John Ploughman's Pictures

It is the sequel to John Ploughman's Talk: thirty-eight short chapters of plain advice by Charles Spurgeon, again in the voice of the Surrey ploughman John. Each chapter is built on an old proverb — If the cap fits, wear it; Never stop the plough to catch a mouse; Every bird likes its own nest — and the picture that illustrated it in the first edition.

Because every chapter was built around a woodcut illustrating its proverb, and John often talks about the picture at the head of the page — a man burning his candle at both ends, Hodge clipping the sow, two dogs fighting over a bone. Those woodcuts are not reproduced in this edition, so here and there the text refers to a picture you cannot see; the proverb in the chapter title tells you what it showed.

Spurgeon wrote it because the first book had found a great many readers and done them good. In the preface he says that it led many to take the first steps by which men climb to better things, and that this moved him to attempt a second book of the same character, in the same simple mother tongue.

Spurgeon says in the preface that to smite evil, and especially the monster evil of drink, had been his earnest endeavour. He had seen what the public-house did to labouring families, and several chapters — He has a hole under his nose, Great drinkers think themselves great men, A leaking tap is a great waster — take it on directly, one of them ending with a handbill for the landlord's window.

From everywhere, Spurgeon admits: he gathered expressions and verses here, there and everywhere, and would rather deny all claim to originality than try to list his sources. He names one especially — Thomas Tusser's Points of Good Husbandry, the sixteenth-century farming rhymes he quotes again and again.

Yes. Under the fun the book keeps pointing past thrift to godliness: warnings against making a god of money, pleas to give to the poor (Scatter and increase), counsel on bringing up children, and a closing chapter in which John thanks God for home and country and ends with a hymn of praise.