approximately half of them date from before 1700; some are much older.) There was also
verse used as an aid to memory, or to sweeten the instructional pill; the old courtesy
books were often rhymed. Some austere Puritans deigned to write in verse, among them
John Bunyan, though his Book for Boys and Girls (1686), later reissued as Divine
Emblems, was hardly designed to delight the youthful heart. It offered, for instance, the
following thoughts ‘upon Death’:
Death’s a cold Comforter to Girls and Boys
Who wedded are unto their Childish Toys:
More grim he looks upon our Lustful Youth
Who, against Knowledge, slight God’s saving Truth...Isaac Watts, in his Divine Songs (1715) was no less concerned than Bunyan with
religious instruction, and Hell was still a serious threat; but Watts’s tone was the gentler
one of the new century, and his verses were easy to remember; many indeed, such as
‘Hush, my dear, lie still and slumber’ and ‘How doth the little busy bee’ are still familiar
today. Moral tales in verse, in which good children were rewarded and bad ones
punished, sometimes with untimely death, continued to be produced through the
eighteenth century and on into the nineteenth. More amiably, Newbery gave new
currency to old rhymes in Mother Goose’s Melody (1765). But the great name in
eighteenth-century poetry for children was that of William Blake. The Songs of Innocence
(1789) clearly stated their intended audience —And I wrote my happy songs/Every child
may joy to hear—though they subsequently reversed the usual process by which adult
books come to be adopted by children, and, in company with the Songs of Experience
(1794), were recognised by adults as classic poetry for the world at large.
Adornment with CutsThe history of illustration goes back further than that of printing. Early printers could
not match the pictorial glory of medieval manuscript—nor, for that matter, can modern
ones—but from the days of Caxton onward printed books have been illustrated. The
early medium was woodcut, which continued to be largely employed until the late
nineteenth century and is still quite often used, though nowadays not printed directly
from the wood block.
In their early days, children’s books as defined here were commonly ‘adorn’d with cuts’.
To modern eyes those cuts are extremely crude, but clearly their customers loved them:
Leigh Hunt, lamenting in 1848 the ‘little penny books, radiant with gold and rich with
bad pictures’ of his childhood, confessed that ‘we preferred the uncouth coats, the
staring blotted eyes and round pieces of rope for hats, of our very badly drawn
contemporaries to all the proprieties of modern embellishment’. Many significant
eighteenth-century artists, including Thomas Bewick and William Blake himself,
illustrated children’s books, and this tradition continued in the nineteenth century with
William Mulready, George Cruikshank, Richard Doyle, John Tenniel and many others.
THE WORLD OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE 671