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Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song-Book: The First Collection of English Nursery Rhymes; A Facsimile Edition with a History and Annotations. Edited by Andrea Immel and Brian Alderson. Los Angeles: Cotsen Occasional Press, 2013.
Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song-Book is a wonderful example of the power and beauty of archival research. The primary sources used by editors Andrea Immel and Brian Alderson are the scarce, fragile, chapbook-size books printed for children beginning in the 1740s and extending into the second half of the eighteenth century, often surviving in a single copy or, as in the case of one of the primary objects of their analysis, in newspaper advertisements only. Their book comes attractively bound in maroon cloth, encased in an identically clothed box along with three jewel-like facsimiles of eighteenth-century books under discussion: Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song-Book, volume 2 (Sold by M. Cooper); Tommy Thumb's Song Book (Worcester, Mass.: Isaiah Thomas, 1788); and The Pretty-Book (George Bickham).
The main premise of their argument is that rather than celebrating John Newbery's A Little Pretty Pocketbook as the putative origin point for children's literature, history ought to commend Mary Cooper's Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song-Book, volume 2, an earlier, and in their words, thoroughly "revolutionary venture" (3). Their consideration of contemporary publishing in support of their argument is detailed and highly interesting, containing discussions of Perrault's Contes, Janeway's Token, Croxall's Aesop, and other literary precursors and contemporaries. Although the editors aim to demonstrate the significance of the Pretty Song-Book, they are also sensitive to the utility of viewing children's literature of this time as a kind of wave phenomenon whose character reveals itself through the collective efforts of many mutually enlightened individuals acting within a matrix of historical and cultural forces. However, the genius of their book lies in its clarity of focus on the physical makeup of the Pretty Song-Book and on the efforts of Cooper and her collaborators, George Bickham and Charles Corbett (along with the pseudonymous Nurse Lovechild), to bring the book into being within the print culture of its time. Toward this end, they write with great liveliness and force about the nature of bookselling and illustration in this period.
Children's literature scholars may find Immel and Alderson's deprioritization of Newbery's A Little Pretty Pocket-Book provocative, although...