Introduction

In her biography of Charlotte Brontë, Winifred Gérin traces the fi gures of Boaster and Clown to the 1825 edition of Aesop’s Fables translated from Greek and Latin sources in 1722 by the Reverend Samuel Croxall, whose fi ery defence of his child readers against Catholicism is addressed in Chapter 1 of this book. Such childhood engagement with Aesop as the young Brontës displayed was by no means confi ned to children whose destiny was literary fame. James Raine, a future shoemaker born in 1791, was taught to read by the age of six by schooldames and his two grandmothers; his paternal grandmother possessed a few books, two of which particularly caught his fancy. These were a life of Christ with woodcuts from the early seventeenth century, and an even earlier copy of Aesop’s fables: ‘tattered, torn and imperfect, equally ornamented with woodcuts, over which I used to pore with infi nite delight’ (Spufford, 1997: 48).