Today we are diving deep into one of the most transformative periods in London's literary history, an extraordinary flowering of the printing industry in the 1740s, and the remarkable little book that helped revolutionize childhood reading forever. Picture this London in 1744, a bustling metropolis of approximately 675,000 people.
In the narrow streets around Saint Paul's Cathedral, the air carries the clatter of presses, the shouts of apprentices running proofs across courtyards, and the smell of ink and damp paper. At the heart of it all lies Paternoster Row, the densest cluster of booksellers, printers and publishers in Europe. From one of its shop fronts emerged a book so small it could sit in the palm of your hand, Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song book. Yet its influence would carry
across centuries of childhood. Let me set the broader scene. The 1740s were an energetic decade in British letters. Alexander Pope was still a dominant voice. Samuel Johnson was beginning to shape London literary life, though his great dictionary was yet to come. The novel was evolving rapidly. Public debate, satire and pamphleteering flourished in coffee houses, print shops and private clubs. London itself was still living in the long afterlife of the Great Fire of London.
As 1666. The rebuilt city bore the architectural marks of Christopher Wren Noma more dramatically than in the great Dome of Saint Paul's Cathedral, completed in 1710. New building codes meant brick and stone were replacing timber framed medieval structures. Streets were slowly widening and fire breaks, insurance schemes and parish watch systems reflected a capital learning to live with risk. Politics also pressed in.
The Jacobite rising of 1745, only a year after Tommy Thumb appeared, sent waves of panic through the capital when the Stuart army advanced as far South as Derby. Contemporary accounts describe Londoners hiding valuables, closing shops and worrying about bank collapses. As rumours flew, troops mustered on the northern approach roads just 113 miles from London. Even when the immediate threat passed, the mood of uncertainty lingered. Now to the street that concerns us most, Pata Nosta Row.
It ran in the shadow of Saint Paul's. It was never grand more Service Lane than Blvd. but by the mid 18th century it had become the nerve centre of the English book trade. Premises were identified by hanging signs rather than numbered addresses, The ship, the Black Swan, the globe and so on. Behind those signs were counting houses stacked with queries of paper, compositor rooms thick with type, and networks of partnership agreements that stretched nationwide.
The growth was dramatic. Across the long 18th century, the number of printers and booksellers active in London expanded several fold. Rising literacy, expanding middle class purchasing power, and a widening reading public drove demand for everything from sermons to satire, travel writing to children's checkbooks, and Paternoster Rowe acting as in a clearing house wholesaler and innovation lab
all at once. A key shift that opened the field was the early 18th century rethinking of copyright, formalised in legislation, often referred to as the Statute of Anne. As companies. National monopoly powers effectively lapsed in 1695 when parliament refused to renew the Licensing Act. The Statute of Anne, passed in 1710, then established for the first time publishing rights that could be defined in law, timed, transferred and defended in the courts.
Under the new regime, authors and their publishers could hold exclusive rights for 14 years, with the possibility of renewal for another 14 years if the author was still alive. That time limit mattered. It created incentives to produce new material and repackage older text before the right expired. It also encouraged investment in niches that the old monopoly system had neglected, including literature for the young. 2 figures help bring this world to life.
First off, Mary Cooper, Widowed in the early 1740s, she carried on and expanded her late husband Thomas Cooper's business at the Globe. 8 Paternoster Row Active through 1760, she became one of the first London publishers to target children explicitly. Long before John Newbury became the poster child for early children's publishing, Mary Cooper was issuing small, affordable books for Little Masters and Misses, and Tommy Thumb's Pretty Songbook was among them.
Cooper was what contemporaries called a trade publisher. She would take in a copy from authors or other booksellers, arrange printing, and send sheets back out through wholesale channels. This model made it possible to publish controversial or experimental material without tying up too much capital. Her list was famously diverse. Children's items, religious pamphlets, satirical pieces, even the occasional risque title.
She also held copyright to a meaningful number of works in her own name, no small achievement for a woman in mid 18th century London. The second name is Thomas Longman. In his 20s he invested heavily to acquire an established Paternoster Rd. business, identified by the sign of the ship and associated neighboring premises. From that published grew the Longman Publishing House, which would go on to shape English literary culture for generations.
Long term partnerships, share purchases in promising manuscripts, and careful cultivation of authors became the hallmarks of the firm. Although hand presses still dominated everyday printing, specialist techniques were advancing that included copper plate engraving process more associated with maps. Music, fine illustration and calligraphic copy books offered levels of line quality and decorative flourish that ordinary letter presses could
not. It is this technique that gives Tommy Thumbs Pretty Songbook its distinct look. Instead of setting tiny movable type, the printer engraver worked text and images into copper plates. Letters could be punched, engraved or etched, images cut, with berrins and ornamental borders added. Paper was dampened, laid over the inked plate and driven through a rolling press under high pressure so the fibres picked ink out of the recessed lines.
The result? Crisp impressions, a tactile plate mark and the capacity for fine detail at miniature scale. A playful design touch in Tommy Thumb alternated openings in red and black ink. Producing this effect required separate inking passes or separate plates, increasing labour and cost. But the visual playoff of such small pages was considerable. Imagine a child turning a book where colours changed from spread to spread. It invites attention and repeats engagement.
Now how small was this book? Well, about 3 inches by three and three quarter inches. Genuinely pocket size for a child. Miniature formats were not unheard of, but pairing that size with engraved illustrations and alternating colour gave Tommy Thumb novelty appeal. Small books were cheaper to post, easy to tuck into parcels and tempting an impulse purchase out on the shop counter.
The copper work for Tommy Thumb is attributed to George Bickham the Younger, part of a family of celebrated engravers. His father, George Bickham the Elder, produced the Universal Penman, an influential engraved masterwork of calligraphic examplers. The younger Bickman moved across genres, music, satire, trade cards, decorative prints and, in this case, a children's rhyme collection.
Contemporary and later commenters note that his output ranged from respectable commissions to more provocative material. The 18th century print market had porous boundaries between polite and bawdy. Now what was inside this book? Well, the surviving volume, Volume 2 gathers 39 short pieces.
Many are still sung today. You may recognise Baa Baa, Black Sheep, London Bridge is Falling Down, Hickory, Dickory Dock, Oranges and Lemons, Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary and little Tommy Tucker. There are also verses that have since fallen out of nursery rotation, including one memorably titled Pisser Bed, a reminder that 18th century humour could be earthy even when aimed at the young.
The rhymes are brief, rhythmic and often paired with small illustrative motifs that invite pointing, chanting and repetition. This was literature to be performed with children, rather than simply read to them. And yes, there is The Lost Volume 1. We know that Tommy Thumb's songbook, effectively volume one in the series, was advertised slightly earlier than The Pretty songbook. Yep, no confirmed copy has survived notices of the time billed.
It is suitable to be sung to them by their nurses till they can sing themselves. That line captures the oral culture surrounding early childhood caregivers voicing the text, gestures and tunes added on the fly, literacy developing through sound and play. Scholars have attempted to reconstruct the contents of the lost first volume by comparing later prints, trade catalogues, and references in other
children's titles. While we cannot be certain of every item, the work of reconstruction helps. Map how popular rhyme migrated through cheap print formats. The mid 1740s saw a burst of interest in little books pitched to young readers. Tommy Thumbs Pretty Songbook showed that plateful, entertaining material could sell. Its success sits alongside other early children's ventures, including those of John Newbury, that blended instruction with amusement.
What had once been a narrowly moral religious genre began to broaden. Publishers experimented with size, illustration, pricing, and tone. From these beginnings grew the commercial children's book trade chat books, spelling aids with pictures, moral tales softened by narrative, and eventually the richly illustrated Victorian gift book. Tommy Thumb helped open that path. Most nursery rhymes had long, tangled lives before they reached the press.
Many originated in adult songs, St. cries, political satire or folk verse. When printers gathered them for children, versions were shortened, rearranged, all stripped of topical references. Print stabilized certain wordings, while oral performance kept them fluid. The subtitle about nurses singing until children could sing themselves says it all. This was a bridge medium between memory and print. Why did small format books
travel so widely? Well, because 18th century Britain was developing the infrastructure to move print quickly. Commercial circulating libraries, shops where you paid a subscription to borrow books were spreading. New Sprint consumption exploded as daily and triweekly papers reached coffee houses, Taverns and private homes. Parcels of books were shipped out to provincial towns and overseas colonial markets.
In that environment, a low cost children's chat book could ride along with larger wholesale bundles. Mary Cooper was not alone in the trade. A surprising number of widows, daughters or wives took the reins of print businesses when male relatives died, and many proved highly capable. Mary Lewis, for example, managed substantial printing and bookselling operations across several decades. Women negotiated rights, extended credit, trained apprentices and decided what
would go to press. Their contribution to the vitality of London's print culture is only now being fully appreciated. And London's publishing innovations did not stay local. Sheets, stereotypes and reprint rights travelled to Dublin, Edinburgh, the American colonies and beyond. Children's items were reissued abroad, translated, pirated or adapted.
A mid 18th century nursery chat book printed off Paternoster Row could turn up years later in a Massachusetts shop or be packed in a crate to the Caribbean. The mechanisms of imperial trade extended the cultural footprint of London's printers. Let us return to Tommy Thumb itself. Only two copies of Volume 2 are known, one held in the British Library in London, the other in the COTS and Children's Library in Princeton University in the USA.
Volume 1, as far as current knowledge goes, is lost. To put that in perspective, dozens of Gutenberg Bible survive. Tommy Thumb exists in just two fragments of evidence for its second volume. When a copy surfaced at auction in 2001, it realised £45,000, a reflection of both rarity and research value. 18th century children's books almost never survive in good condition. They were handled, dropped, scribbled on and eventually discarded. That any copy of Tommy Thumb
endured is remarkable. Conservation efforts at major research libraries now stabilise fragile paper house items in climate controlled stores and make high quality facsimilies available so that scholars and curious listeners like you can explore them without damaging the originals. And if you grew up in the English speaking world, chances are you learned at least one rhyme. First printed in Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song book, the book
helped shift expectations. Children's reading could be lively, musical, and pleasurable. Publishers took note and educators followed. From these tiny engraved pages flowed an entire tradition of literature that balances learning with absolute delight. So next time you're near Saint Paul's Cathedral, take a little wander down Paternoster Row and take a moment to reflect on its global reach of the 18th century parade, the women who drove it, and the enduring sounds of the nursery.
Thank you for joining me on this exploration of London's printing revolution and the birth of modern children's literature. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with someone who loves books, history, or a good story about how small things can have enormous consequences. Subscribe wherever you listen. And if you have a favorite London nursery rhyme, please do let me know by contacting me through the website oflondonguidedwalks.co.uk and I'll see what I can do.