Category Archives: 18th century

How a Young Woman Writer Got Her First Book Published: Lucy Peacock and The Adventures of the Six Princesses of Babylon (1785)

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Very few classic eighteenth-century children’s books have an origin myth, or story about how an adult came to write for a real child because the book he or she imagined didn’t exist and decided the manuscript should be published for others’ enjoyment.  The only one I can think of is Mrs. Barbauld’s brief account of Lessons for Children (1788): “amidst the multitude of books professedly written for children, there is not one adapted to the comprehension of a child from two to three years old …This little publication was made for a particular child [i.e. her nephew and adopted son Charles], but the public is welcome tit.”

The Adventures of the Six Princesses of Babylon (1785) is not in the same league as Lessons for Children, but it stands out because we know the author’s name, how she got her first book in print, and something about her later career.   Miss Lucy Peacock described herself modestly as young and not possessed of advantages, but must have been a rather determined person.   She had written for young ladies a book-length imitation of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene entitled The Adventures of the Six Princesses of Babylon, which is an original allegory about the passions, not a juvenile abridgment of Spenser, as is usually claimed.  Perhaps no bookseller would do business with this unknown writer and with no prospect of newpaper advertisements of the book and so she decided to try subscription publication instead, which the Oxford Companion to the Book defines as:

A system of obtaining orders (and sometimes payment) in advance to enable publication of a book. Worthy books have often been declined by publishers as poor commercial risks. Financial responsibility for their publication then falls on the author, who generally invites others to share the costs.

Bound into the first editions is a list of subscribers, or the names of people who signed up to reserve  copies of The Six Princesses of Babylon. Actually, there are three different versions of the list and the differences between them contribute new information to the story of her campaign.   The first one is the shortest, still Peacock’s tactics for garnering subscribers is clear. She had success attracting the custom of fashionable, titled ladies: at the head of the Ds is “Her Grace the Duchess of Devonshire,”   none other than the showy and notorious Georgiana Spenser Cavendish, a devoted mother after her fashion, put down for seven copies. Peacock also signed up a number of celebrated London musicians, the best known being Dr. Charles Burney, father of novelist Fanny Burney, who also took a copy.  Then there was the Queen of the Blue-Stockings, Elizabeth Montagu.  Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, marine painter, designer of the Eudophusikon, a miniature mechanical theater, the inventor of spectacular stage effects, and his wife both subscribed.  Philanthropist, opponent of tea-drinking, and eventual champion of chimney sweets, Jonas Hanway can be found on the list. And she also landed Lady Charlotte Finch, royal governess to the children of George III and his consort Charlotte.

Could Lady Charlotte had something to do with Peacock obtaining permission to dedicate the Six Princesses to nine-year-old Princess Mary, the eleventh child of George and Charlotte, and their fourth daughter?  The subscribers’ list was reset with the dedicatee’s name at the head of the names in all caps.   Princess Mary’s approbation seems to have swelled the list with enough new names that it had to be reset a third time to fit in another two pages of names.Coaxing members of the London elite was hardly a novel tactic.  What was original about Peacock’s approach was that she solicited subscribers in girls’ schools from the very beginning. There are twenty-two described as such, with the names of the pupil-subscribers set down, giving some indication of the school’s size. The appendix of girls’ schools in Nicholas Hans’ New Trends in Education in the Eighteenth Century (1951) does not record any of them.  But it is possible that there are more schools there. A few of the heads of school put down for multiple copies but did not give the pupils’ names.  Could some of the subscribers who took more than three copies but do not seem to be members of the book trade have been educators?  Peacock’s list of subscribers could be a good jumping off point for further research  on girls’ education.

Who was this enterprising young lady who signed the end of every copy?  Her exact identity has yet to be established from perusing Ancestry Library can be trusted.   We do know that she continued to write for young people—original works, including several featuring Black and Creole characters, translations from the French, and reference works.  She also took charge of their sale and marketing from her Juvenile Library on Oxford Street.  She edited The Juvenile Magazine (1788) for John Marshall.  Did a male relative or friend help her get started on her interesting career in the literary world?  That is yet to be determined, but perhaps a strong entrepreneurial streak surfaced as early as her drive to write.

Looking at an Icon: A Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744)

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John Newbery’s first children’s book, The Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744) has long been famous for uniting amusement and instruction in a new, more modern way and its status has been taken for granted by generations of educators, collectors, and scholars.

Extreme rarity burnishes the book’s luster.  No public collection or private collector can boast of a truly early, that is one from the 1740s or 1750s.  Of the later seven surviving editions , the British Library holds the lion’s share: the earliest surviving one of 1760, the ones of 1767 and 1770, plus an abridged reprint ca. 1790 by John Marshall,  who purchased the copyright and blocks from Francis Powers,  John’s grandson. The Lilly Library has a copy of the eleventh edition of 1763, while the Gdansk Academy of Sciences in Poland has the thirteenth edition of 1766 published in Edinburgh by D. Patterson.  The only relatively common edition is Isaiah Thomas’s 1787 Worcester, Massachusetts reprint, with some twenty copies recorded in the Eighteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue.  Cotsen’s Newbery collection has only the Thomas edition.  All the illustrations following were taken from the 1967 facsimile of the 1767 edition.

The Morgan Library’s copy of the 1787 Isaiah Thomas edition with one of the premiums and its little pouch. It may or may not be contemporary with the book.

The third thing the Pocket-Book is remembered for is the ball and pincushion tie-in, which is considered among the most inventive promotional schemes any eighteenth-century entrepreneur devised—and they could be fiendishly creative. Jack the Giant-Killer’s letters to his young friends Tommy and Polly describes a novel moral regimen to help them be “as good as possible.”  They are to track their deeds by sticking pins into a parti-colored object: the bad ones on the black half, the good on the red half, with Tommy using a gender-appropriate ball, and Polly a pincushion.  Newbery tried to make it as easy as possible to follow the friendly giant’s advice making balls or pincushions available for purchase for an additional two pence at his shop.

The pencil markings were made by the author on a print-out of the newspaper advertisement, not the actual copy!

The advertisements for the book’s first year in print, however, show that the celebrated come-on was  short-lived.  The ads that appeared between May and August 1744 give the price of the book with and without a ball or pincushion.  By October 22, the one for the second edition in the General Advertiser mentioned the ball-and-pincushion scheme in the book, but nothing about being able to buy real ones.  That information was dropped from subsequent advertisements in London and provincial papers.   Enticing as the offer sounded,  probably not enough mammas and papas took the bait and laid out the extra money for the premiums, balls being such common toys and pincushions so frequently made at home.  Newbery’s next promotional scheme summoned his genius without requiring the outlay of additional cash and other booksellers copied it to give their little books the Newbery touch.  The penny pamphlet Nurse Truelove’s New Year’s Gift (1750) stated on the title page that only for good children would be allowed to purchase it and those lucky boys and girls would get the book for free, chipping in a penny for the Dutch gilt paper wrappers.

The ball-and-pincushion scheme of moral accounting , for better or worse, has  deflected attention  from the book’s grab bag of uncredited bits and pieces–with the exception of the first illustration of a baseball game in progress, which sports historians have long treasured.  While the contents of the Pocket-Book are miscellaneous, as was usual with many eighteenth century children’s books, the selection was not haphazard.  Let’s look at the two poems at the end about time’s power and passage.  Because it was important to persuade children to learn how to use their time well while they were young, those subjects were de facto appropriate for them.  Is it possible to trace them back to their authors? Yes, as is frequently the case, thanks to databases like Eighteenth Century On-Line.   “A Poetical Description of the Four Seasons” was an imitation of Book VII, canto VII of Spenser’s Fairy Queene by James Ralph, a friend of Benjamin Franklin, was first published in 1729 and  “Time’s Address to Plutus and Cupid by Way of Application,” following it, was abridged from John Gay’s Fable XII “Plutus, Cupid & Time” in his second set of fables (1738).  Gay’s best-known fable was “The Hare and Many Friends,” which many eighteenth-century children committed to memory and recited out loud.

These poems were never intended to rival the song-book described on the title page as “a new attempt to teach children the Use of the English Alphabet by Way of Diversion.”   The promise of one may have been an attempt by Newbery to capitalize on the success of  his competition’s Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-Book,  the first collection of nursery rhymes, issued within weeks of each other.  The Pocket-Book offered something rather different, as the advertised song book had been folded somewhat haphazardly into the alphabet–at least according to now familiar conventions for pictured alphabets.

The alphabet was off to a promising start with its introduction of the capital and lower-case letters inserted into the formulaic running heads “The Great A Play, “The little a Play” for pages [21]-[68] instead of via tables.  Each letter “played” at a familiar sport or game described in a little illustrated moral emblem, but subjects did not alliterate with the letters. “All the Birds in the Air” is paired with Great O, not  Great A.   The famous sequence of games concludes with little q, so Great R through little w ditties were paired with Great R through little w.  This seems to be the extent of the song book, only a few of which are  nursery rhymes or riff off characters in them.  Their first lines also do not alliterate with the headings.  Fables with applications by Jack the Giant Killer comprise the subjects of Great X through little z, with the last fable left hanging outside the running head alphabet.   Structurally the alphabet is a bit of a mess, although its lack of transitions between sections in the alphabet may not have mattered to its audience at all.

 

The way the sports and games were presented in the Pocket-Book  suggests that some sanitizing had been done.  Only boys take part in activities such as fishing, shooting, riding, birds’ nesting, dancing around the may pole, or play at “Knock Out and Span,” “Pitch and Hussel, “ cricket, leap frog, etc. Girls appear in just two illustrations: “Boys and Girls come out to Play (not the familiar nursery rhyme);” and “I sent a Letter to my Love.” Yet other contemporary sources indicate that a number of the games shown here were not the exclusive property of children, but frequently played by young adults in mixed groups.  Hoop and Hide, a variation on Hide and Seek, is one of the more interesting examples of such a game.  It could be played out of doors, as shown here, but also in the house.  Players were allowed to hide anywhere, but if someone was discovered under or in a bed, then he or she would have to submit to being kissed by the seeker.  That the game could lead to harder stuff was confirmed by Ned Ward in the London Spy (1700), Sir Richard Steele in the Tatler no. 5 (1712), and in Round about  Our Coal Fire (1730).

So this has just scratched the surface of The Little Pretty Pocket-Book.  What d’ye think of it?