Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T21:47:08.743Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Puritan Humor, or Entertainment, for Children*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

C. John Sommerville
Get access

Extract

When Keith Thomas wrote “The Place of Laughter in Tudor and Stuart England,” he could not ignore the so-called Marprelate Tracts, which are famous lampoons on Queen Elizabeth's bishops. But they are a problem, because they are examples of what can only be termed Puritan humor. No one yet has described them as the work of a “funny Puritan.” Those words repel each other. So we usually say they were the work of a “Puritan sympathizer.” Funny Puritans don't exist, almost by definition. Professor Thomas searched for an acceptable expression and finally dismissed the episode—seven pamphlets which have been called “The best prose satires of Elizabeth's reign”—as “bizarre.” In his view, then, it is all simply inexplicable, and he hastens to assure readers that “not only the Church but also its Puritan opponents condemned Martin [the pseudonymous “Martin Marprelate”] for treating the matter with such levity.” Here we have the Puritans we know and love, the ones whom H. L. Mencken defined as those who live with the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.

But English Puritan literature for children reveals other anomalies in this characterization. Puritans and (after 1660) “Dissenters” wrote a great deal for children, more than any other group in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most of it is tedious if not downright grim, including some of their attempts at humor. But much of it was intended to give pleasure. The purpose of this article is to look into the strangely neglected subject of Puritan humor through the prism of their works for the entertainment of children.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , Summer 1989 , pp. 227 - 247
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1989

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

I would like to that Professors Norman Holland and David Leverentz for their advice on various parts of this paper.

References

1 “The Place of Laughter in Tudor and Stuart England,” Times Literary Supplement, Jan. 21, 1977, pp. 77ffGoogle Scholar; Harvey, Paul, Oxford Companion to English Literature (4th ed.; Oxford, 1967), p. 522Google Scholar; Carlson, Leland H., Martin Marprelate, Gentleman; Master Job Throkmorton Laid Open in His Colors (San Marino, Calif., 1981), p. 10Google Scholar, and quoting John Dover Wilson on p. 132.

2 Sommerville, C. John, “English Puritans and Children: A Social-Cultural Explanation,” Journal of Psychohistory 6 (1978): 113–137.Google Scholar

3 Sloane, William, Children's Books in England and America in the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1955)Google Scholar. Only Jole's, WilliamThe Father's Blessing Penn'd for the Instruction of his Children (London, 1674)Google Scholar and Ronksley's, WilliamThe Child's Weeks-work (London, 1712)Google Scholar, could have been “Anglican” attempts to produce entertainment for children. For production figures, see note 21 below.

4 Anselment, Raymond A., “Betwixt Jest and Earnest”; Marprelate, Milton, Marvell, Swift and the Decorum of Religious Ridicule (Toronto, 1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Theses Martinianae (n.p., [1589]), sig. D4.

6 Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. Strachey, James (New York, 1960), pp. 111 ff.Google Scholar

7 Tave, Stuart M., The Amiable Humorist (Chicago, 1960), pp. 12–24, 164f, 94–100, 118.Google Scholar

8 Ibid., pp. 91–94.

9 Munro, D. H., Argument of Laughter (Melbourne, 1951)Google Scholar; Koestler, Arthur, “Humour and Wit,” The New Encyclopedia Britannica: Macropaedia (Chicago, 1979), 9: 5–11.Google Scholar

10 Deetz, James, In Small Things Forgotten; The Archaeology of Early American Life (Garden City, 1977), p. 59.Google Scholar

11 Holland, Norman N., Laughing; A Psychology of Humor (Ithaca, 1982), pp. 47–53.Google Scholar

12 Freud, , Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, pp. 243, 223–236.Google Scholar

13 Sommerville, C. John, “Breaking the Icon: The First Real Children in English Books,” History of Education Quarterly 21 (1981): 51–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “The Distinction of Education and Indoctrination in England, 1549–1719,” Journal of the History of Ideas 44 (1983): 387–407; idem, “English Puritans and Children.”

14 Thomas, “The Place of Laughter.”

15 Quoted in Carlson, , Martin Marprelate, p. 155.Google Scholar

16 Ibid., pp. 75–91.

17 The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967), pp. 78, 393f, 140.Google Scholar

18 Thomas, “The Place of Laughter.”

19 The Practice of Piety (38th ed.; London, 1637), p. 253.Google Scholar

20 Quoted in Anselment, , Betwixt Jest and Earnest, p. 14.Google Scholar

21 Brookes, Thomas, Apples of Gold for Young Men and Women (New York, 1825)Google Scholar. At a standard run of 3,000 copies in each of the 16 reprintings (by 1693), the total of about 50,000 would relate to the 1,360,000 English families calculated by Gregory King, as 3,162,000 copies would relate to the 86,000,000 American households in the 1980 census, that is, one copy per 27.2 families. See my article “On the Distribution of Religious and Occult Literature in Seventeenth-Century England,” The Library 29 (1974): 221–225Google Scholar. The religious census of 1676 showed the Dissenting population to be about 4.5% of the total, or about 62,200 families. See The Complon Census of 1676: a Critical Edition, ed. Whiteman, Anne (London, 1986), pp. lxxvi–lxxix.Google Scholar

22 [Acton, Samuel], The Virgin Saint: or, A Brief Narrative of the Holy Life, and Christian Death of Mary Wilson (London, 1673), pp. 21, 28, 41, 47.Google Scholar

23 Holland, , Laughing, p. 30.Google Scholar

24 Brookes, , Apples of Gold, pp. 132, 142f, 55.Google Scholar

25 Ibid., pp. 141, 45.

26 Ibid., pp. 152, 155.

27 Ibid., p. 189.

28 Ibid., pp. 165, 169.

29 The Non-Conformist's Memorial, ed. Palmer, Samuel, 3 vols. (2nd ed.; London, 1802–1803), 1: 150.Google Scholar

30 Brookes, , Apples of Gold, p. 93.Google Scholar

31 Anon., The Tales and Jests of Mr. Hugh Peters (London, 1660)Google Scholar, and anon., Hugh Peters his Figaries (n.p., 1660). Raymond Stearns suspects some of this material to be spurious, from other chapbooks: see The Strenuous Puritan: Hugh Peters, 1598–1660 (Urbana, 1954), p. 106Google Scholar n. 22. My own search has not turned up such sources.

32 Ibid, pp. 11f. For another version of this story, see Stearns, , Strenuous Puritan, p. 216.Google Scholar

33 Tales and Jests, pp. 27, 25.

34 Ibid., pp. 27, 16.

35 Ibid., p. 17f; Stearns, , Strenuous Puritan, pp. 216, 365fGoogle Scholar; Dictionary of National Biography, 15: 955–963.Google Scholar

36 Fraser, Antonia, Cromwell; The Lord Protector (New York, 1973), pp. 643f.Google Scholar

37 Stearns, , Strenuous Puritan, pp. 140–143.Google Scholar

38 Calamy, , Non-Conformist's Memorial, 1: 116, 203fGoogle Scholar; 2: 176, 200; 3: 44, 45, 67, 305, 450.

39 Ibid., 1: 168; 2: 53; 1: 211.

40 Ibid., 2: 89f.

41 Ibid., 2: 409, 406; Words made Visible: or Grammar and Rhetoric accommodated to the Lives and Manners of Men (London, 1679), sig. A1.Google Scholar

42 The Different Humours of Men represented at an Interlude in a Country School (London, 1692).Google Scholar

43 Smith, Joseph, A Descriptive Catalogue of Friends Books (London, 1867), 1: 36.Google Scholar

44 Sloane, , Children's Books, pp. 168, 172.Google Scholar

45 War with the Devil (4th ed.; London, 1676), p. 11.Google ScholarPubMed

46 For instance, young John Draper read it as soon as it appeared; see Ness, Christopher, A Spiritual Legacy (London, 1684), p. 115.Google Scholar

47 Golder, Harold, “Bunyan's Giant Despair,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 30 (1931): 361–378.Google Scholar

48 The Pilgrim's Progress (New York, 1964), p. 87.Google ScholarPubMed

49 Ibid., p. 93.

50 T. S., Second Part of The Pilgrim's Progress, (London, 1684), sigs. A7fGoogle Scholar. Bernard was a Puritan. James Blanton Wharey describes his work as “not without wit,” meaning, of course, that it was very nearly so: A Study of the Sources of Bunyan's Allegories (1904; reprnt., New York, 1968), p. 89.Google Scholar

51 Sherman's work saw three editions by 1700, plus another two in Scotland, which reflects badly on Scottish humor.

52 The Travels of True Godliness, 3rd ed. (London, 1684), sig. A2v.Google Scholar

53 The Principles of the Doctrine of Christ, or A Catechism (London, 1691), pp. 1–51.Google ScholarPubMed

54 Non-Conformist's Memorial, 1: 352, 394Google Scholar; 2: 141.

55 Vincent, Thomas, Words of Advice to Young Men (London, 1668)Google Scholar and Christ the Best Husband (1672); Mead, Matthew, The Good of Early Obedience (London, 1683)Google Scholar and The Young Man's Remembrancer (London, 1699).Google Scholar

56 A Little Book for Little Children (12th ed.; London, 1702), p. 18Google Scholar. This is not to be confused with a book with the same title by “T. W.”, described in Darton, F. J. Harvey, Children's Books in England, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1966), p. 60.Google Scholar

57 The Practical Works of Richard Baxter (London, 1854), 4: 34–64.Google Scholar

58 Church, Leslie, The Early Methodist People (London, 1948), pp. 237–241.Google Scholar

59 Keach, War with the Devil, sig. A3v, E. B.'s “Epistle to the Reader.”

60 Stone, Lawrence, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (London, 1977), p. 174Google Scholar, recounts a case of a child's hysteria associated with the threat of damnation.

61 Vernon, John, The Compleat Scholler; or, A Relation of the Life, and latter-end especially, of Caleb Vernon (2nd ed.; London, 1666), pp. 24–26.Google Scholar

62 Ibid., pp. 61f, corrected by H. P., comp., A Looking-Glass for Children (3rd ed.; London, 1673), pp. 23f.Google ScholarPubMed

63 Vernon, , Compleat Scholler, p. 61.Google Scholar

64 Looking-Glass for Children, pp. 63f.

65 John Bunyan; The Poems, ed. Midgley, Graham (Oxford, 1980), p. 60.Google Scholar

66 Ibid., pp. 190–192. See also I Corinthians 3: 18–19.

67 Ibid., pp. 202f.

68 Ibid., pp. 214–221.

69 Ibid., pp. 223f, 234f.

70 Holland, , Laughing, p. 108Google Scholar. I am indebted to Professor Holland for his comments on this paper.

71 Ibid., p. 37f; Cox, Harvey, The Feast of Fools (New York, 1969)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hyers, M. Conrad, Holy Laughter; Essays on Religion in the Comic Perspective (New York, 1969), pp. 75–88, 126–130.Google Scholar