10. Alphabet Pies, Animal Quacks, and Ugly Sisters: John Evans and the Growth of Cheap Books for Children

Jonathan Cooper

The printer and bookseller John Evans has conventionally been regarded more as a follower than a leader. Long in the shadow of the Marshall family, under whom he served as employee, Evans was, in the last decade of the eighteenth century, seemingly prolonging the lifespan of the type of publication that had hitherto typified the Aldermary Churchyard press and which it was abandoning in search of ‘respectability’.1 The place of business he established for his work, and which was retained by his family for a further forty-five years, was originally Marshall’s, and what seems to have been his ‘big break’ came courtesy of Marshall when he fell out of favour with the instigators of the Cheap Repository Tracts. Nevertheless, Evans had a distinct career. Stretching into the 1800s (just), he was arguably the last printer of the traditional ‘penny history’ in the capital, a text and illustrative tradition that dated back at least to the printers and publishers of the mid-seventeenth century;2 he was a major link in the production of broadside ballads and slip songs between Marshall and the later printers Pitts and Catnach; and, as this chapter will show, he was a significant and heretofore underappreciated printer of street literature specifically for children.

John Evans was born in 1753. He was the younger son of Thomas Evans, a silversmith, and his wife Elizabeth, and was baptized on 18 November at St Giles Cripplegate.3 He joined the Aldermary Churchyard press under Richard Marshall in the 1770s, and by 1779 was a sufficiently trusted employee to be a witness of Richard Marshall’s will.4 In 1783 he was appointed by the Marshall family (ownership of the business then shared between Richard’s son John, his nephew James, and his widow Eleanor) to run the firm’s new shop at No. 42, Long Lane, West Smithfield.5 For tax reasons, from 1787 the business had Evans’s name on the shop front, although stock was still provided by the Marshalls. By this time John Marshall had established himself as second only to the Newbery firm as a publisher of books for children, and No. 42, Long Lane was a ‘front window’ for his children’s books, as well as for broadsides and other cheaper parts of the Aldermary Churchyard range. A broadside advertisement dated May 1793 lists 114 children’s book titles (a slightly misleading number because some include, and others exclude, multiple volumes).6 Thus children’s books, along with traditional broadsides and chapbooks, were Evans’s bread and butter in Long Lane.

Evans later stated that he was approached by James Marshall to go into partnership with him in late 1789, at the time of the dissolution of John Marshall & Co. Instead, however, he accepted a new contract from John Marshall, allowing him more freedom. He made a bid to set up his own business in early 1793 when the lease on the Long Lane shop ran out. This precipitated a protracted personal and legal dispute between Evans and Marshall, culminating in Evans setting up his own press at No. 42, Long Lane.7 During August and September 1793 Evans and Marshall possessed half of the shop each, before Evans moved his own business next door to No. 41.8 It is from this address that Evans began to issue children’s books with his name on the title page, although all of his surviving dated publications for children come from the first and second decades of the nineteenth century.

However, as has never been fully revealed until now, Evans’s interest in publishing, as well as selling, children’s books dated back to nearly a decade before. John Evans entered a dozen titles in the Stationers’ Register on 19 November 1785, presenting nine copies of each to the clerk, Robert Horsfield. These were all children’s titles and comprised examples of a number of different styles of book — including an alphabet book, The Pretty Alphabet; or, Pleasant Pastime of A.B.C.; two books of riddles, A New Riddle Book, being a Curious Whetstone for the Wit of Young Children by Mr Christopher Conundrum and The Puzzle Cap, an adaptation of one of Madame d’Aulnoy’s tales, Princess Fair Star and Prince Cherry; a factual book, A Concise History of All the Kings and Queens of Europe; and a Hogarthian progress in miniature, The Pleasing History of Master Playful and Master Serious.

In the Stationers’ Register, Evans is named as the only and whole owner of each title. He certainly did not enter the titles on John Marshall’s behalf. None of the titles entered by Evans appears on Marshall’s advertising broadside of 1793, nor among the records of surviving copies of Marshall’s children’s books from this period. It may even be that Evans was the author of these little books — although, if so, he was evidently ‘inspired’ by Marshall’s juvenile offerings such as The Golden Alphabet, The Pleasing Gift; or, A Collection of New Riddles, and The Whitsuntide Present; or, The History of Master George and Miss Charlotte Goodchild, which themselves owed much to John Newbery’s titles such as The Whitsuntide Gift. These titles were thus in direct opposition (a charitable soul might describe them as ‘additional reading’) to Marshall’s publications, even while they were being sold in Marshall’s shop. The imprints of surviving copies make this explicit: no printer or publisher is named, but the books are ‘sold at No. 42, Long Lane, West Smithfield, London’.

There was no recorded Marshall press at No. 42, Long Lane before 1793,9 so it is a matter of speculation by whom and where Evans’s little books were printed. The obvious answer is in Aldermary Churchyard itself, but it is difficult to imagine Marshall sponsoring what was essentially a rival series of publications that gave no credit to himself or his business. The only credible reason why this could have happened is if Evans may have threatened to walk away from No. 42, Long Lane, and Marshall allowed him his own by-line as a retainer in order to prevent this. Yet Marshall did allow Evans quite a lot of leeway to operate under his own account. For instance, Marshall printed all the advertising literature for Evans’s patent medicines. He also allowed Evans to sell copies of Marshall’s publications at retail price and pocket the difference — or, at least, so Evans claimed. Perhaps Marshall would not have worried too much about a few small books, especially if he had been paid to print them.

More probably, Evans found another printer. An obvious candidate would be George Thompson, who in the mid-1790s reprinted and co-published with John Evans reissues of many of the titles Evans had first published in 1785. George Thompson was free of the Stationers’ Company by 1792 and was located first at No. 50, Old Bailey, and then from c.1796 at No. 43, Long Lane. However, it may be that Evans used Thompson as a printer while he was still an apprentice.

Another printer, who is known to have printed for John Evans , as well as his brother Thomas, later in the 1790s, was Philip Norbury of Brentford.10 Norbury also printed for George Thompson. This ‘out of towner’ thus used a number of ‘licensed outlets’ in the city to sell his children’s books, and John Evans could have been another such earlier in his career. If he had helped out John Evans in the 1780s, Evans may have later returned the favour by finding Norbury a number of city distribution centres. It has also come to light recently that Norbury came into the possession of — and used many of — John Newbery’s woodblocks.11 If Norbury was Evans’s printer, which would seem the likeliest situation, this would tie in with the Newbery-esque subject matter of some of Evans’s early children’s books. For example, Evans produced The Puzzle Cap; Newbery had produced The Puzzling Cap.12 Further, Norbury and Evans editions of The Royal Primer, Humours of the Fair, The Entertaining History of Tommy Gingerbread, and Tom Thumb’s Folio are all recorded, and these are all Newbery titles (albeit Newbery’s hero was named Giles Gingerbread). The Pleasing Story of the House that Jack Built; also The Death and Burial of Cock Robin contains the cumulative rhyme that (probably first) appeared in Newbery’s Nurse Truelove’s New Year’s Gift.13 Marshall obtained the blocks from this, and the Thompson and Evans and the Norbury editions appear pretty much identical.14 The surviving copy of The Good Boy and Girls’ Lottery, All Prizes and No Blanks advertises that the book was sold in Long Lane and ‘by the booksellers in Town and Country’, so even if this is really a Norbury printing, it would seem that Evans was making the most of distribution channels established by (or on behalf of) Marshall, including, probably, his mini-army of chapmen.15

A further candidate is Robert Bassam. In 1785 he was a newly established neighbour of Evans, being based at 53, St John’s Street, Smithfield, and printed a number of small children’s books towards the end of century. He is a strong candidate as a copy of A Concise History of All the Kings and Queens of Europe appeared, with the identical titling to the Evans book, in auction with his imprint.16 There is also the survival of A Pretty Riddle Book, being a Choice Whetstone for the Wit of Young Children, by ‘Mr. Christopher Conundrum, Riddle Maker in Ordinary to the King and Queen of the Fairies’, printed by Bassam.17 Another one of Evans’s ‘first twelve’ has the identical title save for the substitution of ‘New’ for ‘Pretty’ and ‘Curious’ for ‘Choice’. If Bassam did not print for Evans, then one was pinching from the other; ‘Christopher Conundrum’ was evidently more of a pirate than a discoverer of new lands. Indeed, riddle books tended to recycle old material from earlier publications, changing the title and sometimes attempting to promote false freshness by adding ‘new’ to it. Perhaps it is best to conclude that little original thinking went into Evans’s earliest efforts.

It is tricky to conclude just how original any of Evans’s publications actually were, as the survival rate of his earliest titles is dismal. A few have survived in institutional collections. A copy of Tommy Truelove’s Present is in the Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton University (where it is attributed to Evans, but to a date between 1792 and 1795, rather than the actual date of 1785), with the contemporary initials ‘HBG’ in a childish hand.18 A Concise History of All the Kings and Queens of England is in the library of the University of California, Los Angeles. Evidently, Evans was sufficiently encouraged to continue with new titles after the initial dozen. A copy of Pretty Pastime for Little Folks is in the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, and includes an advertisement for twenty-eight new books for children, sold wholesale at No. 42, Long Lane, West Smithfield, which includes all the titles Evans registered in 1785.19 The same list but with its own title added at the end of the ‘Threepenny Books’ is found at the end of Pretty Tales and Pretty Things for Good Children, bringing up to twenty-nine the titles produced by Evans in the 1780s or very early 1790s.20 Twenty-eight of these were priced at 3d. or less, which compares with the thirty-nine titles also at 3d. or less listed in John Marshall’s 1793 broadside advertisement for children’s books from Aldermary Churchyard. Evans seems to have been taking a calculated risk producing so many new titles all at once. Since he was perfectly placed as shop manager to gauge demand, he no doubt saw a gap in the market. Francis Newbery, John’s nephew, had done exactly the same thing when he started out.

It is possibly no coincidence that almost all of Evans’s books were produced, from the beginning, at the lower end of the price range. He probably perceived that there was a relative shortage of children’s books available for families on a tighter budget but who had managed to acquire literacy, ‘for the Instruction and Amusement of Young Minds’, as John Marshall’s advertisement has it. Evans seems also to have tried, ostensibly, to undercut the bigger firms such as Newbery. His Puzzle Cap was sold at 2d., Newbery’s Puzzling Cap at 3d. Yet, caveat emptor — Evans’s edition was almost certainly forty-eight pages in extent, while Newbery’s ran to ninety-five pages.

Evans was to push this cheapness, or affordability, to a whole new level in his next children’s publishing and first solo printing project. Thus Evans was staying true to the street literature tradition in which he had been brought up under Richard Marshall, whereas John Marshall was clearly seeking to move to a more middle-class market.21 What he did was to become so much the norm that his role as an innovator has never been considered. Sometime between Michaelmas 1793 and March 1796 at least three sixteen-page children’s books were rolled off his new, or at least newly installed, press at No. 41, Long Lane: The Tragical Death of A Apple-Pye; The Life and Death of Jenny Wren; and Cinderilla.

This, in itself, was not remarkable. Although such slender books were not common, they were not unknown. Richard Marshall had produced some in the 1770s,22 and William and Cluer Dicey probably even earlier.23 In the provinces they were, or would soon be, produced by booksellers such as William Appleton in Darlington and Major Morgan of Lichfield. However, there is no evidence that John Marshall was interested in or produced such flimsy matter himself. No books of this kind with his imprint from the 1780s or 1790s have been discovered, and there is no mention of any in the 1793 advertisement. Instead, the old sixteen-page books were ‘doubled up’. For instance, The House that Jack Built and an abridged The Child’s New Year Gift were put together to make a 32-page book. In some ways, therefore, the sixteen-page format was a return to the past rather than an innovation.

Yet there is something fresh and new about John Evans’s productions. Yes, his The Tragical Death of A Apple-Pye is a rehash of Richard Marshall’s publication, which itself may be a fragmentary survival of a much earlier primer, but it was dressed in wondrous new clothes. A copy, formerly belonging to Justin G. Schiller and now in the Cotsen Children’s Library, is housed in wrappers illustrated in sanguine.24 Apparently uniquely for the period, these not only advertise the book’s price, emphasizing its innovative cheapness at ½d., but also its printer. It does away with the Newbery and Marshall conceit that their least expensive books were without price and the required payment of 1d. was only for the (gilt ‘Dutch’ paper) binding, thereby (consciously or not) diminishing the importance of text and illustrations.25 Evans gives no such free gift. The attractive coloured covers with their depiction of comic cartoon speaking animals, a foreshadowing of countless others over the coming two centuries, is as intrinsic to the book experience as the contents, but not more so. The cheapness is laid on thick — the price ½d. appears three times on the wrappers — as is the ‘street’ nature of the publication. The character on the book’s lower cover is the familiar street figure of the bellman, albeit in the guise of a dog. Not only does he reveal the book’s price, but also where it could be bought — ‘at Mr Evan’s’s’ (sic) — thus proving that the wrappers were designed specifically for this printer and perhaps even for this specific title. It was commonplace for sellers of street literature to cry out the cost of their products and to emphasize their cheapness. This innovation allows the street to enter the shop and home, normalizing the focus on undercutting that continues today.26

The second surviving copy of this title is bound in the more conventional Dutch gilt paper and may possibly be considered a different ‘issue’.²⁷ Inspection of sammelbands, such as Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce adds. 6, reveals that the same title by the same printer bought by the same person at apparently the same time could have different styles of wrappers. This suggests that the whole issue of wrappering was largely haphazard, and thus emphasizes the unusual nature of Evans’s tactic.

It had become quite common for an advertising puff for the publisher to appear in the text of children’s books, as well as a list of other available titles printed at the back of the book. For instance, in the Mary Ann Kilner-authored Marshall publication Jemima Placid; or, The Advantage of Good-Nature the reader is told that Jemima has been given a mission to buy some children’s books in London, which ‘may be bought at Mr. Marshall’s somewhere in some churchyard, but Jemima must inquire about it’.28 Indeed, just such a puff appears in The Tragical Death of A Apple-Pye itself: ‘if my little readers are pleased with what they have found in this book, they have nothing to do but to run to Mr. Evans’s, No. 41 Long-lane, West-Smithfield, where they may have several books, not less entertaining than this, of of [sic] the same size and price’. The wording is adapted from Marshall’s original, which Evans was evidently using as his model. It was, of course, a necessary change to the text, but one cannot help but imagine the particular relish with which Evans replaced Marshall’s name with his own.

The second of the three surviving sixteen-page titles from this period, The Life and Death of Jenny Wren, does not have such a venerable history as The Tragical Death of A Apple-Pye, but it did go on to have a very long life and the text was being issued in virtually the same form eighty years later. This, though, would seem to be the title’s first appearance (with the usual proviso that an antecedent is perhaps waiting to be discovered, or might be lost forever). It is a curious confection. Like its well-established predecessor, Cock Robin, it opens with a portrait of the protagonist and an establishing rhyme (albeit not one as memorable as Richard Marshall’s ‘Little Robin Red-Breast / Sat upon a Pole, / Wiggle waggle went his Tail / and poop went his hole’).29 This merriment is followed immediately by a cold douche for the young reader, ‘Here lies Cock Robin, / Dead and cold, / His end this book / Will soon unfold’, before launching into the famous ‘Who kill’d Cock Robin?’ rhyme.

The structure, and potential history, of The Life and Death of Jenny Wren is more complicated.30 It is evidently a bringing together and editing of various source materials. The first section, ‘The Life of Little Jenny Wren’, has the subtitle in rhyme ‘How she was sick, / And got well again’. This part seems to be related to the Scottish traditional song ‘The wren scho lyes in care’s bed’ (Roud 6942), matched with new material.³¹ That it is not just a thoughtless insertion is shown by the great care that has been taken to match the woodcut illustrations to the text, and then to provide a running commentary on the pictures to explain them to the young reader, ‘Here’s Jenny on the glass, / Eating the sops very fast’, and to insert moral lessons, ‘Jenny’s very naughty tho’, / To use her husband Robin so’. It is reminiscent of the sort of romantic dialogue that appeared in numerous forms in songs and chapbooks such as A Pleasant and Delightful Dialogue between Honest John and Loving Kate, which Evans himself printed.32 It would seem that John Evans really was taking the apparently trivial seriously.

The second section, ‘The Death of Little Jenny Wren’, ostensibly follows on from the first, but seems to come from a totally different direction. After the initial scene-setting, ‘Jenny Wren was sick again, / And Jenny Wren did die, / Tho’ doctors vow’d they’d cure her, / Or know the reason why’, the reader is introduced to a grotesque gallery of charlatan doctors in animal form (in Doctor Goose’s case, a literal quack), whose ridiculous assertions regarding the dead Jenny meet with stinging responses from the authorial voice. Thus, Doctor Jack Ass’s ‘See this balsam, / I make it, / She yet may survive, / If you get her to take it’, elicits the retort, ‘What you say, Doctor Ass, / Perhaps may be true; / I ne’er saw the dead drink tho’, / Pray, Doctor, did you?’ The whole section is a lampoon on the dubious medical treatments that were widely available in the eighteenth century, and beyond. The same practices had been placed in the spotlight decades earlier in The Modern Quack (1718).33 The Modern Quack was reissued by Mary Cooper in 1752, a decade after her own foray into the publication of children’s books with Tom Thumb’s Pretty Song Book.34 It is perhaps too fanciful to suppose that Jenny Wren originates in a lost Cooper title, although both Marshall and Evans seem to have been inspired by Cooper for their Tom Thumb’s Plaything. It is perhaps less fanciful to think of Jenny Wren not only as a further feather in Evans’s children’s printing cap, but also as a stab in Marshall’s back. In the autumn of 1793, when Jenny Wren may have been printed, Evans and Marshall were at war again, but this was a war over the sale of patent medicines. Evans and his new partner, William Howard, had bought the right to manufacture and sell Dr Waite’s Worm Medicine, which Marshall rapidly tried to emulate with ‘an improved preparation’ of his own.35 Evans responded with an advertisement on the front page of The World of 11 November which called out Marshall by name. It might be imagined that an attack on a fraudulent medical practice as a subject for a children’s book would have appealed to him at the time.

The final stanza, which is an editorial addition to the rhyme, is: ‘Now if you’d more of Robin know, / Where you bought this I’d have you go, / And then for what for this you gave, / You there Cock Robin’s life may have.’ So, The Life and Death of Jenny Wren, like The Tragical Death of A Apple-Pye, ends with an advertisement for Evans’s new style of children’s books. The implication is that Evans also printed, or planned to print, a sixteen-page Cock Robin at this time, although no such volume survives.36

A further connection between Evans’s Jenny Wren and The Tragical Death of A Apple-Pye is apparent in the wrappers of the two works. The only surviving copy of Jenny Wren is also dressed out in splendid illustrated sanguine wrappers.37 The images for the two books are evidently drawn by the same hand, and they are part of a numbered series. The wrappers for Jenny Wren have a small number ‘2’ on the upper cover, and those for The Tragical Death of A Apple-Pye have the numbers ‘3’ and ‘4’ on the lower and upper cover, respectively. The illustrated covers again feature speaking animals in contemporary dress, but they spout not advertising slogans but vitriolic attacks on the French: ‘I’ll bite the French dogs / I’ll kill all the frogs’, and ‘And now my dear wench / I’ll kill all the French’. Evans had form when it came to attacks on the French. A slip song of the same period from No. 41, Long Lane is entitled Down with the French! or, Let Them Come if They Dare.38 Anti-French sentiment was everywhere in 1793, since France had declared war on Britain and the Netherlands on 1 February, and appeared widely in cartoons by Thomas Rowlandson and others. Although nationalistic sentiments had appeared earlier in the century in children’s books, this is an unusually forthright example of such militaristic propaganda aimed directly at children. It was not the last, and there are several aggressively anti-French sentiments expressed in later cheap children’s books, including Evans’s own Tom the Piper’s Son.39

The third surviving sixteen-page title, Cinderilla, is perhaps the most revolutionary (Fig. 10.1).⁴⁰ That it is a stand-alone edition of the Perrault fairy tale is rare enough. Although Cinderella and her slipper had become familiar to British readers through the 1729 English translation of Perrault’s Contes by Robert Samber, and she had been included in anthology collections aimed at children throughout the eighteenth century, such as those produced by Newbery, there were very few stand-alone editions. Those that were produced owed much, if not everything, to Samber, and this was equally true of a prose edition that Evans produced in association with Thompson.

Fig. 10.1. Cinderilla, 34.(1.) (upper cover). Private collection.

This sixteen-page edition, though, was a different beast, and can be said to be the first book that truly adapted Perrault specifically for English children. Indeed, it went on, almost certainly unbeknownst to those who came after, to influence everything from pantomime to Walt Disney animation. It was, unlike earlier Cinderellas, densely illustrated with an image on every page. It is a picture story-book in every sense, and the reader is ‘talked through’ the narrative by being directed to the pictures. It is also in verse — and not highfalutin verse but direct rhyme, accessible to the young and, in certain turns of phrase, iconic. Later verse editions tended to be less direct and amusing. Evans’s version also coins (apparently) the deathless phrase ‘ugly sisters’, and appeared a decade before Cinderella became a pantomime sensation in London. The wrappers for the surviving scruffy but precious copy are long gone, but were perhaps in sanguine and with little numbers ‘5’ and ‘6’ at their head.

With the turn of the century John Marshall once more turned his mind to children’s books (and with immense success), but he went upmarket. His Cinderilla, for instance, was ‘Embellished with Coloured Engravings’ — and very smart they were, too — and priced at 6d.41 Evans remained plebeian, one might even say ‘retro’. In the first decade of the nineteenth century he even produced a hornbook — an object more closely identified with earlier times.⁴²

* * *

Just after the turn of the century, Evans, now in association with William Howard of Reading, who had been his partner in the medicine retail business since 1792,43 produced a stream of new sixteen-page children’s chapbook titles, which were to be adopted by numerous other publishers, in London, Scotland, and the provinces, and became mainstays of the genre in later years. He also produced children’s alphabets that were more profusely illustrated than The Tragical Death of A Apple-Pye. The most popular, judged by the number of times it was reissued between 1805 and 1820, was The Pretty ABC (Fig. 10.2). The text consists of a rhyming alphabet — ‘A was an admiral, looking on for a fleet / B was a beggar, that begg’d in the street’ — with each of the letters illustrated as an appropriately populated woodcut. Although there does not appear to be an earlier recorded issue of this alphabet, it has a decidedly 1793 feel to it — ‘L was Louis that lost his poor head […] Q was the Queen of France at the Guillotine […] V was Valenciennes, which the Duke of York took’.

Fig. 10.2. The Pretty ABC, 64.(1.) (upper cover). Private collection.

Other titles included cumulative rhymes in the tradition of The House that Jack Built, such as the ghoulishly titled The Delightful Play of the Children in the Wood, which was a game of forfeits, and which builds to the climax:

This is the church bell that was tolled — when they buried the coffins that did hold — both the parents dead and cold — that left the bright and shining gold — that tempted the uncle cruel and bold — that hired the ruffians that rode a straddle — on the horses with bridle and saddle — that frightened the little robin red-breast — of all the birds he was the best — he brought the leaves that served for a shroud — to cover the two little children so good — starved to death in Blackbury Wood.

There were also ‘show and tell’ books where various scenes are depicted and described. The most interesting of these is probably A Description of Bartholomew Fair. The fair was a subject particularly close to home for printers like John Evans who worked in Smithfield. Many of their customers would have enjoyed the various side-shows and partaken of ‘smoaking hot sausages’ at the annual August fair, and it was hopefully a time of good sales at Evans’s shop. An interesting aspect of this publication is how closely it chimes with surviving written material about the fair, as an inspection of three of the pages reveals when set beside passages from Thomas Frost’s The Old Showmen and the Old London Fairs. Thus a woodcut in A Description of Bartholomew Fair is captioned ‘Here a Linnet discharges a cannon in rage’ (p. 11), while Frost records that:

Twelve or fourteen canaries and linnets were taken from their cages, and placed on a table, in ranks, with paper caps on their heads, and tiny toy muskets under their left wings. Thus armed and accoutred, they marched about the table, until one of them, leaving the ranks, was adjudged a deserter, and sentenced to be shot. A mimic execution then took place, one of the birds holding a lighted match in its claw, and firing a toy cannon of brass, loaded with powder.44

Another woodcut is captioned ‘Here’s a cow with Two Heads, and with both she can eat’ (p. 12), and Frost has ‘In 1803 […] was exhibited at Bartholomew Fair, a two-headed calf’.⁴⁵ Then the Evans publication has ‘Here’s one without arms at work with her toes’ (p. 15), which surely refers to ‘Miss Biffin, who, having been born without arms, painted portraits with a brush affixed to her right shoulder, and exhibited herself and her productions at fairs as the best mode of obtaining patronage’.⁴⁶

Through the first decade of the century these books seem to have been issued first in illustrated sepia wrappers and then, from 1809, in illustrated plain wrappers. For instance, the earlier of the two (known) Howard and Evans printings of The Pretty ABC was issued in the earlier style wrappers with the woodcut and lettering in red — ‘This book and Stilts / For an Halfpenny’ on the front wrapper, and ‘This Book and Swing / For an Halfpenny’ on the rear wrapper. The later printing was in tune with the other 1809 issues, with wrappers illustrated and lettered in black. The front wrapper has a vignette of a man with a barrel organ and dancing dog, captioned ‘Tune Dance and Book / for a Halfpenny’; the rear wrapper has a vignette of a man with a peep show, captioned ‘Galanti Show and Book for an Halfpenny’. This practice seems to have become less regular after 1811. In that year, on 10 April, William Howard died and, as the London Gazette announced the following month, John Evans carried on the business.47 Perhaps in an attempt to reinforce his grip on the market, Evans seems to have produced a fresh spurt of reprints at this time. Unusually for children’s chapbooks quite a number survive, some still folded but unstitched and uncut as if they were never sold.48 It is also possible that Howard’s death caused a disruption to his medicine vending, which encouraged an overdrive on printing for children to claw back income.

There is good evidence that Evans did not leave the type of his children’s books standing between printings. We are helped in tracing this because some of these imprints are, most unusually, dated. For instance, on page 4 of the Howard and Evans Old Mother Hubbard and her Dog, dated 1809, the last line of text reads ‘The Dog was a laughing’, which the tiny woodcut illustration shows him to be doing. Some two years later, however, the undated John Evans printing has ‘She found him a laughing’ (Figs 10.3 and 10.4).49 Also, the other three lines on the same page have typographical omissions (indicated here by square brackets): ‘[She] went to the Undertaker’s / [t]o buy him a Coffin, / [W]hen she came back.’ In addition, the ‘laughing dog’ woodcut has been swapped with the ‘He was reading the News’ woodcut from page 13. Again, when The Pretty ABC was reset for reissue in 1809 a number of errors crept in. ‘G was a good girl, saying her grace’ has been inverted so she is more a ‘good girl, stood on her head’. Also, a mess has been made of ‘V was Valenciennes’ so that it was by the ‘Dukef [printed upside down] oYork took’. However, when the J. Evans and Son printing came out the Duke of York remained in his imperfectly set state, suggesting the text had been left standing — but while the woodcut for G has been restored to the right way round, that for F is now upside down.

Fig. 10.3. Old Mother Hubbard and her Dog (Howard and Evans), 71.(1.) Private collection.

Fig. 10.4. Old Mother Hubbard and her Dog (John Evans), 71.(2.a.) Private collection.

In 1813 John Evans’s brother Thomas died. Both brothers had printed broadsides, slip songs, traditional chapbooks, and children’s chapbooks. Thomas was arguably even more creative and innovative than John in the field of children’s chapbooks during the first decade of the nineteenth century. It is he who seems to have collected, edited together, and expanded to fit the sixteen-page format a whole series of nursery rhymes. These included such later nursery staples as Tom the Piper’s Son, Jack Sprat, Jack and Jill, Little Tom Tucker, and Jack[y] Jingle and Sucky Shingle. Credit for the creation of these seminal children’s texts has generally been given to one or other of the later printers, such as James Catnach of Monmouth Court, James Kendrew of York, or John Rusher of Banbury, whose works have been better chronicled, and in the case of the last two have survived in vast numbers. As with so much else, the Opies generally had it right on the origin of these texts. So, John and Thomas Evans were both neighbours and rivals, and there was some overlap among their titles. However, there also seems to have been at least some acknowledgement of each other’s ‘property’. Thomas ‘copied’ John’s Cinderilla, but they both had their own editions of Cock Robin, Mother Hubbard, and Jenny Wren. However, John never printed Thomas’s best-known publication, Dame Trot and her Comical Cat, originally from 1803, during his brother’s lifetime, and only began producing this and the other ‘original’ titles listed above after his brother’s death, when he evidently inherited or bought his shop and stock.50 John’s Tom the Piper’s Son, on close examination, would seem to be identical to his brother’s save for the imprint. Had Thomas really kept his children’s chapbooks in standing type, or is this an incredibly early example of stereotyping? Sue Dipple’s copy of a 32-page Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe had the seemingly unique printing information ‘T. Evans, No. 42, Long Lane, West Smithfield’ on the title page (i.e. John’s address), but was contained in wrappers that gave Thomas’s address, ‘79, Long-Lane’. John also had a sister, Mary (later Williams).

A study of other firms’ imprints reveals that Evans did not just sell his own material. He (or his heirs) also sold works printed by J. Bysh of Paternoster Row (The History of Tom Thumb), T. & R. Hughes of Ludgate Street (The Royal Alphabet), Dean and Munday (New and Complete Hieroglyphical Bible), Watts and Bridgewater of Queen Street, Grosvenor Square (The Child’s Third Book), J. Rose of Bristol, J. Poole of Taunton (Juvenile Poems; or, the Alphabet in Verse), and J. G. Rusher of Banbury (a 48-page Divine Songs, Reading Made Most Easy, Filial Remembrancer).

Besides his Long Lane address, Evans eventually owned a house in Hermitage Place, St John’s Street Road, Islington, which was built in 1812. By 1816 a second son had joined the printing interest, as in that year both John Edward Evans and Charles Evans were admitted to the Stationers’ Company and the two of them were to continue their father’s printing business. They combined new titles, sometimes by established writers such as Lucy Sarah Atkins Wilson, but more often than not fairly generic morality tales and efforts where the text seems to have been an afterthought once the illustrations had been chosen, along with reissues of their father’s and uncle’s work. Charles died in 1828, and John Edward carried on alone in Long Lane until 1839 and died on 21 July 1857 at Granville Lodge, Hammersmith, aged seventy-three. There was a third son, Benjamin, who does not appear to have been associated with the printing interest. He was left £1,500, which was paid in annual instalments of £300. His sister, Mary Williams, survived him but his wife seems not to have.

Of all John Evans’s publications for children, the sixteen-page titles seem to have been his signature publications. They were the ones that were reprinted most and copied by other printers over the following decades. Indeed, it may have been as a retaliatory act against the later established (but more famous) London printings of James Catnach, John Pitts, and Thomas Batchelar that John Edward Evans reissued his father’s sixteen-page corpus, from stereotype plates, in the 1830s. John Evans himself had died at Hermitage Place on 5 March 1820, just over a month after George III.51 With the death of that long-lived and troubled king the eighteenth century could be said to have ended. In some ways it was appropriate for Evans to have left the scene at the same time. He did as much as anyone to create the cheap children’s book and to develop it from a thing of obscurity into a nineteenth-century phenomenon that brought illustrated children’s books, and later comics, into the hands of millions of children from all backgrounds.

Appendix 1

Provisional short-title checklist of children’s books printed or published by John Evans and his heirs

A list of the books known, through physical survivals or advertisements, to have been printed prior to John Evans’s death in 1820 and then afterwards by his sons. Titles are numbered in approximately the order in which they were first issued. Some titles appeared under a variety of imprints and, when known, these are listed beneath the entry for the first known edition. If a title is duplicated in the list, these are completely different editions, with different illustrations and perhaps different textual content. Identified copies are listed with current locations, where known. Those marked with an asterisk * have been examined at first hand. A list of this kind does not pretend to be definitive, and it is hoped and expected that new titles will emerge in due course. It does, though, reveal Evans to be one of the most prodigious printers and publishers of ‘street’ children’s books in the ‘long eighteenth century’.52 Nos. 1–12 were entered in the Stationers’ Register on 19 November 1785. The titles of these have been taken from the Stationers’ Register entries, and where no copy survives to check this may not have been the exact printed title.

1780s

1. The Puzzle Cap, being a Collection of New Riddles the Whole Calculated to Enliven the Winter Evenings by Promoting Innocent Mirth

(1.) — (sold at 42, Long Lane, West Smithfield, [1785]). 48 pp. Advertisement (two-penny books).

2. Tommy Truelove’s Present, containing a Variety of Pictures with Suitable Verses & Applications Moral & Entertaining, Something in Every Picture Here You’ll Find to Please the Fancy & Improve the Mind

(1.) — (sold at 42, Long Lane, West Smithfield). viii, 42, [4] pp. ESTC N67244.

(a.) Princeton, NJ, Cotsen Children’s Library, 52775 Pams / Eng 19 / Box 008. Cotsen Catalogue *A11 1141.

(b.) Free Library of Philadelphia, \RBD\CB\E\[1792]\T598T\.

(2.) — (G. Thompson, 43, and J. Evans, No. 41, Long Lane, West Smithfield). c.1796. viii, (1), 10–42, (4–44) pp. David Miles Books, 2012, 100 × 65 mm, priced at £2,000 and subsequently sold. Reappeared as Amanda Hall Rare Books, Teffont 41, July 2019, no. 37, at £3,500.*

3. The Pretty Alphabet; or, Pleasant Pastime of A.B.C., Written for the Instruction of All Who Would Become Scholars & Great, by Means of their Learning; to which is added, The History of Fanny.Fairly Who from a Girl Became a Great Lady