The cover and a page from a simplified version of Janeway's Token, published in London in 1830 by the Religious Tract Society.
Puritan Literature for Children
The cover and a page from a simplified version of Janeway's Token, published
in London in 1830 by the Religious Tract Society.
According to Harvey Darton, the Puritans produced the first children's
books in England - that is, books not intended to be used in school, but for
leisure reading. Relying on a dour pedagogy, Janeway's A Token For Children,
first published in 1672 and reprinted well into the middle of the nineteenth
century, leads its readers through a gallery of terrifying death-bed scenes.
Darton however says that the woodcuts were clearly expected to have
aesthetic value in showing, for example, a child without terror contemplating a
corpse in a coffin. John Bunyan's originally unillustrated Divine Emblems
(1686) uses poems to draw spiritual lessons from homely (and sometimes odd)
objects such as a top, stinking breath, or an hourglass. The verses of Issac
Watts' Divine Songs (1715) were composed of easy, often pretty lines, which gave
more emphasis to praise and thankfulness as suitable religious emotions for a
child, and displayed a gentleness new for his time, though the Puritan emphasis
on the innate wickedness of children is still evident
From an edition of Bunyan's Divine Emblems published in 1791. The
emblem of the hourglass can also be found in the New England Primer.
Two pages from Watts' Divine Songs illustrated by Thomas Bewick (1810).
Two of these "moral songs" had the misfortune of being turned
into infant-school recitation pieces which were later parodied by Lewis Carroll
("The Sluggard" and "Against Idleness and Mischief."
Notice the play of light on the canopy of the bed and the use of
perspective.
