Category Archives: 18th century

Registration open for the 2019 Cotsen Symposium on Children’s Books and Transnationalism

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Traditionally research into pre-20th century children’s literature has focused on titles written and consumed in a particular country. However, most 18th- and 19th-century children, parents, and teachers would not have necessarily used a book’s national origin as the chief criterion for selection. In the majority of European countries, children read books in more than one language, so in reality there was a transnational corpus of children’s books crossing language groups, political borders, and the seas, their texts and illustrations translated and transformed. In order to better understand the world of children’s print culture from both the perspectives of the young reader and of the “children’s book business,” its transnational character should be taken into account.

“Books for Children: Transnational Encounters 1750-1850” (Part II) is a continuation of the May 2018 symposium of the same title held at the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters in Copenhagen, where the presentations and discussions made clear that the collaboration ought to continue in order to reach a wider audience.

Online registration for the symposium is open till Saturday October 26, 11:59pm (US Eastern Time).

Please find details of the symposium schedule at https://bookstransnational.princeton.edu/

Organizers

Charlotte Appel
Associate Professor
Head of the PhD-programme for History, Archaeology and Classical Studies
School of Culture and Society
Aarhus University (Denmark)

Nina Christensen
Professor, Head of Centre for Children’s Literature and Media
School of Communication and Culture
Aarhus University (Denmark)

Matthew Grenby
Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies
Dean of Research and Innovation
School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics
Newcastle University (United Kingdom)

Andrea Immel
Curator, Cotsen Children’s Library
Department of Rare Books and Special Collections
Princeton University Library

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…