Joujou de nouvelle façon ou Contes amusans et instructifs à l’usage des plus petits enfans. Vienna: chez Jean-Thomas Trattner, 1759.
8vo (159 x 99 mm). 56 pp. Woodcut title vignette initial, woodcut and typographic headpieces. Modern marbled paper covered boards, edges stained red.***
Forty short tales for children, written by a governess for her charges, first commercial edition (privately printed a year earlier).
Catharina Helena Dörrien, the daughter of a pastor from Hildesheim, was an accomplished botanist and botanical artist who compiled an important flora of the Principality of Orange-Nassau (Verzeichniss und Beschreibung der sämtlichen in den Fürstlich Oranien- Nassauischen Landen wildwachsenden Gewächse, Herborn 1777). The more than 1400 accompanying watercolors which she painted to accompany the flora were well-known in contemporary botanical circles, but they remained unpublished, a fact which consigned her name to near-oblivion.
"Not only an artist and botanist, she was also a writer of children's books, a compiler of pedagogical works and practical instructions to domestic economy, a translator of French works and an illustrator of scholarly books. Above all she was important for the positions she took on the question of girls' education, at a time when this theme was still largely ignored by pedagogical theorists … Nearly 30 years before Campe and Pestalozzi Catharina Helena Dörrien took the stand that girls should also benefit from a well-rounded education" (Viereck, p. 8, transl.).
Dörrien's works for children were inspired by her experience as governess for the four children of the historian and jurist Anton Ulrich von Erath. The Joujou, dedicated to one of her charges (“Monsieur Georges Antoine d’E***H,”), contains stories in French for younger children, each featuring a child with a particular character weakness or virtue (L'enfant poltron, L’enfant étourdi, L'enfant charitable, etc.). While it is hard to imagine a 7-year old reminding his little sister to “profit from the salutary exhortations of our dear parents” (profitons des salutaires exhortations de nos chers parents, p. 10), these original moralizing tales no doubt succeeded in helping these upper-class children reach the all-important goal of learning a fine and flowery French.
OCLC locates 2 copies of this edition (BnF and Univ. & Landesbibliothek Sachsen-Anhalt). An enlarged edition appeared in 1760 and was reprinted in 1783; a bilingual Polish and French edition was printed in Warsaw in 1770, and selections were published in Russian in Riga in 1789.
Holzmann & Bohatta, Deutsches Anonymenlexikon, Bd.; 2, Nr. 11164; cf. Regina Viereck,"Zwar sind es weibliche Hände": die Botanikerin und Pädagogin Catharina Helena Dörrien (2000), pp. 38 & 80. Item #4249
Price: $2,200.00