Perhaps best remembered today as the author of The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), English writer and Puritan preacher John Bunyan also wrote close to sixty other books, including this 1686 collection of poetry for children. In his preface here, Bunyan concedes that rhymes are "foolish," and eschewed by the wise, but maintains that they are a useful teaching tool, when working with the young. He provides an introductory aid to children learning English, giving the alphabet in various fonts, and includes a discussion of vowels and consonants, syllables, spelling examples, and a list of boys and girls' names. The bulk of the book is taken up with the seventy-four poems, devoted to such topics as the Ten Commandmens, Original Sin, The Lord's Prayer, and other subjects of a religious and spiritual nature...

A Book for Boys and Girls; or, Country Rhimes for Children was an assigned text in the course I took on early children's literature, during the course of my masters, and was paired in the syllabus with Isaac Watts' Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children (1715), which is also a collection of poetry for children. On the whole, I did not enjoy the Bunyan quite as much as the Watts. The poetry itself is far less accomplished, and the author's evident contempt for the form, as expressed in his preface, is perhaps explained by his lack of skill with it. The text here consists mostly of awkwardly rhyming four-line stanzas - "My Filth grew strong, and boyled, / And me throughout defiled, / Its pleasures me beguiled, / My soul, how are thou spoyled" - and frequently has a nasty tone to it that is off-putting. A concern with sin and likely damnation is a theme one would expect from a Puritan, but not all such authors manage to convey such loathing, both of the sin and the sinner. Compare Bunyan's tone here to James Janeway, in his 1671 A Token for Children: Being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives, and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children. I think part of the problem is that Bunyan doesn't seem to sympathize with his audience. He realizes that educating the young is important - in this he is like many other Puritans, who were, as a group, the first in the Anglophone world to truly grasp the potential of a literature aimed at children - but he doesn't seem to like them, based on his prefatory remarks about the work being aimed at fools and children, and the necessity of using a "foolish" style to communicate with them.

I have wanted to read The Pilgrim's Progress ever since I was a little girl, and fell in love with Alcott's classic Little Women, which has copious references to it, and I still want to read it, despite my lukewarm response to this collection. I'm glad to have read this one, as it did offer me an additional 17th-century children's text to compare with the Janeway, but I'm not sure I'd strongly recommend it to other readers, unless they are interested in early Anglophone children's literature and/or the work of Bunyan and the Puritans at large. ( )