I had fun the other month looking at Newbery and children’s literature. When moving house, my books were sadly orphaned from me so I had to resort to my Kindle. Having prepared for this by mooching around Project Gutenberg, especially the ‘anonymous’ section. A lot of these listed anonymous works ended up being children’s books printed in the first decades of the nineteenth century, which eighteenth century scholars have annexed for themselves.
Here are mini-reviews of two animal stories.
Published in 1815 by Whittingham and Arliss in Paternoster Row, The Surprising and Singular Adventures of a Hen as Related by Herself to Her Family of Chickens, purports to be the life story of a fowl.
This book is doubly anonymous, as neither the actual writer, nor the hen of the title have a name. She’s aware that “all animals write their lives nowadays”, and it certainly was a thing then, but she feels she still has a story to contribute. The chief thing the hen brings to the animal tale (way in advance of Watership Down and The Animals of Farthing Wood) is gore and misery.
Her mother is killed in the first page. Her two brothers die starvation soon after and then the rest of her nest-mates. She is, however, rescued by a little girl and made a pet of. A kindly chicken calls in to her and offers to teach her to ‘scratch for myself’ but our hen doesn’t see much use in that, as her every whim is catered to. It’s quite a culture shock then, when she is forced out into the farmyard with the other chickens.
One night, in the coop, a fox gets in. The elderly hen still shudders at this memory and asks, “how can I describe the horrors of that bloody scene?” It’s genuinely quite chilling when the chickens realise the savage monster in their midst. She survives that and is passed about, before being stolen by some children who decide to make a cock-shy of her. This was an entertainment where a chicken (usually a cock) was tied to a post and people paid money to throw sticks at it until the cock died.
Spared from this horrible fate, she lives with a lovely young boy, who takes her to his boarding school. The other boys find his attachment to the fowl rather strange and laugh at him for it. Then, two boys read about when Diogenes plucked a hen and declared it Plato’s man and decide to do that to our hero-hen. So they pluck her alive and she describes the pain and blood she endured. The naked hen thrown at the boy, he takes her back to his house where his sister makes her well.
Unfortunately for the hen, the family have dinner guests and one is a bit of a prankster. When asked to bring a dish to a sharing lunch, he decides he wants something with a little flair and bakes a pie crust and puts the hen in it so she’ll burst out at the right moment. He also shoves her up a chimney so she again bursts out and frightens everyone into thinking she’s a ghost.
The family then go on holiday and the servants, not knowing that she is the favoured hen, choose to fatten her up. She describes the boredom of sitting in the narrow space with nothing to do but eat and the discomfort of her rapidly swelling body, so much so she looks “forward to the time when the murderer’s knife would end my miseries.” cLuckily she is rescued and gets to live the rest of her life in peace… but if this story teaches a reader anything, it’s that they wouldn’t want to be a Regency era chicken. Though I suppose chickens have it hard in every era of humanity.
This book had a couple of other little pieces to bulk it out. There was a naff analogy called Pity, which described what an anthropomorphised version of that emotion would be. There was a little story called The Drunkard, in which a king played a Christopher Sly type trick on a drunk man.
Most peculiar of all was a little playlet called Prince Arthur and Hubert. In this scene, the nephew of Bad King John is to have his eyes stabbed out by an old friend called Hubert. He begins by simple pleading;
Arth: Will you burn out both my eyes?
Hub: I must and will.
Then he appeals to Hubert’s humanity, to their shared history together, then by trying to evoke empathy in Hubert by reminding him how irritating it is when a fly comes into your eye, and how much more it would sting to have them burnt out. Hubert comes close to doing it but eventually relents and the two go off together as outlaws.
Of course, this little play has never been performed professionally, but I wonder how many nursery performances of this strange little piece were held up and down the country? I can certainly imagine the smug little git who wanted to play Arthur.
The History of a Tame Robin is an anonymous work printed in 1817 by Darton, Harvey and Darton at 55 Gracechurch Street. It tells the story of a tame robin who is passed from owner to owner and valued by many of them for his tame nature and his unusual song. At one point he goes by the name of Bob, but his ‘real’ name is never given.
What’s most interesting about this book is the way it’s a bit of a throwback, both structurally and tonally. It adopts the latinate, ‘elegant’ tone of a classic Augustan novel with the structure of a bildungsroman, interpolated story included.
When the robin is born, his mother is described as enjoying the “arduous, though pleasing office of maternal tenderness” - and the book is full of these stiff, slightly roundabout phrases, rarely indulging in the more direct address of a classic Grub Street production or the simplicity of later works.
In terms of happenings, the robin is essentially moved from one owner to another. Unlike the poor hen in The Surprising and Singular Adventures of a Hen as Related by Herself to Her Family of Chickens, our robin isn’t ever in much real peril and the people he meets are mostly those who have an “affection toward the feathered tribe.” Occasionally, a new owner may be a little more selfish than others he’s met, or view him more as a commercial opportunity than a beloved pet, but things never really get bad for him.
The goldfinch, in the little interpolated tale, does have a few harsher experiences than the robin but is not subjected to the real cruelties that happened to goldfinches at the time. She’s never put in a cage with a heated bottom to keep her perpetually singing, for example.
There are two sudden cases of penury resulting from houses being burnt down, but one of these is simply observed (and used as an example to show the charitable nature of his kind owner) and another is back-story for a different poor, but kind owner.
Everything comes back to it’s beginning, with an ending which is pleasant and elegant - and that’s the main element of this book. It may not be a litany of pain and destruction, like the poor hen, but it is a perfectly well made eighteenth century novel in miniature, and there’s a fair amount to enjoy in that.
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