Many English superstitions are associated with birds: Simpson and Roud’s Dictionary of English Folklore notes that swans were once thought to sing before they died and swallows to hibernate underwater.  A stranger one is you’ll have good luck all year if a bird poops on you Easter Sunday.  When a bird beat its wings against a window or flew through one into the house, it was a dark portent (Susanna Clark certainly played on that in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell).

The robin and the wren enjoyed almost sacred status as reflected in the once familiar traditional saying, “Cock Robin and Jenny Wren/ Are God Almighty’s Cock and Hen.”  Bad luck followed  anyone who destroyed their nests.  But both are associated kindness to people.One reason may be the robin’s role at the end of the hugely popular ballad The Children in the Wood, or The Norfolk Gentleman’s  Last Will and Testament. Robbed of their inheritance by a greedy uncle, the sister and brother abandoned in the forest freeze to death at night and the robin tenderly covers their little bodies with leaves.   The pathetic tale was so well known that it was reprinted without an introduction in the great ballad collection of the 1720.  Allusions to the ballad are sprinkled all over eighteenth-century literature.  Jonathan Swift furnished the cottage of the humble Baucis and Philemon with a copy of the ballad pinned to the wall.  Gay preserved it among the many references to popular lore  in The Shepherd’s Week, Richardson’s Pamela refers to it along with satirists, playwrights, and the essayists of The Guardian, Rambler, and Connoisseur.

Folklorists still debate if the ballad conferred this status upon the robin, or it was an even older tradition.Edmund Burke used the ballad as a case history of the relative power of stories versus pictures used the ballad as a case study: which stirred the emotions more?

The surviving illustrations don’t make it easy to gauge if the robin tugged at the heartstrings of eighteenth-century readers more the sad fate of the children.The image above that frequently appeared in ballads and chapbooks depicted most of the story’s key scenes in one frame.  The duel where the wicked uncle is run through dominated the center, while a rather unsatisfactory rendering of the dead toddlers and the robin is tucked in the upper left hand corner.   Likewise the robin is difficult to see in this engraving after Sir Joshua Reynold’s painting and significantly, there is no litter of leaves.  This highly romantic 1826 folding frontispiece to Mary Belson Elliott’s retelling the only illustration I have found that elevates the robin’s labors, but it does suggest the difficulty in rendering the subject.

One well known eighteenth-century robin wrote letters of advice to the son of the family whose garden was his home.    When perched on the sill of the library window, it noticed a letter from its little master Billy Careless to his father.  Billy’s failure to express the obligations owed his father when making a request prompted the bird to compose a kind but strong letter:

Give me leave, therefore, dear Billy, to acquaint you, that no one should ever write to his Papa or Mam, without beginning his Letter with, Honoured Sir, or Honoured Madame; and at the same time, not forget to observe…the most perfect Obedience, in a very obliging, respectful Manner.  By these means, you may not only increase your Papa’s Affection, but obtain almost any Thing from him, that you can reasonably ask, provided it be proper and in his Power to grant.

It warbles next the “unpleasing but very useful Song” that a sloppily written letter does not deserve a reply, especially when the recipient knows the correspondent is capable of much better penmanship.  The bird expresses itself “surpris’d  you ever neglect it.”    After reminding Billy about a few other points of good conduct and filial Duty, he takes his “leave on the Wing”, imploring

That I may never have occasion again to write you an unpleasing Letter of Rebuke; and that you will always remember that however distant you are, or how secret you may think yourself from your Friends and Relations, you will never be able to conceal your Faults; for some of our prying, Tattling Trible, will be continually carrying them home, to be whistled in a Melancholy Strain, in the Ears of your Papa.

Signed, “Your ever Watchful, and most affectionate Friend, Robin Redbreast from my little Hole in the Wall, at Sun-rising, the 1^st of June, 1758.”  The postscript assures Billy that the letter was “prompted both by Love and Gratitude, in Return for the Plenty of Crumbs I have received at your Hands.”    Robin’s letter first appeared in the steady selling children’s book, The Polite Academy, or School of Behaviour for Young Gentlemen and Ladies first published in 1759.  However, It probably reached an even wider audience through inclusion in The Complete Letter-writer, or Polite English Secretary (also of 1759) reprinted regularly until the end of the century.  I can’t help but wonder if some of the children reading the busy-body bird’s lecture on manners thought Cock Robin in the nursery rhyme had it coming to him:

Robin’s wife the wren could also be “a little friend to little men.”  An anonymous father wrote the charming but little known The Wren, or The Fairy of the Greenhouse to amuse his three boys while their mother was recovering from the birth of their fourth child. She monitors their behavior, leaving illustrated cards—pink for good, black for bad—hung on ribbons from orange trees in the conservatory when circumstances warrant a reward or punishment. The little boys had behaved well all day until the discovery of a book, the gift of their mama, cut to bits and left it on the window sill.   When their father demanded to know who was responsible, the two culprits accused each other before eventually telling the truth and being ordered upstairs  to bed without any raspberry tarts for dessert.

The next morning, the orange trees in the conservatory tubs had to be checked for a sign from the wren.  (The  method is not original to this book: similar systems were described in Newbery’s The Easter Gift  and in Elizabeth Hamm’s diary in the 19^th century.)   The wren also took the extraordinary step of promising to tell the boys’ friends of ups and downs in their behavior.  Too many infractions would cause her to fly away, the cards to be burnt, and papa leave off writing the story.

 

Are these birds benevolent or bossy?