Before F. J. Harvey Darton, there were several important accounts of the development of English children’s literature.   James Petit Andrews highlighted books published in the 1740s when he was a boy in a piece in his collected essays (1789).  Mrs. Trimmer wrote at greater length about more books in “Observations on the Changes which have taken place in Books for Children and Young Persons” in vol. 1 of The Guardian of Education, Mrs. Trimmer wrote at greater length about more books, but she was writing largely from memory about the contents of older books.  She was much more specific about the pros and cons of recent publications by Elizabeth Pinchard or Mrs. Pilkington, copies of which she clearly had at hand.

More expansive than either Andrews or Mrs. Trimmer is Charlotte Yonge’s “Nursery Books of the Eighteenth Century,” the first part of a three-part essay “Children’s Literature of the Last Century” published in Macmillan’s Magazine 20 (Jul-Sep 1869). Yonge’s legacy as a High Church Victorian writer for children has scared off modern readers, which is a shame.  “Nursery Books” is neither bland nor censorious but stuffed full of clear-sighted, affectionate commentary lacking in the other two authors.

She begins by poking a little fun at parents and critics with this self-evident observation that there is nothing new under the sun:

Each risen generation repeats to the rising one, that there was nothing like it in its departed childhood, and each mourns over the dissipation of mind created by the profusion of reading, till we are sometimes started to find that the same things were said to us that we are now saying to our children.

Descriptions of bits she remembers with pleasure from most of the books dot the essay.   She chuckles over the dilemma of “little Caroline, who insisted on taking  a country walk in the full fashionable dress of the period, including powdered hair, pale-green shoes with high heels, and the tightest possible stays,” a story adapted from Berquin’s L’ami des enfans by Richard Johnson in The Looking Glass for the Mind (1792).  In the discussion of Ann and Jane Taylor’s poetry for children she shares that “we never enter  Cavendish Square without recollection how little Ann and her mother were passing one day in that direction.”   The only it-narrative she really liked, Dorothy Kilner’s Life and Peraumbulation of a Mouse (1789), contained “a dialogue between two little girls in bed on the imaginary terrors of robbers, which is as good as anything we ever read.”

Probably writing fast without much preliminary fact checking, she made some real howlers. Johann David Wyss’s 1812 The Swiss Family Robinson [Der Schweizerische Robinson]  was incorrectly attributed to Joachim Heinrich Campe (1746-1818), the author of 1779-1780 Robinson the Younger [Robinson der jungere].   The slip is redeemed by this shrewd critique, which offers a little historical perspective, an amusing anecdotes, and a lively assessment:

It has been one of the greatest of favourites until Captain Marryat’s nautical criticisms cruelly disclosed its absurdities….No one but a German could have thought it practicable to land the whole family in a row of washing tubs nailed together between plants…but the book is extremely engaging…and we decidedly would prefer reading it at this moment than the rather characterless Masterman Ready by which Marryat superseded it.

This is her approach throughout.   Her discussion of the now unfamiliar Elements of Morality (1798), Mary Wollstonecraft’s adaptation of C. S. Salzmann, is quite insightful but also strikingly personal.   Not owning a copy herself as a girl, she learned of it from “older generations that had been nurtured thereupon and always regarded a reading of it as one of the pleasures of the houses where the ancestral copies still abode.”  The detail of exploring the library in someone else’s home is rather unusual.   Of the clergyman who rescued the little boy lost in the woods, she says slyly, “We suspect he was formal and prosy, but the noble art of skip carried us over all that.” Only someone with a vivid visual imagination could have recalled of the impression the plates–unaware that they were by William Blake–made upon her:

We well remember…the occasional felicity of studying there…a print of this unhappy being, on which we used to gaze with awed fascination [a boy who kicked a door and impaled his foot on a nail]); there was also a miser in a ragged garment, and a benevolent Jew, whose forms impressed themselves on our imagination before our tenth year, though what part they played in the story is so entirely forgotten that probably it was beyond the childish comprehension.

A standout is the discussion of the children’s books by Dissenters Dr. John Aikin, and his sister Mrs. Barbauld.  Although a devout Anglican who wrote in support of the Oxford Movement throughout her long career, Yonge largely avoided the treatment of religion in Evenings at Home.  Instead, she opens with a humorous anecdote about the difference between the French and English: “A French lady walks easily and gracefully, an Englishwoman always moves as if bent on hurrying somewhere.  There is a light, laughing good-humoured touch-and-go moral in L’Ami des Enfans, while every “Evening at Home” has its earnest purpose.”   Still, she sees much to praise in the prose: “We are struck by the perfect precision and polish of the language, even of the most simple, such as renders them almost as complete epigrams as Aesop’s fables, and contrasts with the slovenly writing of the present day.”   Without a warm heart, the beautiful style is not enough for Yonge: “For somehow there was little to love in these well-written books; they had a certain bright coldness which extends to all Aikinism, except perhaps to Mrs. Barbauld’s Prose Hymns…but judging by ourselves, we do not think they could ever have been very dear to anyone.”

As a historical critic, Charlotte Yonge proves to be very good company.  Unlike her predecessors, she expresses her feelings without put aside her analytic powers. When she zeros in on things that made deep impressions without knowing why as an adult, she provides excellent evidence about her reading experiences, an elusive subject that is quite difficult to document.   One of the things she does best is demonstrate why these former favorites did connect with children, because she remembers loving them herself.