Some of her hymns, such as ‘Once in Royal David’s city’ and ‘All Things Bright and
Beautiful’ have worldwide popularity. Her maxim for writing hymns (reported by her
husband) was simple: ‘It must be sung; it must be praise; it must be to God’ (Alexander
1896: xxv). Her publications include Hymns for little Children, (1848) and Moral Songs
(1849).
As we have seen, the main concern of most eighteenth-century writers for children
was didactic. The admonitions in Nathaniel Cotton’s (1705–1788) Visions in Verse (1751)
are not exactly welcoming; nor was there much fun in John Marchant’s (fl. 1751)
Puerilia, 1753: I must eye my Copy duely/And exactly cut my Strokes/Ev’ry Letter
joining truely/So my writing better looks. Dorothy Kilner’s (1755–1836) Poems on
Various Subjects for the Amusement of Youth (1785) offered some amusement as well as
directives on how a God-fearing child should behave, and she is an early exponent of
something close to cautionary verse.
How with smacks he each mouthful seem’d eager to taste,
And the last precious drop was unwilling to waste.
But ye Graces! how can I the sequel relate?
Or tell you, ye powers! that he lifted his plate?
And what must have made a Lord Chesterfield sick,
Why his tongue he applied the remainder to lick.
‘The Retort to Master Richard’The first poet of genius to write for children was William Blake (1757–1827), though it
could be argued that he was really more interested in writing for other adults about
childhood in order to challenge the prevailing ideology of his day. However, a glance at
the title poem of Songs of Innocence (1789) makes it clear that whatever else Blake was
trying to achieve in his poetry, he was also keen to communicate with the young: And I
wrote my happy songs/Every child may joy to hear. The subject matter of Blake’s poetry
was consistent with that of other children’s writers of his day: hymn-like poems glorifying
God through nature, cradle songs, references to children’s games, birds and animals,
even social comment. But, as Heather Glen suggests in Vision and Disenchantment
(1983), what Blake was doing in these poems was initiating a debate on eighteenth-
century morality. He did not go along with the didactic purposes of his contemporaries
and his poems frustrate the notion that there should be an unequivocal moral line
presented to children. Deceptively simple, they hide complexities of irony, and the
expectations of the reader are frequently subverted. For example, the child leads the
adult in ‘The voice of the ancient bard’ and the sheep lead the shepherd in ‘The
shepherd’; the adult acquiesces with youth’s desire for freedom and experience in ‘Nurse’s
song’, and the children find school a cruel diversion from the joys of nature in ‘The
School Boy’: But to go to school in a summer morn/O! it drives all joy away. Unlike
almost all the juvenile literature of this period, there is no clear authorial voice
instructing the reader what to think.
Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794), can be seen as cunningly
contradicting adult dominance and replacing it with the wisdom of innocence and
naturalness, qualities which, in Blake’s mind, were associated with the state of
TYPES AND GENRES 191