Chapbooks

Although the term "chapbook" was not coined until the early nineteenth century, the term designates works of popular literature sold for a few pence, often by itinerant pedlars or "chapmen," which were in circulation from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.  They often contained short versions of romance, ballads, and popular tales such as Jack the Giant Killer and Tom Thumb usually illustrated with a few crude woodcuts. Books such as Robinson Crusoe and Don Quixote, The Fables of Aesop, and The Pilgrim's Progress were also abridged into chapbook form. Few chapbooks before the late eighteenth century were written with children in mind, but by 1800 chapbooks for children were being produced in some quantity.  These often contained nursery rhymes and narrated the "tale" or history of such figures as Mother Hubbard and Cock Robin. Many chapbooks were badly written, and they were often badly printed, but nonetheless they display a raw kind of energy and excitement.  They were the comic books of their day, and preserved, albeit often in a debased form, the imaginative literature of England at time when the ideological climate was hostile to the fantastic.

A chapbook entitled The Death and Burial of Cock Robin, ca. 1787.

 Chapbooks were generally printed on one sheet of paper folded into a single gathering.  At the time this chapbook was printed there were generally 24 pages.

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 A chapbook telling the adventures of Tom Thumb, ca. 1825.

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A chapbook illustrating a famous nursery rhyme - The House That Jack Built - based on the principle of accumulation. One more rhyme is added to each verse. Published ca. 1820.  This is an example of good woodcut design, barely an inch in diameter.

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 A chapbook telling the comic adventures of Mother Hubbard and her dog, published ca. 1820.  Mother Hubbard's face, cloak, and hat have been almost constant features of the rhyme's many illustrations

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A chapbook telling the history of Simple Simon, published ca. 1820

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Early chapbooks such as this one published in 1758 were probably not intended for children.  Reynard the Fox was a beast-epic current in medieval Europe. The woodcut shows Bruin the Bear, who had been sent to fetch Reynard to the king (a lion) to hear accusations against him, tricked into a honey trap.

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A chapbook published in 1783, with woodcuts by Thomas Bewick, purporting to be a "choice collection of fairy tales by Mother Goose."

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Pages from Jack the Giant Killer, a late chapbook published by Otley. The back page lists some of the other titles in the series. The woodcut from another chapbook published by J. G. Rusher of Banbury ca. 1840 shows Jack about to kill ,with a pickax, the giant who has fallen into the hole Jack had dug previously; it was used again and again in eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century chapbooks.  

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Pages from a late chapbook version of Robinson Crusoe, hand-colored, probably by children.

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During the nineteenth century printers issued chapbooks with no covers at all, sometimes simply as a folded but uncut sheet, without stitching.

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