In my previous post, I looked at two books for children, published by two different authors, both featuring a spoiled young West Indian heiress coming to England and correcting her behaviour after receiving judicious instruction from her host family. These two books are examples of a then-popular genre for children's books, which combined morally improving narratives with inset fables, scientific discourses, dialogue, and history lectures. As I mentioned, a book by Thomas Day, Sandford and Merton, was an outstandingly popular exemplar of this genre. 
​   According to scholar ​Peter Rowland, Sandford and Merton was published in three volumes in 1783, 1786 and 1789 and quickly gained such popularity that “the next instalment was eagerly and impatiently awaited by a legion of small readers.” The book was reprinted for over a hundred years but it is now largely forgotten.
     As Rowland describes the premise, "rebellious Tommy Merton, the spoilt son of a wealthy plantation owner from Jamaica, and his friend Harry Sandford, the poor but worthy son of a local farmer, are patiently educated by the Reverend Mr. Barlow... Master Tommy is brought, by precept and self-discovery, to see the error of this ways. A host of interpolated stories [are included], providing introductions to ancient history, astronomy, biology, science, exploration and geography” to which I would add the book includes moral fables in which kindness is always rewarded and cruelty is punished.
    Rowland points out that Thomas Day based Sandford and Merton on the educational philosophies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau; for example, Tommy’s tutor starts teaching him to read only after Tommy himself requests to be taught. Letting the child take the lead seems rather peculiar when we consider that it was routine to beat an education into boys at this time. Reverend Barlow is nothing like the typical switch-wielding schoolmaster, and many school boys must have wished they could have been educated along the lines depicted in Sandford and Merton.

     I recently received a digital copy of a rare and obscure children’s book by Eliza Kirkham Mathews (EKM), generously supplied to me by the University of Iowa. Now that I have a copy of The West Indian, I think I have succeeded in tracking down all of EKM’s books, so I can put together a definitive list of attributions and clear up some mistaken attributions.
     The West Indian was published in 1821 in Derby and attributed to “Mrs. C. Mathews,” 19 years after EKM's death. The most logical explanation for the appearance of this title after EKM's death in 1802 is that her husband Charles sought out publishers for the manuscripts Eliza left behind--even though he and his second wife had no great opinion of her writing abilities. The second Mrs. Mathews was also an author who compiled and wrote her husband's memoir after his death. Her effusive, breezy style is very different from EKM's. ​Anne Jackson Mathews said of her predecessor: “She knew nothing of society or of the world. Her reading had been slender, and confined to the generally mawkish style of the novels of that day. From them she gave faint impressions of nature; and no publisher thought them worth much more than the cost of printing. Disappointment followed disappointment.”
    I like to think Charles Mathews worked to find publishers for EKM’s manuscripts out of affection and respect for her, knowing that it would have been something that she wanted.

    On my trip to England this past summer, I had the privilege of spending a morning researching some old books at the Weston library at Oxford—books which, so far as I know, are unique, in that Oxford is the only library in the world that has a copy. These particular books are not Gutenberg bibles by any means—they are forgotten publications of the Regency era, the kind of books offered in subscription libraries or at bookstores for the average reading public. There is a quiet pleasure in stepping into the reading room at an Oxford library and being entrusted with a book more than two hundred years old that has been slumbering in an archive for who knows how long, and being allowed to open and read it.
     One of the books I examined was a book for children written by William Helme, the schoolteacher husband of the hard-working author Elizabeth Helme. His book is a typical example of the children’s literature of the day, and that’s why I want to talk about it—because it is so typical. It is a compilation of material plagiarized (as we would call it today) from authors of natural history, strung together with a narrative about some children and the wise adult who instructs them and judiciously corrects their faults. Other examples of children’s literature of this type discussed in this blog can be found here and also here. Authors of this type of book did not hold back on their opinions about social issues, as we will see.