children’s attention in his Divine Emblems or Book for Boys and Girls (1686), described
as a sort of ‘after-glow’ to the Pilgrim’s Progress two years earlier. (Hill 1988:266).
Homely Biblical emblems first appear in the Pilgrim’s Progress Part II; both that work
and the children’s verses demonstrate Bunyan’s preaching technique with its emphatic
repetition of key phrases and key words.
Bunyan’s chapbook rivals, readily adapting romances and other traditional stories of
giants, duelling and enchantment, required him to combine his spiritualising with a
sharper urban wit which distinguished the text from the blander Divine Songs (1715) by
Isaac Watts (1674–1748), whose verses were profoundly influenced by Bunyan’s text and
enormously popular. In Watts, piety mingles with a sense of national superiority not
found in Bunyan’s vigorous preaching, which is much more varied in its response to
nature. The shift of tone is strongly evident in the contrast between Bunyan’s Verse
upon the disobedient child (XLVII) and Watts’s Cradle Hymn. Bunyan laments that the
bantling, like a predatory bird, once brought up, turns on parents to ‘pick out their
eyes’. Watts’s child, blessed with a loving mother, and the infant Christ as a role model,
contains no trace of ingratitude or predatory self-interest.
The tradition of the fable, established by the sixteenth century in English works for
children, brought ironic texture to the verse and prose of such major authors who also
wrote for children as Bunyan, Gay, Swift, Richardson, Blake and Kipling; Lear, Carroll
and Beatrix Potter reworked the fabulist material for children influentially. In some
cases the attempt to offer suitable reading material for children involved revision of an
existing adult text; elsewhere sources were inventively adapted and parodied.
Apart from his Aesop, Richardson produced three early works for young readers,
including Letters of Advice to a nephew (1731), The Apprentices’ Vademecum (1733) and
Familiar Letters (1741). Protestant introspection and courtesy books shaped his work,
while the influence of the theatre is pervasive. In Clarissa’s closing pages Richardson
comments, ‘Even the pulpit has lost a great part of its weight.’ By reference, quotation,
comparison and dramatisation within the letter form, Richardson alludes extensively to
the contemporary theatre; he uses its techniques to enhance his instruction and
exploits its ability to persuade and influence.
However, his printing and ideological innovations also have significance for those
investigating children’s books since he not only draws the reader into the text by
exploring the ‘interior self’ (Watt 1974:176) but extends non-verbal meaning on the
page. Experimenting with ciphers and varying print-forms in Clarissa, as the first edition
reveals, Clarissa’s Ode to wisdom by a lady set to her own music, folds out of the book
to allow the reader to play the composition at the keyboard. Her ‘angry passions’ are
composed in musical notation and in a print that resembles handwriting. In Volume IV
(8 June), Richardson includes accusatory forefingers to draw attention to the
expressions in a letter which have kindled Lovelace’s fury. Such printerly extension of
meaning on the page anticipates the inventive techniques employed by modern authors
for children, particularly in picture books.
Whereas the adult or original epistolary form of Richardson’s three major novels
enabled the reader to stand in as ‘recipient’ or ‘correspondent’, his authorised shortened
versions, The Paths of Virtue Delineated or the History in miniature of the celebrated
Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe and Sir Charles Grandison, Familiarised and Adapted to the
TYPES AND GENRES 407