by Nur Sarah
This unique edition of “Watts’ Divine Songs” is one of many from Isaac Watts’ larger collection of moral and religious poems for children which was written in 1715. Published in the mid-19th century, this pocket-sized booklet is merely 8 pages long and contains a small selection of only 3 poems with accompanying illustrations on every page. This particular edition contains the poems ‘Morning Song’, ‘The Little Busy Bee’ (which you might recognize from the parodied version in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) and ‘Brotherly Love’.
Pocket-sized booklets such as this were known as toy books, which is a type of chapbook. Chapbooks were small printed booklets that gained popularity in 17th and 18th century Europe as a medium for entertainment. They were usually made of rough paper between 8-24 pages long that were bound with thread. Any illustrations were printed using crude woodcuts. Because they were so cheaply produced, they became a common source of reading material for lower-class people.
But unlike the usual chapbooks, toy books like “Watt’s Divine Songs” were typically a lot smaller, and were targeted towards the child audience. As part of the marketing strategy, these booklets came with small toys, hence the term ‘toy books’. So early toy books were essentially the first form of children’s books, featuring illustrations to go alongside rhymes and tales as its content. They were often released as part of a series.
Isaac Watts’ original larger collection, Divine Songs, was written in a such a way that was meant to be accessible to young readers, so that they may truly learn and understand moral religious values. It was actually even used as a textbook in schools. Even so, the focus and purpose of it was mostly on education. With the toy book edition, however, there was an attempt at balancing education with entertainment in order to appeal to children.