ABSTRACT
The history of children’s literature is strewn with forgotten favourites; they moulder in attics because we cannot bear to throw them away. Who today has heard of Marigold in Godmother’s House (1934) by Joyce Lankester Brisley (remembered, if at all, for the adventures of ‘Milly-Molly-Mandy’), yet for me it opened magic casements.1 It is difficult to overestimate the imaginative hold of our earliest reading, and impossible to reduplicate its impact, though parents so often try. Copies of the best-loved early children’s books are now notoriously rare, because they were so often ‘read to death’. A typical example might be William Godwin’s Bible Stories, written under the pseudonym William Scolfield, and published in 1802. Of this, as William St Clair has observed, ‘no copy has been found in any library in Britain nor any copy of the original edition’. Single copies of a later edition have survived, but only the first volume (there were two), one in the United States and one in Britain. And this is despite the fact that ‘The book was evidently a commercial success’, it ‘was still being advertised in London in 1828’, and it was in print until 1831.2 Another popular and rather better-known children’s book (by title, at least), suffered a similar fate: John Newbery’s History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, of which the first edition of 1765 exists in a single copy in the British Library.3 Presumably, the rarity of these two books results from the pleasure they gave their earliest readers. Today, some surviving Puffin books are far rarer (and thus more highly valued) than their hardback equivalents.
