Sensualium Pictus (1659). Although not a children’s picture book by modern standards,
this was the first lavishly illustrated picture encyclopedia for children and is evidence of
a new acceptance that children learn best through books designed to stimulate them.
Towards the end of the seventeenth century writers were beginning to write more
sympathetically for children; Thomas Lye’s The Child’s Delight (1671), a spelling book, is
one example.
Not all of the schoolbooks used by children in this early period were therefore lacking
in imaginative stimulus. The old fables, especially the compilation known as Aesop’s
Fables which was first printed in English by Caxton in 1484, were also much used in
schools. One of the earliest English translators was Robert Henryson, whose version has
survived in an edition published in 1570; John Brinsley produced another translation in
1624 and in 1692 Roger L’Estrange provided one of the most comprehensive renditions
in a magnificent collection of 500 tales from Phaedrus, Avian and La Fontaine, as well as
‘Aesop’. While the older animal fables were not Christian in origin, the morals preached
in them were approved by all religious persuasions, and editions of Aesop were used
widely in schools and in the home. The need to illustrate the fables to make them more
accessible to a child had, however, not been fully realised; John Locke, writing in Some
Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) argued that ‘if his Aesop has pictures in it, it will
entertain him much the better, and encourage him to read when it carries the increase
of knowledge with it’ (Axtell 1968:259). Locke’s treatise contained a range of advice on
the teaching of reading and the kind of books best suited to young children; his remarks
on the importance of presenting it in as attractive a format as possible, reflected the
changing mood of the times. Samuel Croxall’s illustrated edition of Fables of Aesop and
Others, published in 1722, was the product of this intention that children’s reading
books should be both morally profitable and also pleasurable; John Newbery later
borrowed heavily from Croxall in his preface to Fables in Verse for the Improvement of the
Young and the Old (1757). The evolution of Aesop from a collection of somewhat florid
moral fables to the neat tales published by Newbery exemplifies the paradox that the
history of children’s literature has always been characterised by continuity mixed with
far-reaching change.
This paradox is especially evident in the tenacious hold on children’s books of
morality, especially the Puritan morality which pervaded much of seventeenth-century
writing. In Thomas White’s A Little Book for Little Children (c.1660), readers are warned
to ‘read no ballads and foolish books, but a Bible, and the Plainmans pathway to
Heaven’. Children were exhorted not only to read scripture; they were also directed to
adult devotional books. Arthur Dent’s The Plaine Mans Pathway to Heaven; wherein
every man may clearely see whether he shall be saved or damned (1610) was an
important Puritan text and was used by children beside other classics such as John
Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1563), usually known as the Book of Martyrs.
An even more significant book, designed specifically for children, and which continued
in publication into the nineteenth century, was James Janeway’s A Token for Children:
Being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives, and Joyful Deaths
of Several Young Children. Published in two parts between 1671 and 1672, the book
contains moral tales of young children who died young of unspecified illness, or the
Plague, and who lecture their families and companions for their lax religious
138 TYPES AND GENRES