Category Archives: Cotsen Curatorial

The Clinking, Clanking Sound of Money in 18th-century Children’s Books

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If you had been brought up in one of the rising European capitalist economies of the 1700s, how would you have been introduced to the concept of money? There is plenty of material trying to shape values about the all-important ideas of getting and spending, but few have been interested in looking for it.  One of the most famous examples, John Newbery’s so-called coach-and-six morality—learn your book, make a fortune trading honestly, and ride in style a gentleman retired from business–has disgusted people with its overt materialism.

That aspirational journey is short on particulars, but it’s a challenge to try and fill in some of the blanks. To make a purchase of sweets or toys, you must know the  denominations of coins and their values.   Recently I bought a 1755 Dutch primer, Nieuwlyks Uitgevonder A. B. C. Boek, because it includes plates of copper, silver, and gold currency in use there.  The antiquarian bookseller remarked that he’d never seen anything like that in a children’s book. The compiler Kornelius de Wit must have considered the ability to identify Dutch coinage as something necessary to be known as with different scripts, and the names of ordinary objects.I’ve not seen anything  comparable in English during the same time period, but that doesn’t mean that filthy lucre is invisible.  What does come to mind are pence tables in verse teaching currency conversion, which don’t illustrate the coins with which the children in the illustrations purchase commodities…

Illustrations of coins do exist in later 18th-century English juveniles  published by the Newberys and they are interesting because they reflect overlapping ideas about the idea of wealth.  Some, like this one of a miser, caution against the too strong a love of money.  He lays up a hoard of money, but being unable to part with it fails to use his riches to benefit the less fortunate or the economy.People receiving windfalls of cash are depicted in two other illustrations I’ve found.  The frontispiece of Richard Johnson’s The Foundling; or The History of Lucius Stanhope (1787) shows Fortune scattering a shower of money down on the heads of the people around her.  Down on the ground is  a fool in a cap with bells on his knees trying to scoop up whatever he can.  It’s very much in the story’s spirit, which shows an heir to a fortune squandering it, s sharp contrast to his adopted brother of low birth, who makes a fortune and preserves it.

The other is difficult to interpret without  having read “A remarkable Story of a Father’s Extraordinary Care and Contrivance to reclaim an extravagant Son” reprinted in A Pretty Book for Children  from the 1701 5th edition of Giovanni Paolo Marana’s runaway best-seller, Letters from a Turkish Spy.    A young man has run through all of his estate except for the ancestral home, which his father urged him to preserve in the family.    The desparate son goes to the room where his father died to hang himself.  He runs the rope through an iron ring in the ceiling and when he jumps, the weight of his body pulls open a trapdoor, out of which spills a shower of gold which his father hid there to save him from himself.  Grateful for his father’s foresight (and knowledge into his character), he reforms and buys back the estate he lost.

Notice how the coins here and in the block of the miser are drawn with crosses across their faces.  I assumed it was a widespread representational convention, but I showed them to Alan Stahl, our curator of numismatics, he said he hadn’t seen anything like this before.

In the coming weeks, look for a post on supply chains in children’s books…

 

 

A Woman’s Work at Her Needle Is Never Done

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“Work” with respect to girls and women used to be synonymous with “needlework.”  Not just the stitching of samplers, but “plain sewing,” the making of shifts and shirts, aprons and babies’ caps for members of the family.   Those tasks were not relegated to the servants: princesses and queens were supposed to cheerfully perform  this necessary work as well.  Virtuous female characters from the Bible and classical literature were cited as examples.  It was said the daughters of Queen Charlotte were expert at tapestry work and fine embroidery of all kinds.

But times were changing according to the anonymous author of The Little Needle Woman: Or the Pleasures of Work.  Published with the Approbation of The Princess Royal of Lilliput, for the Entertainment of the Ladies of Great-Britain and Ireland  (Gainsborough: H. Mozley, 1792).  He or she exclaimed:

Needle—work, the cares of domestic affairs, a serious and retired life, is the proper function of women; and for this they were designed by Providence.  The depravity of the age has indeed affixed to these customs which are  very near as old as the creation, an idea of meanness and contempt; but then what has it substituted in the room of them?  A soft indolence, a stupid idleness, frivolous conversation, vain amusements, a strong passion for public shews, and a frantic love of gambling.

If dexterity with the needle was as important as claimed above, then surely this little pamphlet has illustrations of obedient little girls hard at work.  Just one–the frontispiece shows a girl sewing while she watches the baby in the cradle.  But there is also a picture of a girl practicing the piano while her mama watches, which directly contradicts the rant in the introduction.…To be honest, there are more illustrations in 18th-century children’s books of boys mistreating animals in than of girls sewing.  Only one I’ve found in the collection so far is The Brother’s Gift, which was first published by Francis Newbery in 1770.  The story is straightforward enough.  Kitty Bland returns home from boarding school “perfectly spoiled,” having picked up affected manners.  Like most boarding school misses, she can’t spell correctly, write neatly, read aloud nicely, or, most important of all, sew carefully.  In spite of all this her older brother Billy loves her too much to let this continue  and explains kindly why it is to her advantage to learn all these things—and stop spending so much time staring at herself in the mirror.  Here she is hard at work.And here is her thimble.

If Kitty applies herself, she might one day produce a map sampler like this one in the Victoria and Albert Museum.Or aspire to needle paintings  in worsted like Mary Linwood, who exhibited her full-size copies of old masters in a  gallery on Leicester Square in London for decades.  Here is one after the famous animal painter, George Stubbs.