Chapter II: The Rise of Children’s Books

_I wish Mrs. Marcet, the Right Honourable T. B. Macaulay, or any
other person possessing universal knowledge, would take a toy and
child’s emporium in hand, and explain to us all the geographical
and historical wonders it contains. That Noah’s ark, with its
varied contents--its leopards and lions, with glued pump-handled
tails; its light-blue elephants and ꓕ footed ducks--that ark
containing the cylindrical family of the patriarch--was fashioned
in Holland, most likely, by some kind pipe-smoking friends of youth
by the side of a slimy canal. A peasant in a Danubian pine-wood
carved that extraordinary nut-cracker, who was painted up at
Nuremberg afterwards in the costume of a hideous hussar. That
little fir lion, more like his roaring original than the lion at
Barnet, or the lion of Northumberland House, was cut by a Swiss
shepherd boy tending his goats on a mountain-side, where the
chamois were jumping about in their untanned leather. I have seen
a little Mahometan on the Etmeidan at Constantinople twiddling
about just such a whirligig as you may behold any day in the hands
of a small Parisian in the Tuileries Gardens. And as with the
toys, so with the toy books. They exist everywhere: there is no
calculating the distance through which the stories come to us, the
number of languages through which they have been filtered, or the
centuries during which they have been told. Many of them have been
narrated, almost in their present shape, for thousands of years
since, to little copper-coloured Sanscrit children, listening
to their mother under the palm-trees by the banks of the yellow
Jumna--their Brahmin mother, who softly narrated them through the
ring in her nose. The very same tale has been heard by the Northmen
Vikings as they lay on their shields on deck; and by Arabs couched
under the stars on the Syrian plains when the flocks were gathered
in and the mares were picketed by the tents. With regard to the
story of Cinderella, I have heard the late Thomas Hill say that he
remembered to have heard, two years before Richard Cœur de Lion
came back from Palestine, a Norman jongleur--but, in a word, there
is no end to the antiquity of these tales...._”--“_Michael Angelo
Titmarsh on Some Illustrated Children’s Books_,” in _Fraser’s
Magazine_ for April, 1846.