Fairy tales are a danger to children!

'Partial as we confess ourselves to be, to most of the books of the old school, we cannot approve of those which are only fit to fill the heads of children with confused notions of wonderful and supernatural events. 'Mother Bunch's Tales are of this description.'
 Mrs Sarah Trimmer, The Guardian of Education, Vol. 2. 1803,p.185)

Sarah Trimmer (Wikipedia)

The late 18th and early 19th century is remarkable for the large number of Evangelical writers who turned to producing stories for children.  This was largely a result of the growth of the Sunday School Movement; people like Mrs. Trimmer, Hannah More and Mrs. Sherwood quickly found that there were no suitably improving stories for the children in their new Sunday schools for the poor to read.  There was also a steady demand from the better off, particularly parents in the same Evangelical; circles as the writers mentioned above.  They came from a section of society which had traditionally taken a close interest in their children's upbringing.  Their works were popular in both Britain and America. The influential American writer Mrs. Lydia Child recommended in The Mother's Book, an instruction manual for young mothers, the work of the Taylors, the Edgeworths, Mrs. Barbauld and Mrs. Trimmer, whom she describes as 'among the very best writers of juvenile books; her influence is pure and holy'.  She had reservations about Mrs. Sherwood because of the extremely Calvinistic tone of her theology, and regretted that the Edgeworths, for ideological reasons, as follower of the French philosopher Rousseau, omitted any religious teaching from their books for children.  (Mrs. Lydia Child, The Mother's Book, 1831.p95-103 of 4th ed 1832)  Lydia Child was an influential campaigner for women's rights, the abolition of slavery and Native American rights)

Naturally parents and writers in these social circles carefully scrutinized the books they gave their children and from 1802 to 1805 Mrs. Trimmer edited and largely wrote the very first reviewing journal for children's literature, The Guardian of Education.

One of the most remarkable effects of the virtual monopoly which this group of authors and educationalists established over the production of children's books at this time was the virtual abolition of traditional fairy tales for almost the first twenty-five years of the 19th century.  The Puritans had strongly disapproved of folklore and fairy tales, which they associated with Catholicism and witchcraft, and considered superstitious nonsense.  Mrs. Trimmer's own mildly fanciful moral story, The History of the Robins, 1786, was prefaced by a disclaimer reminding children that robins cannot really talk as they do in the story.  Children should be 'taught to consider them, not as containing the real conversations of birds (for that it is impossible we should ever understand), but as a series of Fables, intended to convey moral instruction...'
(The Guardian of Education, Vol. 2,)

Sarah Trimmer's Fabulous Histories.
with The History of the Robins
(British Library)

The 19th century attack on fairy tales was, however, launched largely on grounds of morality.  In 1802 a correspondent in The Guardian of Education roundly condemned Cinderella, saying it 'is perhaps one of the most exceptional books that was ever written for children...It paints some of the worst passions that can enter into the human breast, and of which little children should, if possible, be totally ignorant; such as envy, jealousy, a dislike to  mothers-in-law (sic, meaning step-mothers) and half-sisters, vanity, a love of dress, etc. etc.' (Guardian of Education, Vol. 2, p.15 and 448 )  Mrs. Trimmer was forced to re-examine her old favourites such as Mother Bunch and Mother Goose, and shortly afterwards produced a damning review of Benjamin Tabart's very charming Juvenile Library, which included the first printed text of Jack and the Beanstalk, 1802.  Even works such as the very respectable Sarah Fielding's The Governess, which both Mrs. Trimmer and Mrs. Sherwood loved as children became suspect.  Mrs. Sherwood replaced the fairy tales it contains with something more improving.

John Newbery's publications became virtually unobtainable.  Charles Lamb,author of Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare, complained to the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, writer of The Ancient Mariner: 'Goody Two Shoes is almost out of print.  Mrs. Barbauld's stuff has banished all the old classics of the nursery...Science has succeeded to poetry no less in the little walks of children than with men.  Is there no possibility of averting this sore evil?  Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history! ' ( Harvey Darton Children's Books in England,p. 131 quoting Lamb's letter to Coleridge)  This complaint is a fore-runner of Charles Dicken's satirical attack on the Rationalists, epitomized by Mr. Gradgrind, in Hard Times, 1854, by which time fantasy and fairy tales were once more accepted: 'Now, what I want is, Facts, Teach these boys and girl nothing but Facts.  Facts alone are wanted in life.  Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.  You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.'

Fairy tales were considered harmful mainly on moral grounds but also because it was feared that children would learn to confuse truth and falsehood, which may have not been unjustified.  Caroline Hutton, daughter of the Birmingham historian William Hutton, recalled that, 'Nothing delighted me so much as did the tales of the fairies.  I no more doubted their truth than I did my own existence.'  She was most disappointed when her home-made wand failed to turn the parlour grate to gold. (Caroline Hutton Reminiscences of a gentlewoman of the last century.  Letters of Caroline Hutton ed. C.H. Beale, Cornish, Birmingham, 1891 p.2)  Mrs. Sherwood as a child peopled the woods near where she grew up with fairies: 'If I could discern fairy rings, which abounded in those woods, they gave me another set of images; and I had imaginary hermits in every hollow of the rocky sides of the dingle, and imaginary castles on every height, whilst the church and churchyard supplied me with more ghosts and apparitions than I dared to tell of.' (Life of Mrs. Sherwood, edited by her daughter Sophia Kelly, 1857 p.37)

Many children, of course, still had access to folk tales in spite of official disapproval.  Harriet Martineau, born 1802, whose father 'held that they developed the imagination in the wrong channels', was told them by her nurse, like many other children, and the traditional tales, along with more sensational literature, were still sold in the form of crudely printed little chapbooks carried round the country by pedlars and having a status similar to modern comics.  (Harriet Martineau, Autobiography, 1877, Vol. 1, p.119)

It was serious folklore collectors, the Grimm brothers in Germany, Andrew Lang and Henry Cole on Britain, who restored fairy tales to the nursery by putting the weight of their considerable reputations behind well presented translations and editions of traditional tales which they collected.  Edgar Taylor argued for the encouragement of the imagination in the preface to the first English translation of Grimm's fairy tales, published in 1823:

'Our imagination is surely as susceptible of improvement by exercise, as our judgement or our memory; ad so long as such fictions only are presented to the young mind as do not interfere with the important department of moral education, a beneficial effect must be produced by the pleasurable employment of a faculty in which so much of our happiness in every period of life consists.'
(preface to German popular stories...collected by M.M. Grimm, 1823, translated by Edgar Taylor)

Curiously enough, fairy tales and fantasy in verse always remained generally acceptable.  It was at exactly this period that John Harris was achieving success with his picture book versions of Old Mother Hubbard, Cinderella  , The Butterfly's Ball, The Lion's Masquerade and numerous other titles.  Edmund Gosse, who was later allowed to read Scott's verse but not his Waverley Novels, supposed the distinction was made on the grounds that the artificiality of verse made it less realistic and so less credible than prose.
(Edmund Goss, Father and Son, 1907 Penguin Modern Classics ed. 1949 p.162)

(M. Roscoe,  The Butterfly's Ball, 1806
British Library)

Verse was, for whatever reason, enormously popular.  Isaac Watts had produced perhaps the most popular collection of children's poems ever published in 1715.  His Divine and Moral Songs for Children was written for a friend who wanted some hymns to accompany catechisms, and many of them are still in regular use.  His poem The Sluggard was parodied by Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland:

'  'Tis the voice of the Lobster; I hear him declare
You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair...'
(The Annotated Alice, introduction and notes by Martin Gardner, 1960, Penguin ed. p. 139)

Watt's reasons for encouraging children to learn poetry by heart are given in his preface:
'There is something so amusing and entertaining in rhymes and metre, that will incline children to make this part of their business a diversion...What is learnt in Verse, is longer retained in memory, and sooner recollected...'
(Watts Divine Songs, 1st ed. 1715, preface)

Original poems for infant minds, 1834 ed.
1st ed. is 1804-5
(British Library)

Many collections of verse for children were produced around the turn of the century, including several well known collections by the Taylors, a family of Nonconformists.  'Twinkle, twinkle little star' has taken its place as a nursery rhyme, while My Mother was admired and imitated throughout the 19th century, appealing, as it did, even more to the Victorian cult of womanhood than to the Georgians:

'Who taught my infant lips to pray,

To love God's holy book and day,

And walk in wisdom's pleasant way?

  My mother.

Who ran to help me when I fell,

And would some pretty story tell,

Or kiss the place to make it well?

   My mother.'

(Jane and Ann Taylor, and others, 

Original poems for infant minds, 

1804-5.  Facsimile ed. 1976, p.76)

John Newbery: Instruction and Delight in the 18th century

'Giles Gingerbread, he lov'd Cream, Custard and Curds,

And Good Books so well, that he eat up his Words'.

(The Renowned History of Giles Gingerbread, Newbery, 1764

John Newbery was the most influential publisher of children's books in mid to late 18th century.
Catherine Hutton of Birmingham, born in 1756, remembered his little books with delight:
'I read all of Mr. Newbery's gilt books, as they were called...Christmas box, New Year's Gift, Goody Two Shoes & etc...I trembled for Bluebeard's wife when she was so naughty as to open the forbidden closet; and when I came to her kneeling at her husband's feet, he with his uplifted scimitar ready to strike, and sister Anne looking out from the window I could read no more.  I burst into tears, laid down the book, and exclaimed "Mama I never will be married."...it was many years before I dared venture to resume the tale, or know that Bluebeard's wife was saved.'
   (Catherine Hutton, Reminiscences of a gentlewoman of the last century...Letters of Catherine Hutton, ed. C.H. Beale, Birmingham 1891)

 Newbery was not the first to publish amusing yet instructive children's books but he was the first to make them a large enough part of his business for many copies to have survived and so he may be considered the first to make a commercial success of his publishing venture.  By the turn of the century he had been joined by others. One of Newbery's most important rivals was  John Marshall of 4 Aldermary Churchyard.  He published quite a range of work, from flimsy chapbook collections of nursery rhymes to attractive little stories like The Christmas Present by 'Solomon Sobersides'.  He also published 'infant libraries', complete sets of matching miniature books in little wooden bookcases.

Newbery knew well that the way to a child's heart is through its stomach and was a great believer in the reward system:
'As (Tommy Trip) rides through the town, he frequently stops at the doors to know how the little children do within; and if they are good and learn their book? and then leaves an apple, an orange, or a plumb-cake at the door, and away he gallops, again, tantivy, tantivy, tantivy.'
(The Lilliputian Magazine, Newbery, 1752, British Library 1387.9.5)
He also used the edible alphabet with great success in the story of Giles Gingerbread, 'the little boy who lived upon learning' :

'Giles Gingerbread, he lov'd Cream, Custard and Curds,

And Good Books so well, that he eat up his Words'.

The little boy's letters were cut out of gingerbread for him, and he learned them as he ate.
(The Renowned history of Giles Gingerbread, Newbery, 1764, S. Roscoe, John Newbery and his successors, 1973)

Giles Gingerbread. From a later, 1820 ed.pub. J. Kendrew, York,
(Osborn Collection, UCLA)

 Andrew Tuer says in The History of the Hornbook that gingerbread letters and gingerbread hornbooks became popular some time in the 18th century.  He quotes Matthew Prior's  poem Alma, Canto II, from Poems upon several occasions, 1721:

'To Master John the English maid

A Horn-book gives of Ginger-bread;

And that the Child may learn the better,

As he can name, he eats the letter...'

(Andrew Tuer, The History of the Hornbook, 1897 vol. 2)

Since Janeway's Token for Children, 1671,  the emphasis seems to have changed a bit from heavenly to earthly rewards for being a good boy or girl.  Little Goody Two Shoes is recommended as a mentor:

'From a state of rags and care

And having shoes but half a pair

Their fortune and their fame would fix

And gallop in a coach and six'

(The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, Newbery, 1765)

History of Little Goody Two Shoes, 1768 ed. (Wikipedia)

This still represented the just reward of honesty and hard work, rather than the activities of a Fanny Hill or a Moll Flanders. Newbery's exemplary stories were firm supporters of traditional morality; 'She never told a lie in her life.  No, No!  she knew that was a naughty pau-pau Trick

 (Nurse Truelove's New-Year's Gift, Newbery, c.1770)

'See Virtue here, with Wealth and Glory crown'd

And all the busy Crowd admiring round;

While she to Church with pious Zeal reapirs

To hear the Sermon, and to say her prayers'.

(The history of Miss Polly Friendly, Newbery, Nurse Truelove...c.1770)

'All Boys and Girls, who are not dutiful and obedient to their Parents , never come to any Good, but are, as they ought to be, always neglected and despised.' 

(A Pretty Play-thing for Children of all Denominations, Newbery, c.1759, Roscoe op.cit. p.226))

John Newbery also sold other educational aids, and, good salesman that he was, promoted them through his story books:

 'When he has learnt the Roman letters, you may teach him the Italic letters in the same Manner, and then the Figures; Afterwards it will be proper to give him a Sett of the Squares sold at the Bible and Sun in St. Paul's Churchyard, by playing with which he will soon learn to read.'  

(A Little Lottery Book for Children, containing a new Method of playing them into a Knowledge of the letters, Figures etc.  Newbery c. 1765? Roscoe p, 171) 

The Little Lottery Book was an original reading aid with a picture on one side of the page and a letter on the other; the child learned his letters by sticking a pin through the picture into the letter which corresponded to it.  Few copies survived such rough treatment.  

Newbery's little books were just as popular in America.  There numerous pirated editions were published by Isiah Thomas of Worcester (Mass) the founder of the American Antiquarian Society, and by Mahlon Day of New York.  Isiah Thomas adopted Newbery's use of advertising, changing the wording to fit his own business and slightly Americanising the text:
'Why! he got all the little books by rote that are sold by Mr. Thomas in Worcester, when he was but a very little boy.  Then he never missed church...He is chosen Congressman already and yet he is not puffed up...'
(Alice Morse Earle, Child life in Colonial Days 1899)