C17th Book of Cautionary Tales for Children up for Sale

A children’s book filled with cautionary tales and written in the late 17th century by William Darton is scheduled to go up for sale at an antiquarian book fair held at 2 Temple Place on London’s Embankment this coming weekend .

The book called The Third Chapter of Accidents and Remarkable Events: Containing Caution and Instruction for Children is made up of tales warning children of the dangers of things such as hot air ballooning, horse riding, firearms, and of course keeping a full grown lion in your bedroom.

Sold for the grand of sum of sixpence, it is believed that the cautionary tales were taken from newspaper accounts and travellers’ tales and contains tales such as ‘the case of one-legged Mr Arnold, who was pitched over the side above St George’s Fields in London, and “the perilous situation of Major Money” who fell into the sea in his balloon near Great Yarmouth, and had to spend five hours in the water before he was rescued’

Then of course there are the dangers of that fearsome beast the tiger. One tale tells of the good fortune of one Mr Green who is saved by a poorly timed leap from an escaped zoo tiger a second recounts the time the only son of Sir Hugo Monro was sitting down for a rest with his companions after a bit of deer hunting, when a tiger jumped at him and dragged him into the jungle, and another lauds the quick witted actions of a woman who while in Bengal is confronted by an enormous beast but is foiled by a rapidly unfurled umbrella.

What about the scarily prophetic warning tales of the risks of leaving firearms within easy reach of children? “Parents and others cannot be too careful in keeping guns and pistols out of their reach,” it says. “At one time we hear of a brother firing at his sister, a man at his wife, and of a youth killing his beloved friend, without either having any such intention.” A quarter of a millennium later and we still see these occurrences in newspapers on a daily basis.

But most fearsome of all is surely the story of the lion kept in a gentleman’s chamber; having hired a servant to cater to the lion’s every need unfortunately he would “frequently mixed blows with caresses” which of course the lion took offence to.

Woken by a great noise, the gentleman found his lion growling over the corpse of the servant who had tormented him so, having bitten his head off. “The terror of the gentleman may be easily conceived,” the book informs us, rather unnecessarily.