The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume XI. The Period of the French Revolution.
§ 4. Hell-fire tales
These educational and semi-educational books have been mentioned because, in early periods, they possessed the importance conferred by isolation. The effect of that isolation is seen when, in more authentic beginnings of children’s literature, “good Godly books” first emerge. The new feature is a natural by-product of the national life. The end of religious persecution in its more virulent forms, the Elizabethan diffusion of knowledge and enthusiasm, the Jacobean growth of style, the puritan fierce flame of morality, the vast increase in the activity of the press—all helped to make the child-mind, not, perhaps, a centre of intensive cultivation, but, at least, not a fallow field. But, since all previous efforts (except the decayed and, so to speak, illegally acquired romances, which will be dealt with when chapbooks are considered) had been, more or less, more rather than less, didactic, the new product was, also, didactic. Its novelty lay in the fact that it was not a text-book. It was purely moral, not forensic nor technical. It was a grim affair, with few literary merits. Hell-fire was its chief theme; anything might turn out to be a faggot for the conflagration of wicked little souls. More than a century later, Mrs. Sherwood was influenced by the same obsession. The kingdom of heaven might be of children; but children were always dreadfully in jeopardy of another fate.
The best vision of these grisly performances is to be seen in one of them. Thomas White, minister of the gospel, in A Little Book for Little Children (1720)—a volume of brief moral addresses—recommends his audience to read
The religious works catalogued by White as suited to the young were adult or semi-adult in purpose. More definitely juvenile was the anonymous Young Man’s Calling … a Serious and Compassionate Address to all Young Persons to remember their Creator in the days of their Youth (1685). The author of a great part of it was, probably, Samuel Crossman, whose initials are at the end of the preface. “Richard Burton” (i.e., Nathaniel Crouch) wrote the residue. An eighth edition appeared in 1725, so the book was clearly in demand. Crossman outdoes White in his examples of martyrdom; his homilies, also, are longer, but not at all more valuable or enduring. Like White, he was vigorously protestant. Some Divine Poems—passably good hymns—were included in the final pages. Among the advertisements at the end is one of Winter Evening Entertainments. This, perhaps—one work alone excepted—is the nearest approach, before the eighteenth century, to a child’s book in the modern sense.