A Peek into the <i>Pocket-book</i>

Abstract

A game called baseball arose from the primeval playing fields of southern England during the earliest decades of the 18th century. This we can deduce from a smattering of clues that have trickled down from the 1740s and 1750s. While these tidbits generally reveal little about the pastime's makeup during that era, one specimen rises vividly above the rest: the base-ball page from John Newbery's A Little Pretty Pocketbook.Many readers of this journal will be familiar with A Little Pretty Pocket-book's contribution to our slender understanding of early baseball. The iconic children's book, first published in 1744, has long been recognized as providing an important benchmark for tracking the game's evolution. Its employment of the term base-ball is the earliest known, and its primitive woodcut and accompanying snippet of verse offer our first fragmentary insights into how the game was played.The Ball once struck off,Away flies the BoyTo the destin'd Post,And then Home with Joy.These few simple lines capture baseball's essence. Their mentions of a boy striking a ball, flying to the next destin'd post, and then returning to suggest that by the 1740s the incipient game was already recognizable. Augmented by the woodcut-in which a striker, a pitcher, and three posts or bases are pictured-it is no wonder that Newbery's baseball page is treasured by those of us with an abiding interest in the pastime's early history. Yet despite our long familiarity with it (the historian Robert W. Henderson first alerted us to the book's importance in his 1937 essay, How Baseball Began), in many ways it remains an enigma. The goal of this article is to take a closer look at A Little Pretty Pocket-book and, the author hopes, persuade it to give up a few more of its secrets.To the kiddies of mid-18th-century England, A Little Pretty Pocket-book must have seemed like a sneak preview of paradise. Never before had any of them encountered a book that illuminated such a cornucopia of pastimes and amusements for their enjoyment. Everything was there: from kite-flying to hopscotch, from leapfrog to blindman's buff, as the book has it. John Newbery's startling invitation to play games and have fun was an almost total turnabout from the snarling admonitions against frivolous behavior that had snapped at the heels of young folk for centuries. And while A Little Pretty Pocketbook did not forsake all responsibility for tutoring children to be upright and virtuous (after all, it included letters from Jack the Giant-Killer to Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly promising them a whipping if they misbehaved), the book clearly relegated traditional moral instruction to a secondary role.Among the pastimes offered for the delight of A Little Pretty Pocket-book's young readers were five constituents of the extended baseball family. In addition to baseball itself, these included the games of cricket, stool-ball, trap-ball, and tip-cat. The latter four were widely played amusements of the era, and it is no surprise that Newbery would elect to feature them in his book. Far less obvious is why he included the relatively new game of baseball, given the likelihood that many of his potential readers in the mid-18th century would not have been familiar with it. His selection of it suggests that he may well have gained an intimate acquaintance with the pastime during his own childhood, raising the tantalizing premise that baseball's first steps could have been taken on terrain very close to Newbery's own upbringing.That would be in Berkshire County, England, where in 1713 Newbery was born on a farm near the small village of Waltham St Lawrence. Having had no formal education, but motivated by curiosity and ambition, he left home at the age of 16 to become apprenticed to a printer in the nearby city of Reading, about fifty miles west of London. When his master died a few years later, Newbery took over the business and married the widow-not an unusual arrangement for the times. …