Capacities of Youth (1756) dispensed with the letters, while retaining the use of
dramatised episodes.
Richardson’s novels kindled a consuming interest in Europe for sixty years among
writers busy on translation, parody and prequel. Richardson’s Aesop, dismissively
treated by the author himself, was possibly loved into extinction by child owners.
Richardson spoke of the ‘alluring force’ of woodcuts, lavishly illustrating the fables at
extra expense; not only did he revise L’Estrange’s Fables (1692) but he commented on
Croxall’s version of L’Estrange, editing out both political and sexual suggestions, in
accordance with the feminised codes within his texts, as Ian Watt (1974:169) has
pointed out. G.Lessing, translating Richardson’s Aesop into German in 1757,
acknowledged feminised codes when praising Richardson’s knowledge of the education of
the human heart and of the promotion of virtue. Richardson’s collaborative literary
production must have been unique. Eagleton characterises him as the ‘engagingly
modern deconstructionist adrift in an infinity of texts’, and describes Richardson’s texts
for adults and for young readers as ‘plural, diffuse kits of fiction’ (Eagleton 1982:21–22),
the result of a process of ceaseless revision responding both to readers and to fellow
authors as he reworked, or authorised abridged versions of, his texts.
The Richardsonian novel, originating in Puritan tract, popular romance and fable,
addresses a deeply anxious response to processes of urban change; in ‘draughts so
small’, the abridged versions for young readers are, though changed in narrative form,
true to the author’s spirit, if less highly charged with sexual intensity. Such sequel-
generating texts, since they encode mythical qualities (like Robinson Crusoe) appear
talismanic in their generative capacity, according to Watt (1974:247).
Chapbook versions adapted or imitated Pamela; shilling versions of Richardson’s
novels were sold by the publisher Francis Newbery from 1769. Mary Wollstonecraft
translated Mme de Cambon’s Kleine Grandison (1782) in 1790 as Young Grandison,
while Berquin’s version appeared in 1791 as Little Grandison. Jane Austen dramatised
material from the original novel with her niece in 1800 (Kirkham 1983:27).
Both Swift (1667–1745) and Gay (1685–1732) wrote fables for children, Gay’s
influenced by Montaigne; Goldsmith (1730–1774) and Charles Lamb (1775–1834) wrote
for children at publishers’ request. Christopher Smart (1722–1771) wrote hymns for
children. Goldsmith produced an epistolary History of England (1764) and was at least
partially responsible for Goody Two Shoes (1765), one of the most successful children’s
stories.
Educational and moral aims, determining form and content in children’s literature by
major authors worked both for and against the interests of women writers. Many, like
Mary Wollstonecraft, sought intellectual recognition by distancing themselves from
derided romance forms, pursuing rational or educational discussion ‘symptomatic of a
desire felt by many women writers to free themselves and their offspring too, from
weaknesses regularly associated with their sex—being too emotional, too fickle, too
affectionate, too doting’ (Briggs 1989:229). Inglis discusses the tendency of European
social life to concentrate very gradually on the family and the virtues of domesticity,
drawing attention to the ‘growth of affective individualism’ in the eighteenth century,
while factors such as two great revolutions and Romanticism wrought changes (Inglis
1981:41–43). If, as McKillop suggests (263), one of Richardson’s achievements in his
408 MAJOR AUTHORS’ WORK FOR CHILDREN