So, in honour of Mother’s Day this weekend, and in celebration of my own mother, who is indeed very kind, I offer up this little instructional poem found in  “Pleasing Poetry and Pictures: For the Mind and Eye,” from 1849.

My Kind Mother.
A Dutiful Child is the Joy of its Parents.

I must not tease my mother,
For she is very kind ;
And every thing she says to me,
I must directly mind ;
For when I was a baby,
And could not speak or walk,
She let me in her bosom sleep,
And taught me how to talk.

I must not tease my mother;
And when she likes to read,
Or has the headache, I will step
Most silently, indeed.
I will not choose a noisy play,
Or trifling troubles tell;
But sit down quiet by her side,
And try to make her well.

I must not tease my mother;
I have heard my father say,
When I was in my cradle sick,
She tended me all day.
She lays me in my little bed,
She gives me clothes and food,
And I have nothing else to pay,
But trying to be good.

I must not tease my mother;
She loves me all the day,
And she has patience with my faults,
And teaches me to pray;
How much I’ll strive to please her
She every hour shall see,
For, should she go away, or die,
What would become of me !

Version 1:
Title: The History of Cinderella; or, the Little Glass Slipper
Printed: Otley, England by William Walker
Date: 1813
Excerpt: “ Her movements were so graceful, and her dancing performed with such nice, and, at the same time, easy exactness, that the admiration of the whole assembly was raised to the greatest height, and every part of the room resounded with loud bursts of applause.” (p. 22)

Unique to this version of the Cinderella story (from the other two) is its numerous wood-cut engraving in the shape of either a rectangle, and more commonly within the text, the shape of an octagon. Furthermore, this Chapbook includes a few stanzas of verse throughout the text alongside the main story line.

Version 2:
Title: The Surprising Adventures of Cinderilla; or the History of A Glass Slipper to which is added An Historical Description of the Cat
Printed: York, by J. Kendrew Colliergate
Date: 1820
Excerpt: ” The King’s son conducted her to the most honourable seat and afterwards took her out to dance with him. She danced so very graceful, that they all more and more admired her.” (p.17)

One of the key distinctive features of this version of the story is the spelling of the protagonist’s name. Cinderella is most commonly spelled with an “e”, however, this Chapbook has published the name with an “i”. Furthermore, unlike the other two versions, this Chapbook includes a section for the alphabet before the main body of the text as well as adds a juvenile section towards the end of a description of a cat.

Version 3:
Title: Cinderella or, The History of the Little Glass Slipper
Printed: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania by Mathew Carey
Date: 1800
Except: ”The king’s ſon conducted her to the moſt honourable ſeat, and afterwards took her out to dance with him. She danced so very gracefully, that they all more and more admired her.” (p.21)

This particular version of the story of Cinderella is a facsimile (an exact reproduction of the original copy) that was acquired privately by the Huntington Library in 1951. According to the printed note at the beginning of this copy, it is “the earliest known American edition of Cinderella”. Mathew Carey, the publisher of this copy, was an Irish immigrant who came to Philadelphia in November 1784. The note further mentions that the text of this version may have been derived from Charles Perrault‘s collection of stories, first published in the late 17th century.

As displayed by the above excerpt, the text closely follows the standard version of the story (Version 2 above also demonstrates this). However, unlike the previous version, this publication includes numerous Latin S‘s, ct-ligature, signature characters, and wood cut oval-shaped images.

I’m guessing it was something of a 27th letter for a while? Often Ss are replaced with ſs every time they appear in a word, except as the last letter (as in “diſtreſs” and “ſenſations” and “covetouſneſs”).

One of the cool things* I get to do in this job is learn how optical-character-recognition works and try to “teach” it to work better. To that end, I built a language. It’s exactly like English except it understands a good chunk of Latin ſ usage. So far it’s mainly  Christian/religious/moral terminology, as well as common words and phraſes — but, if used in conjunction with character-by-character training, and a digitizer who’s willing to add words to the dictionary as he/she goes along, it vaſtly decreases the error rate and improves readability (i.e. keeping editor brain-fry to a manageable level).

It’s not an open format, but rather a proprietary archive for ABBYY FineReader — but, on the off-chance that this helps anyone in the future, I’ve made it publicly downloadable on Google Drive. I’d love to know if anyone finds a use for it!

* Cool if you’re a computer geek.

The popular Punch & Judy puppets (see here and here for more) have been around for centuries, and immortalized in countless ways. In chapbook form, however, the classic tale loses the absurd comedic effect that usually comes with the live show.

The Punch & Judy Foundation (yes, really) even dedicates a page to criticisms and (mis?)conceptions about the tradition. Easily my favourite part is that even Dickens had something to say about it:

“In my opinion street Punch is one of those extravagant relief’s from the realties of life which would lose its hold upon the people if it were made moral and instructive…. I regard it as quite harmless in its influence and as an outrageous joke which no one in existence would think of regarding as an incentive to any kind of action or as a model for any kind of conduct.

“It is possible, I think, that one secret source of pleasure very generally derived from this performance, as from the more boisterous parts of a Christmas pantomime, is the satisfaction the spectator feels in the circumstances that likenesses of men and women can be so knocked about without any pain or suffering.”

Seems like Dickens would’ve been pro-video-game.

My knowledge of Punch & Judy comes from the Marx Brothers’ Monkey Business, and the 1940 version of Pride & Prejudice (with the inimitable Greer Garson and Lawrence Olivier); I’m sure the rest of you have your own references. Our copy of The Serio-Comic Drama of Punch & Judy sits in the Rosalynd Stearn Collection in the McGill Rare Books Library.

 

Spring is finally in the air along with some returning feathered friends. In honour of our avian associates I thought I’d share part of a chapbook on birds. While there are plenty of chapbooks in the collection on birds, I picked Juvenile History of Birds because of a reference to Canada in the first entry. It describes the turkey’s homeland of Canada as “covered with snow above three parts of the year.” I’m assuming that’s three parts out of four, which it certainly feels like sometimes.

This also gives me an opportunity to mention another part of McGill University’s Rare Books and Special Collections – the amazing Blacker-Wood Collection of Zoology and Ornithology. For example, it houses a book with pictures of birds and people made entirely of feathers from 1618! You can see the digitized version here. There are also several collections on different aspects of Canadiana such as Canadian history, literature, architecture, prints, and even the Olympics.

Noon – Retirement

As we gaze upon Montreal’s snow blanket in mid-March, let us also fantasize of the spring that is promised to be near with a few verses from a 1814 chapbook titled Day, A Pastoral.

Now the pine-tree’s waving top
Gently greets the morning gale!
Kidlings, now, begin to crop
Daisies in the dewy vale.

 

By the brook the shepherd dines;
From the fierce meridian heat
Shelter’d by the branching pines,
Pendant o’er his grassy seat.

 

Now the flock forsakes the glade,
Where uncheck’d the sun-beams fall;
Sure to find a pleasing shade
By the ivy’d abbey wall

 

 Not a leaf has leave to stir,
Nature’s lull’d serene, and still!
Quiet o’er the shepherd’s cur,
Sleeping on the heath-clad hill.

This English Pastoral Poetry was relatively refreshing to encode in the process of The Chapbook Digitization Project — especially in the winter term as it poetically describes the day of a shepherd dependent on nature. Amidst downtown Montreal in it’s coldest days, I am left, unlike the resting shepherd in the image, to ponder on brighter days.

The chapbook’s wood engravings were illustrated by Thomas Bewick without colour. The displayed picture was edited to convey the spring colours that are a product of my imagination

Since it’s Saint Patrick’s Day I thought I’d share a tangentially related chapbook on pots of gold and rainbows, though you can forget about any red balloons. The moral of The Boy and the Rainbow, in a typical Victorian fashion, is to ignore such childish nonsense because regular work will get you more gold than chasing rainbows.

For a more serious look at Irish culture and literature, there are a number of chapbooks published in or about Ireland which are a part of the digitization project. You can find some of the titles here.

This month the text-recognition team is working through a number of religious tracts — the Cheap Repository, published in the late 1700s and early 1800s by Hazard and Marshall. While chapbooks were often sold apiece, collections were sometimes later bound by the printers and sold as a whole. In our collection, individual chapters are unbound. (You can see a professionally-bound version of the Cheap Repository, with a table of contents, from 1807 on Google Books.)

A book containing an index of titles (a meta-chapbook?), with an introduction to the printers and their aims, can be found here. In fact it’s more of a promotional piece than a finding aid, as the majority of the pages are occupied with a list of subscribers to the collection. As such, it’s an interesting document of a corporate privacy policy: it seems Facebook’s use of uploaded photos is more contested today than having one’s name and status used to endorse purchases in the 1800s.

You might be familiar with these word and picture puzzles, known as rebus. A rebus is an allusional device that uses pictures to represent words or parts of words, and was a popular pastime in the 18th century and on into the 19th century.

With that quick history lesson, here are some of the picture riddles. Let’s see if you’re as smart as a child from 1811 England (mouse-over for answers):

The Seat of Learning

A Seaport in Wales

A Place in Lincolnshire

How did you do? Three for three?

Some of our chapbooks are less jovial and more philosophical. Published in 1842 at the beginning of the teetotal movement, here’s a dialogue between two men on the effects of the corn laws during famine in the 1800s. I’m not a historian, so I found some extra research on the topic to be pretty interesting. Even without the context, the arguments presented by John, the abstinent Christian reformer, as to how productivity and national debt are all entwined in the propensity for drink of the everyday man, are even more entertaining when read aloud in that delightful rural dialect:

T. Ah, noo John, are ye really gaun to tak a’ the hair o’ comfort us puir bodies hae left ? if it wasna for the dribble o’ dram I get noo and than, I wad sink un’er my affliction athegither; ye canna deny I’m sure but it raised the spirits and mak’s us cheery mony a time, when nae ither thing will do’t.
J. O yes, Thomas, I must confess it raises the spirits, and that to an awfu’ degree, sometimes to 80, but next morning you will find them sink to 40, being 20 below par, and then what state do ye fin’ yoursel’ in ? do ye fin’ your purse ony benter? do ye fin your head ony healer? your character ony better, or your conscience ony sounder, after wallowing in that sinfu’ drink? I trow no, Thomas.

For more dialogues to rival Socrates, like the Dialogue between John and Thomas, on the corn laws, the charter, teetotalism, and the probable remedy for the present disstresses, try The Bible of Divine Origin.