Moral Stories for Children

' A State is civilised in proportion to the number of its members, who have a lively sense of moral obligation... Where such a spirit does not prevail, the most flourishing condition of commerce and manufactures will be found an empty boat....'

(Thomas Beddowes, The History of Isaac Jenkins, preface to the 5th edition, Bristol, 1793)
Most of the source books for this post are now available on the internet, and it is well worth reading some of them.

Her Benny, A tale of Liverpool life.  1890
(Google eds. New York Public Library)

The growing concern of the British public about the living conditions of the poor, and particularly their children, was expressed in poetry and fiction, and quickly became a major theme of British children's books.  Their popularity is a sign of a developing social conscience in the Victorian period.  

In the 18th and the first half of the 19th centuries most children's stories were written to serve a moral purpose by people who were working with the poor.  They saw it as very important to train children to be charitable.  There were very many stories written about the pleasures of giving, and relieving the wants of the needy, rather than selfishly spending pocket money on oneself.  Children were encouraged both by stories and in real life to visit the sick, to provide not only money but also to make and give woolly scarves, baby clothes, plain sewn shirts and warm shawls to the less well off.  There was very little state help for the poor and charity was extremely important.

Since many of these stories were written by people involved in religious movements there is generally a lot about conversion and the power of prayer in them.  Frequently the hero or heroine is exposed to, and resists, terrible temptation to steal or lie, cardinal sins for Victorian children.  Benny, saved from sin by his sister Nelly, prays for forgiveness at her urging: 'If you plaise, Mr. God, I's very sorry I tried to steal but if you'll be a trump an' not split on a poor little chap, I'll be mighty 'bliged to yer.  an' I promise 'e I won't do nowt o'the sort agin. (Silas Hocking, Her Benny, 1879)

Froggy, the crossing sweeper, when offered stolen money cries defiantly: "Take your two bob back again I say.  I'd rather starve than steal...'('Brenda, Georgina Castle Smith, Froggy's Little Brother, 1875) The same innate honesty is apparent in Oliver Twist, an outstanding example of the Victorian belief that gentle birth somehow genetically transmitted such gentlemanly  characteristics as honest, politeness and meekness combined with the ability to stand up fearlessly for the right.  The appealing Oliver probably did as much as a whole series of Parliamentary Reports to arouse public concern for children in the parish workhouses, and for those neglected outcasts begging on the streets whom Fagin and people like him used and corrupted.  The subtle irony of Dickens' description of Oliver's appearance before the Board of Guardians compresses into a few sentences the world of difference between observance of the spirit and the letter of the Acts for the training of pauper children:
  '"Well! you have come here to be educated and taught a useful trade", said the red-faced gentleman in the high chair.
   "So you'll begin to pick oakum to-morrow morning at six o'clock" added the surly one in the white waistcoat.'  (Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, 1838)

Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, 1838
(Wikipedia)

It is easy to deride these moral stories and to forget that when there was only very basic state provision for the poor the encouragement of private charity was absolutely essential.  Children's books, rather than adult fiction, pioneered social realism in the portrayal of the conditions of the poor long before the great adult social novels of the 1840s and 1850s.

The History of Isaac Jenkins, by Thomas Beddoes, physician and close friend of the poet Coleridge, was published in 1793.  It describes the great harvest failure of that period and the effect on one poor family.  Here is part of the description of the sufferings of that winter: 

   'What was to become of the poor, now their little store was all eaten and gone?...It was bad already with them and a worse look-out...God be thanked; there are kind charitable folks in the world, or else many an honest poor creature would have perished for want that winter!...Notwithstanding there came great sickness over all the country, and numbers were swept away by the spotted fever, especially among the poor.  It went worst with the little children, for they died, generally one, sometimes two or more, where there were six or seven in a family.  And nothing was to be heard in the dark of the evening, but the church bells tolling for funerals...' (Thomas Beddoes The History of Isaac Jenkins, London, 1793)

Nonconformist Christian groups were particularly active producing moral stories which described the conditions of the poor.  Many of the writers were actively involved in working with the poor, in Sunday schools and ragged schools and various charities.  The moral stories and religious tracts were published by organisations such as the Society for the Promoting of Christian Knowledge and the Religious Tract Society.  It is hard to tell how much influence they had on the children who read them but many autobiographies mention famous titles such as the best-selling Jessica's First Prayer by Hesba Stretton, 1866:

Hesba Stretton (Sarah Smith) Jessica's First Prayer 1882 ed.
(Archive.Org. University of Connecticut)Just one of many editions

'A thin and meagre face belonged to the eyes, which was half hidden by a mass of matted hair hanging over the forehead, and down the neck; the only covering which the head or neck had, for a tattered frock, scarcely fastened together with broken strings, was slipping down over the shivering shoulders of the little girl.  Stooping down to a basket behind his stall, he caught sight of two bare little feet curling up from the damp pavement, as the child lifted up first one then the other, and laid them one over another to gain a momentary feeling of warmth.  Whoever the wretched child was, she did not speak; only at every steaming cupful which he poured out of his can, her dark eyes gleamed hungrily, and he could hear her smack her thin lips, as if in fancy she was tasting the warm and fragrant coffee.'  Jessica the little beggar girl is reclaimed for God by the local chapel, taught to read and keep herself neat and clean, and eventually adopted by the coffee stall owner.

Children were taught to differentiate between the deserving and undeserving poor, between those who kept their children clean and their houses neat as a new pin, whatever the weather, and whether or not hot water was easily available, and those sluts whose houses and children were filthy and whose husbands, if they had them, spent their money at the ale-house or on gin.

The feminist campaigner Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, also wrote the story of Caroline who has been allowed, as a moral lesson, to spend all her pocket money on finery so that she has none left to help the poor family her guardian confronts her with.  Mrs. Mason, having looked about for a suitable object of charity has found one: 'They ascended the dark stairs, scarcely able to bear the bad smells that flew from every part of a small house, that contained in each room a family, occupied in such an anxious manner to obtain the necessaries of life, that its comfort never engaged their thoughts.  The precarious meal was snatched, and the stomach did not turn, though the cloth on which it was laid was dyed in dirt.  When tomorrow's bread is uncertain, who thinks of cleanliness?  Thus does despair increase the misery, and consequent disease aggravates the horrors of poverty.'

(Mary Wollstonecraft, Original stories from real life, 1788)

Original drawing by William Blake for the 1791 edition, (Library of Congress)

Children's writers were fond of reminding their readers of the contrast between their comfortable lives and those of poor children, to encourage charity.  The Little Beggar Girl by one of the Taylor sisters is just one of an enormous number of similar poems included in children's anthologies:

'There's a poor beggar going by,

I see her looking in,

She's just about as big as I,

Only so very thin.

She has no shoes upon her feet,

She is so very poor

And hardly anything to eat,

I pity her, I'm sure.

But I have got nice clothes, you know,

And meat, and bread, and fire,

And you, mamma, that love me so,

And all that I desire

.....

Here, little girl, come back again

And hold your ragged had,

For I will put a penny in,

So buy some bread with that.'

 (Jane and Anne Taylor, Select rhymes for the nursery, 1807)

 After the revelations of the series of 19th century Parliamentary Reports on labour conditions, the hardships of poverty were often exaggerated by being described with unrelieved grimness for dramatic effect, while the poor, as fictional characters, were often sentimentalised.  Writers of fiction both for children and adults found in the sufferings of the poor a theme which moved their readers.  The working children of the poor excited particular concern partly because compassion of the weak and helpless was a quality which Victorian society admired, partly because the Victorian middle class was well on the way to creating a cult of cosy, sheltered childhood.  From Jane Eyre to Oliver Twist and Andersen's Little Match Girl, all wrung the heart precisely because they were children enduring sufferings which the reader no longer associated with a rather idealised idea of childhood.

Charles Kingsley's famous book about the moral education of a young chimney sweep boy, The Water-Babies was also inspired by Parliamentary Reports into working conditions, in this case those of chimney sweeps' boys, which had not improved much since the 1817 Report into their conditions, mainly because no adequate system of inspection had been set up.  Lord Shaftsbury pressed for further reforms in the 1840s and Kingsley's book helped to rouse public opinion.  The Water-Babies is a very unusual combination of fantastic fairy tale and social realism, and this is probably why it became a children's classic when most moral stories have been condemned as either too moralistic or too sentimental.  ' "Oh yes" said Grimes, "Of course it's me.  Did I ask to be brought here into the prison?  Did ask to be set to sweep your foul chimneys?  Did I ask to stick fast in the very first chimney of all, because it  was so shamefully clogged up with soot?  Did I ask to stay here - I don't know how long - a hundred years, I do believe, and never get my pipe nor my beer, nor nothing fit for a beast let alone a man."

"No", answered a solemn voice behind, "No more did Tom, when you behaved to him in the very same way."'  (Charles Kingsley The Water-Babies, 1863)

Mr. Grimes and Tom.  Illustrator Anne Grahame Johnstone,
c.1960? This children's classic ran to many editions.

Macdonald, himself from a poor background, included some pointed criticism of the insensitivity of some do-gooders in At the Back of the North Wind:  'I have known people who would have begun to fight the devil in a very different way.  They would have begun by scolding the idiotic cab man; and next they would make his wife angry by saying it must be her fault as well as his, and by leaving ill-bred though well-meant shabby little books for them to read, which they were sure to hate the sight of; while all the time they would not have put out a finger to touch the wailing baby.'  

Few writers who wrote adult novels about the poor concerned themselves with children, but there are a few exceptions.  Dickens used characters such at Tiny Tim in 

A Christmas Carol and Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop to heighten pathos in his novels. Arthur Morrison in Child of the Jago wrote the entire novel from the ;point of view of a child brought up in one of London's 'courts'; tenement blocks round a central enclosed square where, in some districts, the police would only venture in twos.

Arthur Morrison A Child of the Jago.
(Illus: Londonfictions.com)

A similar realistic novel is George Moore's Esther Waters, about that shocking unmentionable subject, unmarried mothers.,  It contains an expose of baby-farms, the subject of several Victorian scandals. Unmarried mothers who kept their babies found it very difficult to get jobs except as wet-nurses. Many simply abandoned the babies they could not support, as they had done for centuries. Thomas Coram opened the Foundlings Hospital in London in 1745 out of compassion for the babies whose bodies were to be found on every city dung heap.  In Victorian times infants began to be left in the care of a baby-farmer while the mother went to work.  The baby farmer was tempted to spend as little as possible on their care, to increase her profit, and in several cases these women were actually convicted of murdering their charges, having taken them for a fixed sum saying they would arrange their adoption.  In Esther Waters the baby-farmer Mrs. Spires offers to take Esther's baby off her hands for five pounds, and it is quite clear what will happen to him: '"It goes to my 'eart,'" said Mrs. Spiers, "It do indeed, but, Lord, it is the best that could 'appen to 'em; whoe's to care for 'em?  and there is 'undreds and 'undreds of them - ay, thousands and thousands every year - and they all dies like the early flies.  It is 'ard, very 'ard, poor little dears, but they're best out of the way - they're only an expense and a disgrace. "'

Moore believed that his book helped to remedy this situation by encouraging legislation making baby-farming illegal, and by helping also to create sympathy for unmarried mothers.

(George Moore, Esther Waters, 1894)

The popular best seller Ministering Children, 1854, is not only about the satisfaction to be gained from helping the poor, but about doing it in the right way, not just with money which might be misused, but with visits to the sick, comforting broths, warm clothing and good deeds.  In the preface Maria Charlesworth explains her aim:  'May it not be worthy of consideration, whether the most generally effective way to ensure this moral benefit (of practising charity) on both sides, would not be the early calling forth and training the sympathies of children by personal intercourse with want and sorrow.' (Maria Charlesworth, Ministering Children, 1854)

Ministering Children, 1867 ed.
(University of California, Archive Bookmaker)

Sometimes the writer breaks off the story to make a direct appeal, as in the best seller Froggy's Little Brother by Brenda; Georgiana Castle Smith , 1875:

  'Parents and little children, you especially who are rich, remember it is the Froggys and Bennys of London for whom your clergyman is pleading when he asks you to send money and relief to the poor East End.'  In Flora Thompson's Oxfordshire village where people were relatively poor 'many tears were shed over Christie's Old Organ and Froggy's Little Brother, and everyone wished they could have brought those poor neglected slum children there and shared with them the best they had of everything.' (Flora Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford, 1945)

Froggy's Little Brother by 'Brenda' 1875
(University of Roehampton)

Children's stories in both Britain and America often included scenes such as the one in Little Women where the girls give their Christmas breakfast to a family of starving immigrants: 'A poor, bare, miserable room it was, with broken windows, no fire, ragged bedclothes, a sick mother, wailing baby, and a group of pale, hungry children cuddled up under one old quilt, trying to keep warm.  How the big eyes stared, and the blue lips smiled, as the girls went in.  "Ach, mein Gott!  it is good angels come to us!" cried the poor woman crying for joy.  "Funny angels in hoods and mittens," said Jo, and set them laughing.!' (Louisa M. Alcott,  Little Women, 1868, an American story which was a best seller on both sides of the Atlantic)

The pathos in  most American  stories about the poor, as in Little Women, derives from the loss of a parent or facing straightened circumstances rather than actual starvation, as in Susan Warner's best-seller Queechy, 1852 which was based on her own experiences.  The popularity of books like this and Little Women may have been partly due to the uncertainties of life in America where fortunes were quickly made and as quickly lost.  The book was hugely popular in Britain with both adults and children; in Susan Warner's biography it says there were ten thousand copies sold at one railway station in England, but the publishers scouted the idea of sending the author a cent!' 

The optomistic, resourceful orphan girl was America's unique contribution to the genre in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Heroines such as Pollyanna, Anne of Green Gables, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, or Jo in Little Women faced up to a hard world and made it love them for their impetuous but always good-hearted efforts to please and help others.

Mrs. Francis Hodgson Burnett, a British writer who emigrated to America on her marriage successfully combined the two types of story into one of the classics of its kind, A Little Princess, the story of a little girl whose rich papa leaves her at a select boarding school while he is on an expedition in search of further sources of wealth.  Letters stop coming and the bills remain unpaid.  Vindictive Miss Minchin makes Sara, once the prize pupil, into the school drudge.  Throughout all her trials she behaves with immense unselfishness and nobility.  In this enormously satisfying story the reader can not only enjoy identifying with Sara through miseries that are, masochistically, increased as a result of her immensely noble behaviour, but is rewarded not merely by a happy ending but by even vaster riches than those of which she was abruptly derived at the beginning of the book.  Moreover she magnanimously forgives Miss Minchin for making her the drudge of the school when the bills stopped being paid.

Here is Sara who has found sixpence in the street and bought hot buns when she sees a beggar girl: 'The child was still huddled up on the corner of the steps.  She looked frightful in her wet and dirty rags.  She was staring with a stupid look of suffering straight before her, and Sara saw her suddenly draw the back of her roughened, black hand across her eyes to rub away the tears which seemed to have surprised her by forcing their way from under her lids...Sara opened the paper bag and took out one of the hot buns, which had already warmed her cold hands a little...The child stared up at her; then she snatched up the bun and began to cram it into her mouth with great wolfish bites.  "Oh my! Oh my!" Sara heard her say hoarsely, in wild delight.  "Oh my!" Sara took out three more buns and put them down.  "She is hungrier than I am," she said to herself. "She's starving."But her hand trembled when she put down the fourth bun.  "I'm not starving, "she said, - and she put down the fifth.'  A great piece of writing which never fails to move an audience.

Illustration to an Edwardian edition
(Fotobook.com)

With so very many moral stories on the market 19th century readers may have eventually suffered from benefactor fatigue.  It may have been with some glee that they read parodies of the moral story such as Thackeray's The Rose and the Ring:
   '...there came toddling up to them such a funny little girl!  She had a great quantity of hair blowing about her chubby little cheeks, and looked as if she had not been washed or combed for ever so long.  She wore a ragged bit of a cloak, and had only one shoe on.
"You little wretch, who let you in here?"  asked Gruffanuff.
"Give me dat bun" said the little girl, "Me vely hungry."
"Hungry! What is that?" asked Princess Angelica, and gave the child the bun.
"Oh, Princess!" says Gruffanuff, "How good, how kind, how truly angelical you are !"...
"I didn't want it," said Angelica.
"But you are a darling little angel all the same" says the governess.
"Yes I know I am" said Angelica....' (William Makepeace Thackeray, The Rose and the Ring, 1855)

Edith Nesbit also gave a subtle twist to the Ministering Children theme:
'"Do you mean to say...that you and Alice went and begged for money for poor children and then kept it?"'
(Edith Nesbit, The New Treasure Seekers, 1904)