ABSTRACT
On 13 August 1775, a young Dutch solicitor lost his beloved wife. He was left with three small children, aged one, two and three years old.1 Influenced by Enlightened educational philosophy,2 he decided to raise them himself instead of putting out their education to a schoolmaster or a governess. However, in spite of the lively discourse and the many publications on the education of young children in the eighteenth century, which had been accelerating since Rousseau’s publication of Emile in 1762, Children’s books written in Dutch that were in line with Enlightened ideas and ideals were scarce, almost absent.3 Shortly before the death of his wife, this solicitor had taken his first hesitant steps into the realm of poetry with some devotional miscellany. Shortly thereafter, he wrote a lamentation on her death.4 Lacking appropriate, comprehensible reading material for his small children, he decided to expand his writing and wrote a small collection of poetry for young children, originally for his own.5 The poems were published anonymously in 1778 and almost immediately followed by a second, non-anonymous volume, with a third a few years later. Both separately and bundled together, the volumes became bestsellers.6 The name of the young Dutch solicitor was Hieronijmus van Alphen (1746-1803), and he would go down in history as the father of Dutch children’s literature.7 For more than 70 years, his poems were reprinted countless times and translated into many languages.8 They were even set to music, and his poems echoed in those of his successors, both in form and in content.9 During the last decades of the ninteenth century Van Alphen’s poems were criticised. The children featuring in his poems were considered unrealistic. Critics asked for more realistic children, children who were a little bit naughty instead of primarily good. However, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the poems were rediscovered as an historical pedagogical monument by scholars and, at the same time, seen as providing a nostalgic memory
of the past on the part of the general public.10 This resulted in many more reprints and the poems’ inclusion in literary histories – especially school books on literature – in which we can find some of them even today.11 Over time, the poems have been and continue to be used in education, and so have been transformed and reframed in several ways.12
