Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). All three
incorporate archetypal story themes which have been in constant use ever since: the
perilous journey in the first, the desert island in the second, the miniaturised or
magnified world and imaginary society in the third. These three belong to the general
history of English literature rather than that of children’s books, but they have always
been present as features of the landscape and have inspired many works that were
undoubtedly meant for children.
The titles published by Newbery and his contemporaries were not of comparable
significance. The best known Newbery title was the anonymous Goody Two-Shoes
(1765), often attributed on doubtful evidence to Oliver Goldsmith. It is the story of a
poor orphan who manages to learn her letters, become a teacher, make a good marriage
and grow rich. It was reprinted well into the nineteenth century, and pantomimes
bearing its title are still performed, though they have little or no resemblance to the
original. Newbery’s books are notable mainly for a relaxed and cheerful good-humour;
he described himself to his readers as ‘your old friend in St Paul’s Churchyard’ and liked
his (occasionally corny) little joke. But Newbery and his contemporaries were no more
tolerant of the old folk-tales than had been the previous century. ‘People stuff children’s
heads with stories of ghosts, fairies, witches and such nonsense when they are young,
and so they continue fools all their days’, wrote the author of Goody Two-Shoes.
Newbery’s successors and their competitors were less relaxed than Newbery himself.
Didactic influences of different kinds remained powerful. The educational philosophy of
Locke was followed by that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who preached that civilisation
had overlaid natural virtue with idleness, inequality and indulgence. His British
followers seized on the concepts of simplicity and usefulness, notably in the children’s
stories of Maria Edgeworth and in Sandford and Merton (1783–1789) by the eccentric
Thomas Day. This inserts a number of stories intended to ‘express judicious views of
nature and reason’ into the framework of the friendship of spoiled, rich Tommy Merton
and honest farmer’s son Harry Sandford, and of their education under the wise,
Rousseauite eye of their tutor, Mr Barlow. The emphasis is on the goodness of the
natural and rational, as opposed to the corrupting influence of idle wealth.
Among other moralising writers around the close of the eighteenth century were Mrs
Sarah Trimmer, in whose History of the Robins (1785) ‘the sentiments and affections of a
good father and mother are supposed to be possessed by a nest of redbreasts’, and
Hannah More, who launched in the 1790s the Cheap Repository Tracts, intended to help
the poor to be virtuous and know their place. Hellfire still smouldered: the last of the
major preachers in children’s fiction was Mrs Mary Martha Sherwood, in whose Fairchild
Family (1818) Henry, Lucy and Emily undergo some gruelling experiences for the good
of their souls. (Significantly, this book was toned down in later editions.)
Verse with a PurposeThe beginnings of verse for children parallel the beginnings of story. There was verse that
children heard and knew, though it was not specially meant for them: ballad, popular
song, nursery rhyme. (Many nursery rhymes are not as old as is supposed, but Iona and
Peter Opie estimated in the foreword to their Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes that
670 BRITISH CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW