Celebrating the Digitization of McGill Library’s Chapbook Collection: An exhibition of British and American chapbooks

This exhibition celebrates the creation of the Library’s newest digital collection. The McGill Library’s Chapbook Collection contains over 900 English-language chapbooks published in England, Scotland, Ireland and the northeastern United States.  Through a generous donation from the Harold Crabtree Foundation digital facsimiles have been prepared and the entire collection is now online.

The majority of the chapbooks in the McGill Library’s Chapbook Collection were published in the early 19^th century.  They contain stories based upon medieval romance, English legends and folklore, or abridged from popular literature for adults.   Children’s chapbooks of popular nursery rhymes, fairy tales and books of instruction are also part of the chapbook collection courtesy of The Sheila R. Bourke Collection of Children’s Literature, a major research collection in children’s literature which is held by the Library.

Chapbooks are small in size and number of pages. They were printed on cheap paper and their leaves stitched together, sometimes including an illustrated paper cover. Often undated, without authors, chapbooks are usually identified by their printer and often contain numerous woodcut illustrations. They were carried by peddlers known as “chapmen” and were sold for pennies or less to the rural population on their trade routes.  Scholars link the proliferation of this “cheap print “ to  increased literacy rates and though first-hand accounts of readership are rare, chapbooks are considered a significant aspect of the printed popular literature of the time.

These selections from McGill Library’s Chapbook Collection illustrate a range of subject genres, printers and publishing locations on both sides of the Atlantic.  Included are evangelical publications such as Hannah More’s Cheap Repository Tracts and the Religious Tract Society who modeled their publications on the chapbook format in an attempted to reform the lower classes.

The McGill Library’s Chapbook Collection can be viewed online from the McGill Library website at http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/chapbooks.

Items displayed in this exhibition have been selected from McGill’s Rare Books and Special Collections including The Sheila R. Bourke Collection of Children’s Literature and the Children’s Collection. 

This exhibition was prepared by Sharon Rankin, Liaison Librarian. The Library would like to thank Jason Grand, McGill M.A. English 2014 for the excerpts of his texts used in this exhibition.

Free admission. Accessible during opening hours.

McLennan Library Building Lobby : 3459 rue McTavish. Montreal, Quebec , H3A 0C9

On August 15, 2013 the website was launched!

Through a generous donation from the Harold Crabtree Foundation, digital facsimiles of the  Rare Books and Special Collections chapbook collection have been prepared and a virtual collection created.

The McGill Library’s Chapbook Collection is organized by subject categories which can be browsed. The entire work can be read in PDF format or online, using the page turning functionality of the Internet Archive.

Visit the collection at:
http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/chapbooks

Our collection of chapbooks is divided into several categories by subject matter,  one of which is “Instructional.” This category contains all sorts of chapbooks imparting good manners and religious lessons to  young readers, through songs, poems, and moral tales. The lessons range from charity to industriousness, with a good dose of piety thrown in. One of the main themes throughout each work, however, is obedience, both to God and parents.

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 !

While I love it when we get to touch upon topics of historical significance, maybe my enthusiasm in this case should be reconsidered.

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.

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.