Cotsen Children’s Library

Cover of RBM (vol. 14, no. 2) Fall, 2013

An illustration from a Cotsen Library book was featured on the cover of the Fall 2013 issue of RBM: Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage, issued by RBMS, the Rare Book and Manuscript Section of ALA.

This black-and-white reproduction was based on a hand-colored engraving of a children’s home geography party, printed in Dean & Munday’s The Little Traveller, or, A Sketch of the Various Nations of the World (ca. 1830).

Cotsen Library had used a color reproduction of this engraving on the poster and website for its September, 2013 conference in Princeton entitled, “Putting the Figure on the Map: Imagining Sameness and Difference for Children,” as noted in the text below, taken from the credits page of RBM.

Teaching Geography: hand-colored wood engraving, “The Party,” from “The Little Traveller” (London: Dean & Munday, [ca. 1830]) (CID 3885)

On the Cover: (RBM, vol 14, no. 2, p. 62)

“The Party,” hand-colored wood engraving from: The Little Traveller, or, A Sketch of the Various Nations of the World: Representing the Costumes, and Describing the Manners and Peculiarities of the Inhabitants: Embellished with Fifteen Beautifully Coloured Engravings / by J. Steerwell. (London: Dean and Munday, Threadneedle-Street, [ca. 1830]). The copy of the book from which this illustration is taken is in the Cotsen Children’s Library, part of Princeton University Library’s Rare Books & Special Collections Department.

This illustration was also reproduced on the website and print brochure for a Cotsen Library conference at Princeton on September 11-13, 2013, tided. “Putting the Figure on the Map: Imagining Sameness and Difference for Children.” The conference explored how children’s books were important vehicles for the expression of senses of national identity during the nineteenth century, a time when the world seemed to shrink, thanks to improved communications and transportation that facilitated travel, whether for commerce, conquest or leisure. Similarly the wonders of the world could be brought into the home via photography, maps, travel writing, and fiction. The representation of foreign lands inevitably required the illustration and description of their residents, which gave rise to a rich repository of colorful images of diversity. Through a tangle of national types, stereotypes, and archetypes, children’s books shaped discourse as much as they reflected mainstream adult culture.

Exploring these themes, and others, this interdisciplinary Cotsen conference featured presentations that drew on the approaches of imagology, history, anthropology, psychology, and literary criticism, to discuss modes of expression arising that either targeted children, within or without the classroom, or appropriated discourses for them, to present competing, complimentary or contradictory images of foreign nations.

For more information about the Cotsen Library or this conference, visit the Cotsen website: http://www.princeton.edu/cotsen/

In the 1680s antiquarian John Aubrey was the first Englishman to mention the observance of April Fool’s Day. He stated that it was celebrated all over Germany, but folklorists assume that the holiday was imported from France, where seems to have been well-established by the 1650s. They also speculate that this mock-holiday arose to fill the gap as the tradition of sanctioning all kinds of misrule during the Christmas holiday season waned (think the cruel jokes perpetrated on Shakespeare’s Malvolio during Twelfth Night). In comparison, April Fool’s was a more civilized occasion for mischief-making, being confined to one day and the only kind of horseplay authorized was to trick others into making public spectacles of themselves.

In the eighteenth-century England, perpetrating hoaxes upon the unwary was ubiquitous on April 1, if we can believe contemporary writers. Age and class came into play because children were allowed to try and deceive adults and members of a higher class could impose on those of a lower class. Making an April fool of someone was not below the likes of Jonathan Swift, who in 1713 sat up late with some friends cooking up a prank. A favorite ploy was to convince someone to go on a “sleeveless errand” (aka a wild goose chase) for things that didn’t exist, like pigeon’s milk or the biography of Eve’s mother. .

The first description of an April Fool’s sleeveless errand was described in a notice in the April 2^nd 1698 issue of Dawk’s News-Letter: “Several persons were sent to the Tower Ditch [ the moat around the Tower] to see the Lions washed.” One of the city’s great tourist destinations, visitors since the reign of Elizabeth I went the royal menagerie to gawk at caged lions, tigers, bears, elephants, etc. The lions were kept in the barbican called the Bulwark, which eventually was renamed the Lion Tower. The fast-talking trickster would try to persuade a gullible victim that every year on April 1 the lions were taken down to the moat for a bath. All someone had to do to enjoy the spectacle was enter by the White Gate. Of course, there was no such gate or any wet lions… In the nineteenth century, the merry sometimes distributed fake admission tickets and one is shown above.

In honor of the day, here are two accounts of washing the lions from two eighteenth-century children’s books, which may be unknown in the literature on the holiday. Cotsen has copies of both, but to give readers an idea of the look-and-feel of children’s books during the period, the facsimiles are reproduced from the British Library copies on Eighteenth-Century Collections On-Line. The first account comes from the last chapter of Travels of Tom Thumb Over England and Wales (1746), where the intrepid little narrator confesses to being taken in by the story about the lions’ annual grooming ritual. He also mentions that the most common visitors to the Tower lions are pregnant women, who wanted to know the sex of their babies!

The second, longer description of washing the Tower lions comes from chapter 8 of Richard Johnson’s The Picture Exhibition (1783). The narrator is a school boy, describing a picture he drew of an April Fool’s prank in progress. He clearly disapproves of the incident and there is something unpleasant about the watermen’s gratuitous cruelty towards the poor country bumpkin. While the tone of the narrator’s lecture about appropriate behaviour is too prosy for modern tastes, he was expressing quite enlightened views at a time when blood sports were tolerated and jokes based on highly offensive gender and class stereotypes perfectly acceptable.