Children, poetry, and the eighteenth-century school anthology

Those who have applied themselves to the study of poetry written for children often remark on the relative scarcity of scholarship in the field, compared to the number of studies written about prose works for children. Nowhere is this discrepancy more pronounced than in the analysis of children’s literature of the eighteenth century.1 Donelle Ruwe observes that “[m]ost scholars know very little about early children’s poetry and its origins in the long eighteenth century, and standard anthologies of British literature truncate the history of the genre so dramatically that we are left with only two titles, Watts’s Divine Songs (1715) and Blake’s Songs of Innocence (1789). We then skip over the children’s poets of the Romantic era altogether and move straight to the Victorians Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and Robert Louis Stevenson” (2). Ruwe’s excellent study concerns itself primarily with the second of the two gaps she notes (Romantic-era children’s poetry); but one might also wonder about the first – the period between Watts and Blake. The dearth of scholarship on eighteenth-century children’s poetry is due in no small part to the relative lack of original children’s poetry published in the period. While “children in early modern Britain” may indeed have been, as Matthew Grenby claims, “immersed in a culture of verse” (116), much of it was not what might nowadays be called “children’s poetry”: verse designed for young readers seen as needing their own thematically and stylistically specialised poetics. Along with such devotional forms as hymns, children had access to (often in oral form) the popular songs, ballads, and riddles adults enjoyed, too. A poetry for children, operating as its own genre and occupying a specific place in the print market for a young readership, only really began to crystallise with the publication in 1804 of the Taylor sisters’ Original Poems for Infant Minds: as Ruwe notes, after “1804, the floodgates opened. In the first decade of the nineteenth century alone, more than fifty collections of original, non-hymn children’s poetry on serious subjects appeared, in contrast to the handful of volumes in the previous century” (Ruwe 3).