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Figure 4.6 A sumptuous, aestheticized rendering of Beauty and the Beast. Source: Crane [1875], n.p. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.
Greenaway’s success as a picturebook creator was almost viral. She spawned imitators and garnered high-profile admirers such as John Ruskin (Hearn 1980; Lundin 1998). She earned £2,000 per book when it was rare to receive more than £200 (Muir 1954). Her picturebooks inspired a wealth of other objects, including greeting cards, calendars, wallpaper, ceramics, and children’s clothes. Unlike Crane and Caldecott, Greenaway wrote the whimsical texts for as well as illustrated her most famous picturebooks, which include Under the Window (1879) and Marigold Garden ([1885]). In later years, Greenaway’s depictions of cute, feminized children have been viewed as stultifying. For example, Carolyn Burke (1996) imagines the modernist poet Mina Loy oppressed by her Greenaway wallpaper: “The charming melancholy of the Greenaway girls … had a depressing effect over time” (p. 21). However, as Anne Lundin (1998) points out, Greenaway remained a high-profile artist throughout her 20-year career, despite the mainstream lack of interest in children’s literature at this time. Some of her page designs remain striking, too, as when Peggy and Susie defy their nostalgic Regency costumes to climb up the page in Marigold Garden (Figure 4.7).
Figure 4.7 Page for the rhyme “To Mystery Land.” Source: Greenaway [1885], p. 17. Te Puna Rakahau o Macmillan Brown/Macmillan Brown Library, Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha/University of Canterbury, Ōtautahi Christchurch.
The yoking-together of Caldecott, Crane, and Greenaway has drawn criticism (see Alderson 1990), and there are many differences between their picturebooks in terms of favored subjects, tone, and even artistic ability. However, as when Masaki (2006) focuses on Routledge or Lawrence Darton (2005) on the Dartons, this grouping has the advantage of emphasizing the impact of those involved in Victorian picturebooks beyond authors or illustrators. In the case of Caldecott and Co., Edmund Evans printed or published works by all three (Lundin 2001). Evans popularized color printing, usually working as a wood engraver and eventually supervising the output of multiple apprentices (Alderson 1986). His role was important enough to be noted in large letters on the title pages to many of the books he printed, and he commissioned works including Under the Window and Crane’s Baby’s Opera (1877). Evans is as much responsible for the development of the nineteenth-century picturebook as any author or illustrator – perhaps more so, given that he printed works by many creators. The uniting of Caldecott, Crane, and Greenaway in part reflects the fact that printing techniques, and Evans’s success as a color printer, were the “handmaidens” to the Victorian picturebook (McNair 1986–1987).
The form’s decline can also be linked back to printing techniques. A greater number of impressions could be made from lithographic stones than from woodblocks, and from mid-century, large chromolithographic printing works (often on the continent) produced substantial numbers of picturebooks. Take as an example the firm of Ernest Nister, established in 1877 in Nuremberg. Nister worked with a stable of illustrators and authors (some of them celebrated – E. Nesbit contributed to Nister titles) to produce picturebooks in English as well as in German. The firm later distributed these works in the United States through E.P. Dutton. Many Nister picturebooks took an anthology format, with contributions authored by multiple authors and with illustrations remixed and repurposed; the firm also became known for its movable books (Hunt and Hunt [2006]). Such working practices led to “pictures for the sake of pictures” (Alderson 1986, p. 101), mitigating against the careful attention to the relationship between word and image that is often viewed as the key ingredient in the best picturebooks. It is worth noting, nonetheless, that the period concludes with a return to form: the release of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit in 1901, the year Queen Victoria died. Potter’s picturebooks represent nineteenth-century mores while also looking forward to the twentieth century (Chandler 2007). Their cool and ironic narration, small size, and interest in the gap between words and pictures is a harbinger of what is to come but also a culmination of the great Victorian picturebook tradition – Potter was a keen admirer of Caldecott and Crane, for example.
There are many new directions of travel in the historical study of the picturebook. Robert Kirkpatrick (2019) has charted the period’s less-often discussed children’s illustrators, including some picturebook creators. The role of neglected picturebook genres has been recognized, as in Victoria Ford Smith’s (2015) article on the nineteenth-century painting book. Robin Bernstein (2011) examines how the material culture of childhood constructs and polices race, including substantial discussions of some nineteenth-century American picturebooks. Her ideas have spurred new scholarship on the intersections between picturebooks and toys (Bak 2020; Field 2019). These critical works present specifically nineteenth-century permutations of the interest in intermediality that important commentators such as Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer (2014) see as defining picturebook studies. Other new research has considered how Victorian picturebooks visualize race for their imagined white British child readers, with specific case studies of racist caricature in picturebooks by Lothar Meggendorfer (Brian 2014, 2017), on visualizations of the Great Exhibition for children (Lathey 2017), and on imperialism and ambiguity in the alphabet book (Norcia 2017). While there is still much to be done, these recent publications point to a flourishing field in which nineteenth-century picturebooks merit sustained attention.
Zooming In: Word, Image, Sequence, Gaps
The first part of this chapter surveyed the picturebook’s history in the Victorian period. This section, by contrast, dives deeply into a single picturebook sequence from the time in order to provide substantive and specific evidence of how these developments might appear to the reader. In considering the “Baby Bunting” illustrations from Caldecott’s “Hey Diddle Diddle” and “Baby Bunting” ([1882]), I respond to the important point that historical studies of the picturebook tend to treat pictures in isolation, thus ignoring the “specific sequential nature” of these works (Nikolajeva and Scott 2001, p. 3). This isolationist approach is partly practical, in that it is easier and cheaper to reproduce a single illustration and that it has been difficult to view images of many early picturebooks reliably. Focusing on single pictures may also demonstrate the importance exhibitions have had on the study of the early picturebook; the gallery mode of showing single pictures rather than sequences spills into the catalogs and books that accompany exhibitions (see Alderson 1986). Regardless, it is obvious that sequence is important to the picturebook and discussing one whole series can reveal the value and ingenuity of this period’s oeuvre.
At a basic level, Caldecott’s “Baby Bunting” shows the primacy of nursery rhymes in nineteenth-century picturebooks. This material was partly a reaction to the importance of religious and didactic subject matter in many earlier texts (Masaki 2006). Putting together “Baby Bunting” and “Hey Diddle Diddle” in one book reflects not just a miniaturization of the anthology mode but also the encouragement anthologies gave for picturebook creators to bring together different rhymes into one imagined pictorial universe: the title page shows Baby Bunting meeting the cat who plays the fiddle, while the nursery wallpaper behind the pair represents further characters from “Hey Diddle Diddle” (Figure 4.8).2 Like the alphabet, the nursery rhyme can provide a loose structure for pictorial dilation. Thus, Caldecott breaks up the text as follows, with each of the following lines given a whole page:
Figure 4.8 Cover to “Hey Diddle Diddle.” Source: Caldecott [1882]. Baldwin Library of Children’s Historical Literature, Special and Area Studies
