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قراءة كتاب Chap-books of the Eighteenth Century With Facsimiles, Notes, and Introduction

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Chap-books of the Eighteenth Century
With Facsimiles, Notes, and Introduction

Chap-books of the Eighteenth Century With Facsimiles, Notes, and Introduction

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دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
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Front Cover
A CHAPMAN.

A CHAPMAN.

From "The Cries and Habits of the City of London," by M. Lauron, 1709.


CHAP-BOOKS

OF

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

WITH

FACSIMILES, NOTES, AND INTRODUCTION

BY

JOHN ASHTON

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London
CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY

1882

(All rights reserved)

PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES.

INTRODUCTION.

Although these Chap-books are very curious, and on many accounts interesting, no attempt has yet been made to place them before the public in a collected form, accompanied by the characteristic engravings, without which they would lose much of their value. They are the relics of a happily past age, one which can never return, and we, in this our day of cheap, plentiful, and good literature, can hardly conceive a time when in the major part of this country, and to the larger portion of its population, these little Chap-books were nearly the only mental pabulum offered. Away from the towns, newspapers were rare indeed, and not worth much when obtainable—poor little flimsy sheets such as nowadays we should not dream of either reading or publishing, with very little news in them, and that consisting principally of war items, and foreign news, whilst these latter books were carried in the packs of the pedlars, or Chapmen, to every village, and to every home.

Previous to the eighteenth century, these men generally carried ballads, as is so well exemplified in the "Winter's Tale," in Shakespeare's inimitable conception, Autolycus. The servant (Act iv. sc. 3) well describes his stock: "He hath songs, for man, or woman, of all sizes; no milliner can so fit his customers with gloves. He has the prettiest love songs for maids; so without bawdry, which is strange; with such delicate burdens of 'dildos' and 'fadings:' 'jump her' and 'thump her;' and where some stretch-mouthed rascal would, as it were, mean mischief, and break a foul gap into the matter, he makes the maid to answer, 'Whoop, do me no harm, good man;' puts him off, slights him, with 'Whoop, do me no harm, good man.'" And Autolycus, himself, hardly exaggerates the style of his wares, judging by those which have come down to us, when he praises the ballads: "How a usurer's wife was brought to bed of twenty money-bags at a burden; and how she longed to eat adders' heads, and toads carbonadoed;" and "of a fish, that appeared upon the coast, on Wednesday the fourscore of April, forty thousand fathom above water, and sung this ballad against the hard hearts of maids;" for the wonders of both ballads, and early Chap-books, are manifold, and bear strange testimony to the ignorance, and credulity, of their purchasers. These ballads and Chap-books have, luckily for us, been preserved by collectors, and although they are scarce, are accessible to readers in that national blessing, the British Museum. There the Roxburghe, Luttrell, Bagford, and other collections of black-letter ballads are easily obtainable for purposes of study, and, although the Chap-books, to the uninitiated (owing to the difficulties of the Catalogue), are not quite so easy of access, yet there they exist, and are a splendid series—it is impossible to say a complete one, because some are unique, and are in private hands, but so large, especially from the middle to the close of the last century, as to be virtually so.

I have confined myself entirely to the books of the last century, as, previous to it, there were few, and almost all black-letter tracts have been published or noted; and, after it, the books in circulation were chiefly very inferior reprints of those already published. As they are mostly undated, I have found some difficulty in attributing dates to them, as the guides, such as type, wood engravings, etc., are here fallacious, many—with the exception of Dicey's series—having been printed with old type, and any wood block being used, if at all resembling the subject. I have not taken any dated in the Museum Catalogue as being of this present century, even though internal evidence showed they were earlier. The Museum dates are admittedly fallacious and merely approximate, and nearly all are queried. For instance, nearly the whole of the beautiful Aldermary Churchyard (first) editions are put down as 1750?—a manifest impossibility, for there could not have been such an eruption of one class of publication from one firm in one year—and another is dated 1700?, although the book from which it is taken was not published until 1703. Still, as a line must be drawn somewhere, I have accepted these quasi dates, although such acceptation has somewhat narrowed my scheme, and deprived the reader of some entertainment, and I have published nothing which is not described in the Museum Catalogue as being between the years 1700 and 1800.

In fact, the Chap-book proper did not exist before the former date, unless the Civil War and political tracts can be so termed. Doubtless these were hawked by the pedlars, but they were not these pennyworths, suitable to everybody's taste, and within the reach of anybody's purse, owing to their extremely low price, which must, or ought to have, extracted every available copper in the village, when the Chapman opened his budget of brand-new books.

In the seventeenth, and during the first quarter of the eighteenth century, the popular books were generally in 8vo form, i.e. they consisted of a sheet of paper folded in eight, and making a book of sixteen pages; but during the other seventy-five years they were almost invariably 12mo, i.e. a sheet folded into twelve, and making twenty-four pages. After 1800 they rapidly declined. The type and wood blocks were getting worn out, and never seem to have been renewed; publishers got less scrupulous, and used any wood blocks without reference to the letter-press, until, after Grub Street authors had worked their wicked will upon them, Catnach buried them in a dishonoured grave.

But while they were in their prime, they mark an epoch in the literary history of our nation, quite as much as the higher types of literature do, and they help us to gauge the intellectual capacity of the lower and lower middle classes of the last century.

The Chapman proper, too, is a thing of the past, although we still have hawkers, and the travelling "credit drapers," or "tallymen," yet penetrate every village; but the Chapman, as described by Cotsgrave in his "Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues" (London, 1611), no longer exists. He is there faithfully portrayed under the heading "Bissoüart, m. A paultrie Pedlar, who in a long packe or maund (which he carries for the most part open, and (hanging from his necke) before him) hath Almanacks, Bookes of News, or other trifling ware to sell."

Shakespeare uses the word in a

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