Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song-book

Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-Book

TOM M Y THUM B’S P

R

E

T

T

Y

S ONG-B OOK The First Collection of English Nursery Rhymes A Facsimile Edition with a History and Annotations

by Andrea Immel & Brian Alderson

Los Angeles | Cotsen Occasional Press | 2012

Š Cotsen Family Foundation, 2012 isbn 978-0-615-67876-4 By agreement, Andrea Immel and Brian Alderson retain the right to reuse any of this material for scholarly purposes, including scholarly publications, citing Cotsen Family Foundation as copyright holder.

Printed in China

To the great folklorists and nursery rhyme scholars Iona Opie and her late husband Peter

Table of Contents List of Illustrations viii Preface and Acknowledgments

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Nurse Lovechild’s Legacy: The History of

Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-Book

1

Part I: The Publishing History

Engaging the Pretty Little Reader

3

Putting on a Good Show

13

“All the other Little Books”

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Part II: The Contents

Reconstructing Volume I

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“Silly tales, and foolish songs, the conundrums of nurses”

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Coda 65 Annotations to the Rhymes

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General Index 113 Index of Nursery Rhymes 118

List of Illustrations All reproductions from the Cotsen Children’s Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library unless otherwise noted.

Figure 7 Etched self-portrait of George Bickham Junior. Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum. p. 18

Title vignette: Detail of frolicking boys on p. 63 of Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-Book, vol. II (1744). p. iii

Figure 8 “The Negotiators” (1741).

Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. p. 20

Dedication vignette: Detail of children at desk on p. 4 of Tom Thumb’s Pretty PictureBook (ca. 1750). p. v

Figure 9 Frontispiece, The Young Clerk’s Assistant (ca. 1737). p. 22 Figure 10 Plate showing punches for stamping letters into copper plates, Diderot’s Encyclopédie. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. p. 24

Figure 1 “Alphabetum vivum et vocale,” Johann Amos Comenius, Orbis sensualium pictus (1672). p. 4 Figure 2 “Merry Riddles” and “Invitation,” William Ronksley, The Child’s Week’s-Work (ca. 1712?). p. 7

Figure 11 Plate showing punches used in music and map printing, Diderot’s Encyclopédie. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. p. 25

Figure 3 Subscribers’ list for the letters D-G, Thomas Boreman, The Gigantick History of the Two Famous Giants and other Curiosities of the Guildhall, second ed.

(1740). p. 10

Figure 12 Plate 211, The Universal Penman. p. 26

Figure 4 Frontispiece portrait and dedication, The Child’s New Play-Thing, third ed. (1745.) p. 12

Figure 13 Pages 26 and 57, Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-Book, vol. II. p. 28 Figure 14 Title page and frontispiece, Tommy Thumb’s Message Cards (1746).

Elisabeth Ball Collection, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington. p. 33

Figure 5 Final advertisement, Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-Book, vol. II. p. 15 Figure 6 Detail of May’s Buildings, John Rocque’s Exact Survey of the Citys of London and Westminster (1746). Courtesy of the Beinecke Library, Yale University. p. 17

Figure 15 Final advertisement, Tommy Thumb’s Message Cards (1746). Elisabeth Ball Collection, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington. p. 34

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Figure 16 A rhyming alphabet, Tom Thumb’s Pretty Picture-Book (ca. 1750). p. 36

Figure 26 Tommy Thumb and Nurse Lovechild, Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-Book, vol. II. p. 59

Figure 17 The boy who would not say great A, Tom Thumb’s Pretty Picture-Book (ca. 1750). p. 37

Figure 27 Tom Thumb and his family, Tom Thumb’s Folio (1768). p. 59

Figure 18 Robert Dodsley’s receipt for the printing and paper costs for the second edition of Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-Book.

British Library, Ms. Egerton MS.738, f.

8. p. 38

Figure 28 Plate 96 “On loosing their Toast and Butter,” The Musical Entertainer (1738). Beinecke Library, Yale University Library. p. 61

Figure 19 Title page and frontispiece, Nurse Truelove’s Christmas-Box (1750, Carnan edition of 1788). p. 39

Figure 29 Puff, Henry Carey, The Dragon of Wantley, tenth ed. (1738). Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. p. 62

Figure 20 Dedication leaf, The Travels of Tom Thumb over England and Wales (1746). p. 41

Figure 30 Frontispiece and p. 36, Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-Book, vol. II. p. 63

Figure 21 Title page and frontispiece, Tom Thumb’s Play-Book (1755). p. 42

Figure 31 Advertisement, The History of the good Lady Kindheart (ca. 1778?). p. 68

Figure 22 Jack Nory and Tommy Thumb, The Top Book of All (ca. 1760). British Library. General Reference Collection Ch.760/5.1. p. 43

Figure 32 Title page, Tom Thumb’s PlayThing, part II (ca. 1800). Collection of Brian Alderson. p. 69 Figure 33 “Brow Bender,” Tommy Thumb’s Song-book (1815). p. 70

Figure 23 The New Foundling Hospital for Wit, number IV. British Library, shelf mark 1487.ff.24. p. 45

Figure 34 Frontispiece, Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-Book, vol. II. p. 82

Figure 24 Riddle XVI and its answer, The Child’s New-Year’s-Gift (ca. 1750). p. 53

Figure 35 “La musique” by Hubert Gravelot. p. 83.

Figure 25 William Hogarth’s frontispiece design for Henry Fielding’s The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731). Robert H. Taylor Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. p. 58

Figure 36 “The Old Woman,” Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-Book, vol. II. p. 86

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Figure 37 Detail of the old woman leaning on a fence from plate 129 “Shropshire,” George Bickham Senior, The British Monarchy (1743). Beinecke Library, Yale University. p. 87

Figure 42 “Hey ho! Who’s above?,” Charles Coffey, The Boarding School (1730).

Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. p. 101

Figure 38 “The Mouse ran up ye Clock,” Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-Book, vol. II. p. 89

Figure 43 “There was a Mad Man,” Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-Book, vol. II. p. 104

Figure 39 Thomas Bewick’s design for “Hickere, dickory dock,” Mother Goose’s Melody (1784). p. 89

Figure 44 Tailpiece to plate 180, “The American Colonies,” George Bickham Senior, The British Monarchy (1743).

Beinecke Library, Yale University. p. 105

Figure 40 Tailpiece for “An Old Woman sold Puddings,” Tommy Thumb’s Pretty SongBook, vol. II. p. 90

Figure 45 Folding frontispiece, William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty (1751). p. 109

Figure 41 Headpiece from plate 146 “Yorkshire,” George Bickham Senior, The British Monarchy (1743). Beinecke Library, Yale University. p. 91

Tailpiece: Detail of quacking duck on p. 11 of Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-Book, vol. II. p. 112

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Preface and Acknowledgments

On 5 June 1862 the British Museum Library accessioned some 166 books just purchased from the bookseller Henry Stevens. Among them, priced at a guinea (one pound and one shilling sterling) and boldly assigned to the year 1775, was the second volume of Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-Book. No fanfare attended the accession, or its stamping on 8 December 1863, for the Library had an aversion to broken sets and no copy of Volume I was forthcoming. Nevertheless, they may have realized that this dusty and insignificant volume had vibrancy beyond its mean appearance for it was part of the first, and hitherto unknown, collection of English nursery rhymes. The genre had acquired that designation earlier in the century and by 1863 had already attracted scholarly attention through the labors of the young James Orchard Halliwell (1820– 1879) who had published the first edition of his Nursery Rhymes of England through the Percy Society in 1842 — a collection quickly seized upon for commercial exploitation, especially after being augmented in 1853 by Halliwell’s Popular Rhymes and Fairy Tales.

Despite this, the Library’s curators would have had no sure way of checking the rarity of their acquisition, and for well over a hundred years it proved to be a unique copy, whose companion volume has never yet been discovered. On December 12, 2001, however a second example of a lonely Volume II came up for sale in Bonham’s auction rooms in London, a copy in slightly superior condition, but lacking one leaf (perhaps removed by a sensitive owner on account of its containing scurrilous verses). This was bought by Lloyd Cotsen to become one of the gems of the Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton University and, through the generosity of the Cotsen Occasional Press, is here being made more widely available as a facsimile edition. As an all-engraved book, Tommy Thumb fell outside the scope of the Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue and was thus neither microfilmed nor digitized for Eighteenth Century Collections Online. A monochrome facsimile was produced for a private society in Japan in 2007 but neither this nor the abbreviated treatment of the text with the illustrations uncredited in William S. and Ceil Baring-Gould’s Annotated Mother Goose (1962) are adequate for a full

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representation of the volume. Thus our Cotsen Occasional Press facsimile edition not only offers this historic text a wider audience but will also relieve from the surviving originals the pressure of too frequent consultation.

In preparing the commentary on the Cotsen facsimile (whose missing leaf has been kindly supplied by the British Library) the present editors have sought to shed new light on the obscure history of this little book which has rarely been closely examined in the context of its time, either as product of the evolving market for children’s books or as a reflection of contemporary literary trends. We of course owe an immense debt to Iona and Peter Opie whose Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes of 1951 (since 1997 in a new edition) revealed Tommy Thumb’s central place in the nursery-rhyme tradition and showed the relationship of its contents to the collections that followed it, but we have been fortunate enough to be able to have called upon electronic resources — principally the digitized version of the peerless Burney collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British newspapers — to gain a clearer picture of the London book trade’s output of children’s books in the middle of the eighteenth century. Likewise the discovery of other virtually unknown “little books” — as they were described in contemporary advertisements — have justified our request (happily accepted) to the Cotsen Occasional Press to accompany Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-Book with facsimiles of two other volumes, without which our speculative reconstruction of the contents of the lost volume I could not have been attempted.

We acknowledge with gratitude the willingness of the Toronto Public Library and the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts, to allow us to reproduce their copies of George Bickham’s Pretty-Book and of Tommy Thumb’s Song-Book. Special thanks to Leslie McGrath, Head of the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books, Toronto Public Library and Laura Wasowicz, Curator of Children’s Literature, at the Society, for extending their kind and enthusiastic support for this project. The accompanying volume of commentary and notes with its numerous illustrations required a great deal of correspondence with photoduplication departments in American and British institutions and our requests for reproductions were invariably received with courtesy and dispatched with efficiency. Our sincere

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thanks to: Jaclyn Penny, Rights and Reproductions Coordinator at the American Antiquarian Society; Chris Edwards, Karen Nangle, and Anne Marie Menta at the Beinecke Library, Yale University; the staff of Imaging Services at the British Library; Zoe Stansell in the Manuscripts Division of the British Library; Chris Sutherns at British Museum Images; Susan Walker at the Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, Connecticut; Zach Downey at the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington; AnnaLee Pauls, Photoduplications Coordinator, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library; Christopher Coutlee, Preservation and Digitization Department, Toronto Reference Library. David Hardacre, Lizette Leclerc, and Lyn Tansey at the Cotsen Family Foundation and Wanda LaRose, Richmond, North Yorkshire have provided invaluable assistance every step of the way. Thanks to Ivy Trent, long-time private librarian of Mr. Cotsen for her collegiality, sense of humor, and excellent advice, based on experience in seeing far more complicated Cotsen Occasional Press projects through the press.

John Bidwell, William McCarthy and Jill Shefrin read drafts of the introduction and their comments were invaluable in shaping the final version of “Nurse Lovechild’s Legacy.” It was a privilege to work again with a dream production team: photographer John Blazejewski, Index of Christian Art, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, a veteran of many Cotsen publication projects who always cheerfully accommodates those eleventh-hour requests; Patrick Reagh, an old friend with whom Andrea has been waiting for years to do a book; and Patty Holden, who made the complicated process of page layout and illustration placement a breeze. Special thanks to James E. Tierney, Professor Emeritus, Department of English, University of Missouri, St. Louis, who told Andrea back in the 1990s about a Robert Dodsley receipt for the printing costs of the second edition of Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-Book and to Karen Limper-Herz of the British Library, who revealed to Brian how the British Museum came by its copy of volume II in 1863. And last but not least, thanks to Lloyd Cotsen, collector extraordinaire of eighteenth-century children’s books, who fortuitously assembled so many books that helped solve the puzzle.

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Nurse Lovechild’s Legacy: The History of Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-Book Little Tommy Thumb With his little Pipe and Drum Is come to give you a Dance.

T

om Thumb was a name to conjure with in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The earliest record of his antics is found in the forty pages of The History of Tom Thumbe the Little, probably recounted by one Richard Johnson and published in London by Thomas Langley in 1621. Iona and Peter Opie printed that text in The Classic Fairy Tales (1974), and, as they pointed out in their preface, it was almost certainly not the first, there being mentions of him as early as the sixteenth century. By 1630, Johnson’s prose version had been joined by a metrical rendering, Tom Thumbe, His Life and Death, and with the coming of the eighteenth-century “chapbook” printings in London, Scotland, and the English provinces would become legion.

Spinning away from the story itself, almost by centrifugal force, promiscuous references to the little man attest how widely his history had penetrated not just the storyteller’s repertoire but also the vocabulary of social discourse.

It has been suggested that the chapbook tale was a very late addition to the Arthurian romance cycle.1 Tom Thumb’s name turned up in polemic divinity, in essays about university life, and in satires about the ancients and moderns.

He even strode across the stage in one of the century’s most popular afterpieces, The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731) by Henry Fielding. No one would have needed a gloss on Samuel Johnson’s reprobation of “historic talk” when he remarked: “I withdrew my attention and thought about Tom Thumb.”2 Through all this scatter of allusions, however, Tom Thumb is rarely mentioned as a story exclusively for children. “Old and young” are listed by Richard Johnson as being among the suitable audiences for such “ancient tales in the olde time,” but the young are counted among “Batchelors and Maides” and the “old Shepheard and the young Plow boy.” 3 The failure to

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target them as the chief audience for whatever versions there were on the market at that early date must surely be due to the lack of any sustained commercial or critical attention to children as a distinct category of readers.

Regular fulminations were leveled at the corrupting influence of “fayned fables, vayne fantasyes, and wanton stories,”4 among which Tom Thumb figured, but that broad category of pièces condamnées did not inspire the creation of an alternative body of work that provided children with a more acceptable range of literary entertainment.

The discovery that such books could be composed — and profitably so — came very suddenly at the start of the 1740s, when children’s book publishing irrupted on the scene almost as if by spontaneous combustion. Energetic experimentation took place within just a few years, and surely the most remarkable instance of the ensuing innovation was not just the startling admission of vernacular nursery rhymes into the juvenile library but a publisher’s decision to assign Tommy Thumb to be their editor. The two volumes of his Pretty Song-Book, arriving serially at the beginning of 1744, had a success that endorsed the commercial acuity of the project. At the same time, at what looks like a formal establishment of children’s books as a publishing genre, the Pretty Song-Book brought into an incipient literary canon what has continued to be one of its most resonant and universally approved elements.

As noted in the preface, this commentary on a facsimile of the Cotsen Children’s Library’s copy of volume II of the Pretty Song-Book seeks for the first time to pursue the book’s chequered history through eighteenth-century trade channels. The story involves a motley cast of characters, most of whom have not been identified previously as among the pioneers of children’s book publishing. Contemporary newspaper advertisements offer hitherto unsuspected evidence of the excitement stirred by Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-Book among competing London booksellers. Furthermore, by examining associated children’s books of the period and by including two in facsimile to accompany the Pretty Song-Book, we have attempted a speculative reconstruction of its lost first volume. Its conjectural form suggests that it was very likely conceived as a kind of pre-school reader, a groundbreaking work whose contents, presentation, production, and promotion fulfilled that longstanding aim of children’s book publishers: the wedding of instruction to delight.

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I. The Publishing History Engaging the Pretty Little Reader: “Amusements Given Them in Their Own Way” The full impact of Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-Book as a revolutionary venture can best be conveyed by briefly traversing the seventy years of children’s book publishing before its arrival in 1744 and noting some pioneering attempts to make books more engaging to children. In the seventeenth century, the most lucrative categories of children’s books for London printers were Latin grammars and vocabularies, as they had been since the fifteenth century, when Wynkyn de Worde issued dozens of editions of such works by William Lily, John Stanbridge, and Robert Wittinton.5 With the coming of copyright protection in the form of patents, those for grammars, primers, and the singlesheet alphabets inserted in hornbooks were among the most profitable, and hence sought-after, in the book trade. Such educational works made little effort to entertain their readers, although by the latter half of the seventeenth century a more liberal attitude is discernible in their editing, such as the addition of English explanations to Lily’s long-selling Grammar to make it easier to use in the classroom.6 A quite exceptional portent of better things to come can be seen in that ingenious pictorial vocabulary-cum-encyclopedia, the Orbis sensualium pictus by the liberal Moravian educationist Johann Amos Comenius, whose English edition of 1659 appeared only a year after the book’s first publication in Nuremberg. For the benefit of beginning readers, it opens with a “lively and vocal” alliterative Latin-English alphabet of animal noises, where the dog “Canus ringitur err R,” the mouse “Mus mintrit i i i,” and the chicken “Pullus pipit pi pi” (fig. 1).7 Beyond the classroom there was gathering momentum for addressing the young in a more indulgent way, often in vernacular works by dissenters (chiefly Baptists) that aimed to bring home to them truths about the precarious state of their immortal souls.8 The warnings of hellfire were couched in a new voice, most notably in James Janeway’s Token for Children (1671–1672). Instead of thunderously exhorting his little readers to reform, Janeway promised in

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Figure 1 A playful, noisy exercise in learning the letters. “Alphabetum vivum et vocale” from Johann Amos Comenius, Orbis sensualium pictus (1672). 16.5 x 9.5 cm.

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a conversational, affectionate tone to tell them stories about actual children: “You may now hear, my dear lambs, what other good children have done, and remember how they wept and prayed by themselves…shall I make for you a book?”9 Likewise, John Bunyan willingly plays the “dottril” or “baby” to capture his readers’ attention in A Book for Boys and Girls (1686). Here he spins out verse applications from familiar things — ants, tops, lanterns, frogs, cackling hens, and penny loaves — “to mount their thoughts from what are childish Toys, / to Heav’n.”10 He even occasionally falls into the singsong rhythms of the nursery rhyme: “What hast thou there, my pretty boy? / Plumbs? How? Yes, Sir, a Paper full.”11 The original editions of A Token for Children and A Book for Boys and Girls had no pictures, but increasingly booksellers tried to make the contents of books more delightful and concrete through illustration, as John Locke had recommended in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693). In 1703 Locke edited a bilingual interlineal edition of Aesop’s fables in which all the animal actors appeared in the plates, almost as if to rebuke Sir Roger L’Estrange for producing a mighty quarto in 1698 that retold the brief narratives with a racy sense of story but with lengthy “Reflections” and no pictures. In 1722 Samuel Croxall’s 12mo Aesop began finding its way into schoolboys’ satchels (as it would for over a century), no doubt best tolerated for the spirited soft-metal engravings of Elisha Kirkall, which bore out the truth of Locke’s suggestion that the pictures accounted for much of the fables’ attraction to children.

Decking out a volume of fables, an approved genre for children because their origins lay in classical antiquity, would raise no eyebrows, but charging money for imaginative literature that came from the oral vernacular in the servants’ quarters was a different matter. A case in point is the Contes de ma Mère l’Oye (1697), Charles Perrault’s urbane, moralized retellings of the French fireside stories called the tales of Mother Goose in English and now central to the children’s literature canon. Whether fairy tales could be considered literature, being stories told by illiterate people that were not initially written down, was a legitimate bone of contention during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Yet Perrault’s tales eventually found their way to England. Robert Samber’s translation with illustrations copied after the headpieces in the Paris edition appeared in 1729 — a sure sign, however

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