Introduction
Lear ('There was an old Derry down Derry who loved to see little folk merry, so he made them a book,' and so forth: proof positive), and Jacob Abbott, and the Lambs and the other writers in the following pages.
The scheme of the book precluding more than one or two stories from any one writer, and the quality of the stories of the period in which I was hunting being very poor, it was necessary, before the nineteen stories that form this one volume were collected, to look through, I suppose, as many as a hundred others. Even now I am only too well aware that not every story may be thought very interesting; yet each, I think, has something in its favour even in this exacting age, while about all there is to me a very agreeable flavour of old-fashionedness.
The earliest in point of time is that which describes the wanderings of the good-natured and ill-natured little boys (perhaps an amusing rather than an admirable history), the latest is 'Bob and Dog Quiz.' This is indeed so late—1847—as to be almost in the new spirit, as is also the chapter from Holiday House. It is interesting to see the new spirit creeping in.
II.
I have made one or two slight alterations in 'Little Jack' (page 1), solely for the purpose of adding (in this critical day, when the nursery's sense of the ridiculous is so carefully fostered) to its merits as a story to be read aloud. Now and then it would be, in its original form, quite too comic, although when it was written by the odd but kindly Thomas Day, whose only thought was to do something useful for his fellows, it could probably have been read without an ill-placed smile in any company of children
Thomas Day (1748-1789) is best known as the author of Sandford and Merton, 1783- 1789. The 'History of Little Jack' was first published in Stockdale's Children's Miscellany, and republished separately in 1788. It is one of the most human of the early stories for and about children.
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