Afterlives of Little Goody Two Shoes

Posted on May 3, 2022 by Marianne Hansen

On the title page, a girl and boy walk hand and hand in a rural landscape

The History of Goody Two Shoes, between 1823 and 1830

The story of Margery Meanwell, or Little Goody Two Shoes, is a Cinderella-type narrative that is driven by morality rather than fairy godmothers. First published in 1765, the story begins when Margery and Thomas Meanwell are orphaned. Thomas is sent off to sea; Margery goes to live in the home of friendly neighbors. There, she is given a pair of new shoes, and her excited exclamations over the fact leads to her name “Two Shoes.” Goody means “goodwife,” or as we might say, “missus,” and is a fondly joking name to call a little girl. The rest of the story is presented as a series of vignettes in which Margery overcomes adversity to become a teacher and a respected community member. Margery catches the eye of Sir Charles Jones, and they marry, making her Lady Jones. During the wedding her brother returns. The siblings live happily, made prosperous by their industry.

The popularity of Margery’s meritocratic story led to numerous editions and alternate versions of Little Goody Two Shoes. Within Bryn Mawr’s collections, we have condensed versions, versions in rhyme, story books where Margery makes cameo appearances, and several derivative works. Two such derivative works are The Renowned History of Primrose Prettyface and The Entertaining History of Little Goody Goosecap.

A still life unrelated to the story includes a marble bust, a tennis or badminton raquet. a book, and drapery

The Entertaining History of Little Goody Goosecap, 1828.

Both Primrose Prettyface and Goody Goosecap were issued by John Marshall, a British children’s book publisher who followed in the footsteps of John Newbery. Newbery had published Margery’s story initially, and Marshall capitalized on the trend. However, despite the similarities in themes and nicknames, there are significant differences among the three.

Primrose Prettyface also loses her parents at the beginning of her story. She meets Lady Worthy, who provides her with books that Primrose uses to teach other children. Primrose later takes a position as a maid for the family of Squire Homestead. After leaving Squire Homestead, Primrose finds her way back to Lady Worthy, working as a maid, then as a lady’s companion. Eventually, Lady Worthy’s son returns from university, and after he and Primrose form an attachment, they marry. There are two child-deaths in Primrose Prettyface that function as moral stories. First, one of Primrose’s students, a little boy, wanders off and drowns in a river. The other instance is a house fire in which the cruel son of Squire Homestead and a footman perish.

Lady in elegant clothing speaks witha planly dressed girl

Lady Worthy, The Renowned History of Primrose Prettyface, 1783

Goody Goosecap also recounts the story of an orphan, “Fanny Fairchild.” Her neglectful uncle spends her inheritance and sends Fanny to a charity school. She is later adopted by Mrs. Bountiful who takes her to London and introduces her to society. After they return to the country, Mrs. Bountiful’s son returns from the East Indies and is attracted to the 16-year-old Fanny. In an unexpected stroke of luck, Fanny’s estranged uncle dies, leaving her a fortune of 10,000 pounds. Mrs. Bountiful becomes very sick and expresses a dying wish to see Fanny marry her son. But she recovers, and Fanny establishes herself as a teacher before her marriage, instructing local children on how to be both good and wise. Finally, after much anticipation, Fanny and Mr. Bountiful marry. Goody Goosecap also includes a cautionary incident. As in Primrose Prettyface, a little girl wanders off, but in this story her punishment takes the form of violent kidnappers.

These two derivative works differ tonally and thematically from Goody Two Shoes with their inclusion of loving marriage as a reward for industry and goodness. In Margery’s story, marriage comes as an afterthought; we know little of the man she marries except that he is older than she. Margery’s happy ending instead revolves around the return of her brother. The sons of Mrs. Bountiful and Lady Worthy effectively displace Margery’s brother in the narrative. All three men spend a significant portion of the stories abroad and only return once the heroine has matured.

Margery and Thomas Meanwell, beg for food. A woman brings a plate for them while a dog begs.

Marjory and Thomas Meanwell, The Renowned History of Goody Two-Shoes, 1845.

Replacing Tommy with a romantic figure simplifies the story. Unlike Goody Two Shoes, there are no longer two male companions competing for the heroine. It also transforms the stories of Primrose Prettyface and Goody Goosecap into more mature romances, as we see the growth of each relationship. Margery, in contrast, ends up exactly where she began at the end of her story, at her brother’s side. Despite being married to a gentleman, his character remains vague and the reader focuses more on the reunion of the siblings. The Little Goody Two Shoes narrative from the 1760s took on many different forms following its initial publication, and in Primrose Prettyface and Goody Goosecap, we see Margery’s story maintain its instructive status but also evolve as a romance.

Both derivative works are didactic; the boys who die and the girl who is kidnapped are not sympathetic characters, but rather rhetorical devices. The narrators urge us to scold the children for being naughty and disobedient. Whenever a child is harmed, the reader is meant to learn from their mistakes: do not disobey your parents or you might die a horrible death. By increasing the stakes in both stories, the authors privilege moralizing themes.

Good and bad children compared in The Entertaining History of Little Goody Goosecap, 1828.

All three stories teach their readers to be industrious and obey, as well as read (and, presumably, buy) more books in order to move up in the world. Margery, Fanny, and Primrose are paragons of industry and obedience, and therefore are rewarded. Margery gains material wealth and reunites with her brother by the end of her story. She no longer has to sleep in a barn because her virtues and knowledge make her eligible for a successful marriage. Primrose and Fanny find similar material wealth, but also achieve loving marriages.

Reading all three of these stories back-to-back made their similarities clear, but I also noticed how Marshall’s books deviate from Goody Two Shoes. Margery’s story is very episodic and therefore the characters are less developed and the story does not flow. I personally found Primrose Prettyface and Goody Goosecap more enjoyable because of their recurring casts of characters. Primrose and Fanny are also allowed more growth in their stories, as they develop relationships. Margery’s closest relationship is with her brother, who is absent for the majority of the story. Each book was written with the intention of teaching simple lessons on learning and industry to young readers, but the stories of Primrose and Fanny stand out because of their attention to relationships and character growth.

Several adults and a child gather around a church door, out of which Marjory steps. Caption reads, "The key was now applied to the door, and on its being opened, Little Margery walked forth."

Marjory Meanwell, The Renowned History of Goody Two-Shoes, 1845.

Elinor Berger, BMC 2022

The Entertaining History of Little Goody Goosecap: Containing a Variety of Amusing and Instructive Adventures. London: Printed for John Harris, & Baldwin and Cradock, by S. and R. Bentley, 1828.

Goldsmith, Oliver and John Giles. The History of Goody Two Shoes. Embellished with Col’d. Engravings. London: Published by R. Miller; Old Fish Street, 1823-1830.

Marshall, John. The Renowned History of Primrose Prettyface. London: Printed in the year when all little boys and girls should be good, and sold by John Marshall and Co. No. 4, Aldermary Church Yard, Bow Lane, 1783.

The Renowned History of Goody Two-Shoes, Otherwise Called Margery Meanwell: With Some Account of Her Brother Tommy. G. P. Nicholls, engraver, and Francis William Topham, illustrator. London: James Burns, 17 Portman Street, Portman Square, 1845.

Love Letters

Posted on February 14, 2022 by Marianne Hansen

Has Valentine’s Day made you think you should write a love letter? There’s advice on how to do so on the web, but if you would prefer some examples that jump right into the nitty gritty of courting a person you have seen in church but never been introduced to, negotiating class differences, or what to say to a lady when you know she has other suitors, you may want books that have stood the test of time.

Although we hold a variety of books on writing both personal and business correspondence, we have only three devoted entirely to love letters. The earliest is Formulario de lettere amorose: intitulato chiaue damore – A Formulary of Love Letters, Titled, The Key to Love, 1527. The author, Eustachio Celebrino, was an artist working in the nascent book trade of early 16^th-century Italy. Besides providing woodcuts, he hack-wrote a series of short vernacular works on topics that were likely to sell: calligraphy manuals, an introduction to the Turkish language, an essay on women’s cosmetics, medical advice including protecting oneself from the plague and curing syphilis in ten days, and works in verse. Most of the sample letters in his 24-page pamphlet on love letters are adressed by a male lover to a woman: thanking her for her letter, praising her beauty and goodness, asking for a face-to-face meeting. Some are less happy: the woman replies and refuses to consent to his demands, and he writes a “Letter sent to humble an obdurate woman.”

Two hundred eighty-five years later, we have The Lover’s Instructor, or the Whole Art of Courtship (1812). This brief work begins with “Instructions in the choice of an husband” and the opening command is “Before marriage you cannot be too cautious and quick-sighted; nor afterwards too blind to your husband’s failings and imperfections, if he has any.” The next section, on choosing a wife, begins with a paragraph on calculating the likely benefits to the man of business from being linked with the prospective lady’s family and building connections within their alliances.

Most of the book is made up of sample letters; a few descriptions will hint at the breadth of topics covered: An assurance of love. From a Young Person in business to a Gentleman, desiring leave to wait on his Daughter. From a Daughter to a Mother on the same occasion. From a Young Lady to a Gentleman that courted her, whom she could not like, but was forced by her parents to receive his Visits and think of none else for her Husband (“I was obliged to an ambiguous behaviour, and durst not reveal myself further, because my mother, from a closet near the place were we sat, could both hear and see our conversation.”) From a Young Tradesman to a Lady he had seen in Public. Nancy to George – Flat Denial. William at Sea to Sally onshore.

After thirty pages of these middle class Regency concerns, the book suddenly plunges into a variety of methods by which lovers may communicate secretly. The most complex is a sort of finger signing to silently spell whatever one wants to communicate. An introduction to substitution ciphers and a short description of invisible inks follows.

The last two pages are devoted to rules “to be observed by the Ladies, for promoting Matrimonial Happiness,” emphasizing obedience, good nature, and sincere and constant attempts at improving one’s future conduct.

You can read our copy of The Lover’s Instructor on the Internet Archive at https://archive.org/details/lovers-instructor-kendrew-1812.

North’s Book of Love Letters was published in 1867 and reflects the growing genre of self-help or autodidactic books. The publisher advertises other “Good Books” offering instruction in ballroom dance, horse taming, shorthand writing, household “receipts,” etiquette, card tricks, billiards, self-defense, and playing the banjo.

The volume on love letters Includes 140 specimen letters “suitable for lovers of any age and condition… the whole forming a convenient hand-book of valuable information for the use of those who need friendly guidance and advice in matters of love, courtship and marriage.” After introductory chapters on confidentiality, mutual respect (“one of the most graceful accompaniments of courtship”), the responsibilities of marriage, the approval of parents (“where practicable, it should always be sought”), and secret marriages (“as a rule.. very objectionable”), we come to the letters.

With more than a hundred pages to fill, these include a wide variety of circumstances, letters and their answers, paired positive and negative responses depending on the feelings of one of the partners, and editorial commentary. The writers include a young gentleman, a middle-aged gentleman (to a lady the same), a soldier ordered to active service, a rejected suitor, a lover who will not take “no”, etc. There are letters to a desired lady with whom the gentleman has religious differences, from gentlemen introduced at a ball, and to ladies with whom one became acquainted during a journey. Most of the correspondence originates with men, but some in initiated by women (“A Lady to Her Inconstant Lover”, etc.)

One of my favorite exchanges begins with a man who writes a lady who works in a shop: “I cannot explain to you how great a desire I feel that I should enjoy the very great pleasure of your acquaintance.” After acknowledging that they have no shared friends to introduce them, he asks if he may introduce himself. The lady’s first reply neither rejects nor accepts the offer, on the grounds that she has no idea who he is. He writes back that he thought she might have noticed him walking back and forth in front of the window, and proposes to raise his hat to her the next day . In alternative replies the lady either agree to say acknowledge his greeting if she sees him when she leaves the shop at six in the evening or sharply and humorously states that she wants nothing to do with him.

Another favorite is a letter addressed to a “Lady who Advocates the Equal Right of Women with Men” by a gentleman who says he agrees with her. This is followed by editorial snark, but at least the possibility of equality is broached.

With these examples to hand, you will surely have the confidence to write that special someone. We wish you all possible success in your amatory correspondence!

Celebrino, Eustachio. Formulario de lettere amorose: intitulato chiaue damore. Venetia: Francesco Bindoni & Mapheo Pasyni, 1527

The lover’s instructor; or, the whole art of courtship; containing ingenious letters from both sexes, on love, &c., the mode of conversing by the silent language, and the art of steganography; with rules and manners to be observed for promoting happiness, to which is prefixed directions in the choice of a husband and a wife. London & York: J. Kendrew, 1812

North, Ingoldsby. North’s Book of Love Letters. With directions how to write and when to use them, and one hundred and forty specimen letters, suitable for lovers of any age and condition.... New York, Dick and Fitzgerald, 1867

Five Years – and Counting!

Posted on June 23, 2021 by Marianne Hansen

At the beginning of May 2016, the first of 634 boxes of books arrived at the loading dock of Canaday Library. The enormous collection of 19th and 20th-century works for young readers had been bequeathed to the College by Ellery Yale Wood (Class of 1952).

Delivery worker dragging a pallet of 45 large boxes onto a dolly

The books arrived by the pallet-load.

Over the next three months six student employees unpacked, vacuumed, aired out, and roughly sorted approximately 17,000 books.

Student employees vacuum and shelve incoming books

First: unpack! Second: vacuum!

By the end of that summer, all the books had been sorted and organized by author.

Catalogers and student employees, in processing room, hold up the last book above a shipping box.

Last box of books!

In the succeeding five years, 37 of our student employees have worked on the Wood collection. They alphabetized. They helped identify duplicate volumes. They helped find books to answer reference questions and requests for images – a very difficult task before the books were cataloged and given call numbers. They shelved newly cataloged books, and retrieved and then reshelved books for readers and classes. They put acid-free covers on books with dust jackets, and measured books for the conservation boxes we use for fragile items. Three students – Toby, Kate, and Beck – did preparatory work identifying online records to save our professional catalogers time.

Student employee looks at one book while seated at a computer. A cart of books in the foreground.

Toby checked new books against those we already held, and annotated lists to help the catalogers.

Three of the students who worked on the collection in the first year wrote blog posts – on the Golliwog, Mrs. Molesworth, and Beauty and the Beast.

Books by the once-popular, and very prolific, author, Mrs. Molesworth.

In addition to the students’ posts, we have blogged about the collection 26 times. This blog is the twenty-seventh.

Handmade doll with modern paper clothing made from magazine pages, superimposed on the mid-19th century book

Blog post on Paper Dolls and How to Make Them (1857) with a homemade doll dressed in modern clothing

Subsets of the collection – paper dolls, movable books, fairy tales – are large enough to provide significant resources for scholarly research. This year’s Friends of the Libraries intern, Juliet Smith, is the third student to work on the world-class sub-collection of books about Old Dame Trot. We currently have 62 individual historic books and 25 books which include the poem among other texts. Juliet’s efforts will result in an online bibliography and guide by the end of the summer. Two other students are working on Little Goody Two Shoes and The Butterfly’s Ball – and all of their imitators and derivative works.

Student employee examines a book in our reading room. A cartful of books is behind her.

Juliet works with the Dame Trot collection

The collection has been used by 28 Bryn Mawr and Haverford classes in our seminar room. Besides English courses, these include first year writing seminars, Russian Literature, Classics, Museum Studies, and History of the Book. In Fall 2018 a 360° cluster centered around children’s literature included English, Creative Writing, and Sociology courses, with classes and individual students using the collection repeatedly.

Pages from The Orphan Girl, showing the protagonist praying and selling flowers

The Orphan Girl (1812), used in the History of the Book class

We have presented two exhibitions of these books. To Increase Your Delight introduced the collection to the community in Fall 2016. Four students – Hannah, Isabella, Julia, and Cassidy – spoke on their experiences with the books at an event celebrating the exhibition.

The Girl’s Own Book ran through the 2020-2021 academic year; pandemic restrictions meant that most visitors experienced the show remotely. An online version included the full text of the show and links to online versions of many of the books.

Six students did background research and wrote draft labels for The Girl’s Own Book. Four helped install the show.

Student employee stands next to partially mounted exhibition signage.

Lucy helped hang the signs for The Girl’s Own Book

To date, 42 books from the Wood Collection have been fully digitized and shared globally on the Internet Archive. Because it is time-consuming, we digitize only works in the public domain that are not otherwise freely available.

Screenshot of search results for the EY Wood Collection books on the Internet Archive

Books from the Wood Collection on the Internet Archive

The most strenuous effort in processing any donation of books is cataloging – describing the books and entering them into the library’s public catalog. Historically, fiction – even children’s fiction – has been added to catalogs with little or no information about the major themes in the stories. In cataloging the Wood Collection we broke with tradition to include extensive lists of topics (“subject headings” in library-speak) in the catalog records. So books are not just described as “Juvenile literature”, but with terms like Problem children, Siblings, Orphans, Child labor, Dolls, Boarding Schools, Dreams, Imaginary Voyages, Imperialism, Stereotypes, Adaptations. This deep cataloging has made it possible for students, staff, faculty, and researchers to use Tripod (our online catalog) find books on topics of interest – impossible to do otherwise in a collection of 13,000 books.

Compared screen shots showing 9099 results for the Tripod catalog search ' "juvenile fiction" yale wood' and 54 for the search ' "boarding schools" yale wood'

Extensive cataloging permits readers to find the books they need

Three catalogers and three cataloging assistants have worked on the collection. In the first two years Patrick Crowley, Katharine Chandler, Jo Dutilloy (BMC 2017), and Rayna Andrews (BMC 2011), working part-time, added records for 2750 books.

Starting in 2018, a generous gift from Ellen Michelson (P’09) and additional support from the Friends of the Bryn Mawr College Libraries made it possible to hire a full-time cataloger and a part-time assistant to work exclusively on the Wood Collection. Amy Graham and Maria Gorbunova together cataloged 10,811 books before their appointments ended March 31, 2021. Maria worked primarily on 20^th-century books, although her extensive language skills helped us add Russian, Japanese, French, and German titles as well. Cataloger Amy Graham managed the cataloging project and concentrated on the earlier volumes.

Maria Gorbunova and Amy Graham in the Special Collections office, smiling. Maria wears a t-shrt printed "No Meta-Data No Future."

Maria (left) and Amy on their last day of work

Nearly 600 of the catalog records Amy created were “original” – she was not able to use another library’s description for the book, but needed to catalog it from the beginning based on the book itself and her research on its publisher, author, date, and contents.

Title page of the book La civilité puérile et honneste pour l'instruction des enfans.

La civilité puérile et honneste pour l’instruction des enfans (1736) – one of the books Amy cataloged “from scratch”

As of June 2021, there were 13,402 books cataloged in the Ellery Yale Wood Collection.

The collection is still growing. Curator Marianne Hansen has taken over cataloging, to make information about additional books accessible. A relatively small number of books from the bequest still need to be added to Tripod. We have recently received three donations of twentieth-century picture books for young readers, totaling 125 books. Finally, we buy books to add to our collection – 50 in the last year – and those books must also be cataloged. We look forward to building the collection and making it available to readers for years to come!

Confronting the Legacies of Racism and Colonialism in Special Collections

Posted on May 12, 2021 by Allison Mills

For almost a year, we in Special Collections have been working on a statement documenting the ways in which we are trying to confront the legacies of colonialism and racism in our collections. In June 2020, Black students at Bryn Mawr and Haverford composed an open letter to the Bi-College community. Their letter, which demanded that Bryn Mawr Special Collections acknowledge the colonial racism present in Bryn Mawr’s African Collections and, where possible, create a plan to repatriate objects, represents ongoing, student-led anti-racism efforts at the College—efforts that came to the fore again with the Student Strike in fall 2020. The effects of colonialism and racism in the collections are part of the historical and present-day forms of racism and inequity at Bryn Mawr College that we are committed to addressing, foregrounding, and remediating in the department and at the College as a whole. In response to student voices, the concerns of the wider college community and society, and our own professional ethics, we began working on this statement.

Tied to College and LITS-wide efforts towards diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism, our statement, Confronting the Legacies of Colonialism and Racism in Special Collections, is meant to serve as a starting point for conversation. It is by no means complete or final, and we plan to continue to modify the document as we identify additional ways in which we can address racism and colonialism in Special Collections. As we’ve worked on the statement, we have shared it with some internal stakeholders—the LITS Equity, Inclusion, and Anti-Racism Team, the BMC Collections Committee (which includes faculty and trustees), the President’s Diversity Leadership Group, BMC Alumnae/i Relations and Development, and members of the Bryn Mawr administration. We hope to create a space that allows for on-going discussion, including hosting community-wide conversations about the document in the coming year.

In the meantime, Special Collections staff are engaged in work aimed at addressing the on-going effects of racism and colonialism in our collections, and at increasing the transparency around them. This is a multi-part, long-term project. In addition to addressing our current collection and how we are presenting the material we currently have to the community, we also need to think about future collections. This means identifying and redressing harmful language in descriptions and metadata, actively and ethically acquiring material from a diverse range of voices, and recognizing that we have a professional and ethical obligation to do this work. Special Collections, comprised at Bryn Mawr of Rare Books & Manuscripts, Art & Artifacts, and the College Archives, is primarily intended to be a teaching collection. As educators and caretakers of these collections, we have a responsibility to continue to learn and grow, and we welcome interrogation, critique, and insight into how we can improve our practice.

Read the statement: Confronting the Legacies of Colonialism and Racism in Special Collections

Current, concrete efforts towards this work include:

Who Built Bryn Mawr? Exhibit and Internships
Support for the Perry House Oral Histories Project
Removing portraits of M. Carey Thomas from display
Collecting, preserving, and providing access to materials related to the 2020 Bryn Mawr Strike via the TriCollege Libraries Digital Collections website.
Supporting and preserving Pensby Fellows research
Working with the Anthropology and Archaeology Departments to inventory all cultural objects and any human remains stored in campus collections and will continue to adhere to best practices by implementing the legal guidelines put forth by NAGPRA and by adhering to the most recent code of ethics put forth by professional organizations such as the American Anthropological Association, the American Association of Physical Anthropology, and the Society for American Archaeology
Ongoing improvements of catalog records for African Art & Cultural Artifacts, including identification and provenance research, donor biography research, and development of 2021 summer internship focused on integrating these collections with relevant papers in College Archives
Ongoing development of resources page for researching African Material Culture, including timeline draft of Art & Artifacts collection history
Developing websites to document previous exhibitions on campus, including Exhibiting Africa (2017)
Auditing archival finding aids and digital collections description to bring description up to standards as laid out in the Archives for Black Lives in Philadelphia Anti-Racist Description Resources
Identifying books with problematic themes, language, and/or art through use of subject headings and genre terms such as Racism in literature, Ethnic stereotypes, etc.
Updating and improving the cataloging of historic books to illuminate unexamined facets of contemporary society
Hosting Teach-In on Legacies of Colonialism in the Mineral Collection (with Selby Hearth and Ellie Ga)
Hosting Teach-In on Race, Racism & Cultural Collections (Monique Scott with Tessa Haas)
New acquisitions of contemporary artwork by African American Women
Deepening representation of work by Kris Graves in Art & Artifacts collection to include his most recent portfolio of photographs from protests in Richmond, VA (Summer 2020)
Outreach and connecting with stakeholders and cultural representatives

Home for the – Victorian – Holidays

Posted on December 24, 2020 by Marianne Hansen

Adults and children playing Snapdragon, wiht a large platter aflame in the middle of the table and participants reaching into the flames

A family playing Snapdragon. See footnote for further information on the game.

This year, many of us are struggling with unfamiliar versions of our celebrations of Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, and New Year. Affordable transportation, flexible schedules, and leisure for the middle class (comparable to that available only to the wealthy during Victoria’s reign) have made vacation travel to join family in December an annual pleasure – and obligation – for many of us. As we choose to stay apart this year to protect our loved ones, we may think bitterly of the ideal gatherings depicted in movies and stories, and blame the Victorians for inventing the Christmases we think of as traditional, with a lighted tree, a roast goose (more modernly a turkey), gifts, happy children, and the entire family brought together under one roof.

Of course, we all know that most holiday gatherings fall short of that ideal, no matter how much effort Mother expends. Uncle Harry tells jokes that offend everyone, the turkey takes seven hours to cook instead of five, the children are over-excited and loud, and no one can forget that Grandma died in June. I felt better about the Victorians after finding in the Ellery Yale Wood Collection the 1885 children’s gift book Aunt Louisa’s Holiday Guest, which embodies a far more nuanced depiction of homecomings than one might have predicted.

Large party in a domestic interior. Boys and girls dance together while adults look on. A woman plays the pianoforte in the background and a maid brings in refershments

The publisher’s introduction suggests that the book contains a random assortment of four interesting stories, finishing with one that is topical:

“Again the Publishers offer a new Picture Book to their little friends. The story
of Dame Trot.and her Cat is revived with entertaining Pictures; and, in Good Children,
kindness to the afflicted is the subject. Hector the Dog shows his brave adventures on the
mountains; and Home for the Holidays is what all good boys and girls hope for, in order
that they may enjoy in quiet “Aunt Louisa’s Holiday Guest.”

In fact, all four stories are about homecoming and, whether the editor thought about them in this way or not, they illuminate a variety of facets of that uncertain pursuit. Dame Trot and Her Cat was an anonymous work first printed between 1800 and 1805, perhaps as a knockoff of the new popular poem Old Mother Hubbard. The text of Dame Trot is always about the old lady’s cat, but the language and events vary wildly from edition to edition. The narrative, though, has a stable pattern: Dame Trot comes in and discovers the cat doing something unexpected. It has died, or revived, or is making tea, or cleaning the kitchen, or teaching the dog to dance, and so on. Sometimes she has been in the house all along, perhaps coming downstairs after waking up. Frequently she has gone out to shop or pay calls, and she returns home to novel feline behavior.

This is a very light-hearted take on homecoming, focusing on mostly pleasant surprises. It accepts that things change, and that you may find your life altered when you return to your home, but most of the changes are neutral or beneficial.

The Good Children is less cheery, focusing on hardships suffered by those who are poor and disabled, especially those whose burden is increased by the absence of family. A tired and hungry blind man, walking with his dog, is welcomed at the cottage where the good children of the title live, and they promptly enlist their mother’s and aunt’s aid to offer him food and drink. The man tells the children about his son, a soldier, whom he has not seen for years because he had been stationed in a foreign country, and who he fears is dead.

Miraculously, as he finishes speaking and gets up to leave, his son appears on the road, looking for him. The soldier’s return guarantees the old man’s comfort and support, and sets this small part of the world to right. A homecoming after suffering, and with challenges to come, but an uplifting narrative of family love and filial piety.

The third story, Hector the Dog, recounts the outcome of an imprudent decision. On Christmas Eve a traveler is in Martigny, Switzerland, intending to go through the Great St. Bernard Pass to get to his family’s home by the next day. An innkeeper, who is familiar with the terrain and the weather predicts a storm and urges him to stay the night. He insists that he knows the pass and that he will go ahead. Of course, the weather is as bad as the innkeeper said it would be, and the traveler is overcome.

Fortunately for him, the monks of the Great St. Bernard Hospice make their routine rounds, searching with their dogs for those who need their aid. In recovering the traveler, one of the dogs – the heroic Hector – is buried in an avalanche, but the stubborn traveler survives. The original child readers may have focused sentimentally on the heroism and loss of the dog, but this is also an account of a homecoming gone wrong, where the man’s self-centered and rash insistence on returning on schedule when it was not safe to do so nearly led to his death – and did cost the life of a useful and noble animal who had saved others.

The final story, Home for the Holidays, is a happy version of homecoming, exemplifying the ideal Victorian Christmas that shapes our own expectations. The narrator is a boy, returning to London from boarding school by train with his friends. No archaic nonsense poems or foreign customs here – the poem is entirely up to date with the boy addressing his requests for speed to the guard and the engineer on the train.

He is as pleased as any student by the prospect of a break from studies, and looks forward to family parties and merrymaking. He mentions Christmas, but he expects the fun to go on through Twelfth Night, and plans to go to the pantomime and an equestrian show, and to see Punch and Judy.

The trip is over at last, and the boys rush out of the train to be embraced by their parents and siblings. Here is the homecoming everyone desires – your friends and family together, good food, your favorite entertainments, and nothing to worry about – and it is this homecoming the publisher ends with.

I know, as the publisher did, that this is a fantasy, and that for most of us “home for the holidays” is very different. But there is value in optimistic enthusiasm and being willing to be pleased, even this season. I wish you every happiness as you find ways to celebrate the return of light and warmth in the darkness. And we will look forward to a better year to come.
– Marianne Hansen, Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts

Aunt Louisa’s Holiday Guest: Comprising Dame Trot and her Cat, Good Children, Hector the Dog, Home for the Holidays. Laura Valentine., Kronheim & Co., engraver. London: Frederick Warne and Co., c. 1884. Read our copy on the Internet Archive.

Footnote on Snapdragon
* Snapdragon, the game shown in the first illustration, was defined succinctly in Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1823: “A Christmas gambol: raisins and almonds being put into a bowl of brandy, and the candles extinguished, the spirit is set on fire, and the company scramble for the raisins.” Read more about it on Wikipedia. Should you choose to play, here are a few useful tips:

Protect yourself – hair pulled back; no clothing hanging into the flames; natural fibers; a fire extinguisher next to the door
Protect your table – nothing flammable; protect finishes from damage by alcohol drips; a hot pad under the platter
Most ordinary ceramic dishes will work. The ideal platter is easy to reach into, with a low, slanting rim.
Warm the brandy gently (~100-110° F) before pouring in the dish, or you may have trouble lighting it. The flames of 40% alcohol are relatively cool. Do not use overproof, which burns hotter.
Enjoy!

Bad Children – And Their Imitators

Posted on December 14, 2020 by Marianne Hansen

Heinrich Hoffman wrote Lustige Geschichten und drollige Bilder for his three-year old son, creating a persistent pantheon of naughty children to whom hilariously bad things happen. The book was published in 1845 by the Literarische Anstalt J. Rütten – the same year they published Marx and Engel’s first joint work, Die heilige Familie. Although Karl and Friedrich went on to bigger things, Funny Stories and Comical Pictures was much more widely read than the reformers’ first book throughout the century that followed. By 1847 more than 20,000 copies of the German children’s book had been sold, and in that year the same publisher issued a translation, The English Struwwelpeter, or, Pretty Stories and Funny Pictures for Little Children. Struwwelpeter means Shock-headed Peter, in reference to the wild disarray of a shock of harvested wheat, with sheaves piled up to keep the grain off the ground. It is the name of one of the original naughty children in the book, whose striking appearance made him the eponym of the work, even in English, whose native speakers struggle to get their tongues around the word.The German publishers actively defended their copyright in both languages, but the extreme popularity of the work led to an immediate outpouring of new English books which took their inspiration from Hoffman’s poems. Some books had titles with children’s first names (Envious Tom, Naughty Susan, et alia) or the words “Funny” or “Laughter” – or even “Struwwelpeter”. There were also reprints of earlier works which dealt with childish misbehavior, like Sketches of Little Girls and Sketches of Little Boys, originally published in 1838.

We are gradually expanding our collection of these books about naughty children, but they are relatively uncommon on the market. We do have Funny Books for Boys and Girls: Struwelpeter, Good-for-Nothing Boys and Girls, Troublesome Children, King Nutcracker and Poor Reinhold, published in 1856. In violation of the copyright, it contains a (new translation of) most of the poems in the original, excluding Flying Robert and Shock-headed Peter. It also prints (Heinrich) Hoffman’s Nutcracker, itself part of a complex group of reworkings of E.T.A. Hoffman’s 1816 Nussknacker und Mausekönig. The adaptations of that work include the 1844 version by Dumas, which served as the basis for Tchaikovsky’s ballet. We also hold the 1857 Little Minxes, the crimes of whose female protagonists include refusing to learn to sew, being a self-obsessed clothes horse, and preferring boyish to girlish pursuits. These redressed Hoffman’s neglect of bad little girls – while reiterating conventional ideas about the sexes and gender roles.

When Rütten & Loening’s copyright expired in 1901, the book was still popular and new translations and illustrations appeared immediately. Here is the original English version (third edition, 1851) of Harriet – Gretchen in the German editions – who played with matches in spite of the instructions of her mother and the last-minute pleading of her cats:

When Pauline, renamed again, was published in 1903 by the American firm McLouglin, she had an up-to-date wardrobe, but the same pyromaniacal impulses. Translation of the book into Latin took until 1934, when it had entered the public domain.Outright parody had appeared before the copyright expired. Fritz Netolitzky’s Egyptian-themed takeoff was published in 1896, with the faux-scholarly subtitle Being the Struwwelpeter Papyrus: with Full Text and 100 Original Vignettes from the Vienna Papyri.The work found its 20th-century niche as an abundant source of parodic political commentary. Harold Begbie’s books The Political Struwwelpeter and The Struwwelpeter Alphabet use adaptations of Peter’s portrait to make their lineage clear.You can, with effort, decipher both books – unless you are already well versed in late Victorian British politics – but the satire has lost its edge. Harriet’s poem, for example, mocks Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery, who was Prime Minister from March 1894 to June 1895. He was, as the poem records, interested in racing and two of his horses, Ladas and Sir Visto, won the Derby during his term in office. The critical cat with glasses is the religious reformer Hugh Price Hughes; Wikipedia reveals how unmistakable the identification would be to the contemporary newspaper reader.Swollen-Headed William: Painful Stories and Funny Pictures After the German, by humorist Edward Verral Lucas, appeared in 1914. Its criticisms of Kaiser Wilhelm II were far-reaching and harsh. The emperor appears as the protagonist of each of the Struwwelpeter poems – behaving cruelly to those around him, biting (rather than sucking) his thumb as a sign of contempt, and – of course – playing with fire.Political use of the material reached its zenith with Struwwelhitler: A Nazi Story Book, published in 1941 by the British newspaper Daily Sketch. Funds raised by its sale were used to buy radios, games and “woollen comforts” for the troops and supplies for air-raid victims. Hitler takes the place of Cruel Frederick; Goering’s announcement of rationing cuts is mocked in a parody of Augustus Who would Not Have Any Soup; and Little Gobby Poison Pen has his thumbs cut off for writing lies. Switzerland’s armed neutrality was criticized in The Dreadful Story of Gretchen and the Gun. This book’s illustrations are densely packed with visual information, symbolism, and commentary: Gretchen’s dolly falling to the ground, arm still raised in the Hitlergruß, is characteristically poignant.

Times – inevitably – change, but I regret that in the intervening eighty years the book finally fell out of fashion. It is now a curiosity, rather than the rich compendium of shared experience and imagery that made it such a fruitful resource for parody and political commentary. Imagine what a modern cartoonist could do with these tales of cruelty, wilful disobedience, and disregard for human life.

To read the books mentioned:

The English Struwwelpeter. Our copy is on the Internet Archive.

Funny Books for Boys and Girls. Our copy is on the Internet Archive.

The Little Minxes. Our copy is on the Internet Archive.

Pauline and the Matches and Envious Minnie. Our copy is on the Internet Archive.

The Latin Struwwelpeter is still in copyright and not in the public domain.

The Egyptian Struwwelpeter. Another library’s copy is on the Internet Archive.

The Political Struwwelpeter. Other libraries’ copies are on the Internet Archive.

The Struwwelpeter Alphabet. The Getty Research Institute has added a copy to the Internet Archive.

Swollen-Headed William: Painful Stories and Funny Pictures After the German. Numerous copies are on the Internet Archive.

Struwwelhitler: A Nazi Story Book is still in copyright and not in the public domain.

The Girl’s Own Book – Now Open Online

Posted on September 8, 2020 by Marianne Hansen

Screenshot of the online version the the exhibition, The Girl's Own Book The Girl’s Own Book is now open online at http://exhibitions.digital.brynmawr.edu/the-girls-own-book/index. We invite you to explore the digital exhibition.

The show will open in Canaday Library next Monday, September 14. It will be open Monday through Friday 10am – 4pm. Open to campus community members only through the Fall semester.

Life in London and A London Doll

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Marianne Hansen

The doll, burned beyond recognition, is carried in by a large and poorly behaved dog.

A low point in the life of the London doll.

The London doll whose story is recorded in this book comes to consciousness in the home of a skillful but poorly remunerated maker of joined wooden dolls, Mr. Sprat. He, his wife, and their three children live in a rented top floor room, “the workshop by day and the bed-room at night.” The work benches are along the side of the room with windows, the beds on the floor on the opposite wall. Mr. Sprat makes the wooden parts for the dolls. Mrs. Sprat paints the eyebrows and eyes or, in the case of more expensive dolls, inserts glass eyes. The two boys paint hair or attach wigs, and fit the arms and legs together with pegs, respectively. The little girl paints the blushing cheeks and sweet lips. This industrious family produces dolls in bulk, and one day Mrs. Sprat puts the heroine of this story in a basket with nine other dolls, each wrapped in silver paper and carries them to a doll shop in High Holborn.

Although the doll longs to be put in the front window, she is stored on a high shelf for some time – “it seemed like years to me” – in the back parlour where she has nothing to do but listen to the daughter of the owner read aloud popular children’s books. One day, though, a boy arrives, asking to trade a fruit cake made for the Twelfth Night celebrations for a doll for his sister. He and the doll shop owner exchange increasingly laudatory descriptions of the objects they are negotiating over; the owner claims the doll, “of a very superior make,” is worth twelve shillings, to which the boy responds that the going price for the cake in the shop of his grandfather, a pastry-cook, is fifteen shillings or more.

In the end, the boy gets the doll for his sister, Ellen, and they return to the pastry-cooks’ house, where the old man asks the child to put the doll away, because he needs her to join in the work for the holiday: “to sort small cakes, and mix sugar plums of different colours, and pile up sticks of barley sugar, and arrange artificial flowers, and stick bits of holly with red berries into cakes for the upper shelves of his shop window.” When Ellen finally brings her new toy down, the doll is astonished by what she drolly describes, in a foreshadowing of a recent catchphrase, as “the fine front shop with All the Cakes!” Overcome by the beauty of the decorations, she faints.

The doll is happy at the pastrycook’s, but her seven-year-old “mamma” is soon sent to live with her aunt, a dressmaker. Aunt Sharpshins employs fifteen apprentices, of whom the next youngest is ten. They work from six in the morning until eight at night, with a half hour lunch break, and are exhausted and poorly fed. Under this regime, Ellen becomes ill, and she and her friend Nanny take advantage of her two sick days to finally make clothing for the doll, now christened Maria Poppet.

Ellen and her friend, Nanny, sewing clothes for the doll

Ellen and Nanny make clothes for Maria Poppet.

The story is too long to recount event by event, but by now it must be clear that the author has little interest in the sort of minor domestic incident one expects in stories about dolls, and a great deal of interest in the economic and employment situations in which children in London were living. In fact, Richard Horne’s book was first published in in 1846, three years after he finished his work as a member of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Children’s Employment. The Commission interviewed children in factories, mines, and smaller industries and businesses, investigating their work conditions, their access to education, and their diet.The report was greeted by public outrage, and inspired poets and writers including Charles Dickens to write about children who were obliged to work to survive. Horne’s Memoirs of a London Doll reflects what he learned as a member of the Commission, and reshapes the Report of the Commission into a palatable message for young readers about the hardships endured by children less affluent and less fortunate than themselves.

Horne was a friend of Dickens, and was employed by him as a sub-editor at the weekly magazine Household Words. The two men were part of a network of journalists, scholars, and philanthropists interested in understanding and improving the lives of the poor. Among the most interesting of these, from the standpoint of this book, was Margaret Gillies, a professional painter working primarily in watercolors and miniatures, who illustrated the story. She and her sister, the author Mary Gillies, resided in London and by 1841, they had been joined by the physician and sanitary reformer Southwood Smith (who lived with Margaret for the rest of his life). Among his other work, Smith examined and reported on the lives of child workers in the mines – boys and girls, who often started before they were ten, and whose work included opening and closing ventilation doors, running errands, and dragging loads of coal through tunnels too small for ponies to work in. In 1842, Gillies illustrated Smith’s first report, on his inspections in Leicestershire and West Yorkshire.

Lady Flora set fire to her skirt while dancing with the doll

Lady Flora makes a serious mistake.

True to his interests, Horne led Maria Poppet through a rapid succession of adventures with “mammas” in different walks of life. After Ellen, she passes into the home of the spoiled and heedless Lady Flora, the daughter of a countess and a cabinet minister. Maria lives in luxury with a doll bed complete with mattress and her own dresser for an expanding wardrobe, enjoys shopping, goes to the zoo, and attends the Opera. A dangerous accident sends her to a different home.

She lives briefly with Mary Hope, staying with her aunt because her father, who is a clerk in a bank, has “seven other daughters, and a small salary.” Mary drops her accidentally from a coach while watching a Punch and Judy show, and the doll is inadvertently exchanged for Punch’s baby. The master of the show sells her to a street merchant who deals in used clothing. He sells her to a young Italian organ-grinder who scrapes a living for himself and his sister. The little girl plays with her as she would any doll, but business is business and the two performers also dress her in their (deceased) monkey’s clothing and prop her up on top of the barrel organ. After several additional changes in status and position, Maria Poppet finally ends up at the country manor of a wealthy family, where she believes she has come to rest. She tells us that she has made the acquaintance of another doll whose life story she has heard, and that she hopes “at a future time that these ‘Memoirs of a Country Doll’ will be made public as mine have been.”

The London doll and the country doll, seated togther while their owners play.

The London doll and the country doll exchange life stories

Horne never did write that sequel, and one doubts the ingenious journalist could have described the exhausting and grim lives of young rural workers and child miners in a sufficiently softened and light-hearted way for his juvenile audience. At the same time, it would have been a very interesting book. The Memoirs of a London Doll is quick-paced and full of fascinating detail. The reader who is not ready to plunge into the thousands of pages of Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (published in 1851 by another member of Dickens’ coterie) could start here to ease into the harsh realities of the mid-19^th-century metropolis .

Marianne Hansen, Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts

Horne, R. H. (Richard H.) and Margaret Gillies, illustrator. Memoirs of a London Doll, Written by Herself. London: Henry G. Bohn, York Street, Covent Garden, 1855

Read our copy on the Internet Archive.

With the continuing closure of the Library, we are blogging regularly about books from the exhibition, The Girl’s Own Book. Please follow us on Facebook or subscribe here for notices of new blog posts.

Useful Gossip – About Book Illustration

Posted on July 30, 2020 by Marianne Hansen

Text for Golden Eagle and Titmouse; image of owl

The text describing each image is printed on the back of the page, rather than the facing page, which is initially confusing. A scan of our copy is available on the Internet Archive – find the link at the bottom of the page.

Children’s books are often illustrated, and a number of technological advances in printing during the 18^th and 19^th centuries led to an outpouring of stylish, beautiful, and sometimes brightly colored publications. The earliest of these innovations was wood engraving. The inventor of the technique is unknown, but it was extensively developed by the artist and printer Thomas Bewick beginning in the 1760s. Bewick’s work established the medium, and his workshop produced dozens of prominent engravers who had begun with him as apprentices.

Wood engraving is a relief printing process: the ink is applied to those parts of the printing block which stick out – imagine a rubber stamp. (This contrasts with intaglio processes, where the ink is wiped into lines cut or etched into a plate, and must be lifted out by the paper, which is pressed very hard onto the plate and into the grooves.) Woodcuts, which were normally used for economical book illustration in Europe from the fifteenth century until wood engraving superseded them, are also relief prints. Both techniques use blocks that can be printed at the same time with movable type, set up in the same frames. This makes them easy, fast, and inexpensive to print and means that even ephemeral publications or books that must be printed very cheaply, like children’s books, can have a large number of illustrations. The blocks can be reused indefinitely, and may appear in more than one publication.

Text for Partridge and Sparrow Hawk; images for Bat and Beaver

The varying widths of parallel lines to create different tones is used effectively in the image of the beaver

Woodcuts differ from wood engravings in the direction the grain of the wood runs in the block. For woodcuts, the grain runs the length of the block. Wood engravings, in contrast, are made up of closely fitted cross sections of wood, with the grain running the short way, top to bottom. When a wood engraver cuts a block, they cut into the end grain, using v-shaped burins like those used to engrave metal. The result is that they can make very fine lines, producing detailed illustrations – more detailed than those produced by even very good woodcuts. The other benefit to wood engravings over woodcuts is that they are more rapidly cut. This made them the medium of choice for illustrating newspapers and other periodicals with timely content. Like woodcuts, the blocks are durable, and can be used to make thousands of impressions.

How do you know if you are looking at a wood engraving? If a black and white illustration appears on the same page as words printed from type (same color ink, impression visible on the back of the page, etc.) it is probably a relief print. Between about 1780 and 1840, the chances are good that a print of this sort was made from a wood engraving. (Wood engravings continued to be used into the twentieth century, with other print technologies joining them.) Because a burin removes material, the most important graphic elements are frequently light, rather than dark. The artist “thinks” in white line, rather than in black line. Closely parallel lines, both straight and curving, are characteristic of the technique, and are used to create light and dark areas, depending on the relative widths of the cut away and printed lines.

These illustrations come from Useful Gossip for the Young Scholar, or, Tell-Tale Pictures, a strangely various series of short paragraphs of information on birds, animals, plants, and natural phenomena (with additional entries on the auctioneer, plowing, charity, and Englishmen). Bewick is credited as the illustrator by later catalogers – not in the book itself – and many of the pictures are very closely related to works reliably identified as his. Other illustrations were at least based on his images, but they may have been produced by his stable of apprentices or even copied by another wood engraver. The author, Mary Elliott, wrote moral juvenile works to supplement her family’s income and was published by Darton for decades. One gets the general sense that she was asked to produce text to match a collection of likely blocks in the possession of the publisher – an idea we might pursue another day. The text is broken up into single syllables, as an aid to young readers.

Text fo Cameleopard (giraffe) and Butterflyand Fruit; images for OurangOutang and Tobacco Plant

In the smaller leaf, the black lines convey shape in the “shadowed” half, and white lines delineate features on the “lighted” side.

Some of the “useful gossip” is factual and some moralistic. The Roller, for example “is of the mag-pie tribe, but we hope he does not chat-ter so much. Many words are not proofs of sense; but we may laugh at a bird’s non-sense, though we ex-pect more wis-dom from cle-ver chil-dren, such as my young read-ers.” And we learn of the tobacco plant that it is employed medicinally, for chewing, and as snuff, but “since we do not mean to smoke to-bac-co, it is of no use to us.” The book is worth reading, at least as a snapshot from 1822 of suitable instruction for the very young.

Marianne Hansen, Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts

Elliott, Mary. Useful Gossip for the Young Scholar, or, Tell-Tale Pictures. London: William Darton, 58, Holborn Hill, 1822

Read our copy on the Internet Archive.

Nice Little Games for Nice Little Girls

Posted on July 17, 2020 by Marianne Hansen

Nice Little Games for Nice Little Girls was one of several volumes of amusements issued by Dean & Sons in the 1850s and 60s. Other books in the Mamma and Papa Lovechild series included Nice Little Games for Nice Little Boys, Picture Book of Games and Pastimes (for older children), and The Pleasing Book of Boy’s Sports. Dean offered many books in series, often named after a “relative” – Sister Lady-Bird, Brother Sunshine, and so on. Our book’s full title begins Cousin Lively’s Picture Book of Nice Little… These rather similar books are differentiated by the gender and age of their prospective audiences. Our book is distinctly meant for girls, and it provides a number of clues for the modern reader about what that meant to the anonymous compiler.

The amusements are meant for very young girls – small enough for the warning that the swing should be tied to two trees, which limits the length of the arc the swing can move through. This age range is confirmed by the book for “little boys,” where the children are shown in skirts, rather than trousers, identifying them as too young to go to school – at most five or, just possibly, six.

The board games are also chosen for children who probably still need someone to read the book to them. Nine-men’s morris is offered as comprehensible by girls who are able to play tic-tac-toe (around four years old) And the variant of Fox and Geese adds additional geese to the traditional thirteen to make the sides more even.

There are many active, primarily outdoor, activities, some competitive, some requiring cooperation. The warning against overexertion while skipping rope reflects ideas about gender and physical activity. But many active games are included, in spite of reservations, and skipping is described as “a healthy and graceful exercise,” revealing more interest in fitness than one might predict of a Victorian writer. The companion book, “Games and Pastimes” includes archery, hopscotch, badminton, a game related to cricket, and other athletic activities as suitable for girls as well.

An important difference between this and its “brother” book is that many of the boys’ games include striking one another or contain other aggressive components; the girls play together without much conflict. The author has to add rules to some of the pleasurable activities suggested to make them “games.” As revealed by “Cup and Ball,” a game has at least two players, a competition, and a winner – or more commonly, a loser.

Fortunately, disappointment or triumph is often fleeting: the rounds in many of the games are short, and the loser in any round simply takes over the special role, for example, as the frog in “Frog in the Middle.”

Games which depend on quick thinking are more likely to have multiple losers, and the forfeits we discussed when we looked at the Wide-Mouthed Waddling Frog come into play again. “Thus Says the Grand Mufti” is like Simon Says, with the players obliged to distinguish between “Thus says…” and “So says…” (A mufti is an Islamic jurist, and at the time the book was published “Grand Mufti” referred to the chief mufti of the Ottoman empire, made topical in Great Britain by the Crimean War of 1853-56.)

Quicker and easier than forfeits, and one suspects more likely to promote general hilarity, is the “punishment” of adding a paper horn to one’s coiffure after making an error in reciting an increasingly complex series of silly sentences. “The Genteel Lady” is the last game in the book, and in many ways its highlight, with two illustrations (hand-colored wood engravings) and a long set of instructions.

It’s easy to imagine that this book, like most of Dean & Sons’ carefully considered and promoted offerings, was successful. It was attractive and included fifteen games, with a mix of active and intellectual pursuits, indoor and outdoor amusements, and games that could be played instantly as well as some that required equipment or preparation – and all for sixpence (less than $5 today).

– Marianne Hansen, Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts

Cousin Lively’s Picture Book of Nice Little Games for Nice Little Girls. London: Dean & Son. 1859

Our copy of the book can be read on the Internet Archive.

With the continuing closure of the Library, we are blogging regularly about books from the exhibition, The Girl’s Own Book. The exhibition’s run has been extended through the 2020-2021 academic year. Information about when it will open to visitors and related programming will be available when we are able to give it. Please follow us on Facebook or subscribe here for notices of new blog posts.

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