[Mary's Lamb in] Children's Prayer / The Sabbath / Mary's Lamb / Religion - What is it? / Lord's Prayer [caption titles]

Boston: Henry Bowen's Chemical Print, 19 Water Street, [circa 1832], 1918. One of several known variants, priority undetermined. Collins, Threads of History, 229, describing a similar version, but not this one. A little stained and spotted, but overall a remarkably fine copy.. Broadside-handkerchief printed on plain weave cotton, 20 x 28.5 cm, five poems printed in three columns with four woodcut vignette illustrations, surrounded by a typographical border. A linen handkerchief for children with religious poems, prayers and one of the most famous of all 19th century nursery rhymes, Sarah Josepha Hale's "Mary's Lamb," above which is a woodcut vignette of Mary sitting under a tree with two lambs. That together with the three other Bewickesque vignettes of a bird, a dog and a rooster are not present in the other variants of this handkerchief as described by Collins." Mary's Lamb" first appeared in the magazine Juvenile Miscellany in 1830 and later that year in the book by Hale, Poems for Our Children. It was slightly revised for its appearance in The Song School Book in 1834, and the version on this handkerchief agrees with the first version. Henry Bowen's Chemical Print in Boston issued several similar handkerchief-broadsides.