Fables for the Young

Abstract

This is a curious little (4½ x 5½) volume. The first 54 fables on 118 pages are standard traditional Aesopic fables. Then, on 119-92, we have 38 fables that are taken from Peter Parley's Book of Fables Illustrated by Numerous Engravings of 1836. Note the verbal similarity in title to what we find here on the title-page concerning the illustrations. At the very beginning of those fables on 119 there is a title inserted between illustration and fable: Fables for the Young. In the first group up to 118, there are some prose and some verse fables. Throughout the book, each fable gets an illustration surrounded by an elaborate border made up of a repeated motif including something like a spread fan or palm leaf. The book is inscribed in 1856. The illustrations for the Peter Parley fables seem to be solidly in the tradition of the Parley editions I have seen. Check my comments on them, including Moral Fables and Parables (1863) by Ingram Cobbin, which claims Parley as a source. Here the one-page preface begins with Peter Parley says, but Parley is nowhere else acknowledged. It only confirms the eclectic and unacknowledged character of this book that the frontispiece of The Lion in Love comes from Tenniel six years earlier. Of course there is no acknowledgement. There is a T of C at the beginning.