The Coach and Six: Chapbook Residue in Late Eighteenth-Century Children's Literature

The trend towards a predominantly didactic form of children's book characteristic of the rational and evangelical writing movements of the late eighteenth century did not, of course, leap out onto the market fully formed. ¹ Predating, and, indeed, eventually coexisting with, the rational diversions and evangelical children's books by such authors as Maria Edgeworth, Thomas Day, Sarah Trimmer, and Dorothy Kilner that flooded the English market in the last two decades of the eighteenth century were scores of what can be called “transitional” books. These books, while acknowledging the trend toward inculcating middle-class values and ideology in young readers, still employed earlier chapbook forms and themes. The survival of such chapbook elements in a middle-class pedagogical environment growing increasingly hostile to plebeian influences raises issues of class relations and the cultural production of class. This chapter will survey not only such well-known early children's books as A Little Pretty Pocket Book (1744) and The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes (1766), but also lesser-known works such as The Friends; or the History of Billy Freeman and Tommy Truelove (c. 1787), and Nurse Dandlem's Little Repository of Great Instruction (c. 1784), so as to demonstrate the ubiquity of these transitional books in the late-eighteenth century. ²