Fuller, S. & J. The History and Adventures of Little Henry, Exemplified in a Series of Figures. London: Printed for S. & J. Fuller, at the Temple of Fancy, Rathbone Place, 1810.Second Edition.

12mo (approx. 5 × 4 inches). 20 pp. Original printed stitched wrappers, housed in the publisher’s original printed card slipcase bearing the same titling. A remarkably early and complete example from Fuller’s influential series of paper-doll “metamorphosis” toy books.

Complete with seven hand-colored copper-engraved die-cut figures, one interchangeable head, and four hats (believed originally to have been issued with six, based on bibliographic comparison). The slipcase shows expected wear; the right side panel is loose but present. The booklet itself is clean, well-bound, and in unusually good condition. A highly desirable survival from Fuller’s celebrated Temple of Fancy.

Description and function.
Each die-cut figure corresponds to a chapter of the narrative, allowing the reader to change Henry’s outfit as his fortunes rise and fall. The detachable head slips into small slots behind the costumes, and the hats are interchangeable across all figures. The costume range—from fine clothing to pauper’s rags—allows the story’s moral arc to be physically enacted as the reader progresses through the text.

Narrative.
The story follows Henry, who is kidnapped by gypsies but ultimately restores his honor through honesty, industry, and courage. His trials—poverty, hardship, and temptation—are visually expressed through the changing paper figures. At the conclusion, Henry is joyfully reunited with his parents.

Bibliographic notes.
This Second Edition of 1810 is among the earliest surviving states of Little Henry, issued the same year as Fuller’s Little Fanny—the first published paper doll book. Like its companion titles, Little Henry was printed for S. & J. Fuller by D. N. Shury of Berwick Street, Soho, and sold exclusively at the Temple of Fancy, London’s premier juvenile and drawing-book emporium.

Fuller, Belcher, William Charles, & Morgan & Yeager: Untangling the Origins of Little Henry

Few early children’s books have generated as much bibliographic confusion, and as much collector fascination, as The History and Adventures of Little Henry: Exemplified in a Series of Figures. Long admired for its removable, paper-doll-style figures and moral narrative, Little Henry stands alongside Little Fanny and Little Eliza as one of the earliest movable toy books for children. Yet its transatlantic publishing history has never been fully clarified. Recent archival discoveries now allow us to reconstruct a more complete lineage of this influential title—from its British origins, through early American piracies, to its re-emergence in Philadelphia through the engraved work of William Charles and later the firm of Morgan and Yeager. For movable book collectors, this reconstruction finally situates Little Henry where it belongs: at the foundation of children’s interactive and paper figure books in both Britain and the United States.

The story begins in London in 1810, when the firm of S. and J. Fuller issued Little Henry as part of their groundbreaking series of “metamorphosis” and paper-doll-based toy books. Along with Little Fanny and Little Eliza, it included a small booklet in verse and a set of removable painted paper figures equipped with a movable head, designed to be placed against blank pages to reenact scenes from the story. This interactive component was revolutionary and deeply influential. Fuller’s publications effectively invented the children’s paper doll book and set a pattern that American publishers quickly copied.

Scholars of nineteenth-century children’s culture generally describe S. & J. Fuller’s paper-doll books as a short-lived but influential experiment. Printed for the Fullers by D. N. Shury in Soho, these books were issued chiefly between 1805 and 1815, the period in which the Temple of Fancy was at its height. The Fuller titles preserved in the Bodleian Library’s Opie Collection reveal the peak years of production to be 1811 and 1812, though at least one title appeared in print every year from 1810 to 1814. Writers such as Peter Haining have argued that by 1817 the novelty of the format had already waned in Britain, while Percy Muir describes the Fuller paper-doll venture as more concerned with elegance than economy—its relatively high retail price contributing to a decline in sales and its eventual abandonment.

Because British copyright offered no protection in the United States, the Fuller books were swiftly pirated. In 1812, Joshua Belcher of Boston issued the first American bound toy-book edition of Little Henry, preserving the removable figures, movable head, and moralizing structure. Belcher did not innovate; he copied Fuller faithfully. Nevertheless, his edition has long been treated as the earliest American version, largely because it was the first to appear in complete book form. Although Little Henry was reissued in Boston by J. Belcher in 1812 with seven cut-out figures and a movable head, no authenticated image of this American edition seems to be publicly available. The Belcher Little Henry remains visually undocumented; surviving copies are held in special collections but have not been digitized, and only textual descriptions by early scholars such as Halsey provide evidence for the format. The absence of imagery has contributed significantly to the persistent confusion between Fuller’s English editions, Belcher’s American piracy, and later Victorian reinterpretations. To help document this historically important edition, we are seeking assistance from private collectors and institutions. If you own a copy of the Belcher edition — even incomplete — we would be grateful for permission to publish a photograph of any surviving figures, head pieces, or wrappers.

Please email images to:

📧 [email protected]

Along with your preferred citation or credit line, which we will include with any publication.

A later Movable! The later publishing history of Little Henry is illuminated by an important surviving Eleventh Edition, dated 1830, which reads: “LITTLE HENRY, Exemplified in a Series of Figures. Also written by Doctor Walcot. The Eleventh Edition. London: Printed for S. and J. Fuller, Temple of Fancy, Rathbone Place; where are also sold Books of Instruction in Landscape, Flowers, and Figures, and every requisite used in Drawing.” This imprint demonstrates that Fuller continued issuing the title well beyond its original appearance, maintaining it in the Temple of Fancy catalogue as late as 1830 and promoting it alongside his broader range of instructional and artistic publications. The phrase “exemplified in a series of figures” confirms that even these late editions still emphasized a visual program, although the imagery appears to have evolved in response to shifting Regency-to-Victorian stylistic tastes.

Unlike the 1810 edition, which survives in several children’s literature collections, the 1830 Fuller/Walcot Eleventh Edition is extremely rare. Institutional copies are almost always incomplete: the Bodleian Library’s Opie Collection (Opie G 311) holds a text-only copy with no surviving figures, and no examples with figures are recorded in the American Antiquarian Society, the Library of Congress, Princeton, the New York Public Library, or the Cotsen Children’s Library.

The discovery of a complete 1830 copy changes this understanding dramatically. The example now held by VintagePopupBooks.com is one of the only near complete surviving complete copies of the Eleventh Edition, retaining all seven hand-colored figures, three original hats, and—most astonishingly—both interchangeable heads which we refer to as the “Fancy Henry” and the “Ragamuffin Henry.”. This rare survival demonstrates that Fuller continued to issue Little Henry as a true movable paper-figure book well into the 1830s, contradicting long-held assumptions that the format had failed commercially and vanished after 1815.

Authorship Attribution: Was Little Henry Written by Dr. Walcot (Peter Pindar)?

Although all early editions of Little Henry and Little Fanny were issued anonymously, later nineteenth-century catalogues and advertisements increasingly attributed the rhymed text to Dr. John Wolcot (1738–1819), the satirical poet better known as Peter Pindar. Several sources—including a Fuller catalogue of 1825, an 1842 notice in The Metropolitan, and later trade references—explicitly describe Little Henry as “written by Dr. Walcot,” and modern bibliographers note that the Morgan catalogue also credits him as author. These attributions demonstrate that by the mid-nineteenth century the toy-book was firmly associated with Wolcot in the book trade. However, no manuscript, correspondence, or contemporary documentary evidence that we can find ties Wolcot to the Fuller toy-book texts, and his major biographies do not record any involvement with children’s literature. Scholars therefore regard the attribution as unverified but persistent—likely arising from Wolcot’s reputation as a prolific writer of comic and moral verse. The assumption of his authorship, even if unfounded, underscores how widely known the story became and how fully it entered the literary marketplace, but the true author of Little Henry remains unknown.

VintagePopupBooks.com is home to what is currently the only documented copy with both heads of the rare 1830 Eleventh Edition of Little Henry, and it can be viewed here on this site.

Other notes and variations of interest: Newly surfaced evidence shows that the Philadelphia engraver William Charles was working with Fuller-style toy material even earlier than Belcher. A Cambridge University Press study reveals that Charles printed versions of the English toys around 1810–1811, issuing them not initially as bound books but as individual sheets. These sheets closely followed the Fuller format and demonstrate that Charles had access to the British originals and was already experimenting with movable and inserted figures. His work quickly evolved into full toy books. By 1811 he published Little Eliza in Philadelphia, a companion to Little Fanny and Little Henry. This establishes Charles as an early American adapter of the Fuller movable books and situates him at the beginning of the Philadelphia tradition of toy-book engraving.

Additional bibliographic evidence confirms that by 1815, Charles advertised a Philadelphia edition of Little Henry. While few examples survive today, references in early American bibliographies, combined with the existence of Charles-style plates in later reprints, make clear that he engraved and issued his own edition of the book. Charles’s plates, characterized by crisp copper engraving and occasional hand coloring, formed the basis of a long line of Philadelphia reprints. His work represents an important American contribution to the movable book form and stands alongside Belcher’s in establishing the first American versions of the Fuller paper-doll stories. William Charles’s role in the history of Little Henry has often been overstated or misunderstood. While Charles was clearly involved as an engraver in the American dissemination of Fuller-derived juvenile titles—and likely engraved plates for Joshua Belcher’s Boston paper-doll editions—there is no firm evidence that Charles himself issued Little Henry in a movable or paper-doll format under his own imprint. All surviving Charles-published juvenile titles, including Little Eliza and Little William, are conventional illustrated pamphlets with engraved plates bound into the text. Bibliographic descriptions of Charles’s works consistently omit any reference to loose figures, heads, costumes, or interactive elements. It therefore appears that Charles adapted the Fuller model into a fixed illustrated book form for the American market, abandoning the toy-book format even while retaining its narrative and visual themes.

Charles died in 1820, and his widow, Mary Graham Charles, continued the business from 1820 to early 1823. She reissued many of her husband’s toy books and maintained his professional contacts. Her imprints confirm that she handled both sales and publication, preserving Charles’s copperplates and printed sheets. Upon her death in January 1823, the entire stock—including upwards of two hundred different children’s books, each containing multiple engraved copperplate illustrations—was purchased by the Philadelphia firm of Morgan and Yeager.

A notice published in Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser on December 18, 1823, announced that Morgan and Yeager had acquired the Charles inventory and intended to specialize in juvenile books, producing a new title each month. This purchase included not only printed stock but also the original Charles copperplates, which allowed Morgan and Yeager to continue issuing the same toy books in the 1820s and beyond. Among these reprints was their 1825 edition of Little Henry, confirmed in multiple bibliographic sources. Significantly, the frontispiece and back-cover illustration of surviving Morgan and Yeager copies still carry William Charles’s imprint, proving that the firm reprinted the book directly from Charles’s original plates. Some examples were additionally hand colored, continuing a feature that Charles himself had introduced to Philadelphia children’s books. Morgan & Yeager’s Philadelphia editions of The History and Adventures of Little Henry represent a significant reinterpretation of the work rather than a continuation of the original paper-doll format. Although the firm retained the familiar subtitle “Exemplified in a Series of Figures,” surviving copies—now confirmed through digitized microfilm—demonstrate that these editions were conventional illustrated juvenile books, with copperplate engravings bound directly into the text. The figures are static, integral to the page, and show no evidence of having been intended as loose or movable elements. In this respect, Morgan & Yeager preserved the narrative and visual identity of Little Henry while abandoning the interactive toy-book structure pioneered by S. & J. Fuller and copied by J. Belcher. Their editions illustrate how the title evolved in America from a novelty paper-doll book into a more standard moral and literary children’s work.

In order to demonstrate that the Morgan & Yeager copies were not paper doll books, see the image reproduced from microfilm of The History and Adventures of Little Henry (Philadelphia: Morgan & Yeager, 1825), University of Alberta Libraries / Canadiana, via Wikimedia Commons.

Taken together, the publishing sequence that we have uncovered so far reveals a clear lineage: Fuller’s innovative London movable books of 1810 were first adapted in America by Joshua Belcher in 1812, even as William Charles in Philadelphia was producing his own non-movable engraved versions of the same titles, beginning with toy sheets and expanding into complete books by 1811–1815. After Charles’s death, Mary Charles preserved his work until it passed to Morgan and Yeager, who reissued these books from the original Charles copperplates, including the 1825 edition of Little Henry.

For collectors of movable books, paper dolls, and early American children’s literature, this reconstructed lineage is particularly meaningful. Belcher’s Boston edition represents the earliest American bound toy-book version of Little Henry. Charles’s Philadelphia edition marks the first engraved American adaptation and the root of all subsequent Philadelphia reprints. The Morgan and Yeager editions, identifiable by Charles’s imprint, preserve some of the earliest American copperplate work used in children’s interactive books. By understanding how these editions relate to one another, collectors can more accurately identify and value the various forms of Little Henry that survive today.

The origins of Little Henry—once obscure and tangled—can be traced as such: Fuller in London created the model in 1810; Belcher introduced it to America in 1812; William Charles adapted and engraved the book in Philadelphia in the 1810s; Mary Charles preserved the plates; and Morgan and Yeager carried the work forward in the 1820s.Fuller continued with at least an 11th version into 1830.