Daddy Fox

Last summer I chanced upon an interesting edition of the tale of Reynard the Fox in the free stuff shed in our local dump, and strangely enough this week I came across an account of one of his decendants in the same place. Bertha B. and Ernest Cobb's Allspice, originally published in 1925, was one of a series of books designed not just for children in general but specifically for classroom use, as what we might now call "easy readers." They were sturdily bound, printed in a large-size font, and made use of repetition and a somewhat limited vocabulary. The Cobbs were a husband-and-wife team who operated their own publishing firm (the Arlo Publishing Company) in the Boston suburb of Upper Newton Mills. The illustrations, which we'll get to, are by L. J. Bridgman.

When we first meet Daddy Fox, he has played a cruel trick on Roland Rabbit involving a hive full of hornets. Roland complains to the King (in this case a human, not a lion), who puts a bounty on the fox's head. A miller and his wife scheme to capture him and win the bounty, but with the help of a friend Daddy Fox escapes and miller and wife get their comeuppance. Daddy Fox isn't very honest or very nice, but of course we cheer him on. The title comes from a weak joke about putting salt — or spice — on an animal's tale to subdue it.

As childen's literature goes, Allspice is frankly pretty thin stuff; most kids would probably nod off if it was read aloud to them. The illustrations, however, are quite wonderful. I only wish their sharpness came through better in these scans.

Lewis Jesse Bridgman (1857-1931) was an accomplished artist based in Salem, Massachusetts; an article on the Streets of Salem blog has a brief bio and selections of his work. He's received less attention than some of his peers from the Golden Age of Illustration, but judging from his work for the Cobbs he's ripe for rediscovery. He managed to combine intricate naturalistic detail with a real feel for motion and expression; I particularly like the tenderness with which Ginger Bear rescues his friend from the box in which he is trapped, minus, alas, a bit of his tail. I didn't immediately notice that you can see the feet of the dozing miller and wife just beyond the base of the tree.

The Deceiver

At first glance this is a typical example of the kind of cheap fiction for adolescents that was popular in the early decades of the twentieth century. The publisher, A. L. Burt Company, was known for reprinting authors like Horatio Alger, whose books are indeed advertised in the back matter, specifically under the heading of "Books for Boys." Even though Reynard the Fox isn't by Alger, the figure on the front seems like a typical Alger hero: an adolescent boy on his own, staff and bag in hand, ready to find his way in the world. In fact, though, the cover is a complete work of misdirection. To begin with, where is the fox of the title?

The author of this book, or rather its editor and adapter, was Joseph Jacobs, a well-regarded Australian-born scholar who wrote a number of books on folklore and fairy tales as well as on Judaica. He states in the book's Preface that he sought to "provide a text which children could read with ease and pleasure, and at the same time give their parents, their cousins, and their aunts a short résumé of the results which the latest research in folklore and literary history has arrived at with regard to the origin of the book." There is a fairly learned Introduction and occasional footnotes, as well as amusing drawings by W. Frank Calderon.

The book's full title is The Most Delectable History of Reynard the Fox; it was originally published by Macmillan in 1895. Jacobs explains that he has reworked a text published by one Felix Summerley (a pen name for Sir Henry Cole, who is credited with the first commercially marketed Christmas cards). Summerley / Cole in turn took his material from a volume published in the 1490s by William Caxton, who drew on a Flemish version of stories that had been shaped and reshaped since at least the twelfth century. With all those hands involved you might expect something fairly watered-down, but Jacobs's Reynard is actually quite lively and readable, and it has been reprinted several times, notably by Schocken Books. Reynard is classified by folklorists as a typical animal "trickster," but in these pages he's more of a sociopath, a serial murderer, thief, and fabricator. His story doesn't have a tidy moralistic ending; instead, deceit is rewarded, Reynard triumphs over everyone he has wronged, but he's so engaging that of course we root for him all the way.

There's no adolescent boy in the book, let alone an obviously modern one, and the closest the text ever comes to justifying the Burt edition's cover art is a scene where Reynard is described holding a staff and bag of his own. So the question is, was the cover meant to depict the typical reader, rather than the protagonist, of Reynard the Fox, or was it simply a case of bait-and-switch? The bizarre alternate cover below, also published by A. L. Burt, suggests that it may be the latter.

Needless to say, there are no Native Americans or canoes in Reynard the Fox.

Postscript: Twice in the narrative the text refers to two minor animal characters as "the leopard and the loss." "Loss" puzzled me, as I could find no definition for an animal by that name (but Jacobs thought it unnecessary to add a footnote). With a little research I found that Caxton had "losse," and this is from the Dutch "los," meaning "lynx." So this is our old friend the lonza.