This exceedingly rare copy of the first edition of William Darton's first book is part of the Elisabeth Ball Collection of the Pierpont Morgan Library. Lawrence Darton has suggested that Little Truths may have been written for William Darton's own family; its rural walk would represent scenes common to their experience when the family lived away from the din of London in the quiet village of Tottenham, where Darton had set up as a grocer.

William Darton published a second volume in 1788, Little Truths Containing Information on Divers Subjects. In 1800 both volumes were published under the newer title, abandoning the slight on "great fables." The antislavery passage in the second volume was expanded in 1800 to include references to the poetry of Phillis Wheatley and the letters of Ignatius Sancho—surely the very earliest mention of these black writers in a children's book. The children in the dialogue notice the oddity of saying Columbus "discovered" a country where people already lived.

Lawrence Darton has noted that in the English first edition the dog Prince is ordered to "let them goslings alone!" Subsequent English editions read "those goslings." The reading "them goslings" in this edition confirms that it derives from the first edition. Joseph Crukshank, a Quaker publisher committed to the social causes of the Society, and the publisher of works by Woolman, Benezet, Benjamin Banneker, and Phillis Wheatley, had first published Little Truths in 1789; a decade earlier he had published Anthony Benezet's A First Book for Children. While only a third English edition was appearing by 1790, the book was so popular in the United States that in 1794 the Boston publisher Samuel Hall was enthusiastically advertising a sixth American edition "with many alterations and additions."

One of the earliest historical jigsaw puzzles bears a Darton imprint from Birchin Lane in 1787, and a Darton engraving. The handsome puzzle is signed "John Hewlett Invenit." and "W. Darton sculp."

[ page 17 ]

Newbery's grandson Francis Power, publisher and bookseller briefly up to around 1792, lists 83 titles in this advertisement, including many of the old Newbery-Carnan titles purchased by Darton and Harvey. Thomas Carnan had died intestate in 1788.

Writing a few months after William Darton's death, the three sons state that their father's calculations (in papers found in the manuscript trade book), which seem to have made him pessimistic about the future of the business, were in error.

The fifth edition was published the year after John Newbery's death by his son Francis and stepson Thomas Carnan. Among the delightful flourishes characteristic of the Newbery publishing style is "A letter from the Printer, which he desires may be inserted":

Sir,

I Have done with your Copy, so you may return it to the Vatican, if you please; and pray tell Mr. Angelo to brush up the Cuts, that, in the next Edition, they may give us a good Impression.

In this late edition, Thomas Carnan, who assumed control of the Newbery business, has altered the traditional form of the book, omitting the appendix. The engaging copper frontispiece has worn out; in 1783 Carnan had substituted a not very elegant but long-lasting wood block, which, in this copy, has been hand-colored by a child owner, perhaps one of its competing inscribers: "Ann Harpers Book 1796" and "Eliza Harper har [sic] Book 1796."

For the first Darton and Harvey edition, the wood block used as the frontispiece of the Carnan edition has been cut down and re-used as an illustration in the third chapter. The new frontispiece engraved on copper for the Darton and Harvey edition is missing from this copy, which is bound in unusual blue floral boards.

The view of Goody Two Shoes continues to change with time. On the front wrapper of the Elisabeth Ball copy of the 1817 edition is a handwritten note attributing authorship: "by Mr. Giles Jones—Grandfather of Mr. J. Winter Jones late Principal librarian at the British Museum 1881."

Darton has copied Bewick's image of a man carrying a woman and child across the stream directly onto copper, producing a mirror image. The entire page is engraved, with the text interpreting the picture: "Quite Loaded! Take care poor man! a trip would be very bad, and might cause the downfall of all the family and their bas-ket of muffins."

A Present For A Little Girl is a virtual homage to Bewick, with nineteen copies of animals or tail-pieces from A General History of Quadrupeds. The Elisabeth Ball copy appears to be a variant printing, with the plates rearranged; the mule and the zebra face the title page, and the plate copying Bewick's peacocks, from History of British Birds, which had just been published in 1797, is placed at the end.

Picture sheets were often apprentice work, but the elder William Darton may have engraved these wild cats himself; they are all copied from Bewick's General History of Quadrupeds.

The tail-piece to the jay is the lively vignette of the runaway cart, in which Bewick succeeded in conveying the impression of a turning wheel.

Darton has copied the runaway cart for his section "Boys in Danger":

We are indebted to a very ingenious draftsman for our next print,* and if the republishing of it should be the mean of keeping but one little boy, in all England, safe from harm, we conclude that it will give him equal pleasure with ourselves.

*T. Bewick of Newcastle, engraver of some of the most ingenious wood cuts that the age has produced.

The sons, Samuel of Gracechurch Street and William of Holborn Hill, jointly issued this edition in 1824. One of the plates bears the imprint "London. Published by Joseph Harvey & Samuel Darton, August 1824," an unusual appearance of Samuel's given name. The title page scene of the old woman and her wall of pictures has been vigorously reinterpreted. The gesture of pointing out and describing pictures represents the habitual form of the elder William Darton's books for children.

One of the earliest publications from Gracechurch Street is an edition of Orbis Sensualium Pictus, Comenius's famous picture book. The engravings and the English text appear to be based on the twelfth edition of Charles Hoole's translation, printed for S. Leacroft in 1777, with omissions and revisions; the Latin has been dropped. The Darton edition excerpts a line from Hoole's translator's preface for its title page: "Any good Thing is the better being the more communicated." The

[ page 20 ]

And if we had books, wherein are the pictures of all creatures, herbs, beasts, fish, fowl, &c. they would stand us in great stead: for pictures are the most intelligent books that children can look upon.

Engravings portray "The Ounce," and "A Quail from Egypt."The Book of Nouns conforms to the object teaching method recommended by Comenius when he called his Orbis Sensualium Pictus "our little Encyclopaedia of things subject to the senses." It is advertised in Instructive Hints as "a small Toy Volume."

William Darton the younger, who may have assisted in engraving some of the Bewick copies in his father's books when he was apprenticed at Gracechurch Street, published these handsome hand-colored prints in the 1820s.

Moving between the printer's press and the rolling press, the printer has miscalculated the overlap of image and text; the title page vignette of young Whittington and his cat overlaps the London imprint. Present at the wedding were "the great John of Gaunt, Chaucer the poet and numbers of other celebrated persons." This copy has been inscribed in a very youthful hand "Quintillia Turton her Book 1812" inside the front wrapper, and more falteringly inside the back wrapper, "Miss Q Turton."

The running title "My Friend" has been submerged in martyr's flames due to a printer's miscalculation in this Holborn Hill publication. William and Thomas Darton produced this book in a format popular at their father's Gracechurch Street firm. Throughout the nineteenth century, children in the Dissenting tradition continued to read, or simply to study the pictures, in Foxe's Book of Martyrs. A Quaker children's book published at mid-century in Indiana portrays a child reading Foxe.

The two copperplate engravings, designed by Murry, are signed "W. Darton, sc.," the earliest identified instances of William Darton as engraver. Ann Murry lived at Tottenham, where Darton was keeping a village store during these years. She wrote Mentoria for her pupils, mixing anecdote, poetry, information, and conduct advice in the question and answer style made popular by Rousseau. Mentoria and Murry's sequel to it were popular into the next century.

William, the eldest son, worked with his father in the business at the age of eight and a half, and served as his apprentice from the age of fourteen. Dated 1800, during his apprenticeship, this engraved map of the world signed "W. Darton jun.r" may be his first signed work as an engraver.

The two parts have been bound together by a collector. In Part I, a young woman is seated at the sewing press in the bookbindery: "Children, particularly, should never suffer themselves to be tempted by the rich outside of a book: often a worthless production shines in gold, whilst many a moral and useful work appears in a plain and simple cover." The frontispiece of Part II shows an artisan grinding and mixing colors.

William Darton's note prefacing The Rational Exhibition complains that "while the plates were engraving, and before the printing was begun, paper advanced upwards of thirty per cent!" The use of overmarbled paper was a way of cutting expenses. The great expense of materials discouraged writing as well as publishing.

The elder William Darton might have raised an eyebrow at "the rich outside" of this elegantly bound book, which is also fancy on the inside with blue tinted paper and four pretty etchings. It was a publication of the Holborn Hill firm in the 1840s, when his grandson, John Darton, was a partner.

From the beginning to the middle of the nineteenth century, color in commercial children's books meant hand-coloring, often done by quite young people; in one of her stories, Eliza Fenwick portrayed a poor girl of eleven or twelve who colored children's books for a living. Seated around a table, each with a brush and a single water color, the children painted single sections as the sheets were passed around. More exacting work was done by professional colorists, or by impoverished women using their art training. The Lilly Library has two versions of Methode Amusante with different engravings of the same subjects. Here the engraver has added a charming detail, "Darton et Harvey," on a ship's sail, which has been colored yellow.

A hand-colored copper-engraved picture sheet has been backed with scraps to stiffen it before cutting into individual cards, probably by an early owner. The rhyme follows the form of "A was an Archer," beginning "A was an Anchor."

The most famous of Priscilla Wakefield's travel books, first published in 1801, went into nineteen editions in fifty years. Her diary entry records "a large offer from Darton for the Juvenile Travellers"; the firm's records show that it was £200, as far as can be determined the largest sum paid by Darton and Harvey for any manuscript. The payment was a tribute to a major author, and an aristocrat among Friends, the great-granddaughter of Robert Barclay the Apologist; it was also an indication that Darton and Harvey were prospering. The publishers have produced a handsome book, bound in embossed cloth, with a hand-colored engraved map as frontispiece.

A sample of the violent domestic incident that fascinated contemporary readers can be seen in the section called "Domestic Intelligence" in the May 1803 issue of the European Magazine. Admiral Reeve is thrown from a one-horse chaise; a child in a cradle at Welling, Herts, is partly devoured by rats ("Hopes are entertained of its recovery"); a maniac claims that "he had just risen from the dead, and was sent by Heaven to kill Bonaparte."

To follow A Present For A Little Boy through several editions is to witness some interesting revisions by the author, and a fascinating alteration in perspective on the part of the successive illustrators. A newspaper account of a little girl in Kent who tried to take a piglet from its mother ("the girl, who was not more than seven years of age, fell into the sty, and would probably have lost her life, but for the timely assistance of a neighbour") is illustrated by an engraving of a small child and a very big sow. Darton has put the story in a section called "Docility of Animals."

In 1802, the section has been retitled "Anecdotes of Tame and Wild Swine"; a passage on American pigs has been added. The author writes that "herds of swine, in America, upon hearing the sound of a bell, or the blowing of a horn, or conch shell, return from the woods to their master's farm, where they remain during the night in safety."

After William Darton's death in 1819, his sons Samuel of Gracechurch Street and William of Holborn Hill jointly published some of their father's books, including A Present For A Little Boy. Hand-coloring has softened the encounter in this copy of the 1823 edition.

This easy reader resembles in format William Darton's three-part Trifles For Children. "More Mischief! Playing With Gunpowder" is the subject of an engraved page. "How many accidents have happened on rejoicing days, particularly on the 5th of November!"

This translation for German-speaking Americans was made from the 1808 American edition of Little Prattle Over A Book Of Prints. In the American edition, the reference to November fifth, Guy Fawkes Day, is changed to the Fourth of July, and is so translated: "Wie viele vergleichen Begebenheiten haben sich ereignet an Freudentagen, besonders an den 4ten July!" The illustrations are woodcuts copied from the cuts in the American edition, which were in turn copied from the copper engravings in the Darton edition.

The ascent in a balloon from St. George's Field is marred by "an unlucky accident happening"; nevertheless young Appleby "ascended to a great height, and made a very fine appearance." The plummeting figure in the engraving is Mr. Arnold, who "had but one leg." The account is taken from the European Magazine for 1785. The Gentleman's Magazine also carried the story.

The younger William Darton of Holborn Hill published a book of wood engravings of children's games, A Nosegay for the Trouble of Culling, 1812, with a commentary pervaded by anxiety in the tradition of his father. The author is unknown. There are no pigs, no gunpowder, and only toy balloons, but the remarkable text emphasized the danger and the constant threat of accident, while in the fine engravings, oblivious hearty children went on about their play. This picture sheet was made up of old wood blocks after 1819, four of them from A Nosegay for the Trouble of Culling, and one of a street crier from London Melodies, also ca. 1812. The wood engraver has carved the publisher's imprint into a tree trunk, in the manner of Bewick.

The sliding cover has retained its vivid representation of shelved books. Each of the eight volumes contained within has on its front cover a printed decorated label, "The Infant's own Book, by Darton & Harvey, London"; a paper label with a bird in a cage decorates the back cover. All have the publisher's and printer's imprint of Darton and Harvey and are dated 1800 or 1801. The two parts of The Picture Shop For Little Children list "Price Threepence" on their title pages. Included with the books in Elisabeth Ball's copy is a set of twenty-five alphabet cards, each with a hand-colored copper engraving of a bird.

The Quaker publisher Jacob Johnson of Philadelphia produced editions of many Darton imprints. The Uncle's Present is a cardboard folder with many of the figures copied from the engravings of The Cries Of London in The Infants Own Book-case.

A wooden case lined with pink paper with a shelf and decorated sliding cover contains eight Mills titles dated 1810-1812, bound in red leather. All volumes bear the publisher's imprint "London: Darton, Harvey, & Darton, Gracechurch-Street; and J. Harris, St. Paul's Church-Yard," and the printer's imprint "Printed by Darton, Harvey, and Co." The draughtsman and wood engraver

[ page 27 ]

The very rare earliest edition of the miniature books of Alfred Mills is considered to have finer engravings than later editions; it is also in a smaller format. Its price is advertised on the title page as "1s. 6d. in paper covers; 2s. in leather; and at other prices in morocco." This beautiful copy is bound in red leather.

The giver, or the receiver, of this American edition of the Mills Bible, from the Elisabeth Ball Collection, has lovingly inscribed it with a colored drawing of a rose:

John,
Huffman.
August 16.th 1810.

French and Swedish translations of the Mills Bible have engraved plates copied in reverse. According to Ruth Adomeit, the Swedish book's designation as "second edition" may simply mean that this edition is second to the copied English edition.

The efforts of the Dissenters' Sunday School movement to teach the poor to read came under attack after the French Revolution; such teaching was "a dangerous measure," Hannah More admitted, unless they were provided with "safe books." William Darton, using the imprint "Darton and Co.," joined in the publication of this tract "for the use of Sunday Schools." Reanimated by More's twin passions for moral reform and political stability, religious tracts enlivened by entertaining moral stories exerted a profound influence on the development of children's literature. In 1799, Darton and Harvey published an edition of one of Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tracts, with an English-French parallel text.

Darton and Harvey shared in the imprints of the educational books of Lindley Murray, an American Friend from Pennsylvania, who settled in Yorkshire. His English Grammar, written for a Friends' school for girls, became a standard text both in England and America. Murray's graded readers made up a large part of the curriculum at Friends' schools. An appropriate choice for a child's reader, Wordsworth's poem "The Pet Lamb" was based on the experience of a child in the village school in Grasmere. The poem had just been published in the second volume of Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems, 1800.

Handsome engravings illustrate a spelling book, which may be one of William Darton's own works. O, P, Q, and R are illustrated by Owl & Mouse, Puss & Bird, Quail & Young, and Roses.

An edition of The Little Teacher, perhaps written by William Darton, appeared in 1798. The frontispiece portrays a village Dame's school, with the Dame spinning while her pupils read. Paul Hawkins Fisher, traveling on horseback in the Cotswolds in 1870, the year of the Education Act, came upon just such a cottage school: "The mistress was walking backward and forward, spinning some wool into yarn and performing her scholarly duties at the same time. A boy was in the act of reading his lesson aloud to her."

Training some students as "monitors," Lancaster was able to run a school for many hundreds of poor children in London, which was both an innovative experiment in preparing teachers for mass education, and a pioneering introduction of factory methods into the schoolroom. Of the widespread practice of flogging children, Lancaster wrote that "Some teachers plead for the lash . . . and that with as much zeal as the partizans of Robespierre did for the guillotine!" Lancaster's own "non-violent" punishments were extremely controversial; some of them were adopted by factory owners to intimidate children in the labor force.

Instructive Hints was recommended in Lancaster's Improvements In Education; it teaches children how to handle and care for books. A letterpress note inside the title page of Plain Tales states that "The children of the poor can never be taught to read with facility and pleasure unless they have books exactly levelled at their capacities." Elizabeth Coltman Heyrick wrote for the antislavery cause.

The Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, founded in 1698, was a principal sponsor of the Charity School movement; there were 2,000 such schools in 1800. The London Charity Schools held an annual assembly, which took place from 1782 in St. Paul's. Beginning with the 1818 edition of City Scenes, Blake's poem "Holy Thursday" from Songs of Innocence, 1789, is printed without attribution and with his description of the children, "their innocent faces clean," altered to read "their hands and faces clean," a sad distortion of the Blakean idea of spiritual innocence. This is the second type-printing of Blake's poem, which had been printed by Benjamin Heath Malkin in A Father's Memoir of his Child in 1806. The Taylors may have seen it there, but they may also have seen a copy of Blake's Songs; G. E. Bentley, Jr., has argued that the engraving for "The Charity Children" is modelled on Blake's plate. If so, the engraver, probably Isaac Taylor the younger, must have seen Blake's plate before 1814, when the engraving, but not Blake's poem, appeared in City Scenes. In a diary entry of 1810, Henry Crabbe Robinson recorded a conversation with Jane Taylor in which Blake was discussed.

A speller and a story book incorporating questions and answers ("What is gold?") have been produced in a pleasing square format with pretty bindings. The epigraph of An Evening In Autumn is Edgeworthian: "We are disposed to think favourably of any mode which unites amusement with instruction."

There are two instances of outcast criers in The New Cries , the Jewish old clothes seller and the climbing boys, their outcast status emphasized in the engravings by hostile animals—a cat arching its back at the Jew, a dog snarling at the sweeps. The commentary on the old clothes seller notes the persistent and violent harassment of Jews on the streets, and tenders him a qualified sympathy. The climbing boy is made the subject of a cautionary tale about disobedient children; by elaborating the psychological drama of the stolen child, the authors have cast the climbing boy as a child like other children, punished for his carelessness. In the circumstance, however, it is a vision of damnation. William Darton may have suggested the format and outlined the subjects for the book, first published in 1803, but he is unlikely to have written about the climbing boy in this way.

The dramatic confrontation between vendor and customers in Sandby's "Rare Mackarel," extending even to the animals, may have been a model for the engraving of the old clothes vendor in The New Cries. Sandby's designs set groups of people against simply evoked backgrounds, a filling out of the setting that is characteristic of the illustrations ofThe New Cries, which have been attributed to the younger Isaac Taylor, perhaps with some assistance from his father.

The second part of The New Cries was published in 1808, with a title vignette modelled after Marcellus Laroon, in which children watch a raree-show. One part of the spectacle, in the Taylors' verse description, is topical:

Next comes Bonaparte, on a cream-colour'd nag,
With a sword in his hand, and his hair in a bag.

The new engravings are set four to a page; the chimney sweep, now a single figure maneuvering against the wind, is reminiscent of Blake's little sweep in Songs of Experience. Instead of the snarling dog of the earlier illustration, a companion animal goes with the child through the cold.

[ page 33 ]

[ page 34 ]

City Scenes evolved from a cries-type description of London as a city of thieves into a middle class guide book:

See where the idle milk-maid stands,
To hear the gossip's tale;
While chimney-sweep, with uplift hands,
Keeps drinking from the pail.
And even while the man behind,
The sooty thief is showing,
If he could look at top, he'd find,
His muffins too were going.

These lines, and the description of "The thief that picks one's pocket clean," are omitted from later editions, in which London becomes a safer place, and less colorful. The engravings are by Isaac Taylor the younger. Joseph Farington noted in his diary in 1805 that a London master sweep gained £40 to £50 a year from a climbing boy's labor, and that the total amount of soot sold annually in the city was worth £50,000. Many of the boys (and some girls) who were forced to act as human brushes lived in a condition little removed from slavery. The May Day revelry of the "Chimney-sweeper's dance" was eliminated from later editions of City Scenes.

London Cries is a shared imprint of Darton and Harvey and William Darton the younger in his early years at 40 Holborn Hill. Later editions were published only from Holborn Hill. The title page opening is a remarkable composition for a children's book of the period: the old clothes seller faces the crossing sweeper, and in the engraved verse he seems to address the child, and, by implication, the child reader.

In 1803, the Society for Superseding the Necessity of Climbing Boys gave a prize of forty guineas to George Smart for his invention of a successful chimney-sweeping machine, a round brush attached to a series of hollow sticks that could brush a nine-by-fourteen-inch flue. Three-quarters of London's chimneys could have been cleaned with it, replacing the climbing children. The device is demonstrated in the engraving, as a climbing boy watches. Darton imprints continued to figure in the long crusade. In 1825, an expanded second edition, in parts, of James Montgomery'sThe Chimney-Sweeper's Friend, And Climbing-Boy's Album, bore a Harvey and Darton imprint; part 5 contained The Chimney-Sweeper from Blake's Songs of Innocence. In 1840 a bill was introduced to prohibit the use of climbing children; it was 1875 before regulations were enforced.

The Bee was published in 1788 by W. Chalklen, and taken over shortly after the formation of Darton and Harvey in 1791. The preface indicates that the selection has been made with children in mind. Later editions altered the designation "the best authors" to "approved authors," but Helen Maria Williams, no longer "approved" after the Revolutionary years, retained her place.

[ page 36 ]

[ page 37 ]

[ page 38 ]

William Darton's interest in a poetry collection for children would have intensified with the success of this anthology put together by Mrs. Barbauld's twenty-year-old niece Lucy Aikin. Among the poems are some of her own, Mrs. Barbauld's "The Mouse's Petition," and Southey's recently published "The Old Man's Comforts, And How He Gained Them," better known through Carroll's parody, "You are old, father William."

In the Dissenting tradition of children's poetry Isaac Watts holds the prominent place, and it is that poetic tradition William Darton personally enriched when he solicited and printed the poetry of Ann and Jane Taylor. Dr. Johnson wrote that Watts was "one of the first authors that taught the Dissenters to court attention by the graces of language." It was Watts's later "Moral Songs," nine of which are included here, which Mrs. Barbauld was attempting to imitate in herHymns in Prose; in his letter to the Taylor family, William Darton was requesting something like the "songs" in this section.

Among the poems by "others" is Thomas Foxton's "Dangers of Mispending Time," an imitation of Watts from hisMoral Songs Composed For The Use Of Children, 1728, which had appeared in a later collection with wood engravings by Thomas Bewick. Oakman himself was a secular writer of some wit and notoriety. The book includes two imitations of Watts's "The Sluggard," one beginning "Twas the voice of the glutton/I heard him declare," looking forward to Lewis Carroll's "Twas the voice of the lobster." In making up this volume not long before a letter went out to the Taylor family requesting "moral songs, but not songs," William Darton may have been thinking of marketing other poetry collections made up from several hands.

This is the first edition of the second volume, commissioned in November 1804, after the stunning success of the first. It contains Ann Taylor's "The Vulgar Little Lady" and "Meddlesome Matty," and Jane Taylor's "The Cow and the Ass," which a reviewer compared favorably to a La Fontaine

[ page 39 ]

In the first American illustrated edition, the artist did not scruple to show the "Little Fisherman" suspended from the meathook. Original Poems was an immediate success, but it was never without its critics. Although influenced by the cautionary tales in verse, Sara Coleridge, the author of "January brings the snow," a poem which achieved a status of its own in the nursery, wrote: "The Original Poems give too many pictures of mental depravity, bodily torture, and of adult sorrow; and I think the sentiments—the tirades, for instance, against hunting, fishing, shooting—are morbid, and partially false."

Rhymes For The Nursery, 1806, contained only poems by the Taylor sisters; there are many cautionary tales in verse, including Ann Taylor's "Playing with fire," but the poem that became a classic is Jane Taylor's "The Star." This illustrated selection first appeared in the same year, omitting Jane Taylor's "The Poor Little Baby," beginning "Down, down in the pit-hole poor baby is gone,/The cold earth did rattle its coffin upon."

The Taylor sisters were part of an affectionate family closely touched by death. Death is already a presence in Original Poems, For Infant Minds, as it was in the lives of children of the time. The hymns in imitation of Dr. Watts written by Ann and Jane Taylor are somber works; although Christian hymns are a genre for singing of death, surely there are few books so obsessed with the pain and physical disintegration of the child as this one. Watts saw a grandeur in death since it opened the door to decisive judgment. In the Taylors' death poems, the stern oratory that shapes Watts's "A thousand Children young as I/ Are call'd by Death to hear their Doom" decays into Gothic sentimentality. The frontispiece was "Drawn by Isaac Taylor Jun.r" and "Engraved by Ann Taylor," a rare signed example of Ann Taylor's work. The scene dramatizes the peculiar relishing of guilt in the poem "A Child's Lamentation For The Death Of A Dear Mother."

This 1825 American edition has a charming Garden of Eden scene on its paper wrapper. D'Alté Welch found that Hymns For Infant Minds was the most widely published children's book in the United States in the nineteenth century. It is a sobering thought.

In a letter to "My dear Father and Mother," Isaac and Ann Martin Taylor, from Rotherham where she and her brother Isaac were visiting their sister Ann Taylor Gilbert, Jane Taylor refers to her father's lectures:

Upon inquiry we find that we shall not get into Town in time to reach Ongar on Wednesday night. I shall therefore write to Martin hoping he can get beds for us. We therefore shall not be with you till Thursday evening which we are very sorry for on account of its being lecture night.

The imprint is shared by the Gracechurch Street and Holborn Hill firms in this late edition of the children's periodical and diary; the frontispiece is a scene from an account of a Native American tribe. The Opie Collection in the Bodleian Library contains a unique copy of The Minor's Pocket Book For The Year 1791," published 1790, with the imprint "Printed for the proprietors and Sold by Wm. Darton & Co. Gracechurch Street and by Champante & Wittrow [sic] Aldgate." The poems sent by the Taylor teenagers to the yearly competitions brought them to the attention of Darton and Harvey. "It was the purchase, accidental, shall I say? of the pocket book for 1798 that gave direction, and I hope usefulness to our lives," wrote Ann Taylor Gilbert in her Autobiography.

The drawing illustrates "The Little Cripple's Complaint," Ann Taylor's poem from the second volume of Original Poems; it was made for Little Ann and Other Poems, 1883, in which it was color printed by Edmund Evans.

Adelaide O'Keeffe, the other principal author of Original Poems, was the daughter of the Irish Catholic comic dramatist, whom Hazlitt called "the English Molière."Wild Oats, 1791, performed twenty-nine times in its first two seasons, was acted into the nineteenth century and revived by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1976. After its successful opening, O'Keeffe spent a long summer holiday with his son and daughter Adelaide, on the Dorset coast, during which fourteen-year-old Adelaide was "reading her favourite, Miss Burney's 'Cecilia." ' In Adelaide O'Keeffe's National Characters, the Irish Officer praises the native songs brought to the stage by "O'Keeffe's wild genius, claiming smile and tear."

[ page 41 ]

[ page 42 ]

Both text and illustrations are engraved in this picture book of O'Keeffe's best-known poem, from the second volume of Original Poems, For Infant Minds, which Indiana children still recited in the second part of this century:

The Dog will come when he is call'd,
The Cat will walk away,
The Monkey's cheek is very bald.
The Goat is fond of play.

The accelerating reorganization of the field system after 1809 must have created many scenes of the kind O'Keeffe describes, but they are generally not subjects for children's poetry. In the poem "Cottage Fuel," the kindly squire dismisses his hired manager for abusing a boy gathering wood, who is asserting an ancient right of the commons before enclosure. The opening of the poem is of great interest, for in describing the security his benevolence has gained for him, the squire describes the measures being taken by his neighbors to keep the poor from penetrating their domain: "No prowling mastiff is let loose to watch them;/ No spring-gun charg'd; here no man-trap is set." It is not a good poem, but it is certainly a good subject.

The English national character is represented by "The English Banker," which shrewdly lays out the program for bourgeois success—the accumulation of and zealous guarding of capital ("But root and trunk I keep with me"); a five thousand pound start for each son; pious, fair daughters "well portioned"; a wife who desires an estate; the move to a suburban setting with tenants to be managed morally ("No fighting Cocks—no boxing match"); and the newly ritualized twice-yearly holiday feasts for the family. In 1818, Darton, Harvey, and Darton negotiated a new fourteen-year copyright agreement for Original Poems, For Infant Minds with the Taylor family, which secured each of the sisters around £600. No financial agreement was made with O'Keeffe, apparently, who in later years was told by the Gracechurch Street firm to direct her inquiries to the Taylor family. Perhaps as a compensatory gesture, in 1818, O'Keeffe's National Characters acknowledges her connection with Original Poems; or perhaps in this case O'Keeffe persuaded the Lymington printer to mention this along with her adult novels, and to list them on a leaf at the back of the book. After 1818, the Gracechurch Street firm began to associate her with Original Poems in its advertising.

Interconnected narrative poems develop the characters of a "rich" family on holiday and the nature of day-to-day life at a seaside resort. The work creates an intimacy from observed detail lacking in all of O'Keeffe's other works. In these poems the author seems to be writing of scenes she cared for and of people she knew. A little girl is asked to recite her "favorite poem," which turns out to be Jane Taylor's "Morning Hymn" from Original Poems. In "Young Jack, the Sailor-Boy," a drowned child is revived by the local Humane Society.

Ann Taylor modelled her poem on a lyric by William Cowper, the pre-eminent poet of the domestic. Cowper wrote "My Mary" in 1793 when his companion Mary Unwin was in failing health; it was published posthumously in William Hayley's biography of Cowper in 1803, just in time to provide the model for "My Mother." Hayley's biography falsified Cowper's relation to Mary Unwin, and in the context of the biography the poem read like a tribute to an aged mother. Responding to this strange situation, Ann Taylor produced the poem that Hayley thought Cowper had written in the first place. The frontispiece portrait of Cowper is engraved by William Blake after Thomas Lawrence.

The unhappy Cowper's association with domestic happiness dominates this miniature biographical sketch: "Oh, what a happy thing it is to have a good mother!"

Lady Hamilton is said to have been the model for the mother in this authorized separate printing of the poem, illustrated by a pupil of Bartolozzi. Christine Duff Stewart found that Isaac Taylor the younger had made sketches for the poem, which do not appear to have been used for any contemporary edition; fittingly, one of Taylor's designs was used to illustrate an excerpt from Hannah More's Coelebs In Search Of A Wife in The Minor's Pocket Book in 1810. "My Mother" and More's Coelebs are impressively influential articulations of the new conception of wife and mother as a profession. Cowper's poem "My Mary" and Taylor's "My Mother" moved on parallel paths into the Victorian consciousness. Tennyson's emotional response to Cowper's poem was so intense

[ page 44 ]

[ page 45 ]

[ page 46 ]

"My Mother" is printed with Isaac Watts's "The Cradle Hymn" in this New York edition; the publisher Mahlon Day also issued a series of "My Mother" imitations.

The Cowper-Taylor verse form is used to teach the succession of the sovereigns:

And whose domestic virtues shine,
With brightest lustre, and combine
To make him lov'd by all his line?
George the Third.

The most active producer of "My Mother" imitations was William Darton the younger of Holbom Hill, many of them written by his prolific author, Mary Belson Elliott. Grateful Tributes includes poems to "My Mother," "My Father," "My Sister," "My Brother," and "My Mammy," some of which were also published separately as picture sheets, picture books, and jigsaw puzzles, and widely copied in the United States.

The section "The Golden Rule" illustrated by an engraving of an English child offering a Bible to an African child is an apt expression of the evangelical motive behind much of the antislavery agitation of the time.

Passages condemning slavery incidental to descriptions of the production of sugar occur in many Darton imprints. In Familiar Lessons, two black men are shown operating a cane press. The author states that "The motive to which these lessons are owing, originated in finding those of Mrs. Barbauld and Mrs. Wollstonecraft too frequently formed on the particular circumstances of the children for whom they were composed; which appeared to render them, in many instances, inapplicable as lessons for others."

This is the first separate edition of Cowper's impressive antislavery ballad, which since its appearance in 1788 had been circulated and sung on the streets. The Cornell University Library copy has been annotated by a reader with biblical citations, written in ink above the hand-colored wood engravings. The second poem "Pity For Poor Africans," also dating from 1788, satirizes those who "shared in the plunder, but pitied the man."

Amelia Alderson Opie was a popular poet and novelist, author of a novel based on the career of Mary Wollstonecraft. She married the Romantic painter John Opie. A close friend of the Gurney family, she became a convinced Quaker in 1825, and renounced writing fiction. In The First Chapter of Accidents, William Darton included Opie's most popular poem, "The Orphan Boy," from Poems, 1802. "The Negro Boy's Tale" is from the same volume. For this reprinting, Opie has added a preface addressed to children. The frontispiece is engraved on copper. Lawrence Darton's copy is inscribed "To Mary Lister from her friend Amelia Opie, Norwich, 2nd mo. 2nd. 1826."

Opie wrote this poem for children as part of the swelling antislavery agitation preceding the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833. One of the hand-colored wood engravings shows the interior of a slave ship packed for the middle passage. Other antislavery books published by Harvey and Darton are advertised on the back cover of The Black Man's Lament, including an important American slave narrative, A Narrative of Some Remarkable Incidents in the Life of Solomon Bayley. Amelia Alderson Opie was a Norwich delegate to the World's Antislavery Convention of 1840 in London. The convention refused to seat the women of the American delegation, including Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a historic event which transferred some of the passion of the antislavery movement to the movement for women's rights.

An abolitionist rhyme on the cumulative principle of The House that Jack Built had first appeared in 1800. The effective wood engravings include a portrait of William Wilberforce, the Evangelical crusader against the slave trade, to whom the work is dedicated.

This is the fourth edition of one of the most remarkable narratives of the era, first published in 1837. The engraved frontispiece is a portrait of Moses Roper. This is not a children's book, but many children, especially in the households of Friends, read it. As William Andrews has shown, Moses Roper has used the biblical story of Joseph and his brothers to structure his account of exploitation and deceit. The epigraph is from Cowper's The Negro's Complaint.

[ page 50 ]

Travel among Friends in England often meant from one Friend's house to another, as described in this charming rebus letter from the young Maria Barton Hack to her cousin. It is endorsed on the back by Lucy Fitzgerald, who was the daughter of Bernard Barton and the wife of Edward Fitzgerald, the translator ofThe Rubáiyát:

This letter was written by my Aunt, Maria Hack (when she was a girl) the authoress of 'Grecian Stories'—'English Stories'—'Winter Evenings' &c &c—She was my father's eldest sister. [sgd:] Lucy Fitzgerald.

Nine aquatint engravings of different parts of the world form backgrounds for smaller scenes and cut-out figures, which fit into the grooved side of the lid. Two mahogany pillars combine with shaped gray cards to form the theatre front. Instructions for setting up the scenes were given in a descriptive booklet. The Geographical Panorama was attributed to Maria Hack in Joseph Smith's Descriptive Catalogue of Friends' Books. Possibly she wrote the explanatory booklet, and her daughter, Elizabeth Barton Hack, who designed the illustrations for Winter Evenings, drew the scenes. One of the cutouts is a desert scene identical to the frontispiece of the first volume of Winter Evenings, forming part of a scene described thus:

The place of the camel may now be filled by a group of travellers, one of whom supported by a friend, is expiring from the effects of the simoon, or stifling wind of the desert. The little girl is the daughter of the dying man: she survived the dangers of the journey, and was restored to her mother. The story is related in the first vol. of "Winter Evenings."

"Arrival of Columbus on the Shores of America & astonishment of the Natives" is represented by tiny figures on the hillside watching the approach of ships in the harbor. Emily Taylor wrote several books for the Gracechurch Street firm, into the 1840s. Her brother was Edgar Taylor, the English translator of the Grimms, whose two volume German Popular Stories was published 1823-26.

[ page 51 ]

[ page 52 ]

A map, designed and engraved by Gardner, shows "the Country round Great St. Bernard and Mount Blanc, with the Route of the Tourists." This book imitates for children the popular format of adult books on the "Tour," the word "Tourist" being a recent coinage. The marks of Napoleon appear throughout; at Isola Bella, the narrator sees "a very large laurel-tree … on which Buonaparte had cut the word 'Battaglia' with his knife."

The first attempt to describe Canada to English-speaking children was based on written sources, by a writer who six years later emigrated there and wrote one of the early masterpieces of Canadian literature, The Backwoods of Canada. The children's book in 1826 presents an idyllic view of the crossing and the family's first view of Montreal. When the author actually arrived, in 1832, cholera was raging and her first-hand view of Montreal, "a place of which travellers had said so much," was stark:

I could compare it only to the fruits of the Dead sea, which are said to be fair and tempting to look upon, but yield only ashes and bitterness when tasted by the thirsty traveller.

Another Strickland sister, Susannah Strickland Moodie, also emigrated to Canada, and wrote the classic Roughing It In The Bush.

[ page 53 ]

The American Quaker publisher has copied William Darton's miniature book from the Infants Own Book-Case, with its remarkably tactful text. Even when in error, the author's distinctive opposition to stereotypes is apparent:

An Orang-Outang is a wild man of the woods, in the East Indies. He sleeps under trees, and builds himself a hut; he cannot speak, but when the natives make a fire in the woods, he will come to warm himself.

The Dutch have "slow, phlegmatic dispositions," while the Germans are "a frank, honest, hospitable people"; the European is "generally strong, active, and intelligent." Of people of color, the Tahitians who welcomed Captain Cook are seen to have pleasing physical characteristics and are said to dress like the ancient Greeks.

A member of the committee of 1788 against the slave trade and an advocate on behalf of children used as chimney sweeps, Forster was an avid amateur botanist. In 1820, Harvey and Darton published his work on fungi, "that much-neglected tribe of vegetables."

The author of the popular The Geographical Present states that her intention is "to form a comparison between the systems of Linnaeus and Lamarck, that may prove familiar to the understanding of very young persons."

Observing the interest of his mother and sister in botany, Henry mistakenly thinks that it is a girl's subject: to correct this notion, his father writes to the young medical student, basing his letters on Linnaeus's account of his tour of Lapland. The father plans to read Bacon's essays with his daughter.

Franklin's Way To Wealth is among the younger William Darton's first productions for children. The text was part of Poor Richard's Almanac for 1758, separately published in 1760 as "Father Abraham's Speech." The engraved illustrations show idle workers at the establishments of "W. RESTLESS" and "J. ABSENT." This copy has been bound with a later book list in a wrapper with the W. and T. Darton imprint.

The New York Quaker firm of Samuel Wood had begun publishing children's books in 1806. The introduction to this edition refers to "The London copy, from which this is printed." The woodcuts are crude versions of the Darton engravings.

[ page 55 ]

[ page 56 ]

Although Samuel Wood copied a number of books published by the English Darton firms, in this case, the Wood rebus is the source for the later Darton imprint. This copy is of interest for another reason: it is signed "A. Lincoln" on the front wrapper and contains a sworn statement by Mrs. Lincoln's coachman that the book is from Abraham Lincoln's collection. This famous forgery is thought to be by Eugene Field II, son of the American poet.

This is the first edition published in England, and is based on Samuel Wood's publication, with few alterations, in a reversal of the usual pattern of transmission from England to the U.S. At this period, the Gracechurch Street firm associated with the Quaker activist publisher William Alexander of York in publishing Ann Alexander's important pamphlet on the condition of climbing boys. In 1812, both the Gracechurch Street and the Holborn Hill firms had joined with Alexander of York in the publication of Samuel Tuke's Description of the Retreat, an epoch-making examination of the Friends' institution for the mentally ill.

In the frontispiece, a soft edge engraving by an unknown illustrator who also worked for John Harris, the young Franklin directs his playmates to remove stones from a building site so that they can erect a little quay from which to fish, a popular incident from Franklin's Life and Works. Joseph Lancaster uses the story in his Improvements In Education to argue that such lively behavior should not be repressed but directed toward useful ends: "Whenever a neat, ingenious trick, of a mischievous nature, has been played, we may be sure some arch wag, who officiates as captain of the gang, perhaps a Franklin, was the original and life of the conspiracy."

Scientific notes occupy pp. 15-16 of Part I and pp. 12-16 of Part II. The author of this "light sketch" is "the Sea Pen," described in a note as "a species of certain vegetables, or substances partaking of the nature both of vegetables and animals." The illustrator has portrayed this denizen of "Shaw's Natural Miscellany, Plate 124" as a gloriously Prufrockian mermaid, shown composing the poem in her grotto: a rare portrait of a female author!

In 1808, Darton and Harvey published at least three imitations on their own, The Court of the Beasts, Ann Taylor'sThe Wedding Among the Flowers, and The Balaenic Games, Or, The Whale's Jubilee, which ends with a tournament compared to that of Richard the Second at Smithfield. The illustrations to all of these books suggest that the firm's opposition to fantasy cannot have been overwhelming, especially when the fantastic could be developed in a tradition established by the respectable Dissenter, William Roscoe.

The illustrations for this Darton and Harvey publication from the 1830s recall the heady days of the original Butterfly's Ball. The fantastical wood engraving of bees fighting off an invasion of wasps with spears and swords is worthy of a modem comic book.

W. and T. Darton advertised this fine anthology in 1809. William Upton's poem "The Death of the Hawk and the Council of Birds" is an imitation of The Butterfly's Ball. Adelaide O'Keeffe's "The Redbreast's Petition" from Original Poems, For Infant Minds is included. Although this copy has an 1815 title page, it contains William Darton's presentation leaf, probably engraved after his father's death in 1819; the book may have been made up later of sheets from the 1815 edition.

[ page 58 ]

Copied from an earlier Darton edition, the plates have been colored by hand. William Charles of Philadelphia was among the first to introduce colored plates into children's books in the United States. The printers, M'Carty & Davis, eventually took over the Quaker firm of Johnson and Warner, and in turn sold their stock to the uncle of A. S. W. Rosenbach.

This is one of the earliest picture books of this rhyme, the subject of many chapbooks, and its illustrations are a masterpiece of the genre. In keeping with the small scale of the burial, the "beadle" stitching the shroud should probably be a beetle, and the "bull" tolling the bell might properly be a bullfinch.

Displayed in a later reissue of the book is the famous "timid hare" plate with the gravestone showing the date of the death, and, apparently, of the engraving.

The Dame's cat takes a lover in this zany continuation of her adventures. In their attribution of the work "to the pen of the Duchess of L****, the brothers have revived the fanciful Newbery style that their father had explicitly suppressed on his new title page for Goody Two Shoes.

This is the characteristic red wrapper in which a number of the books from the earlier period were reissued by William Darton after his father's death. Over a bookshelf in the first engraving are the words "The Pretty Books in this corner/Belong to Little Jack Horner."

Portraying the old woman's fearful flight from what turns out to be a natural rather than a supernatural pursuer, the illustrator has made an ambitious attempt to show night scenes throughout. In this copy, the word "ghost" has been inked out at each occurrence. This is the first separate edition of Bloomfield's popular poem, taken from Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs, 1802.

A Regency fop of a cat, not the fairy tale character, buys his boots at Hoby's in St. James. "Further Proofs Of Fashion" include "Pantaloons, a cravat,/ And an Opera hat, Which he wore on his head, a la Russe." Regrettably, the captions and lower parts of some of the wonderful plates have been trimmed.

First published in 1806, Portraits Of Curious Characters in London reflects the contemporary passion for prints representing vendors, street people, and eccentrics as spectacle. Theodora de Verdion, "commonly known by the name of Chevalier John Theodora De Verdion, Who lived in London disguised as a man, a teacher of languages and a walking bookseller," was born around 1744. A copper engraving from which the image in Portraits descends, with folio volumes held at a different angle under one arm and with the umbrella reversed, had appeared as early as 1770.

This popular print shows its descent from the same eighteenth-century engraving that has influenced the image in Portraits of Curious Characters; her death date is given as 1802, emphasizing the topicality of the subject.

The American edition has been copied from the 1806 English edition. Some of the wood engravings are signed "Morgan," probably William P. Morgan, one of the pupils of Alexander Anderson, the first American to follow Bewick's method. Lydia Bailey, the printer, was one of the most prominent members of the book trade in Philadelphia.

The caricatures and text combine to produce a book of unusual power and interest. Professor Sean Shesgreen has suggested it belongs with volumes like Rowlandson's Characteristic Sketches and Cruikshank's London Characters. Some of the wood blocks used in London Melodies are in the Hindson-Reid collection in the University Library, Newcastle upon Tyne. They were made by the older woodcutting method, not the end grain wood engraving technique perfected by Bewick.

On the front cover of this hand-colored picture book of London criers for younger children is an image of Billy Waters, a well-known black street fiddler with a wooden leg, copied directly from Thomas Busby's image, collected in hisCostume of the Lower Orders of London. In 1823, Busby's plate of Billy Waters appeared in a small children's book with truncated text and a wretched doggerel poem. The image could have been copied from Busby's book, from the print which circulated on its own, or from the children's book.

A sensational story from the Gentleman's Magazine has been illustrated with eight copper engravings, a striking woodcut, and a woodcut vignette. In the account, "When brought into court, the child wore a hat and feather purchased for him by his reputed mother." In the copper engraving, little Thomas Dellow perches rather stiffly in his mother's arms wearing the tell-tale headgear; the woodcut, on the other hand, portrays a magnificent hat and feather and a glorying child.

[ page 61 ]

The illustration on wood on the front cover shows boys at a columbarium; on the back cover is a scene with a coach and horses, a driver, and two boys.

J. H. P. Pafford identifies the 1812 edition of this work as "the earliest known dated edition with 'Moral Songs' in the title." There are twelve woodcuts, including the depiction of the thief hanging, a common illustration in editions up to the early nineteenth century, but less so by this date.

This is the first of Mary Belson Elliott's books for the Holborn Hill firm, a colorful narrative poem about Town Mice and Country Mice; the description of the homeward journey of the rag-tag band of survivors is worthy of Watership Down. Although W. and T. Darton seem to have accepted the book at the author's own risk, they have produced it with bold illustrations by a gifted wood engraver. The hand-colored plates have been bound out of order in this copy.

The appealing little Charlotte, rather like Maria Edgeworth's Rosamond inThe Purple Jar, retains her sweetness while having her enthusiasm dampened. Although this early work shows Mary Elliott's narrative skill, she seems to be writing to please her publisher, advertising his dissected maps, instilling contempt for the penny-books of the village book seller, and encouraging child consumer instincts in the building of a proper juvenile library.

The preface to the first edition of 1809 stated that these poems were the work of "two Young Ladies" attempting to support an aged mother, and the poems were individually signed "Eliza" and "Mary." The second author is not credited here. The illustrator of "The Man of Snow" has based the scene on Thomas Bewick's tail-piece to the red-legged crow in History of British Birds, which had previously been copied for the Gracechurch Street publication, Youthful Sports, 1801. The very worn plate bears the imprint of the first edition: "London: Published July 6th 1809 by W and T Darton 58 Holborn Hill." The elder William Darton wrote in Little Jack Of All Trades that "The chief purpose of engraving is to give a thousand or more copies of one drawing or painting." In fact, the soft surface of the metal wore quickly.

Among the many fine plates depicting scenes from rural life is that of a woman and little girl "Swarming the Bees."

One of the most beautiful of the productions of the Holborn Hill firm, this book is made up from a hand-colored copper-engraved picture sheet, cut and folded; the title of the sheet was placed top center on the engraved sheet; when it was made into book form, the title section fell on the second page, unless the verses were put out of order.

[ page 64 ]

Three Elliott books are displayed in their original paper wrappers, which when opened reveal the elaborate folding frontispiece and pretty plates. Elliott's straightforward style meant that her stories could be easily translated, and a series of them was produced for English children studying French, using the engraved illustrations with their English captions. Some of the stories appeared in German.

The adaptation, first published in 1815, is not very appealing, but the illustrator's conception of Goody Two Shoes is; the plates in this apparent reissue of the 1819 edition include a folding frontispiece.

The wood engravings in this American edition are by Alexander Anderson, the first important wood engraver in the United States. The bright orange cover with its bold leopard vignette is a nice departure for Samuel Wood.