ABSTRACT
Poetry may have enjoyed a higher profile in the 1700s than it does today,1
but no one has attempted a study of the anthologies of the period com parable to Joseph Thomas’s analysis of twentieth-century anthologies in Poetry’s Playground: The Culture of Contemporary American Children’s Poetry (2007). Despite the large corpus of eighteenth-century verse for children, critical attention has been focused on the smaller corpus of single-author volumes of poetry, especially those by Isaac Watts, Thomas Foxton, John Marchant, Christopher Smart, Dorothy and Mary Ann Kilner, and William Blake.2 As to the reasons for the lack of critical discussions on anthologies for children published between 1700 and 1799, the determining factors include the difficulties in ascertaining what a volume contains, who selected its contents, and why. Rarely do eighteenth-century editors receive credit for the volumes they compile, partly because the outlandish pseudonyms they chose for themselves – “Tommy Tagg,” “Tommy Trapwit,” “Peregrine Puzzlebrains” – appear to be jokes rather than disguises for real people with serious literary credentials. Furthermore, eighteenth-century anthologies look as if they have been carelessly assembled, so poems may not be identified on the pages they appear and tables of contents and indexes are not always de rigeur. Wary of being tripped up in a tangle of inaccurate or misleading information, scholars tread very gingerly across the entire genre.
