Pretty Little Hymns for Good Little Children

Pretty Little Hymns for Good Little Children (1850). This is the title of a hymn book by a certain Louisa Watts, whose preface is dated from St John’s Wood Terrace, April 1850. It contained 130 hymns. Its title suggests that it was one of the many books intended to indoctrinate children with impossible ideas of goodness, although the preface makes it clear that it was a sequel to Louisa Watts’s Pretty Little Poems for Pretty Little People (Halifax, 1847), which had had ‘a sale so large as to exceed her most ardent expectations’. The 1850 book would stop the child from playing on Sunday (‘Dolls and playthings all away,/ This is holy Sabbath day’, hymn 3); it provides an awful example of...