12
Early Texts Used by Children
Margaret Kinnell
Origins: from Caxton to PuritanismIt has been said that children’s book publishing began in earnest in 1744, when John
Newbery issued A Little Pretty Pocket Book, ‘intended for the Instruction and Amusement
of Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly’ and offered for sale on its own at 6d or
with ball or pincushion at 8d (Darton 1982:1–5). However, this is to assume that early
children’s literature encompassed only books aimed mainly at pleasing the reader. The
span was very much wider and a literature read by children therefore began much
earlier. Many of the texts used by children in the centuries between the introduction of
printing and the development of the serious business of children’s book publishing in
the mid-eighteenth century were far from light-hearted; they were a mixture of courtesy
books, school books and religious texts. Children also took what they could from the
diverse range of cheap paper pamphlets, the chapbooks. These began circulating in
earnest in the seventeenth century after the Star Chamber was abolished in 1641 and
political and religious ideas could be expressed in relative freedom. Along with the
sermons and tracts were published the ‘small merry books’ which Samuel Pepys
collected (Spufford 1981: passim).
Many of these were enjoyed by children and young adults; there were no distinctions
between readership ages in the popular literature circulating in the seventeenth and
early eighteenth centuries. The young John Bunyan read avidly of George on Horseback
or Bevis of Southampton and later repented of his laxity: ‘for the Holy Scriptures, I cared
not’ (Spufford 1981:7). The story of Bevis predates the invention of printing—manuscript
versions were known as early as the thirteenth century—and his famous battle with the
giant Ascapart was depicted in a graphic woodcut in William Copland’s edition,
published around 1565. Certainly, Shakespeare knew the tale. Richard Johnson’s The
Seven Champions of Christendom, first published in 1596, Tom Hickathrift, Old Mother
Shipton, and The King and the Cobbler are further examples of similarly popular tales
which sprang from an earlier, largely oral, culture and were taken around the country
by the travelling pedlars. This literature survived well into the nineteenth century in
better produced formats, and was remarked upon by Wordsworth among others as of
continuing significance for children. The early, rough, uncut paper books with their
crude woodcut illustrations provided much of the reading matter for the mass of the