It’s as easy as ABC! It’s as easy as pie! In an abecedarium titled The Tragical Death of a Apple-Pye, both idioms come true, as children learn an alphabet whose letters greedily gorge on pastry.

The edition featured here was published by John Evans, a major contender in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century children’s literature. His formula was simple: undercut the competition, including John Newbery’s firm, by selling unprecedentedly affordable books. He captured an emerging market: children’s books for hard up families who had managed, against the odds, to acquire literacy. And while his competitors targeted a middle-class audience, Evans “stayed true to the street literature tradition in which he had been brought up”, writes literary historian Jonathan Cooper, who gives 1793–1796 as the likely date for Apple-Pye. It was printed on a press at No. 41 Long Lane, West Smithfield, and sold for a halfpenny, like Evans’ other sixteen-page chapbooks — a tiny format, roughly measuring 3.5 inches tall by 2.25 inches wide.

The book is really three texts in one. First comes an ABC list in which the “life and death” of an apple pie plays out across the alphabet. “Apple Pye, Bit it, Cut it, Dealt it, Eat it . . . Took it, View’d it, Wanted it, X, Y, Z, and &, they all wish’d for a piece in hand.” With so many letters vying for a slice, they decide together on an equitable solution: “They all agreed to stand in order / Round the Apple Pye’s fine border / Take turn as they in hornbook stand, / From great A, down to &”.

Next we encounter “A Curious Discourse That Passed Between the Twenty Five Letters at Dinner-Time”. The abecedarian order repeats, but now the letters speak. “Says A, give me a good large slice. . . . Says I, I love the juice the best.” Finally, Evans includes some self-promotion — “if my little readers are pleased with what they have found in this book, they have nothing to do but to run to Mr. Evans’s” — and a woodcut picture of “the old woman who made the Apple Pye”, which transitions abruptly into Christian pedagogy: “Grace before meat”, “Grace after meat”, “The Lord’s Prayer”. Like in other eighteenth-century children’s books, such as The Renowned History of Giles Gingerbread, learning here is figured as a kind of gustatory consumption: children eat up the alphabet lesson, while its glyphic personifications wolf down their slices. (The link between sweets and syllabaries is more ancient still: Horace recorded teachers bribing pupils with letter-shaped biscuits to encourage their alphabetical uptake.)

Evans’ edition was published in the late eighteenth century — reworking a primer by Richard Marshall from the 1760s — but The Tragical Death of a Apple Pye is perhaps an even older story, first published, according to some scholars, in 1671. For a modern reader, it preserves English paleography as it existed in an earlier state: across the sections, U and V are used interchangeably, like I and J, and “&” is the ultimate letter, after Z. In an attempt to offset the ampersand’s semiotic difference, teachers well into the nineteenth century instructed students to pronounce the final letters of the alphabet as “x, y, z, and per se &”, hiving off the ampersand with the Latin by itself. “Especially bored pupils would not so much recite as slur the [alphabet’s] final syllables”, writes Keith Houston in Shady Characters, “and from this verbal mangling the ‘letter’ & gained a dazzling variety of slang names.” 1905’s Dictionary of Slang and Colloquial English, for example, collects a variety of schoolboy cant for the zaftig glyph: “Ann Passy Ann”, “And-pussy-and”, “empersiand”, “amperzed”, and “zumzy-zan”. Despite “ampersand” having a secondary meaning as “the posteriors” in this dictionary, there is little caloric density afforded to the character in the “Curious Discourse”. Coming at the tail end of the alphabet — and thus getting the dregs of dessert distribution — the ampersand must content itself with merely “lick[ing] the dish”.

For illustrations from another lovely edition of Apple Pye published by Jemmy Catnach in the 1820s, see The Gentle Author’s post over at spitalfieldslife.com. And for more alphabet books, see our complete collection. Finally, check out how abecedariums handle the difficult case of X.