|
|
|
| Previous | Next |
| Author: | Johnson, Richard? |
| Title: | Juvenile Trials for Robbing Orchards, Telling Fibs, and other Heinous Offences. Embellished with cuts. By Master Tommy Littleton, Secretary to the Court. ... The Second Edition |
| Cat. Number: | 0167 |
| Date: | 1774 |
| 1st Edition: | 1771 |
| Pub. Place: | London |
| Publisher: | T. Carnan, At Number 65, in St. Paul's Church-yard |
| Price: | 6d |
| Pages: | 1 vol., 124pp. |
| Size: | 11 x 7.5 cm |
| Illustrations: | Frontispiece plus 16 wood-cuts |
| Note: | Bound in Dutch flower boards |
Images of all pages of this book
The first edition of Juvenile Trials was registered at Stationer's Hall by Thomas Carnan on 18 December 1771. Carnan was John Newbery's step-son, and after Newbery's death in 1767, Carnan and John' son, Francis, carried on the business. Juvenile Trials was probably the most significant new publication brought out by the partnership. It certainly proved an lasting success. The Hockliffe Collection's second edition came out in 1774, a third appeared in 1776, and further editions followed in 1781, 1786, 1803 and 1816. There were also periodical American editions from 1797 (Welsh 1885: 258; Weedon 1949: 50). The central conceit of the book - children putting their misbehaved peers on trial - is to be found also in Anna Laetitia Barbauld and John Aikin's Evenings at Home (1792-96), in which 'Trial of a complaint made against sundry persons for breaking the windows of Dorothy Careful, Widow, and Dealer in Gingerbread' was one of the most celebrated stories.
Richard Johnson, the probable author of Juvenile Trials, was one of the neglected figures who did so much to steer the uncharted course of children's literature in the late eighteenth century. He is usually described as a 'hack-writer', that is to say he would take on whichever kind of writing he was paid for. He was certainly happy to abridge the works of others, and even to plagiarise. Juvenile Trials, for example, like his Letters Between Master Tommy and Miss Nancy Goodwill (0161), owed a substantial debt to Sarah Fielding's The Governess (1749). Johnson's day-books reveal that he became reasonably affluent from little bits and pieces of work which were irregularly put his way, generally by the successors of John Newbery. We know, for instance, that he was paid sixteen guineas (though he was expecting eighteen) by Abraham Badcock, manager of Elizabeth Newbery's business, for pillaging Arnaud Berquin's work to construct the first edition of The Looking-Glass for The Mind (0149-0150), and that he asked for a further £1.11s. 6d. for 'writing Heads [i.e. contents, titles and headings] to the Looking-Glass' in 1792 (see Weedon, Weedon 1949 for details of Johnson's financial dealings).
Sydney Roscoe, Newbery's bibliographer, has suggested that M. J. P. Weedon was perhaps too eager to attribute so many works to Johnson purely on the basis of his day-books, for when he claimed that he had 'written' these texts, he may simply have meant 'abridged', or 'altered', or even 'transcribed' (Roscoe 1973: 150).
Sydney Roscoe, Newbery's bibliographer, has suggested that M. J. P. Weedon was perhaps too eager to attribute so many works to Johnson purely on the basis of his day-books, for when he claimed that he had 'written' these texts, he may simply have meant 'abridged', or 'altered', or even 'transcribed' (Roscoe 1973: 150). Furthermore, Johnson's routine use of pseudonyms makes it difficult to establish exactly what he was responsible for - he often used the name 'Revd. W. D. Cooper', but also worked under more generic names such as 'Master Tommy Littleton', as for Juvenile Trials. Yet neither his originality and influence, nor his commitment to his craft, should be underrated. Not only did his Juvenile Trials start a vogue for narratives which sought to educate their readers into good behaviour through the description of a trial and consequent punishment, but his The Oriental Moralist (c.1791) was the first translation of The Arabian Nights designed specifically for children and had many direct descendants. Moreover, the prefaces to The Looking-Glass for The Mind and his other collections of moral tales sound every bit as sincere and thoughtful as any of the more approved writers of moral tales of the era. Johnson may well have been the 'faithful friend and sincere well-wisher' of 'the Misses and Masters of Great Britain', which is how he portrayed himself in the dedication to his Juvenile Rambles through the paths of Nature (0925-0927), rather than the mercenary writer who simply wrote what he was told would sell. (See also 0092, 0147, 0148, 0161, 0233, 0479, 0604, 0925 and 1101 for other examples of Johnson's work in the Hockliffe Collection.)
Welsh, Charles, A Bookseller of the Last Century, London, 1885
Weedon, M. J. P., 'Richard Johnson and the Successors to John Newbery', The Library, 5th series, 4, i (1949), 25-63
Weedon, M. J. P., 'Richard Johnson and the Successors to John Newbery', The Library, 5th series, 4, i (1949), 25-63
Roscoe, Sydney, John Newbery and his Successors, 1740-1814: A Bibliography, Wormsley, Herts., 1973
Roscoe, Sydney, John Newbery and his Successors, 1740-1814: A Bibliography, Wormsley, Herts., 1973
Day, Thomas The History of Sandford and Merton, Abridged from the Original. For the Amusement and Instruction of Juvenile Minds. Embellished with Elegant Plates 0092 1813 1783-89 London Darton, Harvey, and Darton, Gracechurch-Street Unknown 1 vol., 107pp. 14 x 8.5 cm Frontispiece plus five engravings
The Page ImagesIntroductory essaySandford and Merton was published anonymously in three parts in 1783, 1786 and 1789. Almost immediately, Thomas Day (1748-1789) was recognised as the author, and, much to his surprise, the book went on to become his most famous work. It was perhaps the most famous children's book of its own day, and was still being read a century later.Day had at first intended a work of this sort to serve as a contribution to a larger project planned by his friend Robert Lovell Edgeworth, perhaps something like Day's own Children's Miscellany of 1787 (0090). In the event, Sandford and Merton took on a life of its own, and swelled to volume-length, and then to three volumes when its popularity became clear. Similarly surprising to the author would have been what would become most celebrated about his work. As his preface to the full edition makes clear (not reproduced in the Hockliffe editions), Day originally thought of his book as a collection of separate stories bound together by a frame narrative of his own devising. The narrative, he hoped, would have the effect of making each story 'appear to rise naturally out of the subject', and would therefore make 'a greater impression' on 'the tender mind of a child' (6th 'corrected' edn., 1791, 1:vi). For Day, the narrative was to be subordinate to the individual inset stories and lessons - some moral tales, some lectures on anything from astronomy or zoology - which fill the book. What Sandford and Merton became known for, however, was this connecting narrative, the account of the friendship, and fallings out, of the two boys, Tommy Merton and Harry Sandford. Day drew their characters, and more especially their relationship, too well to allow the frame to remain as unobtrusive as that of, say, the Arabian Nights.That readers soon came to value the frame narrative more than the inset tales is evident from the emphasis of the many abridgements produced in the half century or so after Sandford and Merton's first publication. As early as 1790, just a year after the appearance of volume three, the book was abridged by Richard Johnson who produced a version for Elizabeth Newbery to publish. Although only one of the Hockliffe editions of Sandford and Merton is advertised as being abridged, both in fact omit large sections of Day's original. The earlier edition, dated 1813 (0092), can be regarded as a 'traditional' abridgement of the full text. It condenses long passages, removes those sections on educational theory ('not one word of which any c