Category Archives: Dutch and Belgian children’s books

The Clinking, Clanking Sound of Money 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…

 

 

French Promotional Giveaways about Africa in Cookies, Cheese, and Chocolate

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Funny Jungleland Moving Pictures. Battle Creek, Mich.: W. K. Kellogg, c1909. (Cotsen 4419)

Once upon a time, cereal shopping was an adventure. While mother made the circuit of the aisles, her child disappeared to the cereal section to decide which one had the best giveaway.  The cereal manufacturers were hoped to make the child pine for all their promised prizes so he or she would ask to buy more boxes of their products, supposedly creating brand loyalty. When mother arrived, negotiations began about what brand her darling wanted versus what she was willing to buy, having given in before and seen boxes of untouched cereal stripped of the prizes going stale on the shelf.  We can give thanks to the Kellogg Company of Battle Creek, Michigan for putting the first promotional giveaway for children, Funny Jungleland Moving Pictures (1909), in boxes of cornflakes.

European corporations also have used this diabolical advertising strategy in the promotion of food products to children.  Several ambitious examples of collectible premiums about Africa were added to Cotsen’s collection of advertising ephemera because they looked like an underused source for studying how corporations doing business in particular countries presented to children those cultures formerly under European control.

Africorama was a promotional giveaway ca. 1967 for Petit-Exquis cookies by the L’Alsacienne brand, which had been baking the buttery treats since the 1920s.  The cookie box contained a color enamel metal flag of an African nation. There were two sets, 20 representing the Muslim countries of Africa, and 28 for the “pays noirs” or Black countries. The set in Cotsen has all of the flags except for the Rhodesian one.  Most of the copies coming on the market are seriously defective, so it is unusual to have one so complete.  On the picture of the cookie box to the left, the metal tabs of the flags can be seen. The metal flags were supposed to be displayed on a  folded, perforated cardboard sheet illustrated by Wilquin.  The flags came with the cookies, but the child-collector had to write away for the sheets if they were to be displayed.  The set for the Muslim countries features a full-length portrait of a Berber Tuareg warrior, a Bantu warrior on the Black one. The back of the cardboard display has a big illustrated advertisement for Petit-Exquis cookies, but no clues why L’Alsacienne was issuing such an elaborate giveaway.

The second example of a French promotional giveaway, La collection La Vache qui Rit, also dates from the 1960s.  The semi-soft cheese had been sold in Africa since the 1930s and the continent remains a big market for the product.  Tucked into the little circular cardboard packages containing the cheese were illustrated cards the same size and shape. The child determined to acquire a complete set had to convince his mother to purchase over 200 boxes of cheese. I suspect many mothers were of two minds about that unless her family consumed a great deal of La Vache qui Rit anyway.  Similar to Africorama, single cards and one or the other of the display sheets are not hard to come by, a set as large as this takes persistence and time to accumulate.

The cards, none of which are signed by the artist, are in French and Dutch.  They illustrate in rather attractive detail African animals, arts and crafts, indigenous costumes, and relations between the European colonizers and native Africans in the Belgian Congo. The cards could be stood up for display if cut along the indicated lines on the front and folded as directed. The pictures are captioned, but there is no explanatory text on the back: they are blank. The subjects are quite intriguing; surely many children would have been curious to learn more about what they saw. To look at these cards, no one would have any idea that the Congo had been roiled by political turmoil since it was granted independence by Belgium in 1960.To understand why these two French corporations produced such attractive, elaborate promotional giveaways, one needs to know something about the history of European corporate investment in Africa during the twentieth century.   Have economists studied this phenomenon to learn more about how corporate strategies for increasing market share at home and possibly abroad devised these sets?  Who came up with the ideas?  Who was responsible for the projects, which could not have executed quickly or cheaply.   Was there a motive other than an economic one for making these giveaways?

How might the presentation of Africa in these promotions might have affected French children and African children living in France or abroad?  When were French children taught about the history of their country’s colonization of Africa?   Would they have been exposed to news about Africa in the press, radio, and television? What attitudes towards non-European people were reflected in the illustrations? How would they have compared with those in school books, leisure reading, or the media?  Would children have heard similar or different views expressed by the adults in their families?   And do reminiscences of collecting promotional giveaways as children survive?  Is collecting this kind of ephemera bound up with nostalgia in the same way as it is in America?