University of Virginia Library

The Motives of Puffing: John Newbery's Advertisements 1742-1767
by
John Dawson Carl Buck

Skillful merchandising was central to the extending of culture in the eighteenth century. Merchants, especially the merchants of goods which were or had been considered to be luxuries, had to discover ways of accommodating their goods to affluent middle-class buyers. The accommodations, though apparent in the goods themselves, are even more striking in the advertisements for those goods. In order to create a successful advertisement, a merchant must have a very clear idea of the projected buyers of his product. He must be sure that the advertisement will be where his buyers will look for it and that it will appeal to his buyers' motives for wanting the product.

One of the most successful merchants of the mid-eighteenth century was John Newbery (1713-1767). His success was founded on the intelligent merchandising of books, periodicals, patent medicines, and cosmetics. Himself the son of a farmer and apprentice to a provincial general merchant, Newbery understood and sympathized with the motives of middle-class buyers. When he appeared, explicitly or implicitly, in his advertisements, he usually made himself out to be a benevolent man who shared the values of prospective buyers, a man who wanted to help them in their quest for worldly success. Newbery's concern to provide literature and nostrums for the middle class did not, of course, preclude his being interested in publications designed for an audience in the mainstream of aristocratic western culture, but his greatest successes, literary and medicinal, were securely middle-class.

The frontispiece of The Royal Primer was capped with this verse: "He who ne'er learns his A, B, C, | Forever will a Blockhead be: | But he

who to his Books inclin'd, | Will soon a golden treasure find." The "golden treasure" was not merely metaphorical; Newbery's advertisements for his children's books and for his nonjuvenile books of instruction always suggested that the goal of reading was worldly success. The title-page advertisement for Universal Harmony, one of his earliest large successes, declared that the fascicular songbook was "calculated to keep People in good Spirits, good Health, & good Humour, to promote Social Friendship in all Compys and Universal Harmony in every Neighborhood." The improvement which even this book claimed to provide was not intangible; it was, in fact, hardly distinguishable from the improvement which a tested medicine confers.

What I should like to do is to establish a scale of sophistication in advertisements, a scale ranging from completely matter-of-fact notices that given merchandise was available at Newbery's shop, to the kind of subtlety especially apparent in his advertisements for his juvenile publications. Some of the most subtle were not merely notices for his products but were also advertisements of and for himself. When he was most sucecssful, he made both his products and himself attractive to prospective buyers.

Before he came up to London, Newbery published Benjamin Martin's Micrographia Nova (1742), and on each of the illustrations was this note: "These microscopes are Sold by J. NEWBERY Bookseller in Reading Berks."[1] At the end of the third edition of A Pocket Dictionary, Or, A Complete English Expositor (1765) there was a list of "Books printed for, and sold by J. NEWBERY, at the Bible and Sun, in St. Paul's Churchyard." The list included ninety-five items, probably representing almost the whole current stock of his own books. This book list was advertising of even less subtlety than the notices in Martin's book. The apparatus advertised in Micrographia Nova were immediately related to the subject of the work; the books advertised in A Pocket Dictionary were random. A dictionary, even one "Design'd for the Youth of both Sexes, the Ladies and Persons in Business," did not assume a tightly defined audience: the user might have been interested in almost any kind of reading.

Since Newbery usually counted on a specific audience to read a given book, the success of most of his advertisements depended on the accuracy with which he had projected the specific interests of a specific audience. Newbery's advertisement in A Familiar Explanation of the Poetical Works of Milton (1762) was still a list, but it was considerably more digested than the random catalogue at the end of the dictionary. In publishing this work, Newbery cooperated with the illustrious Tonsons, whose names preceded his on the title page. One of the main motives for cooperation with other booksellers was the availability of advertising space in the book which they published together; in the many cooperative ventures in which Newbery engaged, notices for his books were usually prominent. Having just brought out a new edition of Milton, the Tonsons obviously intended the

Familiar Explanation to capitalize on and even extend the success of that edition. Of the last four pages of the work, however, only one was devoted to their Milton. The other three were occupied by fairly extensive notices for six of Newbery's publications: (1) The Works of Anacreon, Sappho, Bion, Moschus, and Musaeus, translated by Francis Fawkes; (2) The Shrubs of Parnassus, J. Copywell; (3) Newbery's Letters on the Most Common, as well as Important Occasions in Life; (4) A Pocket Dictionary; (5) The New Testament . . . Adapted to the Capacities of Children; (6) The Gentleman and Lady's KEY to Polite Literature . . . particularly adapted to the Use of Latin and French Schools. All these works were closely related to the general subjects treated in or implied by a companion to Milton. A large part of the Explanation was a very pedestrian glossary, and the fourth item in a sense simply extended it. The first two and the sixth were related to the literary aspect of the Explanation. The fifth capitalized on the religious element of Milton's works: in it, as in the sixth, Newbery assumed that parents and teachers would see Milton as part of their children's education in belles lettres. For Newbery the audience of the Explanation extended in two social directions. In one direction, the readers were already relatively cultured and would be interested in classical and contemporary poetry. In the other direction, less sophisticated readers, adult and juvenile alike, were just learning to read Milton and still needed a letter-writing manual.

More exclusively defined assumptions about his audience are apparent in some of Newbery's publications of current belles lettres. At the end of Smart's Hilliad (1753) the notices were for Smart's signed poems, all thoroughly genteel and even austere works.[2] In this case the Augustan pretensions of The Hilliad itself dictated the advertisements. The advertisements for three religious poems, a Latin translation of Pope's Ode on St. Cecilia's Day, and an expensive collection all served further to dignify the work in which they were found and contributed to the vision of Smart as a moral and intelligent successor of Pope.

In the same year as The Hilliad Newbery and three cooperators brought out Richard Rolt's Memoirs of the Life of the Late Right Honourable John Lindesay, a memorial celebration of the popular Scottish military officer. On the last printed page was the following advertisement for some of the same works mentioned in The Hilliad:

Smart and Rolt were close friends; so it was natural that Rolt should want Smart's works mentioned in the Memoirs, but friendship was of secondary importance. Even more than in The Hilliad, the format of the Memoirs was presumptively aristocratic; it was an elaborately illustrated, beautifully printed, expensive (13s sewed, 15s bound) quarto. The subscription list included more national and international luminaries than the list for any of Newbery's other subscription efforts, and the wealth and status of these subscribers account for the book's very impressive format. The procedure of subscription had already established most of the audience, an audience likely to be interested in Smart's poetry, especially when his credentials were so well established in the advertisement. Again, in turn, the advertisement appears to have enhanced the aristocratic qualities of the book in which it was placed.

Both The Hilliad and the Memoirs were rather more aristocratic than Newbery's usual productions. Sarah Scott's and Lady Barbara Montagu's anonymously written Millenium Hall (1762) was a kind of mean between those works and the practical books more usual for Newbery. Millenium Hall was prose fiction, but it was more explicitly improving and monitory than most of the novels we remember from the mid-eighteenth century. Women would enjoy the framed tales of other women victimized by but finally triumphant over a male aristocratic society, and parents probably applauded this cautionary fiction, expecially for their daughters.

The last two pages of the book were devoted to advertising—the first of the two to another list. Here again there was care in the selection of the four works offered. The first work, The History of Mecklenburgh, was another anonymous production of Sarah Scott. Adorned with a copperplate print of the Queen, it was intended to capitalize on current interest in George III's marriage to Charlotte. The other three, A Familiar Explanation, The Art of Poetry on a New Plan, and The Idler, all suggest readers less cultured than the projected audience of The Hilliad and Rolt's Memoirs of Lindesay. The second page of advertisements is more interesting than the first. It included an extensive proposal for Newbery's Compendium of Biography and a notice for The World Display'd. The description of the Compendium opened with a direct appeal to a young audience:

The advertisement addressed a juvenile audience, but the beneficial effects the notice assigned to reading biography would have appealed to a parent's sense of moral utility at least as much as to a child's thirst for entertainment. The Compendium was conceived as a monthly publication, the divisions of which, the proposal asserted, would allow the buyer to discontinue subscribing and still have a self-contained whole. The advertisement concluded that the numbers would be published "the first of every month, so that Gentlemen may have them with their Magazines." Advertisements for fascicular publications frequently emphasized, as this one did, that such publications served as a kind of compromise between conventional, ephemeral periodicals and books. Although the appeals were usually limited to publications for men, Newbery did engage briefly in periodical publications for children[3] and had just concluded an experiment in publishing a magazine for women, The Lady's Museum (1760-61). What we have in this advertisement, I suggest, is a projected confluence of all three audiences: adult male, adult female, and juvenile. Newbery's Compendium imitated and would compete with Dilly's British Plutarch, which had already demonstrated the salability of serialized biography. Although the Compendium was not ultimately successful, one can see characteristic features of Newbery's merchandising here. Newbery was content with Dilly's format; the impulse of his advertisement was only to broaden the audience. Male readers, if not, strictly speaking, gentlemen, might well be interested in the work, but the projected readers of Millenium Hall were young people and rather unsophisticated women. It was toward these women and children that Newbery wanted to extend the appeal of his publication.

The description of the completed World Display'd [4] emphasized purchasing details to the exclusion of any discussion of content. Because the collection had already proven its popularity, Newbery concentrated on persuading people to finish their sets of the voyages or of the travels or of both while copies of all twenty volumes were available. As in the periodical publication of the Compendium, he was emphasizing the ready accessibility of the work—here, though, without notice of its intrinsic merits. By simply mentioning The World Display'd in Millenium Hall, however, Newbery was taking a significant step. There was nothing essentially juvenile about the collection, and Newbery frequently advertised it as an important addition to any adult library. When, however, the advertisement for it appeared in a book attractive to young people, the collection became associated with Newbery's other efforts for children and young people and with his program of juvenile improvement. The advertising vehicle, in this case Millenium Hall, could modify the substance and direction of an advertisement which appeared in other contexts.[5]

So far I have discussed only those advertisements which appeared explicitly as advertisements in Newbery's books. Several facts should be apparent. He obviously took care in most of his books to advertise other

works which were related to the book in which they were advertised. Further, he was frequently rather vague about specifying either an adult or a juvenile audience for his publication. A great many of them would have been intellectually accessible to both audiences, and he did not want to miss any opportunity to capitalize on both. Finally, there was the reciprocal effect of the advertisement on the advertising vehicle. The advertisements in Rolt's Memoirs of Lindesay and Smart's Hilliad not only benefited from their contexts, but they also served further to define and dignify those contexts. Because propriety to the advertising vehicle was less important in newspaper advertisements than it was in books, Newbery could indiscriminately include on the same page appeals for his adult books, juvenile books, and patent medicines and cosmetics. His newspaper advertisements for books tended to be for those that were timely or practical. All the Newbery publications mentioned in the London Chronicle, for example, were utilitarian, usually to the absolute exclusion of belletristic features. The advertisements for books were almost always full or partial quotations of title pages. As the advertisements most closely related to books, title pages had been posted in booksellers' shops since the seventeenth century, and newspapers simply extended Lintot's "rubric Post" beyond the confines of his own establishment.

Newbery and the five other booksellers involved in publishing The Trial of the Hon. Admiral John Byng (1757) were simply capitalizing on the popular interest in the event, but the advertisement was couched in such a way as to emphasize the book's fidelity to the facts of the case. The account was "taken by Mr. Charles Fearne, Judge Advocate of his Majesty's Fleet. Published by Order of the Right Hon. the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty at the Desire of the Court Martial."[6] The official objectivity suggested by the advertisement was offset by the sensationalism of the subject—the sensationalism on which the booksellers were relying for the success of their publication. Booksellers frequently complained that news drove out books, but they realized that news could also make books: the Trial was such an effort. It was not the sort of work which Newbery and his cooperators could expect to have much appeal after the immediate furor of the event had died down. Timeliness, then, was a restriction within which they had to work; there would be little point in advertising the pamphlet in a book likely to outlive public interest in the event.[7]

Even more clearly ephemeral than potboilers were the calendar pocket books. From 1750 until his death Newbery issued yearly editions of The Ladies Compleat Pocket-Book, and his successors continued it until 1789. The advertisement for the Pocket-Book for 1758 declared that it was

published "At the Request of several Ladies eminent for their Oeconomy" (LC, 19-22 November 1757, p. 496), emphasizing first the strictly practical virtues of the book: there was space for keeping an account of money spent and received and for keeping a record of visits and random memoranda. This part appealed to practical women who had a sense of their economic and social responsibilities, but the end of the advertisement was rather less absolutely practical; the Pocket-Book included Though anxious to emphasize the utilitarian values of the Pocket-Book, Newbery recognized a demand for something more than blank memorandum pages and bills of fare. The songs and dances met the desire of his audience—women who wanted to have some idea of what was happening in the beau monde around London. In this sense, then, Newbery was appealing to the purely social aspirations of the readers for whom he published. His readers wanted to rise in society: one mark of that rise, especially for women, was proficiency in such polite accomplishments as singing and dancing. Whether or not they went to the pleasure gardens, they wanted to know what was happening there. In view of the song-and-dance aspect of the advertisement, the reader may have been surprised by "Some Observations upon Industry and Idleness." In fact, the notice seems to have been appealing to desires for both industry and idleness. Newbery was certainly not at fault here. On the same page of the paper was an advertisement for the Dodsleys' Ladies New Memorandum Book, which was presented in a way almost identical to Newbery's notice. Although the projected readers and users of these works were women who aspired to be people of fashion or who wanted to maintain their standing in the world of fashion, they also valued industry. Whatever singing and dancing they might do, the notice implied, none of it would be at the expense of doing their duties as housewives.

So far, I have restricted my discussion to advertisements as advertisements; that is, notices set off in books and newspapers so as to make it apparent that they were advertisements. Newbery did not, however, limit his puffing to clearly distinguished notices. In various ways and with varying degrees of subtlety he incorporated into the bodies of his publications themselves references to his other products and to himself.

On approximately the same level of subtlety as the notices for Benjamin Martin's scientific apparatus mentioned in Micrographia Nova was this note at the end of the preface to Charles Thompson's Travels through Turkey in Asia (3rd edition, 1767):

In such a notice as this one there was hardly any difference from the type of advertisement I have already described. There was, however, some distinction: the notice was more tightly involved in the text of the book at hand than an advertisement on the last pages. Newbery's motive is clear; he was advertising one of Thompson's books in another. The Travels at Large had not been as successful as Travels through Turkey (there had been only one edition of the former in 1744, and Newbery was still advertising that stock in 1767); the advertisement here was clearly intended to exploit the popularity of the smaller (two volumes) and much less expensive (6s) work.

More subtle appeals are evident in some of Newbery's belletristic efforts. In The Babler (1767), for example, Hugh Kelly referred to The Vicar of Wakefield at one point and to The Jealous Wife [9] at another. Although reviews and even mentions of current literary efforts were a very small part of this essay serial, it is interesting that of the few mentions two should have been to works in which Newbery had some interest. The same was true to a much greater extent in The Art of Poetry on a New Plan (1762); whenever possible, the writer of this work made use of Newbery's publications. Recent translations of The Henriade and Jerusalem Liberated received mention and praise, and Smart's poems were prominent as models for imitation. Newbery did not publish very much in the way of belles lettres, but it was natural, in a book of criticism and instruction in the art of writing poetry, that the works mentioned should be, as often as possible, his own.

As I said, Smart seems to have been the center of most of the belletristic notices. Newbery's publications of the works of Francis Fawkes and the pseudonymous J. Copywell (William Woty) appeared after Smart had ceased writing for Newbery, but the bookseller still had some of Smart's works and reprinted several of them as late as the early sixties. Because Smart was, in the fifties and early sixties at least, the best-known poet Newbery had employed, references to the poet helped Fawkes and Copywell interest the bookseller in their collections and eventually guaranteed that Smart's works would be remembered for a somewhat longer time.

In 1760 Newbery published Copywell's Shrubs of Parnassus. At one point in "The Caxon" the poet referred to an "idea-pot," which was glossed in a footnote: "A philosophical name for the head, communicated by the ingenious and ever-to-be remembered Mrs. Midnight."[10] The reference was to Smart's anonymous writing in The Midwife, one of the most

popular of his efforts for Newbery. Two pages later was "On Hearing that the Tragedy of 'Merope' was to be acted for the Benefit of Mr. SMART." Here the poet lamented Smart's untimely mental disturbance and paid particular attention to Smart's religious poetry. At this time Smart had written, in a religious vein, only the Seaton-prize poems, which Newbery continued to sell until the end of his career.

Just as Newbery's interest in The Shrubs of Parnassus was probably enhanced by these references to Smart's work, so too he was attracted to Fawkes's Original Poems and Translation (1761). Forty-four of the almost 300 pages of the collection were devoted to translations into English of three of Smart's Latin poems from Poems of Several Occasions, the volume which had been advertised in The Hilliad and Rolt's Memoirs of Lindesay. Fawkes's book had an extensive list of subscribers, including Mrs. Smart (Newbery's step-daughter), the Rev. Mr. William Dodd, David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith, Dr. Robert James (of Fever Powder fame), Samuel Johnson, Smollett, Sterne, Henry Thrale, William Whitehead, Newbery, and hundreds of others. At least part of the interest in this collection was a result of the honor done to Smart in it. Newbery could hardly fail to recognize the prestige which that honor would lend his establishment. His association with the world of fine literature was further strengthened by the Dodsleys' cooperation in the volume.

The kind of cross-referring of publications I have been describing is even more apparent in the magazines in which he was involved. The Midwife (1750-53) and The Student (1750-51) contained reference to Newbery's other publications or to the bookseller himself. In The Midwife, for example, excerpts from Newbery's other publications were included and the reader told where he might purchase these works. In the first number is "A Ballad: Compos'd by Miss Nelly Pentweazle, a young Lady of Fifteen; and may with great Propriety be sung at Christenings."[11] The poem is a humorous lament for having lived fifteen years and still been a maid. Nelly Pentweazle was one of Smart's pseudonyms; neither he nor Newbery was willing to pass up an opportunity for puffing their other works, and there is a footnote to the poem: "The Above I borrow'd from the STUDENT, or OXFORD and CAMBRIDGE Monthly Miscellany; a six-penny Pamphlet consisting of Original Pieces only, and published with the Approbation and Assistance of those famous Universities." The same kind of cross-referring was used later with reference to another of Smart's anonymous efforts:

In both of these cases Smart was doubtless the writer of both the original works and of their advertisements.

During the time that Smart was writing for The Midwife, he was also contributing to and probably editing The Student. Both works were conceived as appealing to relatively knowledgeable, sophisticated people, but The Midwife was directed primarily to readers in London. The coherence of that journal had to do with its maintaining a light, almost Scriblerian tone. Although the same light tone was characteristic of much of The Student, considerably more flexibility of subject and tone was possible here. The coherence of The Student had to do with the homogeneity of the intended audience; it was a monthly miscellany of the productions of students at the two universities. That it was largely written by the students guaranteed an audience, and the readers might be expected to be interested in a variety of subjects from humor to elaborate Biblical criticism.

Smart assured that his own works would receive notice: there were references to his Horation Canons and to The Midwife. One of the contributions was a humorous autobiography by the Female Student, who concluded her letter by telling the reader, "I am that very same MIDNIGHT, who publishes the Old Woman's Magazine, which makes so much noise in the world."[12] Another of the letters was by a young clergyman, who lamented the present state of the world and told of his patron, a man who had ruined his estate "by that fashionable vice, which is so finely satiriz'd in a poem lately publish'd (and, I am told, by one of your society) call'd NEWMARKET, a Satire" (Student, II, No. 5 [1751], 182). Thomas Warton the younger had written the poem, which Newbery published in 1751.

Newbery himself was also brought to the notice of the readers of The Student:

Clearly a mock advertisement of this kind was different from references to Newbery's publications, and here it seems almost as though Newbery had joined in a prank. In an essay "On the Learning of Oxford Tradesmen and College Servants," however, Newbery's role was more complex. The humor in this essay lay in the Student's mild contempt for the affectations of tradesmen and servants: Newbery may have been one of the jokers in the advertisement for a wife, but here he was quite obviously the butt of the joke, and it may seem strange that he should have allowed himself to be treated in such a way.

The bookseller's appearances in these two references show him as a linear, if very temperate, descendant of the notoriously exhibitionistic Edmund Curll. Newbery did not, however, choose often to appear so frivolous, either as prankster or as butt. The Student also presented him in the fully developed role of the philanthropist. In the fourth number of the magazine (April 1750, I, 132-135) there was "A SCHEME to raise a FUND for the maintenance of the WIDOWS and CHILDREN of the inferior CLERGY." In succeeding numbers there were several pathetic histories of the misfortunes of the families of dead clergymen, and in July appeared a letter "To the CLERGY of GREAT-BRITAIN" in which the writer continued to seek support for the cause:

Here, then, was the kind of image-building that was so important to Newbery. He became in this notice the expediter of a benevolent project to remedy a situation which had become a cause célèbre for a number of people. Goldsmith included Newbery in The Vicar of Wakefield as "the philanthropic Bookseller of St. Paul's Churchyard," whose assistance to Primrose was only a fictional manifestation of the bookseller's philanthropy. Newbery was a genuinely benevolent man, but my intention here is not to document his benevolence. Rather, I am concerned to demonstrate the rhetorical importance of projecting an image of benevolence and to show the ways in which that image contributed to his success.

In the Preface to An Introduction to Physic and Surgery (second edition, 1763) Richard Brookes, emphasizing the utility and cheapness of his work, made particular reference to Newbery: "I must do my Bookseller so much Justice as to declare, that he was not very anxious about his

private Advantage, provided he could contribute to the Benefit of the Public."[13] Again the spirit of the reference is clear.

Given the image of benevolence which Newbery promoted in these and other publications, I find his interest in patent medicines an eminently coherent feature of his mercantile career. Scattered through the pages of the London Chronicle and most of the metropolitan and provincial newspapers in which Newbery had an interest were scores of advertisements for his medicines and cosmetics, along with the notices for the books. Specific advertisements for specific medicines assumed that the man who sold them was a disinterested promoter of health and welfare. The disinterested philanthropist who appeared in so many of Newbery's advertisements would quite naturally appear to be a reliable source for medicines. The reputation for benevolence, however, was nowhere more important than in his involvement in children's literature.

I must emphasize one point before I discuss some of the notices for specific books. Dr. Johnson said about books written for the education and improvement of children, "Remember always . . . that the parents buy the books, and that the children never read them."[14] Although Johnson overstated the case, he touched on the crucial problem of marketing books for children. Newbery's appeals for his juvenile publications had to be at least as much to adults as to the children themselves. For this reason I shall be initially concerned with the advertisements which were placed in publications for adults.

In the appeals to adult buyers Newbery almost always emphasized the utilitarian values of the juvenile publications. He advertised Atlas Minimus (1758) as

With the Atlas Minimus the cards would provide an introduction to geography, and the children might play themselves into knowledge. Even at the end of the collected edition of The Midwife there was an advertisement for The Lilliputian Magazine, "Being an Attempt to mend the World, to render the Society of Man more amiable, and to establish the Plainness, Simplicity, and Wisdom of the Golden Age, so much celebrated by the Poets and Historians."[15] The notice here, as was often the case, was a quotation of part of the title page, but that notice and the title page itself were clearly designed to appeal more to adults than they were to attract children.

I have already discussed some of the advertisements in Millenium Hall, but the most interesting puffing in that volume was not in the form of advertisements per se. At the very beginning of that work Newbery included a notice concerning a passage in the book.[16] Newbery feared that his readers might consider him vain for having included the author's praise of his efforts for children, but he said that the author "is of too much Consequence to be obstinately contradicted; and as the bookseller could not prevail on him to leave out the Compliment above-mentioned, he hopes his publishing of it will not be imputed to any other Motive, but that of his Readiness to obey."[17] The reader's interest would have been provoked by this disclaimer, which directed him to the following passage on the first page:

The writer continued that he had to defer to Newbery's judgment as to whether his effort would conduce to "your great end of benefitting the world" (p. 2).

In Tom Telescope's Newtonian System of Philosophy Adapted to the Capacities of Young Gentlemen and Ladies (3rd edition, 1766), p. 126, Newbery included an address to the parents, guardians, and governesses in Great Britain, Ireland, and the British Colonies, in which he emphasized the same importance of influencing children while they were still young, "to warm their Affections with such little Histories as are capable of giving them Delight, and of impressing on their tender Minds proper Sentiments of Religion, Justice, Honour and Virtue." He concluded his address: "How far Mr. NEWBERRY's [sic] little Books may tend to forward this good Work, may be, in some Measure, seen by what are already published, and, it is presumed, will more evidently appear by others which are coming from the Press" (p. 127). These are some examples of the embodiment of Newbery's image; he wanted to be seen as the improver of mankind. In that attempt he was highly successful.

However, Newbery had to make his books as attractive to children as to

their parents. His earliest attempt[18] was in A Little Pretty Pocket-Book (12th edition?, 1767) which was advertised as "intended for the INSTRUCTION and AMUSEMENT OF LITTLE MASTER TOMMY AND PRETTY MISS POLLY. With Two Letters from JACK the GIANT KILLER; AS ALSO A BALL AND PINCUSHION; The Use of which will infallibly make Tommy a good Boy, and Polly a good Girl."[19] Although the immediate reference of "which" in the last clause was to the ball and pincushion, it referred, I think, to the whole package. Newbery was clearly counting on appealing both to parents' desires for their children to be instructed and improved and to children's desires to be entertained with a pleasant book and toy.

Newberry's business was to sell books: the adition of a ball or pincushion might attract a child to one book, but it would not sell other juvenile publications. I have discussed Newbery's use of book lists with reference to more or less adult works, a procedure that he followed in the juveniles. If anything, the book lists were more extensive in the juveniles; he usually included all the children's books he had in stock.

One of the most frequently used formats for his books of juvenile instruction was the device of letters from an adult to a child, as in Charles Allen's Polite Lady (second edition, 1769), a series of letters from a mother, Portia, to her daughter, Sophy. At one point Portia says, "I have sent you Newbery's dictionary, to assist you in spelling . . ." (p. 9), and later she discusses the value of history in a child's education and tells her daughter, "I would have you, in the mean time, to read a very judicious and accurate abridgment of English history, written in the form of letters from a nobleman to his son, and printed in two volumes 12mo . . ." (p. 35). The work which she mentioned was Goldsmith's History, published, of course, by Newbery.

The cross references in the books for little children are the most entertaining of all. The first rule in all of these works was that reading is a necessary part of being successful and even of being good. Miss Margery Meanwell, better known as Goody Two-Shoes, and Giles Gingerbread were both readers, and it was to their reading and subsequent education that

they owed their ultimate success. The corollary of this rule was that the children might have their books of their good friend, Mr. Newbery. In books in which books played an important role, the books which were read were almost always Newbery's. At the end of an anecdote in Fables in Verse for the Improvement of the Young and the Old (1757), Woglog the great giant hit off a bon mot and "step'd into Mr. Leake's to read one of Mr. Newbery's little books."[20] The same technique was used in Goody Two-Shoes (3rd edition, 1766), when one of Margery's students "sung to Cuzz's Chorus (which may be found in the Little Pretty Play Thing, published by Mr. Newbery) and to the same tune to which it is there set."[21] Here there was no attempt to include descriptions of works or to emphasize those works' improving qualities; Newbery merely wanted to make sure that his young readers would be reminded that if they enjoyed the book they were reading, they might find further enjoyment in his other publications. Reading, these notices implied, was a primary source of enjoyment, and Newbery had the books to provide that enjoyment.

Newbery was the first publisher to attempt seriously and on a wide scale to appeal to children, and to parents for their children. By examining his advertisements, one sees that Newbery's involvement in children's literature is coherent with his usual marketing practices. His usual emphasis in those advertisements which were not strictly descriptive was on aiding social aspirants. In the advertisements for adults Newbery frequently identified himself implicitly with these people and presented himself as a man who had succeeded and who wanted to help his customers to succeed. In the advertisements for children's books Newbery's appeal was one of a benevolent man who desired to encourage children to do what would be good and delightful for them.

Notes