The Huge Motley Field of Early British Children's Literature

Abstract

The Huge Motley Field of Early British Children's Literature Carolyn Sigler (bio) Mary V. Jackson . Engines of Instruction, Mischief, and Magic: Children's Literature in England from Its Beginning to 1839. Lincoln: UP of Nebraska, 1989. Engines of Instruction, Mischief, and Magic is an ambitious and often impressive survey of the early history of children's literature in England. It took Mary Jackson more than ten years of research, writing, and scholarly detective-work to complete, and its strength lies in its wealth of detail about little-known and rarely discussed types of literature read by children, including early religious works and what Jackson calls the "secular adult forerunners" of children's literature from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The abundance of detail, however, is also a major weakness in this study, which occasionally lacks focus, slights important writers, and provides hasty, sometimes misleading, summaries of the literature. The real "beginnings" of children's literature for Jackson come in 1744, when John Newbery's publishing firm opened at the sign of the Bible and Crown in London—the first company actively to market a line of books especially designed for children. The first chapter of Engines focuses on this "Birth of the Children's Book Trade" and its impact on the literary marketplace as well as its important cultural role in "disseminating information about the principles and practical advances of the Enlightenment" (11). Jackson argues convincingly that Newbery, who revolutionized the literary marketplace with his innovative line of colorful and diminutive children's books, was indebted as much to religious writers of the previous century as to the secular writers of popular chapbooks, romances, and courtesy books. In the fascinatingly detailed second and third chapters, Jackson backtracks to the thirteenth through the early eighteenth centuries to trace the influences of these religious and secular writers who either wrote for or appealed to a communal audience of adults and children, including Puritan writers such as Nathanial Crouch and [End Page 96] John Bunyan, and secular writers such as Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe. Jackson demonstrates persuasively that the Puritan values of education, self-improvement, and industry, overlapping the larger secular concerns of the growing and reform-minded middle class in England, ultimately remained core values in later children's literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jackson's analysis of the development of children's literature as a marketing concept, and the growing power of the children's publishing industry to mediate between authors and audience, could be one of the strengths of this study; indeed, an exclusive investigation of "the various conditions and events, beliefs and ideas, that lay behind book trade developments" in children's literature would make a fascinating and important contribution to the field (x). The usefulness of this discussion is diminished, however, by a failure to recognize and clarify the important distinctions among children's literature, children's books, and the children's publishing industry—which Jackson often confuses and uses interchangeably. The tracing of literary publishing and marketing for children constitutes but one of the several major objectives of this survey, which Jackson describes in her preface as an attempt both to encompass and surpass previous histories of the period, including Harvey Darton's Children's Books in England, Mary Thwaite's From Primer to Pleasure in Reading and Samuel Pickering's John Locke and Children's Books in Eighteenth-Century England. Engines proposes to give the reader "a clear picture of the inner consistencies in children's books, and between them and their religious, philosophical, sociopolitical, and trade conditions and esthetic and literary contexts," thus promising to historicize five hundred years of sociological background, economic factors, political and religious influences, biography, and literary developments in approximately two hundred fifty well-illustrated pages. In seeking "to account fully for this huge motley of a field," Engines disregards questions being raised by New Historical, Marxist, and feminist critics about the very problematic nature of writing literary or any other sort of history and fails to acknowledge, or even to be aware of, its own traditional New Critical perspective (ix). And, although Jackson acknowledges her indebtedness to earlier studies such as Darton's, Thwaite's...