Category Archives: 18th century

A Student Complains about Memorizing his Part in a Play Performed at Westminster School in 1720

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A boy whipping a gig. Christopher Comical, Lectures upon Games and Toys. London: F. Power, 1789. (Cotsen 2039)

The adult writer has the privilege of impersonating the child, throwing its voice as if it were a ventriloquist’s puppet.  How often was any child from any class allowed to speak in authentic tones before the mid-nineteenth century?   More frequently than we might think, at least in the case of the elites.  A place where it was permissible was at performances of school plays.  Old public school boys could share vivid memories about the horrors of the educational process through the boy actor who would to deliver the play’s prologue.

Thomas Sheridan, Jonathan Swift’s good friend, wrote a prologue for an amateur theatrical  Westminster School staged in 1720.  In English, it was the prelude to a performance of a tragedy by Euripedes in the original Greek.  A six- or seven-year-old had to learn a longish piece of verse and Sheridan gave him the opportunity to tell the audience just how ghastly the exercise of memorizing it had been.  So ghastly that he wished he could throw away his book and get back to whipping gigs and playing marbles.

A Pretty Book for Children. 7th ed. London: J. Newbery; J. Hodges; B. Collins, 1756. (Cotsen 5744)

The presence of an “I HATE SCHOOL” speech in a steady-selling school book like Newbery’s The Pretty Book for Children, a primer, a speller, and elementary reader in one volume, seems rather subversive for humorously undercutting the message that children who love their books become “great” men and women. Perhaps the compiler was wise enough to know that the educational system would not be toppled if his readers heard an imaginary school boy sound off.  But it was cut later.

So here is Sheridan’s prologue to Euripides, with the boy’s extended negative comparison of his book to his toys. A top can spin, a ball can bounce, a kite can fly.  A book is too heavy and awkward to do any of those things.  The only thing it is good for is a support for his knee when shooting marbles.  Any reading, his mother says, will stunt his growth, so for his part, he would be a much happier boy if he never cracked open another book his entire life.

So there…

Marks in Books 10: Sibling Stand-off in a Copybook?

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[Mathematics and calligraphy manuscript]. [South Molton, Devon?]: Elizabeth Harris, 1750. (Cotsen)

[Mathematics and calligraphy manuscript].

Don’t judge this copybook by its spotted vellum boards.  It looks anything but promising, but it is worth a careful look.    Elizabeth Harris, who may have lived in South Molton, Devonshire, filled it full of exercises for learning commercial arithmetic.  Her signature dated 1750 can barely be read on the front board (it is clearer in the photograph above than in person) and the headpiece in the second photograph above has the year 1749 written in the fish’s stomach.  Elizabeth did not sign and date the pages in her copybook like David Kingsley, so there is no telling how many months in each year she was copying out lessons.  She worked through the basic operations of arithmetic, troy and apothecaries weights, dry, liquid, and cloth measures, the rule of three, etc.  Someone must have felt it was important for Elizabeth to be well versed in arithmetic, probably so she would be capable of managing the family accounts when a married woman.

The title page, which is oriented landscape-wise, is the only one decorated with figures of pen flourishes.  The text inside the bird is not laid out perfectly and you can see that she had a little trouble squeezing in her name, the completion date, and the ownership rhyme which children frequently copied into their books, “Learning is better than House and Land, / For when House and Land are gone and spent, / Then Learning is most excellent.”

[Mathematics and calligraphy manuscript].

Elizabeth didn’t fill up all the pages, leaving a short section of blanks at the end of the book.  At some point, someone–perhaps a brother–claimed possession of it.  Was she there to defend her property? Did she let him have it because she had no further use for it?  Was he much younger than she and simply helped himself?  There is no evidence that establishes when exactly this amusing page was written and who could resist imagining a scenario in which one child takes another child’s book?  The object then becomes a silent witness of  childhood experiences in the past. Assuming that the second owner was a boy is not, on the other hand, pure supposition.  Owner number two did not fill up the pages with lessons, but with transcriptions of a love song and a ballad and the latter is the same tale type about a cross-dressing heroine as the one in David Kingsley’s copybook.  The ballad copied out here stars a noble-born damsel from the Isle of Wight who traveled to France dressed as a man to find the lover her father sent away.

To look through the entire copybook, click here

A Fortnight’s Tour Through Different Parts of the Country. London: F. Power (Grandson to the late Mr. J. Newbery), 1790. (Cotsen 7146)

(Cotsen 7146)

One child apparently appropriating a book from another (often with the same surname) is not unusual, so interpreting the scribbles as a manifestation of sibling rivalry rings true to one’s own childhood experience, with stories in children’s books, and constructs of gender.  But children may also mark up books to establish territory by calling attention to their presence in a world which doesn’t pay them enough attention. The boy who hijacked Elizabeth Harris’s copybook may have had something in common with the greatest exhibitionist in the Cotsen collection, Thomas Webb of Pulham, Norfolk, England, Europe, World (another traditional ownership formula).  He literally inserted himself in the story by putting his initials over all the pictures of its protagonist, Tommy Newton.   Subversion or self-assertion?