Baby Own Aesop

Within my book collection there is a great surplus of children's books which today are not even known to many of their parents. I feel the need to provide a glance to both parents and children of what they are missing and perhaps I can imagine see them reading to their children to expand their limitless imagination and acquire a tiny portion of morals which they might apply to themselves as they grow to adulthood. Walter Crane's beautifully illustrated version of Aesop's fables, shortened and put into limericks for the younger reader and first published in 1887. Aesop's Fables or the Aesopica is a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and story-teller believed to have lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 560 BCE. Apollonius of Tyana, a 1st-century CE philosopher, is recorded as having said about Aesop: ... like those who dine well off the plainest dishes, he made use of humble incidents to teach great truths, and after serving up a story he adds to it the advice to do a thing or not to do it. Then, too, he was really more attached to truth than the poets are; for the latter do violence to their own stories in order to make them probable; but he by announcing a story which everyone knows not to be true, told the truth by the very fact that he did not claim to be relating real events. Read Baby's Own Aesop (1887), with its cryptically political 'morals' and stunning illustrations by Walter Crane. Crane was not just a brilliant graphic designer and chromolithographer, but also an ardent socialist, close friend of William Morris, and a Marxist Trade Union supporter. The Baby's Own Aesop uses short, rhymed versions of the famous fables of the ancient Greek story teller Aesop. In Crane's preface he tells us that he has produced his version of the tales from a manuscript kindly lent to him by the wood-engraver, William James Linton. Crane continues, however, 'I have added a touch here and there'. Since Linton was as radical in his own Chartist-republican way as the more socialist-Marxist-Internationalist Crane, it is virtually impossible to tell which of them is responsible for the very individual character of the morals the book prescribes The title page proudly reports that the rhyming fables come with "portable morals." These morals are usually printed in capitals in the white space surrounding the rhyme, which is itself embedded within the page's picture. The fables originally belonged to the oral tradition and were not collected for some three centuries after Aesop's death. By that time a variety of other stories, jokes and proverbs were being ascribed to him, although some of that material was from sources earlier than him or came from beyond the Greek cultural sphere. The process of inclusion has continued until the present, with some of the fables unrecorded before the later Middle Ages and others arriving from outside Europe. The process is continuous and new stories are still being added to the Aesop corpus, even when they are demonstrably more recent work and sometimes from known authors. Manuscripts in Latin and Greek were important avenues of transmission, although poetical treatments in European vernaculars eventually formed another. On the arrival of printing, collections of Aesop's fables were among the earliest books in a variety of languages. Through the means of later collections, and translations or adaptations of them, Aesop's reputation as a fabulist was transmitted throughout the world. Initially the fables were addressed to adults and covered religious, social and political themes. They were also put to use as ethical guides and from the Renaissance onwards were particularly used for the education of children. Their ethical dimension was reinforced in the adult world through depiction in sculpture, painting and other illustrative means, as well as adaptation to drama and song. In addition, there have been reinterpretations of the meaning of fables and changes in emphasis over ti