Infantine Stories; in Words of One, Two, and Three Syllables

London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1816. Early edition. Very Good. Twelvemo. 144 pp. With six copper-engraved plates (including frontispiece). Contemporary quarter roan over drab boards. Spine titled and ruled in gilt. Edgewear, mostly to corners. Contemporary ink inscription, "Schoolroom Eatington" (?), to front pastedown. Tear to center of one plate with minor loss to part of the image. Fore-edge of lower flyleaf cropped a bit short. Some contemporary ink marginalia. Still a Very Good, internally clean copy. Early edition, first published as a part of Benjamin Tabart's Juvenile and School Library in 1810. All editions are scarce: OCLC records (truncated) only eight copies of any earlier editions (four in the US, three in the UK, and one in the Netherlands) and one copy of this edition (Kent State).

Eliza Fenwick (1766 - 1840) wrote several of these books between 1804 and 1805, and Infantine Stories seems to be the last entry she wrote for the Library. These didactic stories ("The Ball Dress," "The Frenchman," "The Deaf and Dumb Boy," etc.) utilize simple words, with any multisyllable words broken up with hyphens to simplify their reading.

Fenwick was a novelist, children's writer, and key member of Mary Wollstonecraft's circle (who even attended the birth of Mary Wollestonecraft's daughter, the future Mary Shelley). In 1795, Fenwick published her most enduring work: Secresy; or, The Ruin on the Rock, a novel about a young man marrying a wealthy older woman for her money that also draws an analogy between slavery and women's oppression. The novel was "a significant contribution to radical fiction, and to broader 1790s debates concerning education and gender" (ODNB). When Fenwick's marriage crumbled, however, she began writing children's books to support her family. "Eventually, Fenwick moved to Barbados, becoming the founder of a school while confronting the realities of slavery in the British colonies. She would go on to establish schools in numerous cities across the United States and Canada, all the while caring for her daughter and grandchildren, and maintaining her relationships with the English feminists she left behind" (Lissa Paul). Fenwick's pedagogical theory, also reflected in her didactic writing, was "progressive...based on cultivation of the feelings as well as the reasoning capacity, and was devoted to the moral welfare of her family and of the pupils in her care" (ODNB). Though Fenwick is now best remembered as a close friend of Wollstonecraft, her educational writing was well regarded and used widely schools throughout the nineteenth century. Very Good. (Inventory #: 6839)