From Instruction to Delight: An Anthology of Children's Literature to 1850

William Blackburn is a professor of English at the University of
Calgary.

A sound old Chinese proverb compares pointless activity to “putting legs on a snake.” It is a melancholy fact that many academic anthologies are at least as pointless as the appendages of the snake: monuments of busy work, a tribute to the industry and paranoia of their harassed compilers. It is a happy fact that From Instruction to Delight is a glorious exception to this iron rule.

Students of children’s literature have long known that Horace’s dictum — “Aut prodesse volunt aut delectare poetae” (“Poets seek either to instruct or delight”) — is one useful way of getting at the evolution of that literature. Broadly speaking, one can say that early children’s literature prizes instruction above delight; children’s literature, as we think of it today, is the product of a long struggle in which the child’s right to delight in books gradually and precariously established itself. From Instruction to Delight charts the course of that struggle in most useful detail.

This anthology offers a representative selection of children’s literature in England from 1000 to 1850. Here is God’s plenty: slices of the courtesy-books; swatches of hornbooks and the New England Primer; pieces of the chapbooks, of Janeway, of Bunyan, of Newberry; a reasonable sample of the rational moralists of the eighteenth century and finally of the Victorian harbingers of the Golden Age — the age when instruction and delight finally met in indissoluble and apocalyptic union.

Here are bits of many books known largely by name and reputation, and others snatched from oblivion. From Instruction to Delight exhibits a variety of literary forms and a wealth of illustration; it is an anthology that splendidly illustrates the historical richness of children’s literature. Of inevitable interest to scholars and historians, this volume is also eminently readable and will richly repay the attention of anyone interested in the subject of children’s literature. Gaudeamus igitur!