Category Archives: 19th century

Nursery Crime! Sparrow Tells All about Cock Robin Murder!

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Cock Robin, the tale of a murder without a motive  is one of the most famous English nursery rhymes and its text has been a showcase for many gifted artists.  Some very fine watercolors for the illustrations to a John Harris Cock Robin were up for grabs at the Sotheby’s New York December on-line auction of artwork for children’s books.  Harris, the successor to the Newbery firm, was a pioneering picture book publisher and the Cock Robin in the celebrated Cabinet of Amusement and Instruction series of the 1820s, is one of the most famous. The drawings in the Sotheby’s sale were not for this edition, but even so I was concerned they would catch more eyes than mine.  With a trove of nearly three hundred drawings for Harris children’s books in Cotsen, I was very keen to add them to the collection.  Cotsen turned out to be the only bidder, so the six drawings are safe in Firestone, thanks to the generous support of the Friends of the Princeton University Library.

After unpacking them, I went to the vault to reconfirm the attribution and discovered instead that the drawings were “not as described,” which is code in the  antiquarian book trade for “wrongly cataloged.”   The drawings were too lovely to return (to the right is the one of the pipe-puffing owl tolling the bell), so the only alternative was to cross my fingers and go in search of the book they did illustrate.  The mystery was unraveled quickly, thanks to three gems from the collection of Marjorie Moon, author of the Harris bibliography.

The drawings are for an 1808 Harris pamphlet that survives in just four copies:  The Tragi-comic History of the Burial of Cock Robin; with the Lamentation of Jenny Wren; the Sparrow’s Apprehension; and the Cuckoo’s Punishment.  The title page spread  is on the right below and the drawing for the frontispiece on the left.  Look closely and you’ll see that the engraver of the frontispiece edited out the blood pooling underneath the robin in the watercolor.

 

 

 

 

When I started matching up drawings with the passages they represent, it became clear that the Tragi-comic History was faithful in its fashion to both of the traditional nursery rhymes about the robin’s death and its marriage to the wren.  Take a second look at the title page spread.   The frontispiece depicts the grieving widow Jenny Wren, which is a departure from the death and burial of Cock Rbin where the wrens are the pall bearers and the dove chief mourner as the robin’s “love.”  On the other hand, Jenny’s role in the Tragi-comic History is consistent with the title page declaration that the pamphlet is a sequel to the Harris’s 1806 gay two-part retelling of the rhyme about the union of the robin and wren, The Happy Courtship, Merry Marriage and Pic-nic Dinner of Cock Robin and Jenny Wren.

The Tragi-comic History  departs from the prequel by the third stanza, when the birds “lug in” the sparrow to be punished for “his sin.”  Notice how the owl secures the cord around the sparrow’s neck with a stout staff.  (What bird has concealed itself in the hollow tree trunk to the right?)  Stanza four reveals that the author of TheTragi-comic History conflated the traditional rhyme of Cock Robin’s death and burial with the Harris retelling of the marriage and, more importantly, devised a water-tight alibi for the sparrow’s crime that exonerates him of accidental manslaughter.

The sparrow pleads for mercy, saying he has been unable to eat since “shooting in defence / Of Jenny Wren, Bob’s wife, / He’d sav’d her innocence, / But robb’d his friend of life.”  In order to understand exactly what happened, we have to backtrack to The Happy Courtship, Merry Marriage and Pic-nic Dinner.  Here is  Robin, sporting a very jaunty plumed hat, walking his blushing bride to church.

The happy couple exchange vows with Parson Rook presiding.

Friends of all species bring dainties to the feast and dog Tray’s offering is a bone with plenty of good meat for the picking.

The cuckoo, that “wicked elf,” disrupts the festivities by trying to tumble the bride.

Still inflamed by “her charms” in The Tragi-Comic History, the cuckoo had the audacity to visit Jenny in the nest and try to “seize a kiss” when he knew her husband was away.  Seeing the wren in distress, the sparrow, “aimed at Wantonness,/ But hit Fidelity,”   being a bad shot. Now that the birds know the whole story,  “on the culprit they fell,/ With talons, wings, and beaks,/ and drubb’d him very well,/ With scratches, slaps, and pecks.”  The climax of the poem (and prelude to the robin’s funeral) is the invention of The Tragi-comic History’s author.

A word about the artist is in order.  The drawings are attributed to Irish-born Victorian painter William Mulready(1786-1863).  In the nineteen teens, he was studying at the Royal Academy and partly support his young family of three children by designing illustrations for the children’s publishers Harris and William Godwin.  The drawings for The Tragi-comic History are in the same style as Mulready’s better-known ones for another fanciful poem about partying animals, William Roscoe’s The Butterfly’s Ball and Grasshopper’s Feast (1806).

Back to our story… After the sparrow is pardoned, the swallow delivers to every bird an invitation to the “obsequies of their dear worthy friend.”  Unfortunately, only one of the three illustrations for the burial are here: the one of the owl ringing the bell (shown above).  The invitation scene and the one of the robin’s body being borne to the grave with the jay, magpie, dove, and pigeon flying over it with the pall are missing.

The grieving widow returns to her “uncheering home” only to find herself subject to the unwelcome attentions of yet another suitor, this time the “vain and smart” Goldfinch all in scarlet and gold  (he had been attentive during the wedding).  Jenny Wren being no Lydia Bennett, neither his bold uniform nor his “sweet love-tales…could not gain her heart.”  

Thank heavens in the little republic of children’s literature, it is possible with some close reading to establish the facts and nothing but the facts about this famous nursery crime…

 

 

Marks in Books #6: A Mother’s Transcription of Baby Talk in The Imperial Alphabet

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The front wrapper of The Imperial Alphabet. It looks as if the wrong title label was slapped on. The Imperial Alphabet. London: Printed and sold by E. Marshall,[not before 1831]. (Cotsen 9108)

This week I found a most unusual picture book in the nineteenth-century English pamphlets: The Imperial Alphabet  (London: E. Marshall, not after 1831), which sounds as if it must be full of pictures of soldiers and flags and horses.  What the pamphlet offered its little readers was pretty standard fare: an alphabet of lower-case Roman letters, a rhyming alphabet that begins “A was an Apple.  Pray, have you not seen/  One that was striped with red and with green?” plus the “Numerical pastime,” aka the nursery rhyme “One two,/ Buckle my shoe.”

What makes The Imperial Alphabet  a remarkable survival is that it was used by a mother to record her little boy’s early attempts to talk.   She didn’t use the blank pages as a diary, as is so often the case.  Instead she seems to have showed him the pictures, asked him “What is this?” and recorded the actual pronunciation of his words and translation, when appropriate, on the plates of the book.  The note at the head of the title page “Watling 17th Oct. 1831” suggests when and where the exercise took place, but there are Watling Streets in London, Dublin, and St. Albans, so we can’t be sure where mother and son were living at the time.

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Over the frontispiece is written, “My darling child John Archibald’s way of explaining all the pictures,” so she must have been Mrs. Archibald.  The frontispiece is a version of an image of instruction that appeared in countless editions of William Lily’s Latin grammar.  Below the tree of knowledge are little John’s gurglings, “Pitty Tee.  Baw!  Too Baw!”  If his mother hadn’t indicated that “baw” was “boy,” I would have guessed John was referring to the apples on the ground, which look remarkably like balls decorated with letters of the alphabet.   The title page vignette of the bird prompted, “Gake Doodle Doo” or “Great Doodle Doo” which in John-speak meant “Bird.”   It’s a lark, not a rooster, and the cut dates back to the 1750s, where it appeared in the Lilliputian Magazine, the first children’s periodical published by John Newbery.

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All the subjects on the plate for Apple to Fish are familiar objects, but some of John’s words for them need interpretation.    “Baa fy” for “butterfly” is easy, but  “daidy” in “Daidy. Apply” is obscure, as is “Bill doo” over “Dog.”  In 1831, “moo-cow milk” suggests that the phrase was well-established as baby talk.  John couldn’t manage the “sh” at the end of “Fish,”  but he identified “Egg” as something he father liked to eat: “Papa Yoig.”

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The second plate is a mixture of animals and things and John identified them all. “Goke” for “goat,” “Baa Baa Feep” for “lamb,” and  “moc” for “mouse.”   Could “Poo yay” is an attempt to say the name of a pet rabbit instead of “hare.”  It surely isn’t “Puss,” which was a synonym for a rabbit or hare.  John knew  that the “Ink-Stand” was off limits to him: “Ing no tuss.”  “Kite” seems to have elicited an excited response from him: “Mimi kiye,” which meant “Mikey’s kite.”  Mikey could have been a sibling or a neighbor.

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The words on the plate for the letters T through Z seem to have given John some trouble.  For example, he couldn’t pronounce the final “p” in “Top.”   The picture of a traditional head yoke seems to have thrown him for a loop.  The two bows, which go over the heads of the team of oxen, looked like whips (“Fipp”) to him.   Mama was able to construe “Stupid (or striped) Donkey” from “Tupie Nia” but she didn’t seem to know any more than I do what “Tu pa” meant with reference to the picture of the urn.    “Watch” and “Xerxes” were two other things John readily associated with his father.

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The final engraved plate had other family associations for John.  “Queen” was of course his mama, while “Nag” had to be her horse (I wonder if he was prompted in some way).   A favorite dish “appa pa” appeared above “Robin,” which he identified as “Datey Ba.”  Only his mother could have known he was trying to say “Jane’s bird.”  Song birds were often kept as pets by girls, so Jane may have been another sibling.vignettepage23a

John knew exactly what the final illustration was: the chicken standing by the edge of the pond was “Doodle doo waa waa.”  Who knew babies in the early nineteenth-century had the same problem saying “water” as babies do now?  (“Moo-cow” is in the Oxford English Dictionary, but not this sense of “waa waa.”)  The ducks he passed over.

Did Mrs. Archibald have any reason to have done this besides being amazed by anything her little man did?  If she took the education of her children seriously, then she probably was familiar with the influential treatise Practical Education (1798) by Maria Edgeworth and her father Richard.  The father-daughter collaborators did indeed have plenty of hands-on experience with children: Richard fathered upon four wives twenty-two children, thirteen of whom survived; Maria, the eldest of his daughters, was intimately involved in bringing up her many half-sisters and brothers.

The Edgeworths recommended that mothers imitate Richard’s first wife Honora, who kept a notebook of “all the trifling things which mark the progress of the mind in childhood” because education as an “experimental science” would progress through observation rather than theory.   The Imperial Alphabet was a kind of register of John’s progress just like Honora Edgeworth’s notebooks.  Maybe Mrs. Archibald used others of John’s books the same way, but it is more likely that the normal demands of motherhood were too great to allow her to continue.  After all, how many baby books are completely filled in, even for the first arrival to the family?  That this copy of The Imperial Alphabet was not discarded as in substandard condition is a tribute to the acuity of the bookseller who offered it to Mr. Cotsen.  They both realized that all the writing inside it was what made it special.

The entire book has been digitized and can be seen here: