| Between 1686 and 1770 nine significant volumes of religious and moral verse for children published in England formed a specialized genre of religious verse. John Bunyan's A Book for Boys and Girls (1686) established the genre with a toy-like format of short emblematic poems, each followed by a religious "comparison." Isaac Watts's classic Divine and Moral Songs (1715), replacing the emblems with short hymns and songs, improved upon Bunyan's book in poetic values and attention to audience while it also introduced secular themes. Following Watts's successful lead, three more books appeared with varied religious and moral emphasis: John Wright's Spiritual Songs for Children (1727), an unsuccessful supposed imitation of Watts's classic, Thomas Foxton's Moral Songs Composed for the Use of Children (1728), which de-emphasized traditional Christian belief and stressed latitudinarian morality and stoicism, and Philip Doddridge's The Principles of the Christian Religion (1743), which aspired to imitate Watts's easy language and child speaker in poems that form a versified catechism. At mid century the genre was strongly modified by Nathaniel Cotton's Visions in Verse (1751), whose long didactic narrative poems banish traditional Christianity and substitute reason in the pursuit of secular happiness through virtue, and John Marchant's Puerilia, or Amusements for the Young (1751), whose scenes of children at play advocate preparing for a secure middle-class adulthood more than the Last Judgment. But in 1763 Charles Wesley's Hymns for Children returned the genre to its original dominance by fundamental Christianity, and in 1770 the genre's developments culminated in Christopher Smart's Hymns for the Amusement of Children, which combined the Wattsian stress on self-improvement and the Wesleyan emphasis on Christ by its Christianizing of secular virtues.;To date this genre of children's verse has not been clearly recognized, nor have these texts been adequately studied. Upon reconsidering in the light of close readings of these nine texts what few generalizations have been made in the past, one can safely conclude that those observations are misleading or untrue. |
