Category Archives: 18th century

Made by a Child: The Scientifick Amusement (1752), a Vade Mecum Manuscript

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Title page. The Scientifick Amusement or the Useful Companion. England, 1752. (Cotsen 34075)

About twenty years ago Cotsen purchased this little manuscript bound in blue sugar paper boards from John Lawson, an English antiquarian bookseller and great collector in the history of education.  The neatly lettered title page dated 1752 credits sixteen-year-old Robert Brightwell junior as the manuscript’s “author.”  It might have been possible to identify him had he noted the name of the town or house where he was living at the time.  Another clue, the line ” Mrs. Allen My Dear Madame D,” is too cryptic to lead anywhere and seems to be in a second hand.

He must have been a  rather serious lad to have compiled and illustrated a “Useful Companion, containing Short & Necessary Instructions for Youth.” The section on astronomy is one of the longer ones in the first part.  In this opening, Robert carefully wrote out tables of the diameters of the planets and of their distance in millions of miles from the sun.

He also drew a diagram of the solar system as far out as Saturn with its rings and five moons (Uranus would not be discovered until 1781).  In the lower left-hand corner, he attempted a picture of an armillary or artificial sphere, which the Encyclopedia Britannica on-line defines as “an early astronomical device for representing the great circles of the heavens, including in the most elaborate instruments the horizon, meridian, Equator, tropics, polar circles, and an ecliptic hoop.”   A pudgy cherub holds up one hand and looks away from the fearsomely complicated machine.This more detailed representation from a plate in a 1748 issue of the Gentleman’s Magazine, shows that Robert didn’t try to identify the concentric metal bands. Trying to squeeze the information into such small spaces probably seemed rather daunting.Robert seems to have been capable of finer work when motivated.  The section on geography was illustrated with tiny hand-colored maps of the continents, where he went to the trouble of designating longitude and latitude and drawing in rivers, seas, countries, and major cities.  He did run into some trouble in the map of Asia rendering the horn of Africa and New Holland (aka Australia) to scale.Neat  rows of shaded diagrams decorate the margins of the section on geometry.  They are placed opposite the corresponding definitions of solid figures–cube, cylinder, cone, pyramid, sphere, prism, scaleneous cone, etc.It seemed likely that Master Robert was transcribing passages from printed books into his manuscript,  I searched distinctive phrases at random in the Eighteenth Century Collections Online.  The phrase “Scientifick Amusement” turned up once, in an Irish volume of periodical essays published in 1758, but no match: “There are some concerns of greater importance to a human being than the most luminous conception of the full force of the thirteen cards in the scientific amusement of whist…”  The phrase “Platonic body” in the definition of a tetrahedron returned ten results, none passages remotely similar to Robert’s text.  The prose In the history of England was too bland to offer good bits for searching as in this thoroughly uninspiring account of the reign of Richard III.So why might Richard have compiled this manuscript?  It’s possible that he was transcribing a text he  wanted to own, but could not afford to buy.  Perhaps he was copying material for presentation to someone else.  A third possibility is that Robert was consulting several texts and composing an abstract his own words, like the mad narrator of Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub.   Or perhaps he was in the same spot as the hero of Jeffrey Taylor’s Harry’s Holiday (1818), who needed something to do during the summer break and hit upon the idea of making a copy of Joseph Priestley’s enormous New Chart of History .  At least Robert’s project was manageable in comparison!

Picture Bibles for Children from the 1760s: John Newbery versus Edward Ryland in the Marketplace

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Everyone has heard of John Newbery, the first publisher of the modern children’s book and namesake of the American Library Association’s annual award for the most distinguished contribution to American children’s literature.  It is more or less taken for granted that he set the gold standard for children’s books of his own times because of his success in associating his name with quality.

There was someone who made more elegant and expensive books for young readers than John Newbery,  but his career is not discussed in the standard histories of English children’s books.  Only a few collectors know the name of engraver Edward Ryland, whose shop was at No. 67 in the Old Bailey and his beautiful books are highly desirable and expensive when they come on the market.  This post will highlight his first publication for young readers: An Abridgement of Scripture History Designed for the Amusement and Improvement of Children: wherein the most Striking Actions in the Old Testament are Made Plain to the Youngest Capabilities (1765).  Cotsen is lucky enough to have two copies: a rebound one with plain engravings and another one with hand-colored engravings bound with its companion volume on the New Testament in an edition binding of gold tooled red leather.

The front board of Cotsen 1907. The volume with both titles illustrated with a total of 124 engravings was available for 5 shillings. Newbery’s little Bible abridgment had sixty-four relief metal cuts, was half as tall and cost six pence.

Each of the Ryland Bible abridgments also boasted a handsome “book plate”  for a young owner to proudly inscribe her name, as Miss Elizabeth Bentham did.

Here is the title page spread, with an allegorical frontispiece designed by the well-known artist Samuel Wale and engraved by the equally famous Charles Grignion.  The description below the picture explains that Science, the lady in the cloak, is leading the young Bishop of Osnaburg to Wisdom seated on the dias.  The toddler bishop was the second son of George III, Prince Frederick, Duke of Albany and York.  The book’s dedicatee, he was twoish when it was published.  He was intended for a career in the military…

Wale and Grignion’s engravings measure 75 x 88 mm or 3 x 3.5 inches and there is one on every page.

Plate II “The History of the Fall.” This and the following image are more or less actual size. (Cotsen 1907)

Plate VII “The burning of Sodom and Gomorrah.” (Cotsen 1907)

For purposes of comparison, here are two additional plates from Cotsen’s other copy, whose engraved plates are not hand-colored.

Plate IV “The History of the Flood, or General Deluge.” An Abridgement of Scripture History… London: Edwd. Ryland, MDCCLXV [1765]. (Cotsen 357)

Plate V “The Confusion of Tongues” (aka the tower of Babel). (Cotsen 357)

Put John Newbery’s History of the Holy Bible Abridged (1764) next to Ryland’s and the differences in production values are immediately obvious.  Newbery’s volume measures just 10 x 7 centimeters as opposed to the 18  of Ryland’s.  Newbery’s History has 61 soft metal relief cuts, but they are tiny.  At just 45 x 35 mm, the quality of the cutting is workmanlike.   Reproduced larger than actual size here, their shortcomings are cruelly exposed.

The Fall of Man from The Holy Bible Abridged. London: John Newbery, 1764. (Cotsen 34087)

The burning of Sodom and Gomorrah. (Cotsen 34087)

Then as now, consumers got what they paid for.  But far more people in the 1760s could afford six pence for a Newbery Bible abridgment that would fit in a pocket.  The Newbery was cheap enough that some families could put down the money for a copy for each of their children (subscribers’ lists often reveal several children with the same last name at the same address).   Far fewer could invest in a children’s Bible designed to flatter a little prince.  And that may go a long way to explain why Edward Ryland’s children’s books survive in so few copies that almost no one knows how splendid they were…