The best children’s books are those that can entertain readers of any age. The Mermaid “at Home!” (1809) achieves this with a simple, playful trope: a mermaid proclaims “a submarine feast”, and we, as readers, are the invitees. Across the full-colour plates that follow, we’re treated to “grand entertainment” of an aquatic kind, filled with visual and verbal jokes at the expense of the mermaid’s neighbours. We meet the “pike” and “sword[fish]” in battle, a pipefish blowing smoke at an irate fishwife, and a beatific monkfish overseeing the union of a well-heeled cod and his mate. The shark is a gambler, the dolphin a fashionable gentleman. The entertainment culminates with the spectacle of “his majesty”, the whale, spouting.

This gentle humour and mildly satirical content made The Mermaid “at Home!” light entertainment, a relatively new phenomenon in children’s publishing at the time. Until the mid-eighteenth century, children’s literature had been largely serious, didactic, and lacking in pictures. There were some illustrated encyclopaedias, but these were intended to educate rather than entertain. In 1744, the publisher John Newbury published A Little Pretty Pocket Book, which was child-sized, cheap, colourful, and appealing. He followed it with several other educational but playful titles, including Mother Goose Melodies (1772). These books were the beginning of an important new trend in children’s publishing, during a time when the modern conception of “childhood” was also emerging — at the vanguard of these developments, Newbury soon became known as the “Father of Children’s Literature”. Unsurprisingly, these kinds of books sold a great deal better — to an increasingly literate public — than most of the (occasionally dour) educational volumes that had dominated until then.

The publisher of The Mermaid at Home was John Harris, who had apprenticed in publishing from a young age. He worked briefly for John Murray before joining Newbury’s company, where he stayed until his forties. The Newbury children’s books, while more appealing than their predecessors, were still quite didactic. In 1802, when Harris was forty-six (and Newbury long dead), he bought up the publisher and gained full editorial freedom. Harris immediately began to produce books that were purely fun and whimsical, and illustrated them more plentifully than Newbury, preferring copperplate to woodcut engravings. His earliest volumes included The Comic Adventures of Old Mother Hubbard, and Her Dog (1805) and The Butterfly’s Ball, and the Grasshopper’s Feast (1807). They did very well and, in 1809, The Mermaid at Home was published in full colour, as one of 419 titles in Harris’ lucrative catalogue.