SOURCE: Anita C. Wilson, "To Instruct and To Amuse: Some Victorian Views of Aesop's Fables," in Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 2, Sum mer, 1984, pp. 66-68.

[In the following essay, Wilson surveys opinions of various Victorian writers regarding the explicit moral statements in Aesop's fables, showing that writers believed their readers wanted to be amused or instructed through an amusing story rather than through explicit moral statements.]

During the Christmas season of 1847, the Spectator featured a notice of a new book entitled A Selection of Aesop's Fables versified and set to Music, "with Symphonies and Accompaniments for the Pianoforte" (11 December 1847). The appearance of such a work testifies to the popularity of Aesop's Fables during the Victorian era. Among numerous editions were the translations by Thomas James (1948; illustrated by Tenniel) and George Fyler Townsend (1867), and the illustrated editions by Charles Bennett (1857), who also wrote his own text; by Harrison Weir (1860); by Thomas Dalziel and others (1867); by Ernest Griset (1869); by Randolph Caldecott (1883); and by Walter Crane, whose version for the youngest children, The Baby's Own Aesop, appeared in 1887. The fable is, by definition, didactic. But the degree to which the lesson is thrust upon the reader may vary, and for that reason, Victorian attitudes to Aesop are particularly interesting. While the generalization that the Victorian period was a time of transition from instruction to amusement in children's books is over-simplified, questions about the balancing of didacticism and entertainment were certainly of great significance.

In the preface to his edition of Aesop's Fables, Thomas James set forth his intention to eliminate the sometimes elaborate morals which had been attached to the stories by previous translators: "an essential departure has been made from the common plan of the English Fabulists, who have generally smothered the original Fable under an overpowering weight of their own commentary." James did not reject the fables' didactic function; he merely wished to reinstate the use of brief and proverbial morals, instead of the lengthy ones in editions like Samuel Croxall's (1722), some of which are longer than the fables they accompany. In some cases, James incorporated the morals into the fables, and on occasion, "where the story seems to speak for itself, [the morals are] omitted altogether."

Some years earlier, Richard Scrafton Sharpe had taken a similar approach in his Old Friends in a New Dress; or Familiar Fables in Verse. In his preface to the fifth edition (1837), Sharpe observed that "children, whose minds are alive to the entertainment of an amusing story, too often turn from one fable to another, rather than peruse those less interesting lines that come under the term, 'application.' To remedy this situation, Sharpe attempted to integrate the morals with the fables in a more cohesive fashion, "that the story shall not be obtained without the benefit arising from it; and that amusement and instruction may go hand in hand." Sharpe's endeavor was not entirely successful; in most cases he summed up the moral at the end of the fable, so that it could still easily be skipped. His version of "The Lion and the Mouse," for example, concludes:

Sharpe did not object to the idea of attaching separate morals to fables, but regretfully acknowledged that children would probably ignore them. Integrating story and message was as a practical concession motivated by anxiety that children might otherwise seize amusement without instruction; as a review of Sharpe's book in the Monthly Mirror warned, "the cake is eaten, and the task left undone" (August, 1807).

Forty years later, the Examiner's highly favorable review of James' edition, which it declared "must hereafter be the version of Aesop," displayed more faith in the intrinsic morality of the fable and was sharply critical of overly didactic versions:

The present Edition is remarkable for the clearness and conciseness with which each tale is narrated; and the reader will not be slow to acknowledge his gratitude to Mr. James for having relieved the book from these tedious and unprofitable appendages called 'morals,' which used to obscure and disfigure the ancient editions of the work. A fable, if it be good, will inculcate its moral clearly; and it may safely be asserted that in all cases where it is necessary to extract the moral from the tale, and expand it into tedious prose, the fable itself must be intrinsically bad or defective, and had better be cast aside altogether (11 March, 1848).

This attitude reveals the gradual trend away from overt didacticism in mid-Victorian juvenile literature. An 1860 London Quarterly Review article on children's books reprinted in Lance Salway's A Peculiar Gift offers a typical response: "The great art of a storywriter, who wishes to make his book serve any moral, religious, or scientific purpose, is to secure that the principle to be taught is a genuine element in the story, and organically connected with it … (p. 316).

In "Books of Fiction for Children," which appeared in the Quarterly Review in 1967, Bennett Johns applied a similar philosophy to Aesop's Fables. Using James' version of "The Wind and the Sun" as an example of a fable which made its point through the story itself, without additional moralizing, Johns assumed that "there is a fair, wise moral hidden in sound, healthy fiction, which all may read who will." He was not discarding the role of didacticism, but was confident that if the moral were an integral part of the story and not the price exacted for pleasurable reading, children would naturally and effortlessly absorb the teaching: "The youngest reader who has any brains and takes an interest in what he reads—as every child does who is kindly taught—gets hold of the moral for himself without having it preached into him, and without even a reflection tagged on as an antidote to the fiction." The most effective lesson, then, is the least obvious and artificial one.

Yet it was also possible to argue that explicit and straightforward didacticism was preferable, since it at least let young readers know exactly what they were getting. The same London Quarterly Review essay which advocated an organic relationship between story and moral also praised the overt moralizing of the oldfashioned Aesops, because they allowed children to skip what they did not want. This anonymous critic took the role of didacticism in children's literature for granted ("it is impossible to overlook the necessity of teaching as well as delighting children") yet wryly observed that "at present so many ingenious devices have been discovered for insinuating moral or scien tific truths into story-books, that children are never safe". Like Richard Sharpe, the essayist recognized that children were unlikely to acquire any moral lessons from stories unless the teaching was absorbed unconsciously through pleasurable reading. This behavior was not perceived, however, as regrettable, but as a natural and healthy characteristic of childhood: "It is a main requisite then of a child's book, that it should give pleasure…. In rejecting what we call the valuable information, and in readily assimilating what seems to us useless, the nature of the child is asserting for itself the real requirements of an age which perchance we have forgotten."

The manner in which Aesop was presented to Victorian children has been discussed primarily in terms of recreational reading, but the fables were also used in schools; James' edition was "undertaken with a view to remedy the deficiencies of the versions at present in use in schools." Although bringing Aesop into the classroom was hardly unique to the Victorian era, this was one of relatively few books of the time considered suitable for all social classes and types of schools. The publisher of James' version omitted no one from its projected audience, grandly offering "an amusing Handbook for All Ranks and Ages, and a Classbook for all seminaries, from the Royal Foundations to the Ragged Schools" (the latter of which provided basic education to the poorest of children). This comprehensive view was unusual; the criticism of children's books in major periodicals like Fraser's, the Quarterly Review, the Examiner, and the Spectator was directed to readers of middle-class or higher status, and took the concept of fixed class distinctions for granted. As Gillian Avery observes in Nineteenth Century Children, the "idea of the fixed social caste was a peculiarly Victorian one, so far as children's books went. No doubt it was precisely because people in real life were changing caste with such alarming rapidity … that writers hysterically resisted these encroachments" (194). The Spectator's review of Mary and Elizabeth Kirby's The Discontented Children, for example, matter-offactly noted that the story inculcated the necessity "of doing our duty, and resting satisfied with our condition," whether humble or noble (11 November 1854). Similarly, Bennett Johns' Quarterly Review essay advised that "suppose we wish to teach that every one had better be content in his own place … what can tell it to a child more lightly and pleasantly than the following?" What follows is a poem describing how a mountain and a squirrel learn to appreciate each other's talents and position; it concludes, "Let both be content / With what is sent."

Although not questioning the concept of a fixed social structure, an 1865 essay in Fraser's called "On Lessening the Irksomeness of Elementary Instruction" displayed a markedly sympathetic attitude toward the largely working-class children in village schools. The essay asserts that school should be a pleasant and encouraging environment and that the purpose of school books is not primarily to teach the skill of reading, but to cause children to like reading and turn to it for enjoyment and recreation. A typical reading text, consisting of excerpts from stories and essays, is censured as "dismally repulsive." While the book is "highly irreproachable" in moral terms, the essay argues that it is unfair to burden lower-class children with reading that will not provide the interest and stimulation of books for more fortunate children; the writer sardonically questions whether this anthology is "the book that Miss Constantia and Master Reginald are learning to read out of at the Hall or at the Rectory?" Recommended are Aesop's Fables, Robinson Crusoe, Sandford and Merton, and Maria Edgeworth's tales, all of which (with the possible exception of Sandford and Merton, the most directly didactic of the group), were widely read at the time by children of higher social status also. The author voices the familiar objection to books displaying "too pedantic and elaborate a purpose of direct and immediate moral inculcation, simply because that very desirable end will not be promoted but defeated by such a course." The morals in Aesop should be omitted, since "few things have contributed more to the irksomeness of instruction than that obstinate traditionary notion that everything heard, seen, or read must have a hard-edged, definite, and ostentatious moral lesson appended to it…." As is evident for other comments regarding Aesop and didacticism in children's literature, such an attitude was not unusual by the 1860's; less common, however, was the objection to moralizing in books intended specifically for children of the working class. In The English Common Reader, Richard Altick says that these children had little exposure to any recreational reading before the mid-nineteenth century; even in the 1860's, inspectors condemned the failure of most school books "to appeal to the child's imagination and emotions" (154).

Aesop crossed age as well as class lines; in 1851, James' version appeared in Murray's "Reading for the Rail," the publisher's series of books for train journeys. William Caldwell Roscoe, whose grandfather had written The Butterfly's Ball (1807) for the amusement of children, altogether rejected Aesop as children's literature, seeing the fables' only source of appeal in the accompanying illustrations:

… though Aesop has been a good deal pressed upon the attention of 'the youth of the British isles,' we apprehend it has not been with much success: the pithy meaning in which the point of the story lies is lost upon him, and all that he cares for is any humour which may be embodied in the telling. Bewick's wonderful illustrations have charm indeed; but they swamp the fable, moral and all…. The tales gather an interest as elucidating the pictures; and that is all (27).

Roscoe's reaction was not typical, since most mid-Victorians considered Aesop mainly in terms of his appeal to a juvenile audience.

In the last decades of the Victorian age, the fables' status as children's literature was both affirmed and questioned. Aesop was not mentioned in Charlotte Yonge's What Books to Lend and What to Give (1887), although one year later Edward Salmon, in Juvenile Literature As It is, placed Aesop's Fables with the fairy tales of Grimm and Andersen as the most popular and universal works for younger children:

Aesop's fame in the nursery is so great as to appear almost as fabulous, at least in its historic aspects, as the themes of which he treats…. Throughout the ages, in the midst of ignorance and superstition, in the homes of rich and poor alike, Aesop has secured a place (47).

Since parents select a child's first books, Salmon assumed that the explicit didacticism of Aesop and the more implicit didacticism of fairy tales accounted for their presence in the nursery; he took for granted, however, that children themselves would skip the morals and enjoy the stories:

The secret of this favour [among adults] is that fairy stories and fables are regarded practically as engines for the propulsion of all the virtues into the little mind in an agreeable and harmless form. Aesop is distinguished first by brevity; second, by the manner in which his moral is generally hung in an epigrammatic and easily-to-be-avoided form at the end of his narrative (47).

A decade later, the Pall Mall Gazette presented the results of a survey which asked children to list their favorite books. Alice in Wonderland came first on the list of twenty; Through the Looking-Glass, Andersen and the Grimms, Andrew Lang's fairy tale collections, a children's version of the Arabian Nights, and stories by Mrs. Molesworth also appeared. Aesop did not, presumable because of the morals: "Aesop's absence from the elect is perhaps to be attributed to the pernicious trick of printing morals that nobody wants along with the fables" ("What the Children Like," 1 July 1898). By the late nineteenth century, didacticism had relaxed considerably, and few critics worried if children ate the cake and left the task undone. Whether to eliminate the morals, however, or to leave them in precisely because children could then easily skip them, remained a point of contention. Victorian responses to Aesop—as a pleasure book, a school test, a work for all ages and social classes—reveal both the univer sality and enduring appeal of the fables, and the challenge of balancing instruction and amusement which helped determine the shape and context of much of Victorian children's literature.

References

Altick, Richard D. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900. 1957; rpr. Chicago: Phoenix-University of Chicago Press, 1963.

Avery, Gillian, with Angela Bull. Nineteenth Century Children: Heroes and Heroines in English Children's Stories 1780-1900. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1965.

"Books of Fiction for Children," Quarterly Review (American Edition) 121.243 (1867): 29-47.

"Children's Literature," London Quarterly Review 13 (1859-1860): 469-500; rpr. Salway, 299-331.

Darton, F. J. Harvey. Children's Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life, rev. Brian Alderson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Houghton, Walter E. Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824-1900. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966.

James, Reverend Thomas. Aesop's Fables: A New Version, Chiefly from Original Sources. London: John Murray, 1848.

"On Lessening the Irksomeness of Elementary Instruction," Fraser's Magazine for Town and Country 72 (1865): 328-334.

Roscoe, William Caldwell, "Fictions for Children," Poems and Essays by the late William Caldwell Roscoe, ed. Richard Holt Hutton. Chapman and Hall, 1860; rpr. Salway, 23-45.

Salmon, Edward. "Literature for the Little Ones," in Salway, 46-61.

Salway, Lance, ed. A Peculiar Gift: Nineteenth Century Writings on Books for Children. Harmondsworth, England: Kestrel-Penguin, 1976.

Sharpe, R. S. Old Friends in a New Dress: or, Familiar Fables in Verse, 6th ed. London: Grant and Griffith, 1849.

St. John, Judith. The Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books, 1566-1910. Toronto: Toronto Public Library, 1958, rev. 1966.

"What the Children Like," Pall Mall Gazette (July 1, 1898) 1-2.