Category Archives: English Language Children’s Books

Books and “Fancy Articles” for Sale at Richard Miller’s in Old Fish Street, London

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An engraver by trade, Richard Miller was also a publisher and the proprietor of a “juvenile library” (aka a children’s book store) at 24 Old Fish Street in early nineteenth century London.   His shop was quite close to the church of St. Mary Magdalen, shown in the engraving to the left, and south and east of Paul’s Church Yard, long a center of book trade activity. Miller was pretty small fry compared to John Harris, successor to the Newberys and a major publisher in his own right, or the Darton firm, with two bustling businesses at two locations in the city.   By the 1820s, the children’s book market had grown so large that there was plenty of room for multiple shops catering to customers with different tastes and values.

Miller engraved attractive sets of illustrated cards  that were sold for school and Sunday school rewards.  The same sets of sheets were also sold bound as neat little volumes in marbled paper with colored roan spines.  The bound volumes seem to have survived at a higher rate than the cards and certain titles still turn up fairly often on the antiquarian book market.

Cotsen has seven Miller publications and they were probably published in the 1820s (he did not date his title pages as a rule).  There are four little books of engraved plates: The History of Birds, The History of Goody Two Shoes, Pastimes or Amusements for a Girl, and Twenty-Six Poetical Extracts. In the collection of educational cards there’s the Miller Pence Table in forty-eight hand-colored engraved illustrated cards.  The 126-page The Panorama of the World, or An Enquiry into the Manners and Customs of the Principal Foreign Inhabitants of the Globe, illustrated with nine hand-colored engraved plates, is the only proper book in the group.

That leaves Military Heroes That Have Distinguished Themselves During the Late Wars (that is, the Napoleonic wars)  I like it less for the fourteen hand-colored engraved equestrian portraits of great generals like Alexander the Great, Prince Blucher, and the Duke of Wellington, than for the twelve-page catalog of “Books and Fancy Articles” at the end.  In the catalog this book listed under the title “Memoirs of Military Heroes.”  With plain engravings, Military Heroes  cost a shilling and with colored plates (which Cotsen’s copy has) two shillings.  The portraits could also be purchased individually on superfine paper for two pence  or as a set for two shillings.  It was a fair price for such a things then, but not cheap.

Military Heroes That have Distinguished Themselves During the Late Wars. London: R. Miller, [not before 1815]. (Cotsen 35443)

(Cotsen 35443)

Overall there are plenty of indications in the catalog that Miller was more than a very clever packager of his own content.  The opening below offers a delicious selection of novelty parlor games and educational flash cards.  The packs of conversation cards include one called “Pop the Question,” which probably had nothing to do with the conclusion of a courtship.  But maybe not, given the close proxmity to The Ladder of Matrimony  and The Map of Matrimony.  Obviously The Map  represents an imaginary place, like the “country of sighs.”   Still it was available as well as a jigsaw puzzle in a neat box as if it were something for teaching the geography of South America.  Prints had been sold for centuries for sticking on walls as decorations and Miller obliged with the series “Cottage Ornaments” or hand-colored prints for two pence on such edifying subjects as the drunken man or the death of the Earl of Rochester.  Certainly good enough for the parlour   The best of the “Fancy Articles” Miller sold has to be the “Satin Medallion Pincushions” for a shilling that feature  the portraits of the royal family and other famous people from Lord Nelson to worthy divines copied from the subjects on the preceding list of prints.  Do any survive in textile collections?This double-page spread offers more evidence that Miller didn’t rely completely on his own wares to stock his shelves.  He must have sold books by his competitors.  W. F. Sullivan was a school master who wrote many early examples of what would now be considered young adult novels.  He published with a variety of firms over the years, but none by Miller, as far as I can tell.  The roster of eighteenth-century classics like Gay’s Fables and Chesterfield’s Advice to His Son were probably also not Miller publications.  Tthe last title in that list is an edition of James Janeway’s Token for Children, one of the most famous and enduring of all seventeenth century juveniles.  It is not out of place here, because there are quite a few religious titles sprinkled throughout the catalogue.The last page in the catalogue features lots of old favorites–II see two different editions of Dick Whittington and Blue Beard, based on the George Colman dramatic remake.  What’s interesting even more interesting is the use of the term “picture book” to describe a work where the pictures dominate the words text.  It seems that the term must have been in wider use earlier than the OED entry suggests (there is appearances of the term between 1699 and 1847).

Nobody would claim that Richard Miller’s catalogue can compete with one from American Girl, Hearth Song, or any other modern company sells by mail or on the web.   Even though he lacked the technical resources to illustrate every item in his stock with color pictures, he managed with just words to make his merchandise look enticing enough for the  owner of Military Heroes to consider paying a call at the juvenile library on Old Fish Street.

Mother Hubbard and Her Dog Go Abroad in Translation

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Nancy Cock’s Song-Book. [London]: Printed for T. Read, [1744]. (Cotsen 7262290)

It’s no coincidence that the very first two nursery rhyme anthologies, the song-books of Nancy Cock and Tommy Thumb, were collected and published in 1744 by some merry wags in London.   And it’s no exaggeration to say that English language nonsense is rooted in its vibrant and salty tradition of nursery rhymes.  Nonsense isn’t supposed to travel well because the humor depends so much on the resources of the language in which it was created.  If that were true, then why has Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland has been translated into so many languages?  A better explanation might be that when there is a will, there is a way to recast the wordplay so people in another culture can delight in its absurdities.

Old Mother Hubbard and the antics of her dog is another classic of English nonsense that has made people in Europe laugh too, a fact that you won’t learn from the indispensable Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes.  The Opies recorded the continuation and a sequel “by another hand” issued shortly after the John Harris first edition of 1805, imitations like Old Mother Lantry and her Goat (1819), the first pantomime version of 1833, and a translation into German ca. 1830.

The Comic Adventures of Old Mother Hubbard and Her Dog. Illustrated by Robert Branston? London: J. Harris, 1820. (Cotsen 3688)

What the Opies didn’t make clear is that it was the 1820 edition in Harris’s “Cabinet of Amusement and Instruction” with the hand-colored wood engravings attributed to Robert Branson that captured imaginations overseas, not the original edition illustrated with etchings.  See the beautiful high-relief carvings of the amazing dog’s head in the corners of the elaborate gilt frame of the good old lady’s portrait?

Her steeple-crowned hat on top of a mob-cap, the gown with a laced stomacher and ruffled sleeves over a quilted petticoat, became iconic internationally, as did her dog’s ensemble of an opera hat, powdered wig, waistcoat, breeches, stockings with clocks and buckled shoes.  They are both unmistakable in the New Adventures of Mother Hubbard, when they visit the sights of London ca. 1840, the year Victoria married her cousin Albert.

(Cotsen 3688)

 

Cock Robin and the New Mother Hubbard. London: James March, not before 1840. (Cotsen 26792)

Audot published a French prose translation, Aventures plaisantes de Madame Gaudichon et de son chien, in 1832.  Baumgaertner in Leipzig quickly picked it up and repackaged it as an entertaining text carefully annotated for German-speaking children to learn French.   The dog is named “Zozo” here (he isn’t called anything in the English original).

Aventures Plaisantes de Madame Gaudichon et de son Chien. Leipzig: Baumgaertners Buchhandlung, [ca. 1830]. (Cotsen 3708)

The German translation,  unlike the French one, is in verse and it tries to preserve  something of the rhythm in English.   The illustrations are very careful copies of Branston’s for the Harris Cabinet edition, although the colorist occasionally changed the palette.  Mother Hubbard’s cloak is still crimson and her stomacher green, but her quilted petticoat is light yellow and her hat pale green with crimson trim.  In some of the illustrations, the stomacher is Dutch blue!  Frau Hubbard offers her Liebchen a more generous portion of beer than Mother Hubbard did in a stein redrawn with gently swelling contours.  Unfortunately it conforms to one national stereotype of Germans as beer swillers…

Komische Abentheuer der Frau Hubbard und ihrein Hunde. Mainz: Joseph Scholz, ca. 1830. (Cotsen 23460)

Mother Hubbard and her spaniel turn up in an 1840 Baumgaertner picture book, Herr Kickebusch und sein Katzchen Schnurr, which seems to be inspired partly by old Dame Trot, the owner of a clever kitty, whose rhyme predated the first appearance of Mother Hubbard both in English and in German translation by a few years.   The story accompanying plate VIII describes how  Madame Kickebusch, the lady in the Mother Hubbard costume comes to visit Herr Kickebusch with her gallant little gentleman, Azor.  Here the two pets are being introduced to each other.

Herr Kickebusch und sein Kätzchen Schnurr. Leipzig: Baumgärtners Buchhandlung, 1840. (Cotsen 5450)

There are no less than four Russian translations of Alice in Wonderland, included one by Vladimir Nabokov, so why not two radically different ones of Mother Hubbard?   Russia’s first fine art book publisher Knebel’ was responsible for the earlier one. Josef Nikolaevich Knebel is a fascinating figure, who apparently had no scruples about issuing unauthorized reprints of famous modern Western European picture books like Elsa Beskov’s Olles skifard and Tomtebobarnen.  There are no clues in  Knebel’ translation of Mother Hubbard, Babushka Zabavushka i sobachka Bum [The Jolly Grandma and her Little Dog Boom], as to who wrote the text or drew the pictures.  The mystery author was Raisa Kudasheva (1878-1964), who also translated the Knebel rip-off of one of the Beskow picture books.  While the illustrations are in the unmistakable style of W. W. Denslow, whoever drew them was not copying the American’s  version of Mother Hubbard.  

Raisa Kudasheva. Babushka Zabavushka u sobashka Bum. Moscow: I. Knebel’, ca. 1906. (Cotsen 27721)

A purely Russian addition to the dog’s remarkable accomplishments is sledding! (Cotsen 27721)

Of all the versions here, perhaps the closest to the spirit of the English nursery rhyme is the poem Pudel’ [Pudel] by the great Soviet children’s poet, Samuil Marshak.  In some people’s opinion, Marshak beats the original cold and they may have a point.  To what extent the inspired illustrations by Vladimir Lebedev play into this is impossible to say.    It begins something like this:  An old lady who loves a quiet life drinking coffee and making croutons.  Or would, if she didn’t own a rumbustious purebred poodle.   She decides to get him a bone for lunch out of the cupboard, but what does she find inside? The poodle!

Samuil Marshak. Pudel’. Illustrated by Vladimir Lebedev. Moscow, Leningrad: Raduga, 1927. (Cotsen 26976)

There is no end to his naughty tricks.  This is what happens when he gets his paws on the old lady’s ball of knitting wool…

Marshak’s spin on Mother Hubbard is still so beloved in Russia that an animated film was made by Nina Shorina in 1985.  This version on You Tube has optional subtitles so the poetry and pictures can be enjoyed together by non-Russian speakers.

A world traveler, this very English bit of nonsense!