In 1744, when Newbery published this duodecimo, Dr. Samuel Johnson was the presiding genius of English letters; four years earlier, fiction had come prominently into the foreground with the publication of “Pamela” by Samuel Richardson; and between seventeen hundred and forty and seventeen hundred and fifty-two, Richardson’s “Clarissa Harlowe,” Smollett’s “Roderick Random” and “Peregrine Pickle,” and Fielding’s “Tom Jones” were published.  This fact may seem irrelevant to the present subject; nevertheless, the idea of a veritable story-book, that is a book relating a tale, does not seem to have entered Newbery’s mind until after these novels had met with a deserved and popular success.

The result of Newbery’s first efforts to follow Locke’s advice was so satisfactory that his wares were sought most eagerly.  “Very soon,” said his son, Francis Newbery, “he was in the full employment of his talents in writing and publishing books of amusement and instruction for Children.  The call for them was immense, an edition of many thousands being sometimes exhausted during the Christmas holidays.  His friend, Dr. Samuel Johnson, who, like other grave characters, could now and then be jocose, had used to say of him, ’Newbery is an extraordinary man, for I know not whether he has read or written most Books.’"[51-A]

The bookseller was no less clever in his use of other people’s wits.  No one knows how many of the tiny gilt bindings covered stories told by impecunious writers, to whom the proceeds in times of starvation were bread if not butter.  Newbery, though called by Goldsmith “the philanthropic publisher of St. Paul’s Churchyard,” knew very well the worth to his own pocket of these authors’ skill in story-writing.  Between the years seventeen hundred and fifty-seven and seventeen hundred and sixty-seven, the English publisher was at the height of his prosperity; his name became a household word in England, and was hardly less well known to the little colonials of America.

Newbery’s literary associations, too, were both numerous and important.  Before Oliver Goldsmith began to write for children, he is thought to have contributed articles for Newbery’s “Literary Magazine” about seventeen hundred and fifty-eight, while Johnson’s celebrated “Idler” was first printed in a weekly journal started by the publisher about the same time.  For the “British Magazine” Newbery engaged Smollett as editor.  In this periodical appeared Goldsmith’s “History of Miss Stanton.”  When later this was published as “The Vicar of Wakefield,” it contained a characterization of the bookseller as a good-natured man with red, pimpled face, “who was no sooner alighted than he was in haste to be gone, for he was ever on business of the utmost importance, and he was at that time actually compiling materials for the history of Mr. Thomas Trip."[52-A] With such an acquaintance it is probable that Newbery often turned to Goldsmith, Giles Jones, and Tobias Smollett for assistance in