This quaint little chap-book, three by four inches in size, was issued in seventeen hundred and seventy-one, soon after Boyle had set up his printing establishment and four years before the publication of the famous pamphlet.  It represents fully the standard for children’s literature in the days when Newbery’s tiny classics were making their way to America, and was indeed advertised by Mein in seventeen hundred and sixty-eight among the list of books “Printed in America.”  Its title, “The Famous Tommy Thumb’s Little Story-Book:  Containing his Life and Adventures,” has rather a familiar sound, but its contents would not now be allowed upon any nursery table.  Since the days of the Anglo-Saxons, Tom Thumb’s adventures have been told and retold; each generation has given to the rising generation the version thought proper for the ears of children.  In Boyle’s edition this method resulted in realism pushed to the extreme; but it is not to be denied that the yellowed pages contain the wondrous adventures and hairbreadth escapes so dear to the small boy of all time.  The thrilling incidents were further enlivened, moreover, by cuts called by the printer “curious” in the sense of very fine:  and curious they are to-day because of the crudeness of their execution and the coarseness of their design.  Nevertheless, the grotesque character of the illustrations was altogether effective in impressing upon the reader the doughty deeds of his old friend, Tom Thumb.  The book itself shows marks of its popularity, and of the hard usage to which it was subjected by its happy owner, who was not critical of the editor’s freedom of speech.

The coarseness permitted in a nursery favorite makes it sufficiently clear that the standard for the ideal toy-book of the eighteenth century is no gauge for that of the twentieth.  Child-life differed in many particulars, as Mr. Julian Hawthorne pointed out some years ago, when he wrote that the children of the eighteenth century “were urged to grow up almost before they were short-coated.”  We must bear this in mind in turning to another class of books popular with adult and child alike in both England and America before and for some years after the Revolution.

This was the period when the novel in the hands of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett was assuming hitherto unsuspected possibilities.  Allusion must be made to some of the characteristics of their work, since their style undoubtedly affected juvenile reading and the tales written for children.

Taking for the sake of convenience the novels of the earliest of this group of men, Samuel Richardson, as a starting-point, we find in Pamela and Mr. Lovelace types of character that merge from the Puritanical concrete examples of virtue and vice into a psychological attempt to depict the emotion and feeling preceding every act of heroine and villain.  Through every stage of the story the author still clings to the long-established precedent of giving moral and religious