childhood (a similar view was taken up by Wordsworth and Coleridge in Lyrical Ballads
(1798)), and although his enlightened ideas were too advanced for his age, his work has
had a profound influence on poetry for children.
The visionary and humanising influence of the Romantic movement exerted a huge
impact on writing for children, if not, perhaps, immediately. Wordsworth and his
companions contributed to changing views of childhood: There was a time when
meadow, grove and stream/The earth and every common stream/To me did seem/
Apparelled in celestial light/The glory and the freshness of a dream... It is an open
question whether the spirit of the Romantics directly influenced writers of poetry for the
young in the early nineteenth century. On the one hand there was some liberalism in
juvenile poetry. William Roscoe’s (1753–1831) The Butterfly’s Ball and Grasshopper’s
Feast (1807) and its eight imitations (in the same a year), were entirely free of
moralising. Catherine Ann Dorset (1750–1817) wrote one of these, The Peacock at Home
(1808), which was better than its precursor, though fewknow her name today:
Worms and frogs en friture for the web-footed fowl,
And a barbecued mouse was prepar’d for the Owl;
Nuts, grain, fruit and fish, to regale every palate,
And groundsel and chickweed serv’d up in a sallad.Roscoe and Dorset sold 40,000 copies of their two books within the year. Ann Taylor
(1782–1866) and Jane Taylor (1783–1824), best known for Original Poems for Infant
Minds (1804), with other writers, including Adelaide O’Keefe, also heralded a kinder
approach to children in poetry, as this extract from ‘Evening’ demonstrates:
The moon through your curtains shall cheerfully peep;
Her silver beams rest on your eyes
And mild evening breezes shall fan you to sleep
Till bright morning bid you arise.The Taylors’ most famous poems were probably ‘My Mother’ from Original Poems and
‘The Star’ (Twinkle, twinkle...) from Rhymes for the Nursery (1806). As Percy Muir
observed: ‘Here, at last, were books that children surely chose for themselves, albeit with
the undoubted approval of their elders’ (Muir 1954:91).
The originality of the Taylors did not lie in willingness to abandon admonitions to
virtuous behaviour in children—in fact, the Taylors were the seminal developers of the
moral tale in verse, and their poetry, for all its new gentleness, still demonstrated
unswerving moral conviction. It could be argued that in the early part of the nineteenth
century, the type of poetry written for children was dominated more by the tone and
content of Original Poems and its successors than by the Romantics. Lucy Aikin
included Wordsworth in the second edition of her anthology Poetry for Children (1825);
after that Romantic poetry was, and continues to be, regularly anthologised. Coleridge’s
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner has long been part of the children’s canon.
192 POETRY FOR CHILDREN