Category Archives: 18th century

Before Viral Animal Videos: Andrew Lang’s Animal Story Book (1896)

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Any old family vacation house by the sea should have a neglected cache of old books somewhere and I discovered one in the  second story bedroom, where  I picked out The Animal Story Book edited by Andrew Lang because it looks exactly like one of his Colour Fairy Books.  H. J. Ford, the main illustrator of the set, decorated this volume as well.  His design of a huge lion roaring at the moon on the dark blue binding is still imposing even though the cloth is shabby and the gilt faded.

Lang’s avuncular introduction has not aged very well: “We now present you (in return for a coin or two) a book about the friends of children and of fairies—the beasts. The stories are all true, more or less, but it is possible that Monsieur Dumas and Monsieur Theophile Gautier rather improved upon their tales….There ought to be a moral; if so, it probably is that we should be kind to all sorts of animals, and, above all, knock trout on the head when they are caught, and don’t let the poor things jump about till they die.”  The portrayal of Indigenous peoples, South Asians, and Blacks in word and image leave something to be desired by today’s standards.  But at least Lang graciously credits contributions by others, including his indefatigable wife Leonora, who provided “all the rest.”

There were fewer selections about animals famous in Classical literature like Alexander the Great’s horse Bucephalus or Androcles’ lion  than I was expecting.  Travelers’ tall tales about blasting off the heads of gigantic pythons or the predations of blood-thirsty packs of wolves are carefully balanced by ones about animal loyalty and sagacity.  One about a friendship between man and beast, another about an unlikely bond between species, and a third about a perfidious bird and obedient dog are worth sharing.

Here is a delightful anecdote about Sadi, the Indian elephant in  the 6th Duke of Devonshire’s menagerie of exotic animals:

 This lucky captive had a roomy house of its own built expressly for it in the park, a field to walk about in, and a keeper to look after it, and to do a little light gardening besides.  This man treated the elephant (a female) with great kindness, and they soon became the best of friends.  The moment he called out she stopped and at his bidding would take a broom in her trunk and sweep the dead leaves off the grass; after which she would carefully carry after him a large pail of water for him to re-fill his watering pot—for in those days the garden-hose was not invented.  When the tidying up was all done, the elephant was given a carrot and some of the water, but very often the keeper would amuse himself with handing her a soda-water bottle tightly corked, telling her to empty it.  This she did by placing the bottle in an inclined position on the ground and holding it at the proper angle with her foot, while she twisted the cork out with her trunk.  This accomplished, she would empty all the water into her trunk without spilling a drop and then hand the battle back to her keeper.

Sadi died in 1829 and is supposed to have been buried at Chiswick, although the site of her grave has not been found.

“A Strange Tiger,” the biography of a famous tiger sent as a gift to George III in 1790 and resident of the Tower Menagerie, comes from the Rev. William Bingley’s Animal Biography in three volumes, first published in 1803 and reissued multiple times in the 1800s.

Unlike most of its tribe, the little tiger soon made itself at home on board ship, and as it was too small to do much harm, it was allowed to about loose and played with anybody who had time for a game.  It generally like to sleep with the sailors in their hammocks, and they would often pretend to use it for a pillow, as it lay at full length on the deck.  Partly out of fun, and partly because it was its nature so to do, the tiger would every now and then steal a piece of meat, if it found one handy.  One day it was caught red-handed by the carpenter, who took the beef right out of its mouth, and gave it a good beating, but instead of the man getting bitten for his pains, as he might have expected, the tiger took his punishment quite meekly, and bore the carpenter no grudge after.  One of its favourite tricks was to run out to the very end of the bowsprit, and stand there looking over the sea, and there was no place in the whole ship to which it would not climb when the fancy took it.  But on the whole, the little tiger preferred to have company in its gambols, and was especially fond of dogs, of which there were several on board.  They would chase each other and roll over together just like two puppies, and during the ten month or so that the voyage from China lasted, they had time enough to become fast friends.  When the vessel reached London, the tiger was at once taken to the Tower, which was the Zoological Gardens of those days.  The little fellow did not mind, for he was always ready to take what came and make the best of it, and all the keepers grew as fond of him as the sailors had been.

This sounds quite unbelievable, but historians of the wild animal trade during this time have established it was normal to give the animals their freedom on board ship unless circumstances warranted otherwise…

“Signora and Lori,” which Leonora Lang translated from the 10th number of Deutsche Blaetter (1867) is a variation on those fables in which one clever but unscrupulous animal takes advantage of  a more amiable one.

A German gentleman owned a handsome parrot who was a great talker and a poodle Signora Patti named after the great soprano.  He trained the dog to fetch a basket at the command, “Go to the baker.”  When she dropped it in front of him and patted the floor with her paw, he would drop money into it, which was the sign for her to run to the shop and return with cakes.   Sometimes her master sent her without any money, saying “On the tick.”  The baker would fill the order and put it on account.  Either way, the Signora was rewarded with cake.   The clever parrot quickly learned the commands and turned the situation to its advantage.

But it was not only for pastime that Lori exercised his gift; the cunning bird used it for the benefit of his greedy beak.  It began to happen often to the master to find that his private account-book, carefully kept in the smallest details, did not agree well with that of his neighbor the baker.  The Signora, declared the baker, had become most accomplished in the art of running up a long bill, and always, of course, at her master’s orders.  Only the master, when he looked over the reckoning, growled to himself: “My neighbor is a rogue; he chalks up the amount double.”

How very much was he astonished, then, and how quickly were his suspicions turned into laughter, when he beheld, through a half-open door, the following absurd scene.

It was one fine morning, and Lori sat upon the top of his cage, calling out in his shrillest tones: ”Signora, Signora!” The poodle hastened to present herself before him, wagging her tail, and Lori continued, “go to the Baker.”  The Signora fetched the little basket from the place, and put it before her tyrant, scratching her paw on the floor to ask for money.

“On tick!” was Lori’s prompt and brief remark: the Signora seized the basket, and rushed out of the door.  Before long she returned, laid the basket, full of the little cakes before the parrot, and looked with a beseeching air for the reward of her toil.

But the wicked Lori received her with a sharp, ”Get out,” putting her to” flight, and proceeded to enjoy his ill-gotten gains in solitude.

The situation surely demanded that Lori be punished.   If it is any consolation, the anecdote is  more good-humored than La Fontaine’s well-known verse fable, “The Monkey and the Cat,” because the duped animal isn’t hurt (the cat who pulls the roasting chesnuts out of the fire for the monkey is badly burned).

It’s a subject for another time to explore when the appetite for stories like these about animals became so beguiling to readers and how they came to cross media in our time.

More Pretty Little Pocket Books for Children

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A woman’s hanging pocket in the collection of the V & A.

The word “pocket book” was a term for a wallet or small purse for money and personal objects in the eighteenth century.  That wasn’t its only meaning, however.  It also referred to books– especially memorandum books (i.e. “diaries” in British English) or vade mecums, compilations of useful information– that could be comfortably stowed in a weskit pocket  or the hanging bag attached to a tape that tied around a woman’s waist.   Related to almanacs, they were revamped for adults by enterprising publishers in the 1740s, among them John Newbery, more famous for his children’s books.  Twenty years later he went back to the drawing board and reconceptualized the pocket book for younger customers.  Newspaper advertisements confirm that the publisher really was its compiler. .The Important Pocket-Book or Valentine’s Ledger (ca. 1765), which was also a tie-in to The Valentine’s Gift, may be the first of its kind and a good model for the genre as a whole, whether or not  Continental children’s books publishers were influenced by it.

Cotsen 5354.

The more famous Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744), which could be carried on its owner’s person without any trouble, was not meant for ready reference or record keeping. The Important Pocket-Book was, with its  tables of money, weights, and measures and a  calendar for recording daily expenses over a twelve-month period that was not keyed to a particular year, making it saleable over a long span of time.  On the facing pages Newbery added a second calendar for tracking good and bad deeds, a feature which does not seem to have caught on.  He also selected stories from classical literature such as Cornelia, mother of the Graecci, and combined them with anecdotes from modern history, and short fiction reprinted from others of his juveniles. Selections were accompanied by both copperplate engravings and wood cuts. Shown below is the cut of Father Time illustrating a story about a time-wasting school boy and an opening from the moral ledger that was marked up for about a month.  Someone tried to erase the notes, but “Bad” is still visible on the right hand side.  The entire package of material was attractively bound in boards covered with Dutch floral paper shiny with gilt.Prentjes Almanach voor Kinderen, a charming Dutch pocket book bound in pale apple-green printed boards (Cotsen 3466), is much smaller than The Important Pocket-Book  and appears to have been issued annually by its publisher W. Houtgraaf. In 1799, the contents featured a page of information about eclipses, which was probably suggested by the three forecast between April and October, culminating in a total solar eclipse. The selection of literature was somewhat lighter in character than the stories in the Newbery book.  Prominently featured was a series of illustrated poems about children’s pastimes,  itinerant street vendors, and strolling players.  English street cries for children often portray as many sellers of foodstuffs as small commodities, whereas the Almanach shows just one vendor tempting children with sweet teeth with a basket of “china apples, i.e. oranges.”  A somewhat unusual subject is the man crying umbrellas, a convenience that was still something of a novelty in  Europe. Children were surely more likely to flock around the bagpiper with his trained animals than the seller of useful objects, especially when the musician undoubtedly would perform for anyone with pennies burning in their pockets.  While it was a well-established practice to draw vendors full-length,  I can’t help but wonder if it was deliberate that the attractive nuisance is shown without an audience, whereas the ink vendor has a customer that looks like a school boy to his left.The daintiest of the three pocket books is, of course, French, but it may come as a surprise that Reveries orientales (Coten 65141) was issued in by Louis Janet in 1794 during the French Revolution.   I did look at a near contemporary catalogue of moral, instructive, and amusing children’s books issued in Lyons by Bohaire  (Cotsen in process)  to see what pocket books he stocked and found three or four for ladies with elegant engravings and bindings that sound as fashionable as this one in embroidered cloth with tiny drawings under isinglass (or horn) with a little pocket lined with rose paper on the inside of the rear board.  The tiny engraved plates are based on the ones by famous Roccoco artists for the celebrated Cabinet des fees, a multivolume anthology of French fairy tales and stories from the Thousand and One Nights.  The rather perfunctory monthly calendars of accounts surely could not compete with the illustrations, like the one for the tale of the miserly merchant Abou Cassem.John Newbery probably would not have approved of this frivolous approach to a kind of children’s book that he believed ought to help form good habits and regular self-examination, but the French and Dutch examples here suggest that the conventions for pocket books were just as fluid as they were stable.