{"id":811,"date":"2020-01-22T16:09:21","date_gmt":"2020-01-22T16:09:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/?p=811"},"modified":"2020-01-22T16:09:22","modified_gmt":"2020-01-22T16:09:22","slug":"before-and-after-childrens-literature-cheap-print-and-young-readers-across-europe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/before-and-after-childrens-literature-cheap-print-and-young-readers-across-europe\/","title":{"rendered":"Before (and after) children\u2019s literature: cheap print and young readers across Europe"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Elisa Marazzi<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is widely accepted that what we now call children\u2019s books were born in the 18th<\/sup> century, when both the Enlightenment and commercial reasons made some farsighted men and women start publishing books that were explicitly addressed to children. But children existed also before the 18th<\/sup>century, so what did they read? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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1: The Primer of Claude de France. France, probably Loire Valley, Romorantin, c. 1505. Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS 159, folio 3\/r, available online https:\/\/www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk\/illuminated\/manuscript\/discover\/the-primer-of-claude-of-france <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Some of them were so lucky that their parents or their preceptors commissioned, wrote, and even assembled books that were to be used exclusively by them. Let us think to the illuminated manuscript assembled for Claude of France in the early 16th<\/sup> century [picture 1], or to F\u00e9nelon\u2019s Adventures of Telemachus<\/em>, written in the 17th<\/sup> century for his pupil Duc de Bourgogne, second in line to the throne of France. Not to mention the nursery library assembled by Jane Johnson for her children in the early 18th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many more children must have encountered the printed materials that circulated\nwidely among peasants, working classes, servants, etc. since the invention of\nthe printing press. In spite of the fact that literacy rates differed depending\non urbanism, religion, emigration, and many other factors, it has been\ndiscovered that a great part of illiterate or semi-literate people not only had\nmany opportunities to enjoy narrations by just listening to them, but were also\nkeen on buying cheaply printed products even if they were not able to work them\nout completely. How about their children?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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2: 1610 edition of Den sack der consten [\u2026] [The Bag of Arts]. Brussels, 1610, available on Google Books. The prologue of the 1528 edition, the earliest known, mentions that the book contains \u201csome silly things for the youngsters and some other things\u201d – translation by Andrea Van Leerdam, whom I thank for letting me know about this book.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Examples of cheap print for children are attested before the 18th<\/sup>\ncentury. Book of secrets, containing recipes and medical remedies, were a\nsuccessful genre already in the age of manuscripts; so successful that a Dutch\npublisher issued a book of secrets explicitly addressed to children as early as\n1528. [picture 2] <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A quite renowned collection of ballads preserved at the British Library and named after their collector, the Duke of Roxeburghe, contains at least two 17th<\/sup> century moral ballads that might have foreseen children as a privileged audience. [See banner image.] <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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4: The Tyrant’s Views Frustrate: To Which Are Added, I Wonder’d (sic) What He Meant. The Shepherd’s Holiday. Drive Me Not To Despair. There’s My Thumb I’ll Ne’er Beguile Thee. The Highland Lassie. You’re Fitter for a Lover’s Arms. Cynthia’s Perplexity. Glasgow, J. & M. Robertson, 1808, Newcastle University Library, shelfmark Chapbooks 821.7 AIN (64) <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Moreover, children were likely to share cheap print with the rest of the\nsociety. Chapbooks printed in Glasgow by J and M. Robertson in the first two\ndecades of the 19th century carry an interesting woodcut on their title page:\nit represents two adults and a child singing ballads together. This must have\nbeen an advertising strategy (title pages functioned as covers in chapbooks),\nand it is also evidence that cheap print of any kind would have reached\njuvenile audiences by the means of orality. [picture 4]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Printed broadsheets that narrated stories through pictures with a small\namount of text as captions were probably appreciated by semi-literates, and for\nthe same reason they must have encountered the attention of children. Sometimes\nthey were not even conceived of as reading materials, but they contained a\nreally limited amount of text, as in the Venetian fogli da ventola<\/em>:\nsingle sheets mounted on a stick in order to be used as fans. They were not addressed\nto children, but there is evidence that young people were enjoying them as well,\nthus encountering written words even if they did not attend schools. [picture 5]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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5: Foglio da ventola printed with humorous faces changing upside-down when mounted as a fan. Printed in Bologna, Luigi Guidotti, [late 18th century]. Milan, Raccolta delle stampe Achille Bertarelli, shelfmark Popolari Profane p. 15g-10, available online http:\/\/graficheincomune.comune.milano.it\/GraficheInComune\/immagine\/Popolari+Profane+p.+15g-10 <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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The juvenile use of such fans is attested in a Venetian painting by a follower of Pietro Longhi, La bottega del caffe\u2019, oil on canvas, 18th century, detail. Work available online https:\/\/progettocultura.intesasanpaolo.com\/patrimonio-artistico\/opere\/la-bottega-del-caffe\/<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

More didactic and educational printed materials must also be mentioned,\nsuch as ABCs, primers, catechisms, that represented, for instance, about the 18%\nof French chapbooks, the so-called Biblioth\u00e8que bleue<\/em>. But they weren\u2019t confined\nto schools, since it was not only young people that needed to practice on them.\nMoreover, it was not understood that children in schools had to read didactic\nbooks: in the 16th<\/sup> century the Venetian schoolmasters declared that\nchildren practiced reading on chivalric romances in cheap editions instead of\nusing primers. And in the 18th<\/sup> century they still complained about\nthat. Also in France, in the 17th<\/sup> century, bishops banned from\nschools fairy tales, romances and prophane books that were used to teach them\nto read. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Social history research on 18th<\/sup> century France has shown that\nyoung peasants and thieves carried sorts of cheap print on their bodies when\ninspected by the police. Even in 18th<\/sup> and 19th<\/sup>centuries,\nwhen books for children were increasingly issued, most families would not\nafford them. Cheap print for the general public was still an option; moreover,\nsome clever publishers started to issue massively cheap print for children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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6: A Whetstone for Dull Wits; Or, A New Collection of Riddles, for the Entertainment of Youth. : Of Merry Books This Is the Chief, It Is a Purging Pill, To Carry of All Heavy Grief, And Make You Laugh Your Fill. Glasgow, R. Hutchison, 1804. Newcastle University Library, shelfmark Chapbooks 821.04 JOE (5) <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

This British books of wits, printed probably in the early 19th<\/sup>\ncentury, has a larger number of woodcuts than the standard layout of a chapbook,\nand in fact it is specifically addressed to children. [picture 6] Chapbooks for children issued\nby Kendraw of York are among the most renowned examples [picture 7], but also in other countries\ncheap print for children became a proper publishing genre in the 19th<\/sup>\ncentury. Let us focus on Spain, where pliegos de aleluya,<\/em> broadsheets\ncontaining images and captions, were used both as games (lottery) and as\nancestors of comics. Traditionally addressed to the general audience, in the 19th<\/sup>\ncentury they were increasingly dedicated to children and proposed to them traditional\nnarrations such as popular romances and fairy tales. [picture 8]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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7: The cries of York for the amusement of good children. York, J. Kendraw, [ca. 1826]. Digitised by Washington University Libraries, https:\/\/digitalcollections.lib.washington.edu\/digital\/collection\/childrens\/id\/1160<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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8: Historia del nuevo D. Quijote. 59. Barcelona, A. Bosch, [187-?]. Digitised by Centro de Estudios de Castilla La Mancha https:\/\/previa.uclm.es\/_ceclm\/CentenarioQuijote\/tboquijote\/tbos\/NuevoDQ\/index.htm<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Similar products were printed all over Europe also before that the so\ncalled Imagerie Populaire <\/em>was founded in \u00c9pinal, France, by Mr Pellerin. It was a\nprinting shop specialising in lithography that took over the business of\nprinted images selling them across Europe. Through some agreement Pellerin\u2019s\nbroadsheets were also translated into English and printed in the United States.\n[picture 9]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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9: Two Broadsheets printed by Pellerin in \u00c9pinal, [late 19th century]. The one on the left was published in the USA by the Humoristic Publishing Company, Kansas City. Princeton University Library, Special Collections – Cotsen Children’s Library, shelfmark Print Case 149986 <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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In addition, new printing techniques made illustrations and colours\ncheaper, so that broadsheets could even become cheap toys. Pellerin even\nprinted a Chinese Shadow Theatre: sheets were intended to be pasted on\ncardboard and then cut in order to build the shadows of animals and people that\nwould act on the stage of a cardboard theatre. [picture 10]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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10: Ombres Chinoises (6) Les Aventures de Polichinelle, \u00c9pinal, Pellerin [late 19th century]. Princeton University Library, Special Collections – Cotsen Children’s Library, shelfmark French Popular Print 149986 (Box 1) <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Research on all this is still at an early stage, but it is evident that cheap print represented a large part of the publishing market, especially in 18th<\/sup> and 19th<\/sup> century, and that it was often enjoyed by children. This means that we have only a partial understanding of what children were reading in the past. Cheap and ephemeral printed products are very likely to tell us more about that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elisa Marazzi is a Marie Sk\u0142odowska Curie Research Associate at the School of English, Literature, Language and Linguistics<\/em>, Newcastle University.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Elisa Marazzi It is widely accepted that what we now call children\u2019s books were born in the 18th century, when both the Enlightenment and commercial reasons made some farsighted men and women start publishing books that were explicitly addressed to children. But children existed also before the 18thcentury, so what did they read? Some of … Continue reading Before (and after) children\u2019s literature: cheap print and young readers across Europe<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7893,"featured_media":814,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26,27,263,264,262,261,179,265,266],"class_list":["post-811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorised","tag-18th-century-childrens-literature","tag-19th-century-childrens-literature","tag-broadsides","tag-cardboard-toys","tag-chapbooks","tag-cheap-print","tag-childhood-reading","tag-ephemera","tag-history-of-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7893"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=811"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":831,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811\/revisions\/831"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}