Category Archives: 18th century

Cross a River with a Goat, Cabbage, and a Wolf…

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Lewis Carroll gave his pupils puzzles to make logic and mathematics instruction more interesting.   He might have sprung on them the well-known river crossing problem which goes something like this… There was a man who had to get a goat, cabbage, and wolf across the river in a boat too small to hold all four of them. What was he to do? The goat was sure to eat the cabbage if left alone with it and the wolf the goat if given a chance.  With a little quick thinking, the task can be successfully completed.

People have been solving this problem at least since the 12th century, when an illumination featuring a wolf, a sheep, and a vegetable that looks like kale appears in the Ormesby Psalter.  Since the 12th century, many variations on the river crossing problem have been noted in at different times, places, and sources.

The Schoolmasters Assistant. London: Richard and Henry Causton, (1773). (Cotsen 33112)

Between 1705 and 1801, there were seventeen occurrences with a fox, a goose, and a bag of oats, five for a fox, a goose, and a bag of wheat, and three for the more familiar goat, cabbage, and wolf.  The majority appeared either in Jacques Ozanam’s famous Recreations for Gentlemen and Ladies or well-established school books like Thomas Dilworth’s Schoolmaster’s Assistant, under the heading “pleasant and diverting questions.”

Jeux Nouveaux Réunis. Paris: JJF, [1904]. (Cotsen)

For some time it seems that the goat, cabbage and wolf puzzler had been simultaneously associated with instruction and amusement.  Yesterday I discovered more evidence for that in an unlikely place, a recent acquisition, Jeux nouveaux reunis dating from around 1904.  Four or five Parisian companies involved in making pastimes seem to have partnered to produce a big wooden chest shown below stuffed with 64 entertaining pastimes individually boxed. Le souci du batelier: question du vieux tempts [The boatman’s problem] is the only logic puzzler to be found among all the dexterity and disentanglement puzzles.   The box contains a printed slip with the solution and figures of the goat, cabbage, and wolf on little wire stands and the boatman.

Players who couldn’t work it out in their heads could experiment with the figures plotting a sequence of trips across the river  that  would  preserve  cabbage  and  goat.It’s been speculated that the Jeux nouveaux reunis was a salesman’s sample.  Jerry  Slocum, the great historian and collector of puzzles shows in Puzzles Old and New that dexterity and disentanglement puzzles became an increasingly popular family entertainment in  early twentieth century.  He photographs the box of his copy of  Puzzle Parties (1911) sold by a Connecticut firm which contains many of the same French puzzles in the box Cotsen acquired.  Perhaps boxes were sold in France for puzzle parties as well as for sale overseas. 

Money, that Clinking, Clanking Sound in 18th-century Children’s Books

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If you had been brought up in one of the rising European capitalist economies of the 1700s, how would you have been introduced to the concept of money? There is plenty of material trying to shape values about the all-important ideas of getting and spending, but few have been interested in looking for it.  One of the most famous examples, John Newbery’s so-called coach-and-six morality—learn your book, make a fortune trading honestly, and ride in style a gentleman retired from business–has disgusted people with its overt materialism.

Een Nieuwlyks Uitgevonden A.B.C. Boek. Amsterdam: N. T. Gravius, [1750-1759]. (Cotsen)

Een Nieuwlyks Uitgevonden A.B.C. Boek.

That aspirational journey is short on particulars, but it’s a challenge to try and fill in some of the blanks. To make a purchase of sweets or toys, you must know the  denominations of coins and their values.   Recently I bought a 1755 Dutch primer, Nieuwlyks Uitgevonder A. B. C. Boek, because it includes plates of copper, silver, and gold currency in use there.  The antiquarian bookseller remarked that he’d never seen anything like that in a children’s book. The compiler Kornelius de Wit must have considered the ability to identify Dutch coinage as something necessary to be known as with different scripts, and the names of ordinary objects.I’ve not seen anything  comparable in English during the same time period, but that doesn’t mean that filthy lucre is invisible.  What does come to mind are pence tables in verse teaching currency conversion, which don’t illustrate the coins with which the children in the illustrations purchase commodities…

Illustrations of coins do exist in later 18th-century English juveniles  published by the Newberys and they are interesting because they reflect overlapping ideas about the idea of wealth.  Some, like this one of a miser, caution against the too strong a love of money.  He lays up a hoard of money, but being unable to part with it fails to use his riches to benefit the less fortunate or the economy.People receiving windfalls of cash are depicted in two other illustrations I’ve found.  The frontispiece of Richard Johnson’s The Foundling; or The History of Lucius Stanhope (1787) shows Fortune scattering a shower of money down on the heads of the people around her.  Down on the ground is  a fool in a cap with bells on his knees trying to scoop up whatever he can.  It’s very much in the story’s spirit, which shows an heir to a fortune squandering it, s sharp contrast to his adopted brother of low birth, who makes a fortune and preserves it.

The other is difficult to interpret without  having read “A remarkable Story of a Father’s Extraordinary Care and Contrivance to reclaim an extravagant Son” reprinted in A Pretty Book for Children  from the 1701 5th edition of Giovanni Paolo Marana’s runaway best-seller, Letters from a Turkish Spy.    A young man has run through all of his estate except for the ancestral home, which his father urged him to preserve in the family.    The desparate son goes to the room where his father died to hang himself.  He runs the rope through an iron ring in the ceiling and when he jumps, the weight of his body pulls open a trapdoor, out of which spills a shower of gold which his father hid there to save him from himself.  Grateful for his father’s foresight (and knowledge into his character), he reforms and buys back the estate he lost.

Notice how the coins here and in the block of the miser are drawn with crosses across their faces.  I assumed it was a widespread representational convention, but I showed them to Alan Stahl, our curator of numismatics, he said he hadn’t seen anything like this before.

In the coming weeks, look for a post on supply chains in children’s books…