CHAP-BOOKS.*
Tins is a curious book, and must have cost the compiler no small amount of labour. With the literature of the last cen- Char-Booke of the Eighteenth Century, with Pawinitilas, Nato, and Introduction. By John Ashton. London : Chatto and Windt's. 1832, Mother Shipion. A, Collection of the Earliest Editions 01 her Prophecies, With an Introduction. Manchester Heywood and Son.
tury most men of culture are familiar; but the Chap-Books of the age which found a ready sale through the country are known to few readers. We do not forget that certain popular writers—Swift and Goldsmith, for example—wrote a number of pieces, which were printed as broadsides and hawked about the street. No one knew better than Swift how to catch the ear of the common people, and in prose or rhyme he was equally success- ful. In a different way, Goldsmith also wrote for the people. The author of the Vicar of Wakefield was, in Godwin's judgment, the author of Goody Two Shoes, and we know that, as a youth at college, he would write street ballads, sell them for five shillings apiece, and steal out at night to hear them sung. Goody Two Shoes—which Charles Lamb lamented as almost out of print —is not in Mr. Ashton's collection, and therefore the omis- sion of this incident in Goldsmith's life may be excused; but the exciting adventures of Tom Hickathrift are inserted, and yet he forgets to state that Thackoray claimed this capital story for Fielding. Lovers of literature will remember, too, that Cowper was also a friend of the Chapmen, and that long before John Gilpin's famous feat of horsemanship was known to every child in the country, he had produced several half- penny ballads, some of which, as he tells us, "had the honour to be popular."
The chap-books collected and described by Mr. Ashton in this volume appealed, it is probable, to the lowest class of readers; but considering the state of education in the country in the reigns of Anne and of the Georges, that class could not have included the lowest order of the people. These books, says Mr. Ashton, " are the relics of a happily past age, one which can never return, and we, in this our day of cheap, plentiful, and good literature ; can hardly conceive a time when in the major part of this country, and to the larger portion of its population, these little chap- books were nearly the only mental pabulum offered ;" and he adds that they help us to gauge the intellectual capacity of the lower and lower-middle classes of the last century. To some extent, they do this, no doubt, but the test is an uncer- tain one. We do not know how far they found acceptance with the lower-middle classes, and we do know that, especially in the latter half of the period, there was a fair share of literature in circulation at once wholesome and popular. No comparison, indeed, can be made between the two eras. The mass of good and "goody " books and tracts poured over the land in our time by the agency of societies or individuals is a phenomenon which would have astonished Wesley, who was himself a pioneer in this pious labour. It is impossible, too, to compute the ser- vice rendered to popular education by such men as Charles Knight and William and Robert Chambers. Everybody reads now-a-days, and among the educated classes literature of a really high stamp is enjoyed to an extent unknown in the last century. And the best writers of the age have so raised the tone of popular literature, that much which was highly acceptable to our forefathers is alien to the taste of modern readers. What, for instance, can be more striking from this point of view than the contrast between such novelists as Scott, Dickens, and George Eliot, and their predecessors, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne P Even Richardson, whose Pamela was recommended from the pulpit by a Bishop, rewards the heroine of that tale by marrying her to the man who had unsuccessfully attempted her seduction ; and Defoe, who wrote one immortal book known to every reader in " Greater Britain," produced others which, like Moll Flanders, proclaim on their title-pages the exceeding grossness of the time. .
The coarseness of the eighteenth century, especially of its earlier half, is seen most conspicuously, with two or three noble exceptions, inits greatest writers ; and perhaps the worst offender is Swift. The literature of that age, however, affords a curious contradiction. Miss Wedgwood, in her interesting book on Wesley, observes that "the eighteenth century presents us with a picture of vice and irreligion in the land such as can hardly have been exceeded since it was a Christian country." The statement may be open to question, but when she adds that, on the other hand, literature was then far more distinctly moral than it is now, she has strong grounds for the assertion. Every writer was expected to point a moral. The moral was oftentimes a very bad one, but• something of the sort was generally attempted, and there are ample indications of this purpose in the chap-books collected in this volume. Thus the " History of Joseph and his Brethren," in rhyme, the first story in the selection, is intended to be edifying ; it is certainly very
comical, especially in the pictorial illustrations of Joseph's family—tiny pigmies, all of them ; while Joseph, risen to a great estate, has a bulk equal to his fortunes. Then we have" A Terrible and Seasonable Warning to Young Men," being the narrative of a young man who, after living a loose life, met the Devil " at the Cock and Lyon, in King Street," who told him he should never want for money. However, he was per- suaded to throw the money away, upon which " he was suddenly taken in a strange manner," and was fain to send for ministers to pray with him, which they do, as we see, kneeling together, like little children, on the bed. Of the truth of this affecting tale there could be no question, for did not the young man, Alfred Joiner by name, live in Shakesby's Walks, in Shadwell ; and was ho not, when the story was printed, "lying at his mother's house P" Here, too, is the famous" History of Dr. John Faustus," of which Mr. Ashton observes, with incontrovertible truth, that" there is very little similarity between this history and Goethe's beautiful drama." It is a story devoid of imagination, and Faustus must have been a fool, indeed, to have sold himself to the Devil in order that he might play the silly tricks recorded of him in the chap-book. However, there is a moral even here, apart from the Doctor's unhappy end, for he has a dream of hell, and sees thousands of shopkeepers, some of whom he had known, tormented for defrauding and cheating their customers. "Timely Warnings to Sinners," given with the utmost particularity of name and date, often formed the subjects of this literature for the people. Thus we read how two men, Nicholas Newsom and David Higham by name, drinking in a public-house in Dud- ley on Thursday, the 5th day of March, 1761, laid a wager "whether could swear the most blasphemous oaths," how they were "struck deaf and dumb, with their tongues hanging out of their mouths," and how a sermon was preached on the occasion by the Rev. Dr. Smith. There are edifying ghost-stories also, one of which relates that a beautiful young lady, having sold herself to the Devil, to revenge herself on her false lover, carried him away in the night in a flame of fire. The moral of Mother Bunch's receipts for girls to get husbands is not obvious, unless like the moral of a fable, it must be looked for at the end of the book, where you may see a touching representation of the wise woman's funeral ;--
" Thus all her art at length could not her save
From Death's dire stroke and mould'ring in the grave."
Mr. Ashton might with advantage have devoted more space to Mother Shipton, who is dismissed by him in the briefest way. In the introduction to the little volume before us on the life and strange prophecies of this Yorkshire celebrity, we are told that for 140 years edition after edition has been issued from the press of her oracular sayings, yet so little is known about her that one account gives the year 1483 as the date of her birth, while according to another tradition she died in 1651. Several of her so-called prophecies are the inventions of modern writers, and one of them we owe to Praed. The author of a brochure entitled Mother Shipton Investigated conjectured that her hooked nose, turned-up chin, and peaked cap, "as shown in the picture on the edition of the prophecies issued in 1663, became gradually transformed into the figure of Punch." Several of the "mar- vellous strange" stories told of the Mother remind us of the freaks of Spiritualists; others are extremely coarse, and unworthy of representation iu a modern dress. " Children," said Johnson, " do not like stories that are childish, but such as stir their imagi- nation," and this good end is amply achieved by " Guy, Earl of Warwick," " Jack the Giant Killer," " Thomas Hickathrift," the " Babes in the Wood," " Sir Richard Whittington," and many another pleasant story in verse and prose. The style of the tales is generally simple, but sometimes the writer is ambitious, and then we come upon such phrases as " Guy clad himself again in Belona's livery," and " the golden trumpets sounded with great joy and triumph, and the stately, pampered steeds prance over the ground." " Sir Bevis of Southampton" is not, we believe, a favourite with children, and certainly he does not deserve his title of a noble knight. It is some excuse for him that he had a wicked mother, and it is to his credit that, on being taunted for his religion by sixty Saracens, he encoun- tered and slew them all ; but ho should not have eloped with another man's wife, neither ought he, perhaps, to have boiled his father's murderer in a cauldron of pitch and brimstone, "which treatment had such an effect on the mother of Sir Bevis, that she threw herself from the top of her castle and broke her neck." The pious Sir Bevis, after slaying lions and dragons, killing men by the thousand, and converting a kingdom to Christianity, fell sick at last, and died the same day as his wife, a pleasing arrangement, familiar to the readers of these heroic tales. Some of the stories deal, on the contrary, with the common-place incidents which Defoe loved so well to describe, and the narratives of vulgar criminals and vulgar crimes, like some publications of our own day, catered to coarse tastes.
Mr. Ashton deserves our thanks for a volume which is enter- taining, amusing, and possibly instructive. In many instances, he gives only the titles of the Chap-Books, which are sufficiently suggestive ; sometimes he prints the entire narrative, but the quaint fac-similes inserted on nearly every page of the volume form its most attractive feature. Some of the woodcuts are allowed to do duty more than once, and to illustrate different stories. We may remark, in conclusion, that the compiler is scarcely consistent in observing that the chap-book proper did not exist before 1700, while admitting that collections of ballads " equally come under the category of Chap-Books."
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