imbecility upon the things they loved."[A]

Many of these little books have been doubtless long since forgotten,
though they did not deserve such a fate; but the name of "Goody Two
Shoes" is still familiar to the ears of English children, though the
book itself may be unknown to thousands of little ones of this later
generation.

"Goody Two Shoes" was published in April 1765, and few nursery books
have had a wider circulation, or have retained their position so long.
The number of editions that have been published both in England and
America is legion, and it has appeared in mutilated versions under the
auspices of numerous publishing houses in London and the provinces,
although of late years there have been no new issues. Even in 1802,
Charles Lamb in writing to Coleridge, said--

""Goody Two Shoes" is almost out of print. Mrs Barbauld's stuff has
banished all the old classics of the nursery, and the shopman at
Newbery's hardly deigned to reach them off an old exploded corner of
a shelf, when Mary asked for them. Mrs Barbauld's and Mrs Trimmer's
nonsense lay in piles about. Knowledge, insignificant and vapid as Mrs
Barbauld's books convey, it seems must come to a child in the shape of
knowledge; and his empty noddle must be turned with conceit of his own
powers when he has learnt that a horse is an animal, and Billy is
better than a horse, and such like, instead of that beautiful interest
in wild tales, which made the child a man, while all the time he
suspected himself to be no bigger than a child. Science has succeeded
to poetry no less in the little walks of children than with men. Is
there no possibility of averting this sore evil? Think what you would
have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives'