65, 76, 86,
41, 59; contemporary measure- 89, 96, 134, 188–90, 192
ment of, 177–78; education, 76, morality, 47, 60, 158, 166
84; and freedom, 69, 71, 73–75, More, Hannah, 2, 96, 100, 104, 109–12, 115,
80; graphemic/phonemic method, 131, 136–37, 159, 186, 191, 199
83–84; and happiness, 76; reading mother, 7, 14, 23–25, 27, 35, 70, 85,
instruction, 42, 74, 82–84, 86; 96–97, 105, 125–26, 128–30, 142,
spelling, 76–77, 80–81, 83–85, 149–50, 152–55, 157, 164–65;
178–79 child-eating, 164; child-eating. See
206 • Index
also Die Menschenfresserin, and print culture, 16, 21, 109
child-eating taboos; young, 132, proximal development, zone of, 87–88,
151–52 91, 93
multiple intelligences. See Gardner, pseudonym, 47, 51, 57, 97, 126, 130, 193,
Howard 198
Munsch, Robert, 150, 198 publishers, 1, 3, 5, 8, 16, 22, 51, 58, 65, 76,
Musée de Cluny, xv, 122, 124 96, 116–17, 119–21, 128, 162, 192
Myers, Mitzi, 97, 104–6, 190, 198 publishing houses, xiii, 5, 8, 16–17, 54,
136, 192, 196
natural history, 42, 49, 77, 101
Newbery, John, 16, 19, 29, 60–61, 92, 184, Ragged Schools, 174, 194
199 reason, 54, 59, 77, 112, 135, 144–46,
Newington Green, 97, 119, 125 150–51, 162; and imagination,
New York City, 57, 112, 114–15, 151 144–46
New-York Historical Society, xvii, 114, rebranding, 97, 104, 110
186, 192, 194 review, 2, 30, 89, 105–6, 177, 196
Nine Living Muses of Great Britain, The, Richardson, Samuel, 105
xv, xviii, 99, 111, 190 Roberts, William, 110, 199
nineteenth century, 3, 8–9, 15, 19, 37, Robinson, Mary, 112, 115, 153, 196
42–43, 48–49, 57, 60, 64, 68, 77, Romantic: children. See children, Roman-
136–37, 148–49, 151–52, 174; tic; fantasy, 5, 16, 61–63, 162, 166
early, xxiii, 1, 4, 6, 8, 14, 23, 30, 32, Romanticism, 22
40, 46, 54, 59, 64, 85–86, 159 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 23
novel, 1, 22, 28, 30, 32, 54, 70, 74–75, 80, Ruddick, Sara, 70
89–91, 97, 113, 129, 161, 175;
epistolary, 90, 115, 152, 157–58 Said, Edward, 53, 199
Samuel, Richard, xv, xviii, 99
ogres, male, 164 Sarland, Charles, 61, 199
Ogress. See Die Menschenfresserin Scholastic (publisher), 60, 186, 199
O’Malley, Andrew, xxiii, 71, 198 schools, 16, 28, 31, 44, 48, 50, 60, 69, 71,
Osborne Collection of Early Children’s 85, 90, 101–2, 118–19, 123–25,
Books, xvii–xix, 51, 65, 86, 196 157, 188–89
Oxford Children’s Books, xiv, xviii, 46, Sendak, Maurice, 26, 48, 170, 185, 199
186 Sex and the City, 112, 115, 192
Oxford English Dictionary (OED), 23, Shakespeare, William, 4, 163, 194
29–30, 41, 51, 76–77, 95, 190 Shefrin, Jill, 185, 199
Shelley, Mary Godwin, 13, 96–97, 113,
padrones, 173 126, 128–30, 136, 143, 199;
parents, 69, 89, 166–67, 170, 172–73, 175; Frankenstein, 136–37; Laurette,
as children’s books purchasers, 22, 126–28, 130; Maurice, or the
28, 102, 118, 128, 162–63 Fisher’s Cot, 126, 128–30, 192, 199
Peltz, Lucy. See Eger, Elizabeth and Lucy Sheridan, Elizabeth, 99
Peltz shops, xiii, 1, 6, 8–10, 13–14, 16, 19–21,
Phillips, Richard Sir, xiii, xv, xvii–xviii, 23–25, 28, 30–35, 37, 47–48, 65,
9–10, 16, 21, 51, 53–57, 71, 75–77, 91, 114, 183–84; and sales, 29, 33,
113, 136, 152, 186, 193, 196–98 54, 58, 72; and shoppers, 6, 10, 14,
politics, 30, 118–19 22–23, 25, 34, 121
Portraits in the Characters of the Muses slavery, 16, 53, 72–73, 77, 80, 188; slaves,
in the Temple of Apollo. See Nine 68–69, 71–74, 77, 80, 87, 135;
Living Muses of Great Britain, slave trade, 16, 53, 71–72, 77, 111,
The 117, 186; slave trade, abolition, 53,
Postman, Neil, 31, 199 72, 77, 117, 188
Presents for Good Girls, 48, 80–81, 124 Somerville, John, 199
Price, Richard, 118–19 spinning tops, 90
Priestly, Joseph, 119 Spufford, Francis, 183, 199
Index • 207
Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White, Theroux, Paul, 49
135–36, 199 thinking and feeling children. See chil-
St.-Aubin, Stéphanie Félicité Ducrest de, dren, Enlightenment
23 Tierney, James, 30, 185, 199
St. Clement Danes Church, xiii, 16, 18 Tighe, George, 126, 128
Stott, Anne, 110–11, 191, 199 Todd, Janet, 122, 125, 199–200
St. Paul’s Cathedral, xviii, 19, 21, 114, 197 Tomalin, Claire, 126, 128, 130, 192, 199
St. Paul’s Churchyard, xiii, 16, 19–21, 117, Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book, 82–83,
184, 190 199
Styles, Morag, 83, 141, 149, 195–96 Townsend, John Rowe, 29, 61–63, 95,
sugar, 72–73; boycott, 72–74, 120 122, 199
Summerfield, Geoffrey, 162–63, 199 toys, 29, 49, 60, 91–92, 121; educational,
25, 49, 92, 154
Tabart, Benjamin, xiv, xxiii, 1, 7–8, 10–11, Traves, Peter, 189, 199
13–14, 16, 30–31, 34–35, 42–44, Trimmer, Sarah, 22, 47, 96, 105, 118–19,
46–49, 54, 60, 64–65, 153, 188–89; 197, 199; Fabulous Histories, 84,
Juvenile Library, xiii–xiv, 1–2, 189; Guardian of Education, The,
6–11, 14, 16, 23–29, 32–35, 37, 40, 47, 105, 197
53–55, 59, 65–66, 69, 72–73, 75, Trumpener, Katie, 25, 200
91–93 twenty-first century, 3, 6, 8, 19, 22, 42,
Tallis, John, xiii, xix, 12, 199 49, 81, 92–93, 112, 115, 130, 136,
Taylor, Ann (see also Taylor, Jane and 160–61, 163–64, 178
Ann; Gilbert, Ann (formerly Tay- Tyson, Gerald, 117–18, 120, 200
lor)), xv, xix, 2, 96, 125, 130–37,
140–41, 144, 146, 148, 159, 162, Vallone, Lynne, 97, 159, 190–91, 200
184, 188, 193, 197; My Mother, Veseer, Aram, 183, 200
xix, 21, 130, 137, 141–42, 144, Vygotsky, Lev, 68, 87–88, 93, 200
146–51, 184; My Mother, music,
148, 193; My Mother, puzzle, xv, Wallis, John, xiv, xvii, 26–27, 195–96
147–48 Walsh, Claire, 10, 32–35, 200
Taylor, Isaac, xv, xix, 96, 131–34, 193 Warner, Marina, 164–65, 167, 170,
Taylor, Isaac (father), 131–32, 134 173–74, 200
Taylor, Isaac (son), 131–33, 193; The Wedd, A.F., 34, 80, 114, 152–53, 157–58,
Family Pen, 131–33, 199 194, 200
Taylor, Jane (see also Taylor, Jane and Wenger, Etienne, 82, 198
Ann), xv, xix, xxv, 2, 21, 96, White, Allon. See Stallybrass, Peter, and
130–34, 136–37, 141, 146, 159, Allon White
162, 175, 184, 188, 193; “Twinkle, Wildsmith, Brian, 48, 200
Twinkle, Little Star,” 130, 136–37, Williams, Raymond, 2, 183, 200
141 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 62, 68–69, 71–73,
Taylor, Jane and Ann, 131, 133–34, 136, 96–97, 104–7, 109–15, 117–19,
141, 159; Hymns for Infant Minds, 121–32, 136–37, 143–46, 151–52,
133, 199; Original Poems for Infant 157, 160–62, 172–73, 189–90,
Minds, 131–33, 137, 141–42, 146, 198–200; Mrs. Mason Story, xv,
162, 188, 193, 199; Rhymes for the 62, 97, 121–28, 130, 189; “On
Nursery, 130, 133, 136, 184, 199; National Education,” 85, 89;
Signor Topsy-Turvy’s Wonderful Original Stories from Real Life,
Magical Latern, 133, 135–36, 175, xv, xix, 62, 84, 97, 122–23, 127,
192, 199. See also Taylor, Ann; 189; A Vindication of the Rights of
Taylor, Jane Woman, 16, 22, 69, 71, 73, 85, 89,
Taylor Family, the, 132 106, 111–13, 115, 117, 146, 152,
teachers, 4, 27, 50, 65–66, 71, 89, 93, 95, 160, 176–77, 200
97, 111, 114, 118–19, 123, 130, women, xi, 5–6, 10, 14, 23–24, 34–35,
155, 178 62–63, 65, 69–72, 74, 85–86, 88,
telescope, 49, 91–93, 192 93, 95–102, 198; as community
208 • Index
or readers, 81, 84–86; didactic, enslavement, 69, 71, 74; oppres-
98, 104, 121; enfranchisement sion of, 113–14; as shoppers, 14,
of, 71, 107, 117; Enlighten- 23–24, 34–35, 121; teaching and
ment authors, 2, 5–6, 62–63, 93, writing, 2, 5, 96, 100, 113, 118,
95–102, 104–5, 107, 109–13, 115, 120–21, 125, 130, 136
130, 136–37, 153, 159, 187, 190, women’s studies departments, 109, 191
195–97; Enlightenment authors, Wordsworth, William, 59, 118, 183
“literary ladies,” 77, 96, 102–3,
107, 109–10, 112, 114–16, 118, Zipes, Jack, xxi, 4, 64, 165, 176, 183
120–21, 130–31, 136–37, 191; Zucchi, John E., 173, 200

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THE CHILDREN’S

Reimagining Shakespeare for Children Youth of Darkest England

Transcending Boundaries Voracious Children

Brown Gold A Critical History of French Children’s

From Nursery Rhymes to Nationhood Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature

NEW YORK AND LONDON

Simultaneously published in the UK

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2011.

© 2011 Taylor & Francis

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 0-203-83325-2 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN13: 978-0-415-93789-4 (hbk)

—Jorge Louis Borges, “The Total Library”

List of Figures xiii

Introduction And in This Book There Are Many Houses 1

Chapter 1 This Is the House That Ben Built 7

Chapter 6 In the End 181

1.1 Entrance to Tabart’s Juvenile Library. Frontispiece, Eliza

1.2 “Band Box Seller,” a watercolor by William Marshall

1.3 Charles Keeping illustration from “Song of the Shapes,”

1.5 New Bond Street and Grafton Street, London 2008. 12

1.6 Godwin’s Juvenile Library, with Aesop above the door,

1.7 Frontispiece to Isaac Jenner’s Fortune’s Football (1806). 15

1.8 Relative locations of some of the featured publishing

1.9 Statue of Samuel Johnson. St. Clement Danes Church,

1.10 Shops on the north side of St. Paul’s Churchyard. Thomas

1.11 Shops on the south side of St. Paul’s Churchyard. Thomas

1.13 Puzzle map. England and Wales. London: E. Wallis, 1826. 26

1.14 Book Case of Instruction. John Wallis, 1813. 27

1.15 An interior view of Tabart’s shop. Visits to the Juvenile

1.16 Interior view from the entrance. Visits to the Juvenile

1.17 Another view of the interior of Tabart’s shop. A Visit to

2.1 The “Communications Circuit,” from Robert Darnton’s

2.2 “The Whole Socio-Economic Conjuncture,” from “A

2.3 Titles under the “Biography” heading of the catalogue

2.4 The introductory paragraphs of the catalogue pages bound

2.5 These pages, also from the 1804 catalogue, demonstrate

2.6 These pages, also from the 1804 catalogue, demonstrate

2.7 2009 Oxford Children’s Book catalogue cover, indicating a

2.8 A Grammar of General Geography (1824): Spinning

3.1 Nora learning to be literate. Visits to the Juvenile Library

3.2 Frontispiece, William Mavor’s The English Spelling-Book. 78

3.3 Title page, William Mavor’s The English Spelling-Book. 79

4.1 Richard Samuel’s 1778 Portraits in the Characters of the

4.2 Anna Barbauld by Thomas Holloway; after Unknown

4.3 Woman engraved as Maria Edgeworth by unknown artist. 108

4.4 Joseph Johnson (1738–1809) by William Sharp after

4.5 Frontispiece, Original Stories from Real Life (1788).

4.6 Couronnement d’Otton II et de Théophano. Musée

4.7 William Godwin. National Portrait Gallery, London. 127

5.1 Detail from William Hogarth’s 1732 portrait of the

5. 2 “My Mother” puzzle pieces and cover image

5. 3 “My Mother” puzzle (William Darton Jr., 1811). 148

5.4 Key to Eliza Fenwick, parse-by-color grammar book,

5.6 Print (1789) by Thomas Park of Penelope Boothby by

Early attempts at negotiating the material of The Children’s Book Busi-

“Re-Imagining Eliza Fenwick: Instruction, Delight and Marketing,” Special

Dedicated to furthering original research in children’s literature and culture,

Very early on in my research for The Children’s Book Business, I methodi-

Figure 1.1 Entrance to Tabart’s Juvenile Library. Frontispiece, Eliza Fenwick,