19th century | Cotsen Children’s Library

Boys being boys… Another episode in the ongoing rivalry between Horrid Henry and Peter Perfect

During the Big Move–shifting miles of rare materials into RBSC’s cavernous new vault whose completion was celebrated in the previous post, “Moving Day in Feather Town“–I discovered three really awful nineteenth-century books about bad boys. In contemporary children’s books, characters whose halos have slipped down around their shoulders are not exactly underrepresented… Think of Francesca Simon’s Horrid Henry, whose antics have given rise to a multi-media empire. Bad boys are by no means non-existent in older children’s books, but the way boyish misbehavior was punished has changed dramatically as attitudes towards authority, curiosity, mischief, and mistakes have become more lenient.

Two well-known stories about bad boys display zero tolerance for boys like Horrid Henry who disrespected authority. In Kings 2:22-3 of the Old Testament, the prophet Elisha passes a pack of young louts on the road to Bethel. These ancestors of the Purple Gang yell at Elisha, “Go up, you old baldy” and Elisha retaliates by cursing them. Two female bears come out of the woods and maul forty-two of the no-goods.

Oh dear…

Undoubtedly this gruesome story was the inspiration for many cautionary tales about bad boys. Daniel Fenning’s best-selling school book, The Universal Spelling Book (1756) was the source of this famous one about the brothers Tommy and Harry, which Charles Dickens alluded to in David Copperfield. Harry the elder brother was a rotter and Tommy the younger was a Peter Perfect. Guess which brother was eaten by lions?

Woodcut, page 43, Cotsen 118 (19th edition, 1773)

Woodcut of the lion lunching on Harry on page 43 of the 19th edition of Fenning’s Universal Speller (1773). The Universal Spelling-book. [Providence]: re-printed and sold by John Carter, [1773] (Cotsen 118)

By the nineteenth century bad boys are all over picture books, but they usually make mischief in a series of illustrations rather than starring in a continuous narrative. All three of the books I found during the Big Move–one French, one British, and one German–fall into the second category. In Les Proverbes de Pierre (1890), illustrator Jean Geoffrey dresses up his little devils in Pierrot costumes and sets them loose in the classroom and in the street. Notice that it takes a young peep show operator (the one with what looks like a little tower strapped on his back) and the boy-gendarme to break up the squabble below. The second picture shows what can happen when the teacher steps out of the classroom. Is the boy in the upper left sending up his teacher? Where are the wild beasts?

Page 21, Les Proverbes de Pierrot. Paris: Librairie Ch. Delagrave (Cotsen 10743)

The one boy waves a hat that reads “Ass” while his accomplices dance on a sign saying “Lazy.” (Cotsen 10743), 1

In the British picture book Young Troublesome (ca. 1850), John Leech gleefully shows just how much mischief a public school boy could make at home during the Christmas holidays. In this plate the adults stand by helplessly as the young pickle shows his little brothers and sisters how easy and delightful it is to slide down a bannister.

Plate 2, “Young Troublesome.” London: Bradbury & Evans, [1850] (Cotsen 3141)

There are also illustrations showing boys playing practical jokes that are anything but fun and games. In Ludwig Kies’ Der Kinder Art und Unart (ca. 1855′), the boys in the boat dump an elaborately dressed tailor overboard. The tailor’s terrified expression suggests he thinks that once his heavy clothes become waterlogged, he will drown. The boys, who may be working class, show no remorse for what they have done and it looks as if no one will step forward and punish them. .

Plate [53], Der Kinder Art und Unart. Stuttgart: Schreiber und Schill, [185-?] (Cotsen 24963)

Likewise Leech’s Young Troublesome seems to think nothing of interfering with the servants while they are working, or apologizing when his prank ruins their clothing. The hapless servant may have no other recourse than complaining to his comrades below the stairs.

Plate 10, (Cotsen 3141)

Of all activities forbidden to children, playing with fire may have been one of the most satisfying because it was so risky. From the late eighteenth century onward, it is not especially difficult to find illustrations of children whose clothes have caught fire, a very real possibility in homes where there were multiple fireplaces with open grates. William Darton senior liked such subjects, but no engraving in his firm’s juvenile books can compare with this one from Der Kinder Art und Unart of a boy running out of the hen house, which he accidentally set aflame. Unlike many of the plates in this book, no adult appears to reprimand the little arsonist (or mourn his passing as the kitties did Hoffmann’s Paulinchen).

Plate [30], (Cotsen 24963)

In sharp contrast, Young Troublesome and his assistant look as if they have deployed every bit of firepower behind the scenes to bring the juvenile theater production of The Miller and His Men to a triumphant conclusion. The size of the explosion seems to have given his papa pause. Or perhaps his ears were ringing from all the racket from the special effects.

Plate 7, (Cotsen 3141)

Last but not least, is this illustration of a boy on his way to school pausing to get a light from a street urchin, while a gaping classmate watches them indulging in a forbidden vice. A casual depiction of underage smoking like this one in a picture book would be enough to get Les proverbes de Pierre a PG-13 rating these days and possibly launch a heated discussion on childlit-listserv…

More bad habits… (Cotsen 10743), 33.

Front board of The Water Babies. [London: Hodder and Stoughton for] Boots the Chemists, [1919] (Cotsen 15234), with design of Tom the water baby enjoying aquatic sports.

A revered professor in the UCLA English Department used to say that when a person could rattle on confidently about a book–preferably an uncontested masterpiece like Hamlet or Ulysses–without having ever cracked it open, only then could the degree of Ph.d be conferred.

Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1863) is one of those books I expected to fake for the rest of my unnatural life. When asked to serve on the advisory board of the Grolier 100 Books Famous in Children’s Literature project I did not confess my ignorance, knowing that Brian Alderson would wrangle The Water-Babies entry, having edited the Oxford World Classics edition. This month I was finally obliged to fetch the book from the basement, where it had been languishing for some time, and read it from cover to cover without benefit of pictures, either.

Page 17, The Water-Babies. London: Philip & Tacey, Ltd., [1955] (Cotsen 39124). Tom was a chimney sweep before being transformed into a water baby. Here he stumbles into a village school, where he sees for the first time children working at their lessons.

I’m happy to say that The Water-Babies lived up to its reputation as one of the most peculiar children’s books ever written and some of the passages about the rearing and educating of children are worth sharing. All quotations are from the 1995 Oxford University Press paperback edited by Brian Alderson, of course. If you have a tender stomach, Kingsley’s indelicate sense of humor may not be your cup of tea.

Here is the hideous and not entirely benign fairy Mrs. Be-Done-By-As-You-Did, who visits the water-babies on Fridays. When pleased with them, she gives “them all sorts of nice sea-things–sea-cakes, sea-apples, sea-oranges, sea-bullseyes, sea-toffee; and to the very best of all she gave sea-ices, made out of sea-cows’ cream, which never melt under water.”

[161] Tipped-in plate of Mrs. Be-Done-By-As-You-Did by Jessie Willcox Smith, (Cotsen 15234)

The real business of the day is to “call up all who have ill-used little children, and serve them as they served the children….And first she called up all the doctors who give little children so much physic (they were most of them old ones; for all the young ones have learnt better, all but a few army surgeons, who still fancy that a baby’s inside is much like a Scotch grenadier’s), and she set them in a row; and very rueful they looked, for they knew what was coming.

And first she pulled all their teeth out; and then she bled them all round; and then she dosed them with calomel, and jalap, and salts and senna, and brimstone and treacle; and horrible faces they made; and then she gave them a great emetic of mustard and water, and no basons; and began all over again; and that was the way she spent the morning” (Chapter V, p. 109).

This second excerpt is less savage, unless you happen to be in the children’s book publishing business. During his journey to the Other-end-of-Nowhere, the hero Tom visits a number of remarkable places.

“And first he went through Waste-paper-land, where all the stupid books lie in heaps, up hill and down dale, like leaves in a winter wood; and there he saw people digging and grubbing among them, to make worse books out of bad ones, and thrashing chaff to save the dust of it; and a very good trade they drove thereby, especially among children” (Chapter VIII, p. 157).

Last but not least is an excerpt from Tom’s sojourn in the Isle of the Tomtoddies:

“And when Tom came near it, he heard such a grumbling and grunting and growling and waiting and weeping and whining that he thought people must be wringing little pigs, or cropping puppies’ ears, or drowning kittens: but when he came nearer still, he began to hear words among the noise, which was the Tomtoddies’ song which they sing morning and evening, and all night too, to their great idol Examination–“I can’t learn my lesson: the examiner’s coming!” And that was the only song they knew….

Then he looked round for the people of the island: but instead of men, women, and children, he found nothing but turnips and radishes, beet and mangold wurzel, without a single green leaf among them, and half of them burst and decayed with toadstools growing out of them. Those which were left began crying to Tom, in half a dozen different languages at once, and all of them badly spoken, “I can’t learn my lesson; do come help me!” And one cried, “Can you show me how to extract this square-root?” And another, “Can you tell me the distance between Lyra and Camelopardalis?” And another, “What is the latitude and longitutde of Snooksville, in Noman’s County, Oregon, US?” (Chapter VIII, p. 165)

Page 202, Tomtoddies vignette, Cotsen 34543

Harold Jones’s illustration of the Tomtoddies imploring Tom to stop and help them. Page 202, The Water Babies. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1961 (Cotsen 34543)

This post may squelch most people’s desire to read Kingsley, but perhaps a few will be curious to dip into a story dubbed by its author as “all a fairy tale and only fun and pretense,” that was one of the great children’s best-sellers of all time. It’s never too late for a Kingsley revival??? For more babies who love the water, take a look at the exhibition https://blogs.princeton.edu/cotsen/tag/water-babies/

Tom talking to his friend the lobster as imagined by Jessie Willcox Smith. Page 15 vignette, (Cotsen 15234)

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Category Archives: 19th century

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Quotable Quotes from Kingsley’s Water-Babies