Zooming Out: Key Figures and Milestones
There are many precursor texts to the Victorian picturebook. Comenius’s pictorial encyclopedia Orbis Sensualium Pictus (1658) is sometimes called the first picturebook for children. In the eighteenth century, harlequinade lift-the-flap books offered integrated interactions between words and pictures (Figure 4.1; see Reid-Walsh 2017). From 1801 onwards, John Harris’s adaptations of the then-dominant form of illustrated literature – the chapbook or popular pamphlet of folktales, ballads, etc. – for children foreshadow favorite subjects for the picturebook, such as nursery rhymes, and favorite gestures, such as the soliciting of young readers’ participation, as in a frontispiece illustrating the opening line of The Butterfly’s Ball: “Come take up your hats & away let us haste” (Figure 4.2; see Moon 1992; Schiller 1973). Around the time of Victoria’s coronation, Felix Summerly (Henry Cole) sought “to place good pictures before my own and other children” in his Home Treasury (quoted in Summerfield 1980, p. 48). The success of this project is visible in dynamic illustrations from the series, such as Jack dangling from the beanstalk (Figure 4.3). Nonetheless, not all of these works are children’s picturebooks proper. They may be variably aimed at adults as well as children. They may have too many words and too few pictures. Moreover, their high quality may contrast with many of the colored toy books – toy book is the Victorian synonym for picturebook – which would follow (Masaki 2006).
Figure 4.1 The harlequinade is one precursor to the Victorian picturebook. Source: Queen Mab 1771, n.p. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.
Figure 4.2 Children are invited into the book. Source: Roscoe (1808), frontispiece. The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.
Figure 4.3 Jack evades the giant’s grasp in the Home Treasury. Source: Summerly 1845, n.p. Children’s Book Collection, CBC PZ6 .C674tr 1845, Young Research Library, University of California, Berkeley.
By contrast, in the 1840s, the picturebook’s burgeoning status is clear from a single text: Heinrich Hoffmann’s Lustige Geschichten und drollige Bilder (Merry Stories and Funny Pictures), later known as Der Struwwelpeter (Shock-headed Peter). This immensely popular work, first published in Germany in 1845, had been translated into English by 1848 as The English Struwwelpeter (Brown and Jones 2013). While critics often focus on Hoffmann’s moralism – ironic or otherwise – the book’s alternate importance lies in its design and synthesis of word and image (Metcalf 1996). Alderson (1986) points out the varied uses of the page across the volume, which configure narrative illustrations in many different ways. Illustrations bisect the text, march above it, and appear in sequential rows that evoke the comic book (Figure 4.4). The Struwwelpeter phenomenon is also significant because it shows the nineteenth-century picturebook as an object circulating between multiple countries. One of the best-loved Victorian picturebooks – a pattern for what was to follow – was a German import that demonstrates the form’s transnational character.
Figure 4.4 Flying Robert being swept into the air. Source: Hoffmann [between 1850 and 1852], p. 24. Bryn Mawr College Libraries, PA.
The popularity of The English Struwwelpeter led to the publication of numerous other picturebooks, sometimes advertised as uniform with it in size (Alderson 1986). Where these works are concerned, it is illuminating to look at particular publishers as well as particular author–illustrators, because publishers played a substantial role in producing and popularizing picturebooks (cf. Alderson 2009; Paul 2011). Tomoko Masaki (2006) has presented a meticulous account of every toy book produced by George Routledge and Co. from the 1850s onwards. These proliferating series began with Aunt Mavor’s Picture Books for Little Readers in 1852. The eleventh title in the 14-book series, Uncle Nimrod’s Third Visit, is indicative of the format. On each illustrated page, fairly extensive passages of text accompany hand-colored images (Figure 4.5). The framing conceit is a visit to the Great Exhibition of 1851, so the illustrations present a miscellany – elephants and chess boards, fine china and bells – as does the text, which gives “facts” about different nations: “Spain is an idle country, I am sorry to say” (Uncle Nimrod [1852], p. 7). Including this series, which comprised multiple titles about the Great Exhibition as well as alphabet books, Aesopica, and original animal stories, Routledge published some five hundred toy books between 1852 and 1892. Other important bibliographies chart the picturebooks and associated educational toys produced by the publishing firms associated with the Darton family (Darton 2005; Shefrin 2009). While the Dartons began to publish in the late eighteenth century, they were active into the 1870s. There is yet further work to be done in considering producers whose picturebooks present an almost befuddling variety, such as Dean and Son, the prolific publishing house most famous for novelty and movable picturebooks.
Figure 4.5 A basketwork elephant from India at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Source: Uncle Nimrod’s Third Visit [1852], pp. 3–4. Courtesy of Toronto Public Library.
Masaki’s work discusses, but emphatically does not center, three prominent picturebook illustrators active in the mid-Victorian period: Caldecott, Walter Crane, and Greenaway. These creators were integral to the development of the toy book, as most canonical historical accounts insist (see, e.g., Darton 1982; Muir 1954), and all three worked with Routledge. Of the group, Caldecott – whose work I discuss substantially in the next section – is usually acknowledged as the superior picturebook auteur. Caldecott was born in 1846 and began to work full time as an illustrator in his mid-twenties, escaping the financial career that his father had wished him to pursue. His illustrations appeared across popular periodicals including the Graphic and the Illustrated London News, popular novels such as a new edition of Frank Mildmay (1829) by Captain Marryat, and popular publishing forms such as the gift book. From the 1870s onward, he worked predominantly on picturebooks. The Diverting History of John Gilpin and The House that Jack Built were published in 1878, and the later named series R. Caldecott’s Picture Books continued to appear until his premature death in 1886 – Caldecott’s last picturebooks were An Elegy on the Glory of Her Sex, Mrs. Mary Blaize and The Great Panjandrum Himself, both from 1885. Caldecott’s varied and humorous manipulation of the gap between words and pictures, use of negative space on the page, and economical draftsmanship – he famously described illustration as “the art of leaving out” (Caldecott quoted in Blackburn 1886, p. 126) – have endeared him to twentieth- and twenty-first century commentators. Alderson (1986) sees him as establishing a quintessentially English model of the picturebook in which line is more important than color. Sendak (1988) gives him pole position in the title of his collection of essays on children’s literature: Caldecott and Co. More recently, an acclaimed juvenile biography insists on his relevance to new generations of child readers (Marcus 2013).
Walter