1
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Children’s Book Illustration and Adults in Victorian England
A Thesis submitted in partial satisfaction
of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts
in
Art History
by
Audrey Chamaine Pearson
February 2006
Thesis Committee:
Dr. Elizabeth Helsinger
Dr. Katherine Fischer-Taylor
2
Table of Contents
I. Introduction 4
II. Foundations and Beginnings 9
III. The Sixties 14
IV. Color and Toy Books 25
V. Conclusion 40
Bibliography 44
Illustrations 47
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List of Illustrations
Figure 1. Thomas Bewick. “Vignette to The Kingfisher.” A History of British Birds by
Thomas Bewick vol. II: Containing the History and Description of Water Birds.
Newcastle: Edward Walker, Pilgrim-Street, 1826.
Figure 2. Thomas Bewick. “Vignette to The Long-Eared Owl.” A History of British
Birds by Thomas Bewick vol. I: Containing the History and Description of Land Birds.
Newcastle: Edward Walker, Pilgrim-Street, 1826.
Figure 3. George Cruikshank. “The Elves and the Shoemaker.” German Popular
Stories. London: C. Baldwin, 1923.
Figure 4. George Cruikshank. “The Short Courtship.” Points of Humour. London: C.
Baldwin, 1823-1824.
Figure 5. Arthur Hughes. “A Toadstool Comes Up in a Night.” Sing-Song: A Nursery
Rhyme Book. London: George Routledge and Sons, 1872.
Figure 6. Arthur Hughes. “There’s Snow on the Fields.” Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme
Book. London: George Routledge and Sons, 1872.
Figure 7. George Cruikshank. “Cinderella and the Glass Slipper.” German Popular
Stories. London: C. Baldwin, 1923.
Figure 8. Richard Doyle. “Triumphal March of the Elf-King.” In Fairyland: A Series of
Pictures from the Elf-World with a Poem by William Allingham. London: Longmans,
Green, Reader & Dyer, 1870.
Figure 9. Walter Crane. “Eleven, Twelve, Ring the Bell.” One, Two, Buckle my Shoe.
London: Edmund Evans, 1868.
Figure 10. Walter Crane. “ ‘You Have Been in the Closet Once and You Shall Go
Again!’” Bluebeard’s Picture Book. London: Routledge, 1875.
Figure 11. Walter Crane. “ ‘Come Down!’ Cried Bluebeard.” Bluebeard’s Picture
Book. London: Routledge, 1875.
Figure 12. Kate Greenaway. “Untitled.” Kate Greenaway’s Painting Book. London:
Frederick Warne & Co., 1884.
Figure 13. Randolph Caldecott. “Frontispiece.” The House That Jack Built. London:
Routledge, 1878.
Figure 14. Randolph Caldecott. “Untitled.” The House That Jack Built. London:
Routledge, 1878.
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Children’s Book Illustration and Adults in Victorian England
Introduction
Charlotte Brontë’s masterpiece, Jane Eyre, opens with an important scene of the
heroine as a child, entertaining herself with a book. As she describes it to her audience,
I returned to my book—Bewick's History of British Birds: the
letterpress thereof I cared little for, generally speaking; and yet there were
certain introductory pages that, child as I was, I could not pass quite as a
blank....
The words in these introductory pages connected themselves with
the succeeding vignettes, and gave significance to the rock standing up
alone in a sea of billow and spray; to the broken boat stranded on a
desolate coast; to the cold and ghastly moon glancing through bars of
cloud at a wreck just sinking.
I cannot tell what sentiment haunted the quite solitary churchyard,
with its inscribed headstone; its gate, its two trees, its low horizon, girdled
by a broken wall, and its newly-risen crescent, attesting the hour of
eventide.
The two ships becalmed on a torpid sea, I believed to be marine
phantoms.
The fiend pinning down the thief's pack behind him, I passed over
quickly: it was an object of terror.
So was the black horned thing seated aloof on a rock, surveying a
distant crowd surrounding a gallows.
Each picture told a story; mysterious often to my undeveloped
understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting: as
interesting as the tales Bessie sometimes narrated on winter evenings....
With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy....1
In this revealing passage, the reader learns not only about Jane’s character, but how
children used illustrated books during the early nineteenth century. While Jane pays
some attention to the text, what she calls “letterpress,” she admits that she does not care
much for it; instead, mention of this particular volume would have reminded Brontë’s
contemporary readers of the famous images by Bewick. These woodcut images, which
are not only of birds and seascapes, but also include vignettes of funerals and suicides,
incite Jane to use her imagination and to project her own ideas and life into the graphics
1 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (New York: Popular Publishing, 2001), 1-2.
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(figures 1, 2). Bewick explains in his preface to volume two of the History, the very
volume that Jane is viewing, that part of his motivation in creating his books of British
birds was to cultivate scientific inquiry in the minds of youth. One of his primary means
of accomplishing this task is to provide stimulating art to accompany his text. The
playful vignettes that accompany the text and illustrations concerning birds seem
incidental to the work, but as we see from Jane’s description, it is these very illustrations
that make the volumes so entertaining. Works such as Bewick’s ushered in the great era
of British print illustration during which illustrated books for children became a major
market.2
What if this situation were to be reversed, and instead of a young Jane perusing
adult literature, an older Jane enjoyed a child’s book? Just as books written for adult
audiences may have served to entertain children, children’s illustrated books fascinated
adults. Why this was so and the implications of adult interest in children’s illustrated
books are subjects that have not been adequately addressed in the literature written on
nineteenth-century children’s illustrated books. As adults constituted a large portion of
the audience of children’s illustrated books, and were the primary purchasers of these
texts, the history of that relationship deserves closer critical attention. My thesis will
argue that the focus of any study of this relationship should remain with the illustrations
and illustrators because they were really what aroused adult interest in these books, and
not the rhymes or tales they illustrated, in the nineteenth century.
Since the latter half of the nineteenth century, Victorian children’s books have
been collected, valued, and studied by adults. The first criticisms of these volumes in
2 Peter J. Bellis discusses Jane’s book as a visual object of social power and struggle within the Gateshead
household. Peter J. Bellis, “In the Window-Seat: Vision and Power in Jane Eyre,” ELH 54, no. 3 (Autumn
1987), 639-652.
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early reviews of the 1820s through 1860s by contemporary readers centered on the
books’ aesthetic aspects, rather than their textual content, showing that the primary focus
of interest in these books at the time they first appeared and were collected was with the
visual rather than textual content. However, as time progressed, during the twentieth
century interest in the literary value grew while interest in the illustrations and illustrators
waned. It is not entirely clear why this was so, and I can only venture that the field of art
history found other objects of interest which superceded any Victorian productions while
the field of English literature expanded to include children’s literature as a legitimate
topic of study. During the twentieth century, social studies of Victorian illustrated
children’s books have been mainly from the literary point of view. Rarely are these
books examined for the social implications and revelations that their art exposes.
The majority of literature on nineteenth-century children’s book illustrations deals
either with the collection of these books, explaining to a connoisseur audience which
books are worth collecting or describing existing collections, or with the biography of an
individual artist and his or her oeuvre. It is only within the last decade or so that the
illustrations have been under closer scrutiny by critics and historians. A few studies, such
as Julia Thomas’ Pictorial Victorians3, attempt to re-evaluate Victorian illustrated
literature by reading the text and the images in relation to one another, bridging the gap
that had previously arisen between studies of the same materials in the disciplines of
English literature and art history. These studies are quite recent, however, and are the
beginnings of a developing field of interest. Overlooked for so long, the illustrated
children’s books of the nineteenth century are a wealth of information regarding those
3 Julia Thomas, Pictorial Victorians: the Inscription of Values in Word and Image (Athens, OH: Ohio UP,
2004).
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who created them, and those for whom they were created, and are worth studying for
those reasons, as well as the joy that the books themselves are able to still convey today.
The general history which has been written about children’s books is that they
shifted from the eighteenth-century instructional hornbooks and chapbooks with minimal
illustrations to late nineteenth-century books that were created with lively colored
illustrations and minimal text. This change, according to most accounts, was the result
of new print technologies that were developed allowing books to be printed cheaply,
flooding the market with affordable quality children’s books and doing away with the
need for crude chapbooks.
Another reason cited for the change in children’s literature is that the conception
of children’s education changed from focusing on a child’s religious and moral education
to the cultivation of the child’s aesthetic sensibilities. Children’s illustrated books have
their history rooted in education, whether it was the learning of facts and language or
religion. For example, in 1693 John Locke published Some Thoughts Concerning
Education. In this work, Locke advocated the inclusion of illustrations in books for
children as an aid to their learning.4 The original objective of children’s books was to
educate the child and prepare him or her for adulthood, should the child live so long.
Manners, religion, and ethics were the most common subjects in these books, with very
little room for humor or entertainment for the sake of entertainment. When in 1870
Parliament passed an education act, which “instituted compulsory elementary education
for all British children,” the new situation produced a need for more children’s books in
4 Michael Patrick Hearn, “Discover, Explore, Enjoy,” Myth, Magic, and Mystery: One Hundred Years of
American Children’s Book Illustration (Norfolk, VA: Chrysler Museum of Art, 1996), 7.
8
England, and a surge of growth specifically in the area of children’s illustrated literature.5
However, by the end of the nineteenth century, children’s books sought to educate
children by cultivating taste. As visual aesthetics is a large part of taste, emphasis in
books shifted toward sophisticated, high quality illustrations from which children could
learn the difference between good art and bad.
While the above claims hold true, I believe that there is yet another reason for the
change of these materials over time. This is that children’s books had an ever-changing
relationship with their adult audience. Children’s book illustrations acted as a reflection
and a cause of the changing relationship of the adult audience with the children’s books
throughout the nineteenth century in England. Anne Lundin has published on adult
reception of Victorian illustrated children’s books, but her study is limited to the work of
Walter Crane, Kate Greenaway, and Randolph Caldecott.6 I would like to expand upon
her work, stretching further back to George Cruikshank’s illustrations, and then to the
illustrators of the 1860s. By doing so, I hope to build on Lundin’s preliminary work, and
to provide a more complex and complete history of Victorian children’s book illustration.
5 Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History (Athens, OH: Ohio
UP, 2002), 91-92. 6 Anne Lundin, Victorian Horizons: The Reception of the Picture Books of Walter Crane, Randolph
Caldecott, and Kate Greenaway (Lanham, MD & London: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2001).
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Foundations and Beginnings
While many arguments can be made for the beginning of children’s book
illustrations, I would like to begin with George Cruikshank’s illustrations for German
Popular Stories by the Brothers Grimm, published in 1823. This was the first edition of
the stories to be published in English, and Cruikshank was chosen to do the illustrations.
The first volume included a title page and eleven etchings. Many critics now cite
Cruikshank’s edition of the Grimm stories as the first true instance of a successful
English illustrated book for children. Joyce Irene Whalley called this book “symbolic of
a new era which lay ahead, when children would be permitted to read for pure
enjoyment.”7 John Ruskin praised Cruikshank, saying “The illustrations of Grimm’s
Fairy Tales are of quite sterling and admirable art; they are unrivalled in masterfulness of
touch since Rembrandt, and in some qualities of delineation unrivalled even by him”.8
Apart from being the first English translation of these tales, the book is praised for the
imaginative and entertaining illustrations by Cruikshank.9
Cruikshank’s illustrations to this book reflect two of the traditions out of which
British children’s book illustration grew—the illustrated luxury books of fairy stories in
eighteenth-century France, and England’s tradition of satirical illustrations and caricature.
The general public today is unaware that what we now think of as children’s illustrated
books actually began as books for adults. The earliest children’s books were largely
educational or moralistic, with very little entertaining content. Usually, these objects
took the shape of hornbooks, a wooden paddle which often included the alphabet or Bible
7 Joyce Irene Whalley, Cobwebs to Catch Flies: Illustrated Books for the Nursery and Schoolroom 1700-
1900 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), 17. 8 John Ruskin quoted in Julian Moore, The Three Cruikshanks: A Bibliographical Catalogue (London:
W.T. Spencer, 1897), 5. 9 Hearn, 7.
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verses, to be carried with the child, or very cheaply printed chapbooks which were low
quality mass-produced pamphlets hawked by traveling men. As Michael Patrick Hearn
states of some of the earliest of children’s literature, “Most children’s books remained
uninspired and uninspiring, and boys and girls desperately seized on the more
imaginative and exciting adult lore....”10 The history of illustrated books then begins with
adults, not with children.
Prior to the advances made in British book illustration, France had its own period
of magnificent illustrated volumes. While many of these focused upon fairy tales and
fantasy, they were targeted toward educated adults, rather than children. This fact is
reflected in the costly craftsmanship of the volumes.11 Amongst the famous French
illustrators were Fragonard, Moreau, Boucher, and Monnet. Illustrators this prestigious
would not have made materials with the intention of having them handled regularly by
children. Instead, the children’s book illustrators of this time were almost always
anonymous artists. A few books were produced for young royalty in the court of Louis
XIV, including Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables choisies (1668-1693) and Histoires ou
contes du temps passé (1697) by Charles Perrault. These books were the exception,
rather than the rule. What is important to notice is that in the eighteenth century, rather
than adults taking an interest in the literature and illustrations being made for children,
upper-class children were drawn into illustrated literature produced for adult fantasy and
adventure.
Grimm’s tales came from the brothers’ homeland of Germany, but they should be
treated as belonging to the same class of continental European folk tales as the French
10 Ibid.
11 Henry C. Pitz, Illustrating Children’s Books: History—Technique—Production (New York: Watson-
Guptill, 1963), 26.
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fairy stories. These stories came from folk tales, passed down orally to various
audiences, not least of which was a child audience. They taught children dangers of life,
while providing entertainment. In their oral state, then, the tales which the Grimm
brothers collected were largely intended for children; however, the resulting written
version of the stories were aimed toward adults.
The examples of the French tradition and the Grimm tales show that fairy stories
and fantastic tales should not be automatically assumed to have been placed into written
form specifically for a child audience. This is a common misconception today. We can
also trace English origins for fairy literature within the canon of English literature, based
in adult tastes. For example, one needs only look to great English literature of the
Elizabethan era to see fairy stories at work for adult entertainment, often with political
overtones attached, such as in Edmund Spenser’s The Fairie Queene, an epic poem
which makes allusions to Queen Elizabeth. The works of William Shakespeare have long
been considered high-brow adult entertainment, yet many of his plays, such as A
Midsummer’s Night Dream, contain fairy lore and even fairy characters. Out of this
literature came art based upon the fairy characters and fantastic situations the writers
imagined. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw a boom in what came to be
known as the school of the fairy painters. Much of the inspiration for these painters came
directly from Shakespeare’s plays. Exhibited prominently, these paintings were not
dismissed as works for children, but occupied a celebrated position in England as
expressions of great English literature and traditions. To categorize any nineteenth
century book containing fairy subject matter or illustrations as simply children’s material
is to neglect the larger English tradition.
12
Cruikshank’s illustrations to the Grimm volumes also stem from the English
tradition of political caricature. George Cruikshank grew up working within the world of
the great eighteenth-century English caricaturists. His own father, Isaac Cruikshank, was
a caricature artist alongside Thomas Rowlandson and James Gillray. George was
apprenticed to his father at an early age, learning the trade and eventually surpassing his
father’s talents. The young Cruikshank even was employed at times to finish plates for
an ailing Gillray.12 For the first part of his life, then, George Cruikshank worked
exclusively within the realm of the satirical print. It was not until the 1820s that he began
to illustrate books.
Cruikshank’s Grimm broke away from the norm by mixing the humor of satire
with fantasy, resulting in what would become one of the most dominant tones of
children’s books in the future. What Cruikshank demonstrates, then, is the birth of
modern English children’s books out of the traditions of European adult illustrated
literature. The image from “The Elves and the Shoemaker” is a good example of this
blend (figure 3). Cruikshank has illustrated the climax of the story, the moment when the
elves find the shoes that the shoemaker has placed out for them. While the subject matter
itself is that of the fairytale, Cruikshank has applied his own satirical visual language to
the image to evoke the energy of the scene. The faces of the elves are exaggerated and
grotesque, as is often the case in the humor of satirical images. However, Cruikshank
does not employ this style in order to undercut the subject, but to express the happiness
and humor of the moment. Sexual humor is also commonly used in visual satire.
Cruikshank has adapted this aspect of satire by including the faces of the shoemaker and
his wife peeking out at the elves. In a ribald image by Cruikshank form the same period
12 Percy Muir, Victorian Illustrated Books (New York and Washington: Praeger Publishers, 1971), 39.
13
of production, a man and woman find themselves in bed together, and a man peeks
gleefully over a door at the couple (figure 4). Cruikshank sets up very similar scenes in
each of these pictures. The shoemaker and his wife take the place of the satiric voyeur
who is the happy witness to the man and woman’s bawdy act. By having the shoemaker
and his wife “watch,” Cruikshank alludes to the ribald comedy of caricature without
including any sexuality in this image. In this way, Cruikshank adapted the satirical visual
language that the English public was accustomed to at this time to the new folk stories
from the continent, creating a volume that adults would enjoy and be able to share with
their children.
14
The Sixties
The 1860s are generally accepted as the golden period of Victorian illustration. It
was a time of unprecedented demand and production of illustrated literature. The first
major studies written about Victorian illustration were Gleeson White’s and Forrest
Reid’s13 on the illustrations of the 1860s. It was during this period that the division
between children’s illustrated literature and adult’s illustrated literature was beginning to
develop. However, the boundary between the two genres was hazy, at best, and most of
the artists who worked within children’s illustrations also illustrated for adults. Often,
the two audiences were served by the same material. While there were many illustrators
of children’s books during the sixties, I have chosen Arthur Hughes, Richard Doyle, and
John Tenniel as representative cases, and will focus strictly on their achievements and
contributions to the field. Each of these three case studies represents artists who did work
for adults. Arthur Hughes was involved with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and
exhibited at the Royal Academy prior to his time as a book illustrator. Richard Doyle
and John Tenniel were both staff artists for the popular periodical, and now symbol of
Victorian popular culture, Punch. Doyle was also one of the most highly regarded and
prolific fairy painters of the period. As a result, all three of these artists were known by
adults before they were established as children’s book illustrators.
Arthur Hughes is regarded as one of the major children’s book illustrators of the
Victorian period, and is usually classified as an artist of the 1860s. Although Hughes’
illustrations to George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin (1872) and Christina
Rossetti’s Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872) were all published in the 1870s,
13 Forrest Reid, Illustrators of the Sixties (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1928).
Gleeson White, English Illustration, 'The Sixties': 1855-70 (Westminister : A. Constable and Co., 1897).
15
here his work will be treated among that of the sixties, as he is categorized by Muir and
White. Hughes did not work in color, so his illustrations are heavy with cross-hatching,
as are most from the 1860s. Furthermore, Hughes’ work in the 1870s does not differ
stylistically from that which he did in the 1860s. As a result, chronologically these books
belong in the seventies, but stylistically they are very much a product of sixties’ book
illustration.
Arthur Hughes collaborated with Christina Rossetti on Sing-Song: A Nursery
Rhyme Book, finally published by the Dalziels after rejection by two other publishers.
Hughes was recommended to Christina by William Michael Rossetti to illustrate the
volume.14 Hughes was already established as an illustrator, having earlier completed the
illustrations for George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind. As Lewis Carroll
did for John Tenniel when he illustrated Alice in Wonderland, Christina Rossetti provided
Hughes with her own sketches of images to her poems to serve as a guide.15 Each page
features black and white vignettes by Hughes and short poems by Rossetti. Together,
text and image weave an atmosphere that has at its heart themes of death and loss, the
passage of seasons, and young life and family. Lorraine Janzen Kooistra sees Hughes’
illustrations as extensions of Rossetti’s own artistic vision, allowing the expression of
poetic meaning through image. In this way, the poet could write her verses simply
enough for children to be able to read, while providing clues for deeper comprehension
through the graphic elements of the page.16
Arthur Hughes was an appropriate partner for Christina Rossetti. Both were
affiliated with the Pre-Raphaelite circle without actually belonging to the brotherhood.
14 Kooistra, 97.
15 Kooistra, 98.
16 Kooistra, 42.
16
Because of his affiliation, Hughes would have been aware of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s
thoughts on book illustration. Dante Gabriel believed that the book illustrator should not
simply replicate the text, but should use it as a departure point for the artist’s own
creativity. Hughes adapted this philosophy of illustration to his own work, specifically to
Sing-Song. He used Sing-Song as an opportunity to execute careful studies of flowers,
birds and insects from direct observations in the manner of the Pre-Raphaelites. At the
same time, his work is not devoid of artistic imagination, or ‘allegorizing on his own
hook,’ as Dante Gabriel called it. One instance of Hughes applying his own visual take
on Christina Rossetti’s words is in her poem, “A Toadstool Comes Up in a Night”:
A toadstool comes up in a night—
Learn the lesson, little folk: —
An oak grows on a hundred years,
But then it is an oak.
Rather than illustrate the difference between the meager toadstool and the majestic oak,
Hughes has selected the words toadstool and little folk as visual departure points to
invent his own scene (figure 5). The result is an autumnal vision of imps playing on
oversized toadstools, watched by the eye of a passing village woman, or perhaps even a
witch. In a review in the Athenaeum, the writer said that Hughes’ “designs echo the spirit
of the verses in a manner which is very different from that of ordinary ‘illustrations,’
because they never fail to add something to the meaning of the poems, and accord with
the spirit which pervades the whole volume.”17 The scene Hughes draws for his
audience is one of nocturnal fantasy and fairy lore, quite in the style established by
Cruikshank’s Grimm illustrations. Since Hughes was born in 1832, it is most probable
17 “Review of Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book,” Athenaeum no. 2306 (January 6, 1872): II.
17
that he was exposed to Cruikshank’s work as a child, and almost surely would have been
aware of Cruikshank when studying book illustration himself.
Further evidence that Hughes had seen Cruikshank’s work and kept it in mind
when doing his own later work lies within the illustration to “There’s Snow on the
Fields” (figure 6). In it, a young girl sits to the side of a fireplace, eating “hot pottage,” as
stated in the poem. However, the placement of the child and the construction of the
hearth scene recall Cruikshank’s illustration for “Cinderella and the Glass Slipper” in
Grimm’s tales (figure 7). Each illustration works for the text which it accompanies, yet
there is a striking similarity in the way that the illustrations both construct a stage-like
hearth-side setting. However, Hughes has done away with the additional planes
emanating out from Cruikshank’s image, resulting in a hearth scene that is much more
immediate, and works with the personal nature and message of Rossetti’s poem.
Through this comparison, it is clear that Hughes expected his adult audience to make the
connection between his work and that of Cruikshank’s Grimm illustrations, without
considering that Hughes has merely copied the earlier artist’s work. Through visual
allusions such as these, Hughes is attempting to add to the larger English fairy literature
tradition.
Although Sing-Song is largely considered to be a children’s text, it was surely
read by adults as well. Both Rossetti and Hughes had adult followings, Rossetti for her
two published collections of poetry (and her earlier work in The Germ) and Hughes for
his illustrations for texts such as Allingham’s The Music Master. Hughes had also
worked as a painter, having exhibited at the Royal Academy in the 1850s. Further
indication that Hughes and Rossetti assumed that adults would read the volume is in the
18
theme of the relationship between mother and child that resounds throughout the book
and its illustrations. Clearly, this book was meant to be read aloud by a parent-figure to a
child, serving the desires of both sets of audiences. Hughes’ illustrations would have
been viewed by the adult while reading to the child, who most likely would have shared
the images as the narration progressed. A child could also have spent time with the book
alone, meditating upon the artist’s work without necessarily being able to read the text.
“My Baby has a Mottled Fist” speaks about the embraces between mother and child and
is accompanied by an illustration of a mother being kissed on the cheek by an
androgynous child. The volume closes with two pages of lullaby poems. Illustrating the
first, a mother rocks her baby in her arms, and in the illustration to the final page, perhaps
that same mother has now tucked her infant into a cradle. If Sing-Song were read all the
way through by mother and child, these final pages could signal the end of story time and
the beginning of bed time.
Another popular artist of the sixties who illustrated books for children was
Richard Doyle, commonly called Dickie. Following in the footsteps of his illustrator
father, John, Doyle became successful as a staff illustrator for Punch from 1842 until his
resignation from the magazine in 1850. By this time, the public had been often exposed
to his work. Doyle himself had designed the famous Punch cover. This early exposure
helped ensure Doyle a large adult audience when he went on to illustrate children’s
books. Doyle’s work as a children’s illustrator began with The Story of Jack and the
Giants (1851), and lasted through the seventies.
Doyle published In Fairyland, one of his most acclaimed volumes, for the 1869
Christmas season, postdated as published 1870. Jan Susina calls this book, “The greatest
19
illustrated Victorian book of fairies,” 18 reflecting the spirit of much of the criticism
toward the book. This book consisted of a series of playful fairy pictures to which
William Allingham wrote poems. Engraved and printed by Edmund Evans, the
illustrations were brightly colored, and the book itself was quite large at 147/8 X 10
7/8
inches. The illustrations of In Fairyland were the major selling-point for the book, which
quickly sold out two printings.19 In fact, the volume was originally conceived as a series
of pictures without any extra accompanying text.20 Although today it is generally
considered a children’s book, the original price of a guinea and a half was much higher
than most other children’s books of the time, causing us to question whether this book
was strictly for children at that price, especially when compared to the inexpensive
Walter Crane sixpenny books appearing at this time.21
That In Fairyland was such a success due to its images is further emphasized by
the later reprinting of the book with different text. The original book was printed as In
Fairyland: A Series of Pictures from the Elf-World, placing the primary emphasis on the
pictures of the book, rather than the poetry which the book also contained. Fourteen
years after the first publication of the book, The Princess Nobody was published. The
Princess Nobody was a version of In Fairyland in which the writer, editor, and folklorist
Andrew Lang took the original engravings and cut and rearranged them. He wrote the
new story for Doyle’s images, completely replacing Allingham’s poems.22 This is a
testament to not only the strength of the images, but to their appeal to adults, as shown
18 Jan Susina, “ ‘Like the fragments of coloured glass in a kaleidoscope’: Andrew Lang Mixes Up Richard
Doyle’s In Fairyland,” Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies 17, no.1 (2003), 111. 19 Bryan Holme, “Introduction,” In Fairyland (New York: Viking Press, 1979), 8.
20 Susina, 105.
21 Muir, 102.
22 Holme, 8-9.
20
through the adult Lang’s strong interest in them. Born in 1844, Lang was in his mid-
twenties when the first publication of In Fairyland came out, proving that his love for the
illustrations was not drawn from his exposure to them in childhood, but far later.23
Doyle’s images were striking and lively enough to have remained popular many years
after they first appeared.
The attention that In Fairyland received in its own time is easily explained upon
looking at the pages of the work. Doyle created a lively world full of humorous details.
In his “Triumphal March of the Elf-King,” Doyle has designed a procession that is in the
spirit of Richard Dadd’s strange fairy paintings (figure 8). Each figure contains
personality, and Doyle has provided realistic portraits of various species of insects and
birds. Although the poems written by Allingham are somewhat generic in their content,
Doyle’s images make up for that lack with the internal relationships among his figures,
creating stories within the images for the viewer to imagine.
If the true test of greatness is the ability to last over time, then Alice in
Wonderland should be considered the greatest illustrated children’s book of the 1860s.
John Tenniel’s illustrations to Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-
Glass (1872) are probably the most enduring and best known of the sixties’ illustrations,
and arguably of the entire Victorian period. John Tenniel is one of the strongest
examples of the popularity of the book illustrator in Victorian times, and the ability for a
book to sell based upon its illustrations. Today, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is the
most celebrated work of Lewis Carroll, guaranteeing his place amongst the canon of
English literature. It was also quite well known shortly after its publication and certainly
23 Andrew Lang was also the editor of a popular series of twelve illustrated fairy literature anthologies, the
first of which was The Blue Fairy Book (1889). Lang’s interest in folk and fairy literature, however,
predates his work on Doyle’s illustrations. For more information, please see Jan Susina’s essay.
21
by the time Punch wrote that “Everybody worth thinking about has read the sequel to
Alice in Wonderland, the new book called Through the Looking-Glass.”24 However,
Alice was Carroll’s first published work of fiction, written under Charles Lutwidge
Dodgson’s pseudonym. His name was unrecognizable to shoppers browsing books in
stores during the Christmas season. Nonetheless, Alice was still a popular book when it
appeared because it contained Tenniel’s illustrations. The name of a famous illustrator
was enough to sell a book, regardless of the author, and Tenniel’s name did just that.
Alice is a prime example of a Victorian illustrated children’s book which
transcended its intended juvenile audience to have an impact on adults. From the first
reviews of this book, we know that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was considered to
be, and marketed as, a children’s book at the time of its publication by both its creators
and audience. Dodgson first wrote the book for the child Alice Liddell, and only after
giving her his original manuscript, hand illustrated by the author, did he decide to publish
the work. In 1865, the year it was first published, Alice was reviewed as a children’s gift
book.25 Pitz notes that large volumes of illustrated texts by noteworthy illustrators were
displayed in parlor rooms for the entire family to peruse, including careful children.26
Alice could easily have fit into this category, as it was published in time for the same
Christmas market for which these large illustrated volumes were produced. The first way
that Alice was able to reach out to the adult public was through Tenniel’s illustrations.
Tenniel’s Alice work is full of references to his Punch illustrations, to the point
that Michael Hancher has published on the references in Alice to Disraeli, John Bull,
24 Punch (March 16, 1872): 112.
25 Michael Hancher, The Tenniel Illustrations to the “Alice” Books (Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 1985),
xv. 26 Pitz, 36.
22
Great Britain’s Lion and Unicorn, and the March Hare’s insanity, as well as others. It
seems a natural transition for illustrators of periodicals to have crossed over into
illustrating children’s books as well as adults. As the print culture progressed, children’s
books began quite literally to look much more like adult books because they shared
common illustrators. The works of Charles Dickens, today read by family audiences of
both adults and children, were written for the vast growing adult literate public, and were
spread out in serial form for the public to purchase as they did magazines. One of
Dickens’ illustrators was George Cruikshank, who easily could illustrate for adults or for
children without losing any of the meaning of his work. Tenniel had been on the Punch
staff for fifteen years by the time Alice was published, the last two of which he had
served as a chief artist. This, as well as many previous publications such as his
illustrations to Aesop’s Fables (1848), ensured that Tenniel was somewhat of a household
name prior to his illustrations to the Alice books. It was Tenniel’s name that appealed to
an adult audience searching for a suitable gift book. While his illustrations are diverting
enough for children, adults could speculate upon Tenniel’s sources for characters,
comparing them to his Punch works for their own amusement.
Michael Hancher makes much of the Alice-Punch connection. In The Tenniel
Illustrations to the “Alice” Books, Hancher makes comparisons between Tweedledee and
Tweedledum and Tenniel’s illustrations of the young John Bull in Punch. Hancher
considers many prior Punch cartoons as inspiration for the images of the Cheshire Cat,
Humpty Dumpty, the Frog-Footman, and the Caterpillar, to name a few. He also finds
the face of Benjamin Disraeli in the railway carriage illustration in Through the Looking-
23
Glass.27 Although it is entertaining to find similarities between Tenniel’s works, they can
be explained away by the fact that Tenniel was drawing from his own visual repertoire.
Hancher neglects to explain to his audience why these visual commonalities are of such
importance to the understanding and enjoyment of the Alice illustrations.
The Alice illustrations can be seen to carry more weight when these
commonalities are viewed as visual clues left by a playful illustrator for an audience that
would have been familiar with his previous work. Such an understanding would involve
knowledge of world and national events, and an acquaintance with Punch cartoons. The
greater the education, political awareness, and investment in popular culture possessed by
the reader of Alice, the greater the enjoyment in viewing the pages.
Tenniel found the pages of the Alice books to be a fertile site for the cultivation of
the same visual satire he drew for Punch. Roger Simpson argues that “the adaptation of a
children’s-style illustration to the uses of satire...allowed effective sniping at all of the
perceived affectations of early and mid-Victorian England....”28 In other words, the use
of the visual language of satire to illustrate children’s stories, fantastic and magical,
allowed those stories to be read without guilt, because the satire provided a mature outlet
within juvenile material. Alice, then, is part of the tradition of children’s book
illustrations that Cruikshank established. The caricatures of the graphic aspect of the
page also coincided with Lewis Carroll’s own literary satire, most recognizable in his
parody versions of popular didactic poetry, such as Isaac Watts’ Divine and Moral Songs
for Children (1788) and Jane Taylor’s Rhymes for the Nursery (1806). Carroll turned
27 Hancher, chapters one and nine.
28 Roger Simpson, Sir John Tenniel: Aspects of his Work (London and Toronto: Associated University
Press, 1994), 139.
24
earlier children’s literature on its head in his “wonderland,” and Tenniel’s illustrations
were strong enough to support Carroll’s satirical and strange text.
25
Color and Toy Books
The spirit of the colored toy children’s book was dominant in the last quarter of
the nineteenth century amongst children’s literature. Even Lewis Carroll reprinted his
successful Alice books as The Nursery Alice in 1889, although the idea was first
suggested by the author in 1881.29 This reformatted nursery book featured twenty
colored enlargements of the Tenniel illustrations. The market had shifted by this point to
expect children’s books to include large, colored illustrations rather than the earlier black
and white woodcuts and wood engravings which had dominated the work from Bewick
through the 1860s. The art of colored illustrations is now considered to have been
perfected at that point by the printer Edmund Evans. Percy Muir has said of Evans that
“he raised the standards of book production at a time when they were very markedly in
need of improvement.”30 Evans worked at length with three main illustrators: Walter
Crane, Kate Greenaway, and Randolph Caldecott. These three became known as the
academicians of the nursery, or the triumvirate of Evans, and are the most famous and
collected children’s book artists of the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
With the colored toy book, the division between children’s and adult’s illustrated
literature was solidified. These books were printed specifically for the nursery, and the
pages were filled with simple, and often minimal, text addressed to children. Usually the
text was of well-known stories or children’s rhymes, or taught the alphabet or how to
count. However, that books were addressed directly to a young child audience did not
mean that adults stopped caring for illustrated children’s books, but that the manifestation
of their interest changed. At this point, adults became interested in children’s books for
29 Simpson, 162.
30 Muir, 157.
26
the stylistic artwork held within, as well as for the education and entertainment of their
children. Publishers and critics were well aware of this phenomenon, and may have
encouraged it by drawing attention to its development in popular periodicals. The Art
Journal discussed the existence of books written for “the pleasure of grown-up as well as
infantile minds” as well as books “nominally intended for the little ones, but also catering
to the grown-up folks.”31 Mrs. E. M. Field wrote in The Child and His Book (1891) that
“The nursery picture-book has a curious tendency to find its way to the drawing-room
table and to the smoking-room lounge, even perhaps to the serious study shelf. And
uncles and aunts who buy these charming productions ‘for the children’ are frequently
discovered to be themselves gloating over them in a corner.”32 Through these accounts, it
is made clear that works for children were aestheticized and enjoyed by the adult
audience despite, or because of, their intended age group.
In most cases, the design of the book itself, as well as the artwork within, became
more important than the tale the book told. The art of the colored toy book moved off of
the pages and into the nursery, and the home. Children’s book illustrations were made
into wallpapers, such as Tenniel’s earlier illustrations to the Alice books. Kate
Greenaway’s work created the market for “a plethora of Greenaway-styled clothing,
ceramics, jewelry, wallpaper, and needlework as well as the more familiar cards,
calendars, and bookplates” in the late nineteenth century.33 Walter Crane went on to
design “wall-papers, tapestries, plaster friezes and ceilings, pottery, tablecloths, textiles,
31 “Children’s Christmas Books,” Art Journal (December 1881): 380, 408.
32 Mrs. E. M. Field, The Child and His Book (London: Wells Gardner, Darton, 1891), 314.
33 Anne Lundin, “Kate Greenaway’s Critical and Commercial Reception,” Princeton University Library
Chronicle (Autumn 1995): 2.
27
stained glass and ceramic tiles”34 for a market that desired his unique style after
becoming aware of his work through nursery books. We can see from these examples the
popularity of illustrations as adult commodities. By adapting the illustrations to everyday
items, the market greatly increased the accessibility of children’s book illustrations for
adult use and appreciation, extending the popularity of such items far outside the pages of
the books and the walls of the nursery.
Walter Crane was the first artist to work with Edmund Evans on colored toy
books. Crane’s work with Evans resulted in brightly colored Sixpenny Toy Books that
sold for little money but were saturated with Crane’s own artistic interests, not least of
which was the developing Arts and Crafts movement. These toy books were some of the
first incarnations of what today is commonly referred to as a picture book. Crane became
well known by many adults, and his children’s books had a large mature following of
decorators. Parents used Crane’s books to educate their children in taste, preferring his
work for its academic nature.35 A reviewer from the Graphic wrote that “Mr. Crane is
doing an admirable job in educating the eye and cultivating the taste of the youngsters;
and if he succeeds even partially in rescuing them from the love of vulgar daubs which
have so long passed muster as coloured picture-books, he will not have lived in vain.”36
The actress Ellen Terry wrote in her autobiography that she was not allowed to have bad
books, and instead her parents gave her Walter Crane to read.37 Thick lines, attention to
decorative detail, and his ability to draw from various sources and styles such as neo-
34 Muir, 161-162.
35 Hearn, 10.
36 “Christmas Books,” Graphic (December 7, 1878), 583.
37 Ellen Terry quoted in Tomoko Sato and Toshio Watanabe, Japan and Britain: An Aesthetic Dialogue
1850-1930 (London: Lund Humphries Publishers, 1991), 129.
28
classicism and Japanese prints in order to create his own hybrid style characterize
Crane’s children’s books.
That Crane’s work appealed to an adult audience should be quite obvious.
Already mentioned were Crane’s wallpapers, plasters, and ceramics. Additionally, Crane
became deeply involved with William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. In fact,
Crane was the first president of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society. Crane exhibited
many paintings at the Royal Academy, the first of which was a version of The Lady of
Shalott in 1862. However, it was not his academic work that brought him such fame for
design, but his Toy-Books. It would be modest to call Crane a very successful children’s
book illustrator. “Between 1865 and 1875 he illustrated 37 books for very young
children, nursery rhymes, and fairy tales.”38 Of Bluebeard’s Picture Book (1874),
Gleeson White wrote, “The ‘Bluebeard’ and ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ toy books, and
‘Princess Belle Etoile,’ and a dozen others are nursery classics, and classics also of the
other nursery where children of a larger growth take their pleasure.”39 Crane set high
standards for the inexpensive children’s books which were produced during the last
quarter of the nineteenth century, and paved the way for the successes of Greenaway and
Caldecott.
Crane’s own idiomatic style was blossoming at the same time that artists, and
indeed all of England and the West, were becoming increasingly exposed to Japan.
Following a period of sakoku, or ‘closed country,’ which had been in place since the
1630s, Japan opened negotiations to trade with Great Britain in 1854. 40
The first major
encounter with Japanese culture for the British public was at the International Exhibition
38 Alan Crawford, “Walter Crane,” Crafts 169 (Mar.-Apr. 2001), 22.
39 Gleeson White, “Children’s Books and Their Illustrators,” Studio (Winter 1897-8), 34-35.
40 W. G. Beasley, The Rise of Modern Japan (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 22.
29
of 1862. Many artists of the period, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti and James McNeil
Whistler, began collecting Japanese objects and incorporating them into their work.
Crane himself received some Toyokuni prints from a naval lieutenant during a visit to
family friends in the summer of 1867.41 He later wrote in his autobiography that what
influenced him in Japanese prints was “definite black outline and flat brilliant as well as
delicate colors, vivid dramatic and decorative feeling.”42 Crane took what he had learned
from Japanese print artists and applied it to his own toy books.
One such book was One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (1869). Crane’s interest in the
style and composition of Japanese woodblock prints is apparent in this book, not only
through the change in his own style, but also through direct references. For example,
within the center of the illustration for “Eleven, Twelve, Ring the Bell,” Crane placed a
Japanese woodblock print (figure 9). Crane’s own composition of his scene references
the flat composition of the Japanese print. The family’s fireplace has the same diagonal
thrust as the print’s screen, and the bookshelf provides a dividing horizontal line, just as
the railing separates the building from the landscape within the print. Crane’s drawing is
much flatter than in his previous work, and he has used far more areas of solid color,
opening and simplifying the image. This picture is one of Crane’s simplest and least
crowded. It seems that this is due to the proximity of its creation to Crane’s discovery of
Japanese prints. Later, Crane further developed his style in accordance with his
involvement with the Arts and Crafts movement, and filled his interiors with much more
detail. Also important in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe is the appearance of the artist’s
cartouche that Crane had begun using by this point. The crane inside is both a play on
41 Isobel Spencer, Walter Crane (London: Studio Vista, 1975), 53.
42 Ibid.
30
the artist’s name and an homage to Eastern bird motifs, in the same way that Whistler
adopted a stylized butterfly as his artist’s signature.
As Muir has noted, Crane’s illustrations often integrated several “Golden Ages,”
such as his own conceptions of medievalism or Greek classicism.43 Crane also wrote that
he was influenced by Italian painters including “Uccello, Gozzoli, Crivelli, Botticelli,
early Venetians, Mantegna.”44 As time went on, Crane adapted his work to reflect and
accommodate each of these “golden ages” as sources of material. By combining many
diverse styles of the past, Crane created illustrated worlds that were exotic and distant,
yet familiar. Older readers could use Crane’s pages as inspiration for their own interior
decoration, while younger readers could simply sit and imagine the world that the images
created.
Crane’s primary concern in his books was his illustrations, not his text. With such
powerful and complex illustrations, including text was problematic. The text was
necessary to provide meaning and narration, but it could also distract from the graphics.
Crane tried several methods of including text with his illustrations. Unlike the images
produced by Caldecott, which seemed to create a much broader story than the bare lines
of rhyme possessed, Crane’s illustrations need their text to provide a flowing narrative.
However, Crane wished to fill his books with as much imagery as possible. In
Bluebeard’s Picture Book, Crane’s solution was to include the text in a small, scroll-like
square in the corner of the image, leaving the remainder of the page to be illustrated.
Whereas Caldecott expanded upon the story within his illustrations, creating
various subplots and jokes, Crane used subtle decorative elements to expand upon
43 Muir, 162.
44 Walter Crane, “The Work of Walter Crane,” Art Journal (1898), 4.
31
themes. On the second page of Bluebeard, Crane illustrates the scene where Bluebeard’s
wife is first left alone with the key to his rooms and chests. Directly behind his wife is a
wall tapestry depicting the temptation of Eve. By juxtaposing this classic Biblical scene
on a piece of interior decoration with the heroine of the story, Crane graphically
foreshadows the heroine’s temptation to defy the rules that Bluebeard laid down, leading
to her downfall. To recognize this bit of marginalia, Crane’s work requires an educated
audience capable of making thematic connections. While one hopes that children could
do such, it is much more probable that adult admirers would be those who benefited from
Crane’s interior clues.
The fifth illustration to this book shows the sister of Bluebeard’s wife at the top of
the castle, searching for signs of their brothers in the distance (figure 10). To the right of
the figure, a coat of arms is painted on the wall’s gable. Although in reality this is an
unlikely spot for a coat of arms to be placed, Crane has included it to reinforce the main
thrust of the story. The coat of arms are held by a dragon, and include a black skull, a
bloody dagger, and a key. Below, a line of script reads “Gardez le clef,” or, guard the
key. The key is the seed of temptation, and the catalyst for the many murders that
Bluebeard has committed. On the following page, the coat of arms appears again, this
time at the center of the page and the center of the action (figure 11). However, the skull
is no longer there, and has been replaced by a man hanging from the gallows. The reason
for the change in the coat of arms is that Bluebeard’s wife’s brothers can be seen in the
background through a window, and justice for Bluebeard’s crimes is sure to follow. It is
the small details such as these that make Crane’s work fascinating. He has often been
criticized for being overly decorative, and too busy, but this same decorative quality
32
allows him to visually compress themes, creatively scattering clues throughout his
ornamental schemes. To truly appreciate Crane’s books, one must sit with them for long
periods of time, reflecting upon patterns and visual oddities. He places some of the most
rewarding graphics in traditionally marginal places.
Crane was commonly grouped together with the other Evans illustrators,
Greenaway and Caldecott. However, Crane did not wish to have to be constantly
compared to the other two. The professional rivalry between the three did not arise out of
being liked more or less by children, the target audience of the works, but out of the
opinion of adults. Crane wrote concerning his rivalry with the two other illustrators that,
“I do not know whether the children were more interested, but I think their elders were, in
the work of Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, who seemed to suit the English taste more
exactly perhaps than I did.”45 While it is unfortunate that all three illustrators were
treated competitively when the work they did was unique to each, the constant
comparison seems to have pushed each illustrator to work at his or her best, elevating the
picture book to a higher quality.
One of the key differences between these three as illustrators is that Crane
portrayed distant times and places, such as the medieval era or the Far East, while
Caldecott and Greenaway illustrated a different kind of English past. Theirs was a pre-
industrial England, and their stories took place in the countryside rather than the busy
streets of London. One reason for the appeal of children’s illustrated books for adults,
particularly the works of Greenaway and Caldecott, is that they present a serene, rural
environment which contrasted severely with the noisy, dirty modern world. As the
nineteenth century progressed, illustrated children’s books tended more and more to
45 Walter Crane, “Notes on My Own Books for Children,” The Junior Bookshelf (October 1940), 14.
33
represent idyllic country scenes and tales rather than focusing on commerce and the city.
“The men of the sixties loved quirks of human character and the infinitely varied
movements of the human frame; the new trio made do with a few stereotyped characters
and a predicable repertoire of poses. The world they created was cozy and appealing,
without stress, strain, or question.”46 By opening a book by one of these artists, the
reader was taken away from the everyday world to a world that was peaceful and happy.
Greenaway’s work was quite successful at capturing an imagined past, stirring up
nostalgia and allowing adults to drift into a vision of a distant childhood. Greenaway’s
figures have long been noted and praised for their charm. These are the children that
adults wish existed in reality. Even when sad, they exude beauty and calmness. Percy
Muir’s description of Greenaway’s work was that “she created a small world of her own,
a dream-world, ... above all a world at least as remote from the one in which she lived as
from our own.”47 Part of the remoteness of this world is the costume in which the
inhabitants are clothed. Greenaway’s mother was a dressmaker, so Kate Greenaway
knew about fashions and dress-design. Greenaway chose to dress her perfect children in
her own designs, rather than the way that children dressed in her own time. Doing so
created another level of separation from reality. The costumes that Greenaway created
were inspired by the dress of the English Regency. Greenaway’s designs were so popular
that they inspired a revival of sorts of this kind of fashion. The department store,
Liberty’s of London, began a line of children’s fashions modeled upon Greenaway’s
books. Perhaps parents believed that clothing their children in Greenaway’s fashions
could place them one step closer to the idealized youth in Greenaway’s world.
46 Pitz, 38.
47 Muir, 170.
34
Greenaway’s A Apple Pie (1886) is an alphabet book that uses an old, simple
rhyme to teach children the letters of the alphabet. At the top of each page appears a
large capital letter, followed by the coinciding line of the poem. Below the text, each
page is peopled by Greenaway’s figures, who act out the line of text. Characteristic of
Greenaway’s work, the figures are mainly children, elaborately costumed in regency
garb. Although the book was meant to teach young people the alphabet, the letter “I” is
omitted. Edward Ernest writes that, “The text for this book was taken by Kate
Greenaway from a very old rhyme written before the English alphabet contained the
letter “I.” Miss Greenaway omitted this letter purposely, following the traditional
version.”48 If Greenaway’s only reason for creating this book was for the education of
children, she arguably would have included this vowel; otherwise, children would be
learning an alphabet that is incorrect by modern standards. However, Greenaway’s adult
audience prized the older feel of her books. By including the poem in its older form,
Greenaway preserved the nostalgia that reading it could bring, which surely pleased her
educated fans. Omitting the letter “I” proves that Greenaway was not simply producing
books for children, but also for the adults who were fans of her work. Indeed, it has been
argued that by this period alphabet books were largely excuses for the format for a
children’s book, and that A Apple Pie was a prime example of such an excuse. Whalley
argues that this book “reaches a style which, even in its own day, must have attracted the
adult as a work of art in a way that the earlier, cruder children’s books can never have
done.”49
48 Edward Ernest, The Kate Greenaway Treasury (Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing
Company, 1967), 237. 49 Whalley, 34.
35
Kate Greenaway’s Painting Book was published in 1884. This book featured
pages of images taken from Greenaway’s books. Alongside the colored image was the
same picture without color (figure 12). Children were meant to view Greenaway’s
original and interpret and imitate her coloring. Included in the beginning of the book is a
page of explanation. The editor wrote that “Young eyes are keen to recognise the work
of some of our great artists in the form of a Series of Painting Books, of which this
Volume is one; the aim has been to place the child on a simple road of appreciation of all
that is best in Art.” This note tells us that the editors published the coloring book with
the intention of artistically educating children. By participating in the creation of art by
adding color to the page, children would learn to recognize that which is tasteful and
artistic. The other suggestion in this text is that Kate Greenaway is an appropriate artist
to lead in the artistic education of the young. By this point in her career, Greenaway was
considered to be an ideal illustrator for children because of the always lovely, static world
of childhood that she created. Once again, we are reminded that children’s books were
used as a means of exposing the young to aesthetic examples, especially in the work of
Greenaway and Crane.
Greenaway was aware of the confusion associated with the adult and children’s
audiences. She wrote about children as an audience that, “Children often don’t care a bit
about the books people think they will and I think they often like grown-up books—at
any rate I did.”50 This comment brings up the question of who Greenaway was really
interested in pleasing with her work. While most would say that her books were printed
specifically for a young child audience, adults prized her illustrations. Perhaps
50 Quoted in Anne Carroll Moore, “A Century of Kate Greenaway,” The Kate Greenaway Treasury
(Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1967), 100.
36
Greenaway was illustrating for adults under the guise of children’s work. It seems that
she believed that only by creating work adults would find interesting could she please her
child audience.
Art critic John Ruskin became enamored with Greenaway’s work, and maintained
a longstanding friendship through letters exchanged between the two. Ruskin admired
Greenaway’s vision of the English idyll countryside which he believed had been
destroyed by industrialization and modern times. Greenaway’s work preserved that
which had been lost in real life, saving a vision of a utopian England for future
generations to appreciate.51 Ruskin himself was bound to the world of children’s books
early on, and published his own The King of the Golden River in 1851, complete with
illustrations by Richard Doyle. As the most important British art critic of his time,
Ruskin’s involvement with children’s illustrated literature and Kate Greenaway is
indicative of the importance of the field during Victorian times.
Like Greenaway, Randolph Caldecott’s books mainly illustrate rural scenes of a
recent past. The first two books that Caldecott illustrated for Evans were The House
that Jack Built and The Diverting History of John Gilpin, both 1878. Art Journal critic
William Henley wrote of the books that “They made more noise and gave more pleasure
than all the pictures of the year, and between old folks and young there was a contest of
admiration over them. They were better than popular, they were fashionable....”52
Caldecott’s work was embraced by critics and consumers. Typically, Caldecott
illustrated commonly known rhymes, such as “Hey Diddle Diddle,” stretching the entire
51 Katie Trumpener, “City Scenes: Commerce, Utopia, and the Birth of the Picture Book,” The Victorian
Illustrated Book, ed. Richard Maxwell (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2002),
365. 52 William Henley, “Randolph Caldecott,” Art Journal (July 1881), 210.
37
rhyme out over the course of a book. Caldecott expanded the small text, with each page
usually only including a line or two, which allowed the image to expand upon the story
by including a variety of action and characters. Whereas Greenaway’s world was serene
and static, Caldecott’s was lively, with images that come across as rhythmic in their
energy.
Caldecott’s work has often been noted because of the sparseness of his images. In
contrast to Crane’s crowded, teeming pages, Caldecott left much blank marginal space
separating his graphics from the usually short bit of text. Muir exclaims that “the
economy with which he secures his effects is astonishing, more especially for its
novelty.”53 The trend before Caldecott had been to create very detailed images, heavy
either with decoration or cross-hatching. Instead, Caldecott relied upon sketchy minimal
line with color filling in the image. Caldecott also favored alternating fully colored
images with uncolored outlines which served to fill in gaps in the story and propel the
narrative without calling as much attention to the pictures. The strength of Caldecott’s
images lay within what they portrayed, rather than the level of detail with which they
portrayed the subject. Visually, this opened up Caldecott’s images. Katie Trumpener
views Caldecott’s conservative graphics as a means of creating an open world for escape
from the everyday noise and crammed spaces of the city. By leaving space on the page
for his images, Caldecott “facilitate[s] imaginative escape out of the grim, cramped
present.”54
In The House That Jack Built, Caldecott begins his book with a full, colored
image of Jack, motioning with an outstretched arm, presenting his country estate to
53 Muir, 167.
54 Trumpener, 363.
38
Regency-clothed visitors (figure 13). His home is far from London, and resembles the
English country manors built in the eighteenth century, complete with elaborate gardens
for the pleasure of visitors. This picture exudes English-ness, from the British flora
lining the house’s walkway, to the dogs playing upon that walkway. In a very direct way,
Caldecott has illustrated the first line of the poem: “This is the house that Jack built.”
The next illustration adds upon that line (figure 14). It a sepia-colored drawing, and lacks
the bright colors or details of the previous picture. In this picture, Jack opens his door to
a maid with two children. This simpler image is much more welcoming to a reader than
the previous, and shows Caldecott’s relationship to his audience. Jack stands in for
Caldecott’s presence, leading the way for parents and children into the story and the
book, opening the door for a shared experience.
Maurice Sendak, one of the most famous twentieth-century children’s book
writers and illustrators, proclaimed Randolph Caldecott to have been the originator of the
modern picture book.55 It is fitting, then, that the American Library Association
established in 1938 the Caldecott Medal as an annual prize to be awarded to the finest
illustrated children’s book. This has ensured that Caldecott has retained his fame long
after his death. It also shows that the level of interest in children’s illustrated literature is
still high within some specialized adult audiences, especially those who have children or
interact regularly with them such as librarians and schoolteachers. Each year, trained
professionals must consider the illustrated children’s books which had been published
within that year, and choose that book which they feel was the overall best product. The
selection of the Caldecott Medal is not up to children, but the adults in the American
55 Claudette Hegel, Randolph Caldecott: An Illustrated Life (Greensboro: Avisson Press, 2004), 8.
39
Library Association. Even today, many adults are largely invested within the child’s
world of print. However, the general public is nowhere near as involved in illustrated
children’s books as it was during Victorian times. The books are of interest mainly to
professionals, and this interest is usually centered on the relationship between children
and their books.
40
Conclusion
When Alice voices her opinion, “what is the use of a book...without pictures or
conversations?”56 she is doing more than making a childish statement. She is providing a
voice for many adult Victorians who would rather see texts with images than not. And
even more than illustrated adult literature, it was desired that children’s books should
contain excellent visual stimuli. That the general public developed such a strong interest
toward children’s books is astounding to today’s sensibilities. But it was not the text
alone that initiated this nineteenth-century cultural obsession. As we have seen, it was
mainly motivated by the extraordinary high quality illustrations contained within the
books. The combination of text and image made the Victorian illustrated children’s book
a veritable world, and an object worthy of attention and collection to even the most
important artists and critics of the era.
The nineteenth century saw a movement toward providing pleasure rather than
simply instruction and education for children in illustrated books. Pedagogically,
pleasure was thought to aid the child in reaching the goal of learning because the child
would wish to spend time with his or her books and take an active interest in them.
Learning, in this way, could become fun rather than chore. However, the fact that adults
as a group became increasingly aware of the children’s capacity to enjoy print and
literature signals back to the adults’ own pleasure when experiencing these materials.
Adults were usually the people purchasing children’s books for children, and were
always the writers of books for children. Both writers and purchasers had to project
themselves into the mindset of the child to decide what elements would make for the
56 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass (New York: New
American Library, 1960), 17.
41
most entertaining and proper children’s reading materials. This self-regression allowed
for additional escape from daily worries.
Apart from this self-regression, the books served as other outlets for Victorian
adults. Through Crane’s books one could travel to strange lands without leaving the
comfort of home, or ever being terrified of what these other worlds contained. Even
when peopled with beasts, the pages presented a sterile, harmless fantasy where no
danger was ever really present. If one wished to stay within England, but do away with
the modernity, technology, the crowds and the filth, Greenaway and Caldecott were
always available for perusal. Greenaway presented a calm reality full of pretty boys and
girls, Caldecott an energetic and humorous rustic world.
When compared, there is a shocking difference in style from Cruikshank’s time to
the colored toy books. Images went from small, black and white vignettes which
accompanied texts to being the bulk of the book, creating a world of images from sparse
poems and stories. Also, children’s books went from featuring a handful of small cuts to
including illustrations on nearly every page. Clearly, the image took over the children’s
book as the nineteenth century progressed due to the popularity of the illustrators, as well
as advances in print production and changes in pedagogical approaches to children’
education. Once color was made customary for printed images, the need for heavy cross-
hatching disappeared. Images became more open, with heavier reliance upon outline.
Children’s books were praised by adults for their ability to convey and embody
childhood.
However, for all of the differences in style, children’s book illustrations
maintained thematic congruencies. The interest in illustrating fairy tales and folklore has
42
lasted up to modern times, as has the tendency to include humor within the illustrations.
In this way, Cruikshank is the father of British children’s book illustration, having drawn
from folk tales and satirical humor in his work. Tenniel’s illustrations to Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland remain the most popular, although many illustrators have
since done their own visual renditions of the book, not least of which were such figures
as Arthur Rackham and Salvador Dali. His illustrations even served as the basis for
Disney’s feature-length animated film of Alice in Wonderland (1951). This signals that
the qualities that came to make up a good illustrated children’s book have not changed
drastically since the nineteenth century. Greenaway and Caldecott are still considered
appropriate nursery materials, as evidenced by many reprintings of their works by
modern publishers. The nineteenth-century children’s books created the foundation and
beginnings of a very successful genre of literature. Although adults today do not seem to
have the same investment in current children’s illustrated literature as the Victorians did,
the interest in Victorian children’s literature lives on in our research of the era.
Victorians had a very different relationship to children’s books, then, than we
presently do. For Victorians, folk tales and fairy tales were a major source of
entertainment. Oral tradition of these genres was a thing of the recent past for them, and
was probably even still taking place among family settings. Victorian adults took great
interest in reading the stories that had not long before been committed to paper by the
Brothers Grimm. In an age when medievalism and Arthurian legend were all the rage,
fairy stories and fantastic tales were welcome additions to the popular imagination. We
see the Victorian enthusiasm for everything related to fairies in the stories, poems, book
illustrations, stage drama, and fairy painting of the period.
43
Also remarkable was the way that Victorians adapted elements of children’s book
illustrations into their daily lives. The fact that Victorian-era adults decorated their
homes with wallpapers featuring Crane’s designs, or gained inspiration for interior
decoration based on the interiors of juvenile volumes demonstrates the level of adult
investment in these objects of youth. Children’s books crossed the boundaries of age,
and were equally available to both young and old. As stated in criticisms from the time,
the most successful of these books are those that are able to please both audiences. It
seemed that the test of good children’s books was whether they had enough visual or
literary content that an adult would be able to gain use and entertainment from them,
while still presenting straightforward simplicity and educational value to young readers.
With standards as high as these, it is clear why illustrated children’s books from
nineteenth-century England will continue to be treasured for years to come.
44
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Figure 2.
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Figure 14.
