ABSTRACT
It has been said that children's book publishing began in earnest in 1744, when John Newbery issued A Little Pretty Pocket Book, ‘intended for the Instruction and Amusement of Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly’ and offered for sale on its own at 6d or with ball or pincushion at 8d (Darton 1982:1–5). However, this is to assume that early children's literature encompassed only books aimed mainly at pleasing the reader. The span was very much wider and a literature read by children therefore began much earlier. Many of the texts used by children in the centuries between the introduction of printing and the development of the serious business of children's book publishing in the mid-eighteenth century were far from light-hearted; they were a mixture of courtesy books, school books and religious texts. Children also took what they could from the diverse range of cheap paper pamphlets, the chapbooks. These began circulating in earnest in the seventeenth century after the Star Chamber was abolished in 1641 and political and religious ideas could be expressed in relative freedom. Along with the sermons and tracts were published the ‘small merry books’ which Samuel Pepys collected (Spufford 1981: passim).
