By Ralph Bergengren

ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS OF TITLE PAGES FROM THE HARVARD UNIVERSITY COLLECTION

EARLY in the seventeenth century there was born in England, in very humble circumstances, a popular literary epoch that survived well into the first quarter of the nineteenth, and has now come finally to rest in such chapbook collections as those of the British Museum and our own Harvard College Library. Without that useful person, the collector, scarcely an original specimen of this once popular literature would probably now be in existence, although in "Jack and His Giants" and in "Dick Whittington and His Cat," to say nothing of many other nursery favorites, one would still find it difficult to avoid a passing acquaintance with some of its most interesting figures. Taken as a whole, however, it was the little brother of modern popular writing in very many branches, nowadays most nearly approximated by the dime novel which delights the twentieth century messenger or elevator boy, or by the "dream books" and "fortune tellers" that still hold an appreciable number of kitchen audiences; readers of one class would doubtless still find pleasure in the adventures of "Captain Hind, the Great Robber of England," nor would those of the other long hesitate to accept the authority of "Mother Bunch" on all questions pertaining to the romantic affections.

These small audiences are all that remain of a vaster audience, the entire rank and file of the British nation, that once absorbed the chapbooks in such countless numbers that to-day the great collections of the world contain very few duplicates. A superficial examination of these collections, either at the British Museum or on the shelves of this department of the Harvard Library, would find a great many apparent duplicates; but a closer inspection would show different imprints and reveal the fact that not only did one absurd illustration do duty for many different stories, but practically every story was printed and reprinted almost indefinitely. The sum total must therefore have been quite incalculable and it is known that the publishers amassed fortunes that compare favorably with the financial returns of modern popular publishing. Modern chapbook publishing is a different matter, the modern chapbook comparing with its original only in point of size and neither in intention, character, nor audience; the older chapbook, frankly published for the amusement of the masses, was much more worthy of respectful consideration. As for the "first cause" that called the chapbook into existence—namely a desire for cheap and amusing reading on the part of great numbers of human beings—the Sunday supplement of the daily newspaper now fulfils the same requirements, and fulfils them, with a few familiar exceptions, on a much higher level of refinement, barring the crude vulgarities of its page of humor.

Whether the American or English collection of these waifs of a past popular literature is the better — and in the case of material in which there are so few actual duplicates any collection may righteously claim the distinction of being unique — is a mooted question, but the American collection at Cambridge is unquestionably the better arranged and more readily accessible. It includes between 2,000 and 3,OOO individual publications, the bulk of them found in such collections as the Gibson Craig, the two Boswell collections and the Ritson collection, and the remainder coming from various sources, many of them picked up from time to time in the gradual bringing together at Harvard of what is undoubtedly the greatest present holding of miscellaneous folk-lore. Without attempting to cover this remarkable collection as a whole, one may find in its latest, and from one point of view most important, addition an intelligently representative sample of practically the whole body of this peculiar literature taken in its simplest expression and at a time when the greater number of its authors were modestly anonymous; in its broadest aspect the volumes, always small, were of various sizes, and reprinted even such imperishable writings as Pope's "Essay on Man" or an occasional play of Shakespeare's. This recent addition is the chapbook collection of no less a person than James Boswell, bound together in three small volumes with the descriptive title "Curious Productions," and with an autograph note by the great biographer.

"Having when a boy," wrote Boswell, "been much interested with 'Jack the Giant Killer' and such little story books, I have always retained a kind of affection for them, as they recall my early days. I went to the printing office in Bow Churchyard and bought this collection and had it bound up with the title of 'Curious Productions.' I shall certainly, some time or other, write a little story book in the style of these. It will not be an easy task for me, it will require much nature and simplicity and a great acquaintance with the humors and traditions of the English common people. I shall be happy to succeed, for he who pleases children will be remembered with pleasure by men."

Boswell's collection, which now stands side by side with several other volumes, each containing a dozen or more English chapbooks that were long supposed to have been collected by the same hand, but are now believed to have been brought together by his son, the younger Boswell, contains some 85 chapbooks so well selected as to suggest the thought that the collector, who probably did no more than purchase all the chapbooks that the printer had in stock at the time of his visit, might perhaps have intended to make the results of his labor representative as well as "curious." Now more than literally worth their weight in gold the volumes probably cost Johnson's friend and biographer something less than the price of having them bound together, and the entire collection was made in 1763 in the printing office in Bow Churchyard, then the principal London factory for chapbook publication.

The English chapbooks, current at the time when Boswell made his pilgrimage to Bow Churchyard, have been roughly classed as religious, diabolical, supernatural, superstitious, romantic, humorous, legendary, historical, biographical and criminal, — as already suggested, they attempted much the same task of meeting all degrees of the popular taste that now devolves upon the Sunday editor. Under these subdivisions appear an inexhaustible list of romances, dream books, jest books, riddle books, histories, tales, legends, garlands of songs and verses and miscellaneous what-not printed in small 16 or 24-page pamphlets and adorned with the crudest imaginable wood-cuts. They were distributed in the eighteenth century by the Chapman or travelling pedler, who, like Autolycus in the "Winter's Tale," carried them from village to village with his other merchandise; whose reputation was far from being admirable — and from whom later generations have derived the word chapbook. Printed on cheap paper and obviously submitted to the hardest usage that could befall a book their life was necessarily precarious; and it would have been more so except for the collectors, whose names have sometimes given the chapbooks of their own collections a further and extraneous interest. Pepys, for example, as great a biographer of himself as Boswell was of Johnson, had his own chapbook collection, and when "my wife and I did number all the books in my closet, and took a list of their names, which pleases me mightily, and is a jobb I wanted much to have done," there were probably a certain number of chapbooks included within the scope of their domestic activities. In its own degree it is something of a victory for the Harvard Library that both of the Boswell collections are now domiciled on this side of the water.

In the collection made by the elder Boswell the "History of Jack and the Giants" finds naturally the place of honor at the beginning of the first bound volume. The curious reader easily recognizes this Jack as an old acquaintance, although perhaps surprised to find him, on occasion, travelling in jovial company with the son of King Arthur, and neither of them supplied with ready pocket money — a condition that hardly suits one's preconceived notion of princely finances in the days of the Round Table. Except for the nursery — and even from the nursery there are persons so lacking in a sense of the humor of such a position that they would fain banish the Giants on the trumped-up charge of bearing false testimony — Jack's famous giants are no longer vital figures in literature, nor can we get even a mild tremor at the grim possibility that any one of them has merely

"Gone to get his brother, who
Will kill and likewise torture you."

But in the giant that was, the genuine Jack's giant who "to terrify him told that men's hearts were his favorite diet, which, he said, he most commonly eat with pepper and vinegar," it is still interesting to note a touch of realism that hardly lingers in modern nursery versions. Of the eighty-odd pamphlet volumes that follow, many of the title-pages are, after the fashion of the time, little less than spectacular digests of the attractive contents. There is "the Compendious Record of the Merry Life and mad Exploits of Captain James Hind, the Great Robber of England. Together with the close of all at Worcester, where he was drawn, hanged and quartered for High Treason against the Commonwealth, Sept. 24, 1652"; the "Mad Pranks of Tom Tram; whereto is added His Merry Jests and Conceits and pleasant Tales, very delightful to Read"; "The Golden Cabinet or, the Compleat Fortune Teller. Wherein the meanest Capacities are taught to understand their good and Bad Fortunes, not only in the wheel of Fortune, which is calculated to the nicest Degree of any yet extant; but also by those Sublime Arts and Mysteries of Palmestry and Physiognomy whereby you may discover at first Sight the Temper, Disposition and likewise the Manner of whomsoever you desire to know"; or "The History of Dr. Faustus, Showing How He Sold Himself to the Devil to Have Power to Do What He Pleased for Twenty Four Years. Also, Showing Things Done by Him and His Servant Mephistopheles, with an Account of How the Devil Came for Him and Tore Him to Pieces." Many of the curious little volumes bring the reader face to face with characters whose names are inevitably familiar; there are the "Wise Men of Gotham," the "Babes in the Wood," "Mother Shipton and Her Prophecies." Nor can one leave this region of seductive title-pages without a passing mention of "Joaks upon Joaks, or No Joak like a true Joak"; and the "History of Mother Bunch of the West, Containing Many Rareties Out of Her Golden Closet of Curiosities," a chapbook highly valued by youth or maiden acutely or chronically seeking affection in the eighteenth century. In the volumes of the Boswell collection, indeed, the collector succeeded in bringing together a type of nearly every kind of very popular chapbook, the omission of such volumes as Boswell himself would have considered "literary" being perhaps not altogether unintentional.

These chapbooks, which reflect popular manners as well as taste, were very fully and very poorly illustrated, the illustrations growing poorer and poorer as subsequent editions wore out the wood-cuts and enriched the publisher. There seems in those days to have been little or no waste of conscience on the part of those who produced the chapbook literature, for, although the imprint often declares that the cuts are exclusive, the same pictures were used over and over to illustrate different stories, histories, jest books or garlands. So far did this go that even devils and angels were interchangeable; nor would the "honest publisher" have hesitated to make the noble Guy of Warwick do duty as Captain Hind, or that notable highwayman do duty as the noble Guy of Warwick. There was apparently no surplus of honor even among publishers, for the successful editions of a new chapbook were pirated as fast as presses working under the figurative skull and cross-bones could print them; Boswell's volumes, coming fresh from the Bow Churchyard printing office, are, therefore, exceptionally good examples.

Despite the passing of this chapbook epoch, which lingered well into the nineteenth century — lingered, indeed, until it was quite purged of the coarseness inherent in the humor of the period that gave it birth and vanished finally in fairy lore and children's stories — it would be possible still to trace in the popular writing of the present century the same element of human nature that made the chapbook popular. There still remains the love of things heroic and marvellous, the delight in matters odd, supernatural or exciting curiosity, the morbid interest in the lives and doings of the criminal classes; all, of course, more or less altered to fit a different human environment. This human environment has far outgrown the chapbook; but although nothing could nowadays be more intrinsically valueless than a single specimen, the great collections, with their many thousand quaint examples, are an invaluable mirror of the age that produced them.