ABSTRACT
Robert Louis Stevenson published A Child’s Garden of Verses in 1885 and it has never been out of print.2 He had been dabbling with children’s poems since 1881 and sent out copies of a version called ‘Penny Whistles’ to his friends Sidney Colvin and William Henley in 1883. Rejecting ‘New Songs of Innocence’, which he described as blasphemy, he finally settled on A Child’s Garden of Verses which was an immediate success when it was published on 6 March 1885, went into a second printing three months later and came out in America the same year. Charles Robinson was the first illustrator and his richly textured, art nouveau decorations complement the text beautifully (Stevenson 1885). Since then there have been countless editions, translations and illustrated versions.
