Songs for the Nursery [Circa 1820]

Description

Songs for the Nursery  [Circa 1820]

Songs for the Nursery [Nursery songs] . Published by William Darton June 1818, 38 Holborn Hill. Printed by G.Smallfield, Hackney. (Possibly printed in 1820, copy in University of Oxford Library with 5 pages of adverts dated 1822. Square 16mo. Bound in a light green cloth with a label.  Rare edition. No title page, if it had one. But complete with 59 pages of text and five pages [One side and Two Leaves] of publishers adverts at rear. Illustrated with 24 engraved plates after William Marshall Craig, each one with the publishers name, W.Darton Junr. and dated 1818 along the lower margin. Of the 24 engravings, 10 are hand coloured. The colouring does not appear to be by a child but as coloured by the publisher. The hand coloured plates face the following pages: 5,6,7,9,10,11,12,13,14, with a touch of red on the plate facing page 31. Of the 110 Mother Goose rhymes included in this collection, 31 are identified by the Oxford dictionary of nursery rhymes as the first printed source. It includes many nursery rhymes still popular today such as “Jack and Jill,” Hushabye, Baby,” “Rain, rain go away,” “Pat a Cake,” “Hiccory, Diccory, Dock,” “Sing a Song of Sixpence,” plus others that have fallen by the cultural wayside. The cloth is worn and the spine has been strengthened professionally; Missing the title page [?] The frontis appears slightly smaller in width due to binding,one page of the advert at rear has had a corner tear repaired professionally; but all text is present and the last page is a little grubby. The text is generally clean with the odd mark. The spine has been repaired with hand stitching by a previous owner.A very acceptable book of an extremely rare item.

Size 135 x110mm [5.25 x 4.5 inches)

Item details

Notes:
The collation exactly matches that of the Tabart edition as seen on the ‘Internet Archive’ https://archive.org/details/songsfornursery00londiala/mode/2up

As the original label was lifting, the restorer was able to look at the original cloth underneath the label on the cover. The cloth was originally white with a thin blue design, very different to now, the white now appearing green and the blue design soften.

Darton Catalogue. check list : H1475. First published by Tabart and Co, in 1805 which was received with bad reviews. William Darton Junior acquired Tabart in 1811-12. W.Darton,Junr , republished the book and used the Tabart plates which had been re-engraved with the ‘W. Darton Jun’ address, 58 Holborn Hill, and dated 1818. [William Darton Senior died in in 1819.] The Darton family’s edition as stated in their book by Lawrence Darton ‘ The Darton’s’ had the original yellow wrappers as the title page as per usual. As the publishers advertise books published by William Darton, the adverts indicate the book was printed after 1819 when his father’ William Darton Senior’ died.

Darton’s printings were usually available in three states: without illustrations for sixpence, with illustrations for 1/6 and with hand-coloured illustrations for 2/6.

Songs for the Nursery (1805), one of the first four English nursery rhyme anthologies, was something of a classic by 1817.  The anonymous author of the Juvenile Review was rather displeased that such a “foolish” book should be so popular when it filled children’s minds with false ideas like dishes running away with spoons and old women flying as high as the moon.  Tabart the publisher paid no attention to her and when he closed the business in 1820, the Darton firm in Holborn Hill, then its successors Darton & Clark kept Songs in print until the mid-1860s. …. [Albeit with different wood engravings] 
A comment in Charles Lamb’s letter to Dorothy Wordsworth of June 2 1804 offers evidence that Songs was compiled by Eliza Fenwick, a aspiring novelist in the 1790s, who was struggling to support her family in the 1780s by writing children’s books and taking on  literary piece work ….Tabart took with the illustrations, which indicates that the traditional verse of the nursery was being taken more seriously than ever before. ….. It turns out to have been a well-known, versatile, well-connected artist, William Marshall Craig (d.1827). The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography states that Craig was considered one of the most distinguished designers of woodblocks from 1800 until his death.  ….We know that Tabart employed Craig because Marjorie Moon discovered  advertisements for Tabart’s six-penny series, “Tales for the Nursery,”  that credited the artist with the designs for the illustrations.  Some of the plates in the early editions as well as the ones recycled in  Tabart’s Collection of Popular Stories for the Nursery, were signed with Craig’s name as the “inventor.”

https://cotsen.blogs.princeton.edu/2020/03/curators-choice-songs-for-the-nursery-collected-from-the-works-of-the-most-renowned-poets/
Andrea Immel

Item details

Publisher: William Darton
Date: 1818
Place: London
Book ID: 60004407