Tea at Trianon: Chapbooks

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Chapbooks

Chapbooks were the popular reading for the common people from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. (Via Hermes) Many popular fairy tales were spread by such a means, as well as news and sermons. According to the National Library of Scotland:

Chapbooks are small paper-covered booklets, usually printed on a single sheet or portion of a sheet, folded into books of eight, 12, 16 and 24 pages, often illustrated with crude woodcuts. They were in circulation from the 17th to the 19th centuries, sold by travelling hawkers, pedlars, street-criers or 'chapmen' for a penny or less on the streets and at markets and fairs. The word 'chapman' is related to the word 'cheap', but it is probably also related to the Anglo-Saxon 'ceapian', meaning to barter, buy and sell. The quality of paper used was invariably coarse; chapbook printers frequently employed worn and broken type and it was not uncommon for the illustrations to bear no relation to the text.
Chapbooks, along with broadsides, comprised the staple reading matter of the 'common people' in an age well before the arrival of harbingers of modernity such as the telegraph, the train, the telephone and the mechanised printing press. The subject matter of chapbooks was quite broad - sermons of covenanting ministers, prophecies, last words of murderers, songs and poems by Robert Burns and Allan Ramsay, biographies of famous people such as Wallace, Napoleon and Nelson, romances, legends, not to mention manuals of instruction and almanacs. One of the features of this type of publication is the proliferation of provincial imprints - chapbooks were printed in places such as Fintray, Newton Stewart and Inveraray, as well as Edinburgh, Falkirk and Glasgow. Chapbooks were read, or perhaps more accurately, read out to people of all ages, though few publishers catered specifically for children. James Lumsden of Glasgow was an exception - he produced good quality chapbooks for children in the early 19th century. Chapbooks gradually disappeared from the 1860s onwards, not only because of the explosion in the amount of cheap printed matter available but also due to strong competition from religious tract societies such as the Stirling Tract Enterprise which regarded many chapbook publications as 'ungodly'.

Julygirl said...: You always come up with new and interesting tidbits on your Blog.
Most likely more people read in those days than they do now, (with the exception of your readers.); November 3, 2009 at 11:05:00 PM EST