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THE HISTORY OF FAIRY TALES
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1667–1745. Gulliver's Travels, by Dean Swift. (One modern edition, with introduction by W. D. Howells, and more than one hundred illustrations by Louis Rhead, is published by Harpers. Another edition, illustrated by Arthur Rackham, is published by Dutton.)
1700–1800. Chap-Books. Very many of these books, especially the best ones, were published by William and Cluer Dicey, in Aldermary Church Yard, Bow Lane, London. Rival publishers, whose editions were rougher in engraving, type, and paper, labored in Newcastle.
The chap-books were little paper books hawked by chapmen, or traveling peddlers, who went from village to village with "Almanacks, Bookes of Newes, or other trifling wares." These little books were usually from sixteen to twenty-four pages in bulk and in size from two and one half inches by three and one half inches to five and one half inches by four and one quarter inches. They sold for a penny or six-pence and became the very popular literature of the middle and lower classes of their time. After the nineteenth century they became widely published, deteriorated, and gradually were crowded out by the Penny Magazine and Chambers's Penny Tracts and Miscellanies. For many years before the Victorian period, folk-lore was left to the peasants and kept out of reach of the children of the higher classes. This was the reign of the moral tale, of Thomas Bewick's Looking Glass of the Mind and Mrs. Sherwood's Henry and His Bearer. Among the chap-books published by William and Cluer Dicey, may be mentioned: The Pleasant and Delightful History of Jack and the Giants (part second was printed and sold by J. White); Guy, Earl of Warwick; Bevis of Hampton; The History of Reynard the Fox, dated 1780; The History of Fortunatus, condensed from an edition of 1682; The Fryer and the Boy; A True Tale of Robin Hood (Robin Hood Garland Blocks, from 1680, were used in the London Bridge Chap-Book edition); The Famous History of Thomas Thumb; The History of Sir Richard Whittington; and The Life and Death of St. George. Tom Hickathrift was printed by and for M. Angus and Son, at Newcastle-in-the-Side: Valentine and Orson was printed at Lyons, France, in 1489; and in England