ABSTRACT
The founding text of this study is perhaps Sarah Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories (1786) (later published as The Story of the Robins), which concerns a family of birds who talk among themselves, but also exist as ‘real’ robins in the garden of a human family whose children gradually come to understand and appreciate the birds. The book was reprinted throughout the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth: Betty Goldstone calculates it had a life-span of one hundred and thirty-three years.1 The publishers Griffith and Farran advertise The Story of the Robins in 1877 as part of their ‘Original Juvenile Library’, quoting favourable reviews: ‘the delicious story of Dicksy, Flapsy, and Pecksy, who can have forgotten it? It is as fresh today as it was half a century ago.’ The work appears several times in their list, in different editions at different prices. The shilling edition is listed together with a number of other related favourite animal stories from the past: The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse (Dorothy Kilner, 1783), Memoirs of Bob, the Spotted Terrier (Anon., 1801), and Keeper’s Travels in Search of his Master (Edward Augustus Kendall, 1798).2 The similarity of the names Dicksy, Pecksy, Flapsy and Robin (Trimmer’s young robins) to Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter in Beatrix Potter’s 1902 Peter Rabbit has often been noted, testifying again to the long life and influence of Trimmer’s story.
