The History of Goody Little Two Shoes was one of the moral lesson books that Jane Austen owned as a child. These seem to have been popular in the Georgian era. Another book with moral lessons came out two years after her death. Entitled The Accidents of Youth, its tales were meant to warn children of risky behaviors and improve their moral conduct. The tales would have been scary enough to make me think twice as a child. I love the Internet Archive, which allows you to read the books virtually intact, with illustrations and original font type. The only thing you can’t do is hold the book or feel the thickness of the pages.
Fronticepiece of The Accidents of Youth, 1819
Interestingly, these accidents beset children today, especially those left to their own devices in the countryside.
One young man aims at a bird with a slingshot and kills his mother, a horrific tale. Another’s hair is set on fire by a candle.
Kitchen accidents were quite common. After death from childbirth, kitchen fires killed more women than other accidents combined. In these stories children are warned of the dangers of hot kettles and catching one’s clothes on fire from coming too close to a fireplace. In the first image, a cast iron pot, hanging directly over the fire on an iron hook tips over, burning the child. Billowing skirts caught fire in fireplaces, as the second image attests.
The final image in this post shows the danger of a broken glass window and a young boy falling from furniture that he had rearranged at play. Another, earlier book entitled The Blossoms of Morality and published in 1806, concentrates on the instruction of young ladies and gentlemen”. The stories include “Juvenile tyranny conquered” and “The melancholy effects of pride”. One can imagine that, after reading Fordyce’s Sermons to his young children, Mr. Collins would have picked up these books to read to his children.
I wonder how long the concentration of today’s youth would have lasted when listening to these morality tales. One nanosecond? I think not.
Jane Austen's World 
These illustrations are great, though deeply unsettling. I wonder if Edward Gorey was inspired by this book. Thanks for sharing this.
Reblogged this on bleustokcings.
I thought the kitchen was still the site of many if not most of children’s accidents today. I “like” the illustrations, though. When I was small, I think we had a number of books like that and few stories didn’t have a moral.
These illustrations are fascinating. They are the same as those in my copy of Struwwelpieter by Henrich Hoffman…a relic of my childhood! I have to officially announce that I still suck my thumb in moments of great stress despite the tale of the Scissor Man!
I thought of the same book! (But I don’t still suck my thumb… I remember all too well the blood gushing out of his thumb stump.)
My father was a police officer and he was like a walking, breathing version of these books describing in great detail the perilous world we lived in until we were afraid sometimes to even use our forks :)
This is so interesting. I think modern-day parents possibly worry more about their kids but are less likely to describe to them in graphic detail the bad stuff that might happen.
In the days before antibiotics, a small injury could easily be fatal. That may explain the grave warnings. I would never have survived!
Am I the only one who found those stories/images hilarious? (I hope not!) Having grown up in the country in the days before bike helmets, de-clawed cats, safety switches and the like, I certainly incurred my share of childhood injuries. But we shrugged them off pretty quickly. The idea that death and/or severe maiming awaits those foolish enough to climb a tree or pick up a slingshot is really pretty ridiculous. I am however, enough of a hypocrite as to not allow my own children to engage in most of the risky behaviors that I found so amusing in my youth.
Different hazards to worry about at each stage of history. My grandmother’s oldest sister died when her long skirt caught fire when she was doing the laundry in a large kettle over an open fire outdoors–just two years after her husband, father and baby died in the influenza epidemic.
Even in more modern times. Remember those washing machines that had an electric wringer attached – early 1950s? My sister, then aged five, got her arm caught in it. Her arm was too thin and flexible to set of the safety mechanism. Fortunately, the same flexibility save her from much more than a bucket full of tears.
Lewis Carroll had fun with those edifying works:
“It was all very well to say ‘Drink me,’ but the wise little Alice was not going to do THAT in a hurry. ‘No, I’ll look first,’ she said, ‘and see whether it’s marked “poison” or not’; for she had read several nice little histories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasant things, all because they WOULD not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them: such as, that a red-hot poker will burn you if you hold it too long; and that if you cut your finger VERY deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds; and she had never forgotten that, if you drink much from a bottle marked ‘poison,’ it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.”
I was just thinking about the lewis carrol quote while reading this too! :) Gotta love literature!
An excellent reminder, notBridget, and another reason why ‘Alice’ appealed so much to children.
I rather suspect I’m looking at the source material for Edward Gorey’s “Gashlycrumb Tinies”
miss thing, I think it is also the source for the Grimm Brother’s Fairy Tales :)
I don’t know whether to just laugh or wonder at Regency teaching methods. I choose to laugh, suspecting that Jane did the same. I think my favorite part was that the eye ‘burst’ when Tom-cat scratched.
please tell me why this was my last post from you have i been naughty? not deliberately i assure you or has something terrible happened to vic regards freda in winchester england
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