18th century | Cotsen Children’s Library

Balderdash! John Newbery and the Boisterous Birth of Children’s Books (2017) is an explanation of where children’s books came from for preschoolers. This is the first collaboration of author Michelle Markel and illustrator Nancy Carpenter, but they are both veteran creators of picture book biographies. Working with other people, they have introduced young readers to modern artists Marc Chagall and Henri Rousseau to powerful women Queen Victoria and Hillary Clinton. They have also tackled more obscure but worthy women subjects, such as Fannie Farmer, founder of the Boston Cooking School and the young Jewish girl who played an important role in the Shirtwaist Strike of 1909 on the East Side. .

Markel and Carpenter are not the first to write a juvenile biography of John Newbery (1713-1767), the London bookseller widely believed to have “invented” the children’s book as we know it (I discussed their predecessors in a previous post). For that achievement, Newbery was selected in 1922 as the namesake of the American Library Association’s annual award for the most distinguished contribution to American children’s literature.Can the life of John Newbery be made relevant to a twenty-first century child? And how many will actually find it interesting when so few vivid facts or anecdotes that would make him come alive survive?. The heated controversy about whether he treated his writers like indentured servants obviously won’t do and neither will George Colman’s nasty but hilarious send-up of the proud social climbing papa visiting his son at Oxford. Tidbits like those would detract from the legend of the philanthropic bookseller who was the friend of the rising generation. There are no portraits of him, so the imaginary one by Stephen Markel on the cover of Shirley Granaham’s 2014 biography, is all over the Internet for lack of anything else. How many people assume it was taken from some eighteenth-century original in a museum?

Perhaps the fewer the facts, the better, given the age of the intended audience for Balderbash. Markel and Carpenter have succeeded in constructing an amusing and uplifting account that only a pedant might take issue with. Carpenter takes the liberty of presenting mid-eighteenth-century society as more literate and diverse than it actually was. If we can believe illustrations depicting Newbery’s bookshop, the little books were stored not on low ranges of shelves like a modern children’s room, but in drawers. But why snark at such good-humored illustrations?. John Newbery would have approved of the way Carpenter incorporated Jack the Giant-Killer and Tom Thumb into the scene above.. I also think the shameless old promoter would have liked even more the scene where Newbery peeks out of his shop, watching his satisfied little customers begin reading their loot before they are barely out of the door. Actually the real John Newbery’s usual tactic was to model the desired behavior by showing the grown-ups presenting good children with rewards of his little books. The goal never deviated from suggesting his books should be gobbled up like plum cakes!Markel’s opening is inspired: “Lucky, lucky reader. Be glad it’s not 1726.” She goes on to explain that all the wonderful books like Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe were for adults and children had nothing of their own except “preachy poems and fables, religious texts that made them fear that death was near, and manuals that told them where to stand, how to sit, not to laugh and scores of other other rules.” That has more than a grain of truth, as these two illustrations from children’s books published before 1744 show.What a difference between those two horrifying images and these two from A Set of Squares, one of Newbery’s earliest works for young people for teaching reading along the principles of John Locke. It’s not mentioned in Balderdash! (the only surviving copy is in the Cotsen Children’s Library) and in fact there are no facsimile illustrations from actual Newberys (which would have spoiled the concept).Was it all a lark creating those pioneering children’s books? I doubt that Newbery dreamed up the concept for the first periodical for children, The Lilliputian Magazine (1751), in the print shop, sitting under drying racks filled with sheets of A Little Pretty Pocket-Book. Perhaps he should have, but we will probably never know. It was obviously far beyond the scope of a picture book biography to retell in greater detail the story of Newbery’s career as a children’s book publisher. But there is a certain irony that Markel and Carpenter have given the legend of John Newbery (for which he was partly responsible) a charming new form, which will probably guarantee its continued circulation.for another generation.

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!