Author Archives: Andrea Immel

Rosamund’s Dilemma: A Purple Jar or A Pair of Shoes?

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Celebrated children’s book author and novelist Maria Edgeworth is the young lady with the long curls and pretty hat at the left of Adam Buck’s famous group portrait of Richard Edgeworth and nine of his twenty-two children.

Maria Edgeworth’s most famous (or infamous) short story  is “The Purple Jar,” the first in the series of the Rosamund stories, which began appearing in The Parent’s Assistant (1796).   Why has this story overshadowed the series showing how a lively seven-year-old girl developed into an intelligent,thoughtful, and engaging young woman?  Possibly because so many readers have been somewhat taken aback by the behavior of  Rosamund’s mother on the shopping trip in London.  During an awkward moment with her daughter, she might have exercised her authority gently to avoid an unpleasant outcome, but instead she chose to treat it as a teachable moment and let things take their course.

Rosamund might have seen a display something like this when she went to the apothecary shop with her mother. Plate 6 from General Knowledge made Easy, or the Child’s First Step to Mechanics, Mineralogy, Agriculture, Sculpture…London: D. Carvalho, ca. 1830. (Cotsen 26558)

When Rosamund and her mother visit the apothecary’s shop, the little girl is captivated by a jar she wrongly assumes to be made of  deep purple glass.  She begs her mother to buy it for her, but her mother sensibly explains why she will not.   When it is clear that Rosamund is unlikely to change her mind, her mother gives her the choice of the jar or a new pair of shoes, but not both.  After some more thought, Rosamund decides she will take the jar. When the precious jar is delivered to the house, Rosamund discovers almost immediately that the luscious color comes from the nasty-smelling liquid it contains.  Once the liquid has been poured out,  an ordinary clear glass container remains.  Her mother holds her to her decision and will neither return the jar nor purchase the new shoes for another four weeks.

Of course Rosamund should not have ignored the evidence from her senses that her shoes were completely worn out.  Stones were getting in through the tattered soles, which made walking even a short distance rather painful.  But her lively imagination presented such a glorious image of that purple jar filled with flowers on the mantel that she ignored her mother’s suggestion to inspect the jar, just in case it was not what it seemed.  Possession of the jar, Rosamund convinced herself, would bring her a  degree of happiness that no pair of shoes could.

Rosamund’s second fatal mistake is the more intriguing of the two because it involved a different kind of intelligence.  Like a fairy, her mother promised to grant her one wish and one wish only.   Rosamund should have realized (maybe) that she was in exactly same situation as a heroine in a fairy tale and o course, no fairy is not obliged to sit down and review the pros and cons of a wish on offer. Another reason why Rosamund should have been more cautious before she leapt.  By choosing the purple jar instead of the shoes, she ended up with the equivalent of a sausage hanging where her nose should be, just like the silly wife in  Charles’ Perrault’s “The Three Wishes,” but without the luxury of one more wish to put things to rights again.

Be careful what you wish for–you might get a sausage that is two yards long attached to your face… French popular print of Charles Perrault, “Les souhaits ridicules” [The ridicious wishes.”

What Rosamund realizes during her month of stumbling around in down-at-the-heel shoes, is how difficult it is to anticipate where you will need to go.  Her shoes were so disgraceful that her father left her at home while the rest of the family visited a glass house, a sight she very much wanted to see.    No shoes, no outing.    Rosamund’s journey in “The Purple Jar” was not as long as Dorothy’s on the Yellow Brick Road, but it was no less arduous for having taken place inside of her head, being the first step on the road to maturity.  While Rosamund wanted to be a sensible, intelligent and independent person, she also sensed that it would be good to hold on to the capacity for magical thinking that got her in trouble in the first place: “Oh mamma, how I wish that I had chosen the shoes–they would have been of so much more use to me than that jar: however, I am sure–no not quite sure, but I hope, I shall be wiser another time.”

A pair of girl’s shoes ca. 1790 in the collection of the Philadelphia Art Museum. The soles are not very thick, so it’s easy to imagine that they would wear thin with use. Once they got well-worn and stretched out, they look as if they would fall off the feet very easily, there being no straps.

“The Purple Jar” looks like nothing more than a realistic story in easy language for young children.   Yet the way Edgeworth skillfully weaves fairy tale elements into an everyday incident underscores its importance in her life.   It implies that there is no learning without curiosity, imagination, or chance of making mistakes.

A artfully arranged collection of colored glass can be dazzling, so Rosamund can be forgiven for being seduced by the display in the apothecary shop…

This post is dedicated to the memory of Mitzi Myers, who loved and understood Rosamund perhaps better than anyone except Edgeworth herself.

Books and “Fancy Articles” for Sale at Richard Miller’s in Old Fish Street, London

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An engraver by trade, Richard Miller was also a publisher and the proprietor of a “juvenile library” (aka a children’s book store) at 24 Old Fish Street in early nineteenth century London.   His shop was quite close to the church of St. Mary Magdalen, shown in the engraving to the left, and south and east of Paul’s Church Yard, long a center of book trade activity. Miller was pretty small fry compared to John Harris, successor to the Newberys and a major publisher in his own right, or the Darton firm, with two bustling businesses at two locations in the city.   By the 1820s, the children’s book market had grown so large that there was plenty of room for multiple shops catering to customers with different tastes and values.

Miller engraved attractive sets of illustrated cards  that were sold for school and Sunday school rewards.  The same sets of sheets were also sold bound as neat little volumes in marbled paper with colored roan spines.  The bound volumes seem to have survived at a higher rate than the cards and certain titles still turn up fairly often on the antiquarian book market.

Cotsen has seven Miller publications and they were probably published in the 1820s (he did not date his title pages as a rule).  There are four little books of engraved plates: The History of Birds, The History of Goody Two Shoes, Pastimes or Amusements for a Girl, and Twenty-Six Poetical Extracts. In the collection of educational cards there’s the Miller Pence Table in forty-eight hand-colored engraved illustrated cards.  The 126-page The Panorama of the World, or An Enquiry into the Manners and Customs of the Principal Foreign Inhabitants of the Globe, illustrated with nine hand-colored engraved plates, is the only proper book in the group.

That leaves Military Heroes That Have Distinguished Themselves During the Late Wars (that is, the Napoleonic wars)  I like it less for the fourteen hand-colored engraved equestrian portraits of great generals like Alexander the Great, Prince Blucher, and the Duke of Wellington, than for the twelve-page catalog of “Books and Fancy Articles” at the end.  In the catalog this book listed under the title “Memoirs of Military Heroes.”  With plain engravings, Military Heroes  cost a shilling and with colored plates (which Cotsen’s copy has) two shillings.  The portraits could also be purchased individually on superfine paper for two pence  or as a set for two shillings.  It was a fair price for such a things then, but not cheap.

Military Heroes That have Distinguished Themselves During the Late Wars. London: R. Miller, [not before 1815]. (Cotsen 35443)

(Cotsen 35443)

Overall there are plenty of indications in the catalog that Miller was more than a very clever packager of his own content.  The opening below offers a delicious selection of novelty parlor games and educational flash cards.  The packs of conversation cards include one called “Pop the Question,” which probably had nothing to do with the conclusion of a courtship.  But maybe not, given the close proxmity to The Ladder of Matrimony  and The Map of Matrimony.  Obviously The Map  represents an imaginary place, like the “country of sighs.”   Still it was available as well as a jigsaw puzzle in a neat box as if it were something for teaching the geography of South America.  Prints had been sold for centuries for sticking on walls as decorations and Miller obliged with the series “Cottage Ornaments” or hand-colored prints for two pence on such edifying subjects as the drunken man or the death of the Earl of Rochester.  Certainly good enough for the parlour   The best of the “Fancy Articles” Miller sold has to be the “Satin Medallion Pincushions” for a shilling that feature  the portraits of the royal family and other famous people from Lord Nelson to worthy divines copied from the subjects on the preceding list of prints.  Do any survive in textile collections?This double-page spread offers more evidence that Miller didn’t rely completely on his own wares to stock his shelves.  He must have sold books by his competitors.  W. F. Sullivan was a school master who wrote many early examples of what would now be considered young adult novels.  He published with a variety of firms over the years, but none by Miller, as far as I can tell.  The roster of eighteenth-century classics like Gay’s Fables and Chesterfield’s Advice to His Son were probably also not Miller publications.  Tthe last title in that list is an edition of James Janeway’s Token for Children, one of the most famous and enduring of all seventeenth century juveniles.  It is not out of place here, because there are quite a few religious titles sprinkled throughout the catalogue.The last page in the catalogue features lots of old favorites–II see two different editions of Dick Whittington and Blue Beard, based on the George Colman dramatic remake.  What’s interesting even more interesting is the use of the term “picture book” to describe a work where the pictures dominate the words text.  It seems that the term must have been in wider use earlier than the OED entry suggests (there is appearances of the term between 1699 and 1847).

Nobody would claim that Richard Miller’s catalogue can compete with one from American Girl, Hearth Song, or any other modern company sells by mail or on the web.   Even though he lacked the technical resources to illustrate every item in his stock with color pictures, he managed with just words to make his merchandise look enticing enough for the  owner of Military Heroes to consider paying a call at the juvenile library on Old Fish Street.