Baby Bunting!Father’s
gone
a-hunting,
Gone to fetch
a Rabbit-skin
To wrap the Baby Bunting in.
(Caldecott [1882], pp. 14–23)
In presenting only two rhymes, the volume also meets the picturebook criterion of brevity: in this case, 17 words for “Baby Bunting” and 30 for “Hey Diddle Diddle,” combining to 47.
The first illustration to the “Baby Bunting” sequence is a half-title showing the baby sitting on a chair (Figure 4.9). The image recalls the tradition of the pictorial encyclopedia for children, inaugurated by the Orbis Sensualium Pictus, or of the exhibit or rebus book: a straightforward equivalence where one short piece of text elucidates a single picture. The rhyme’s title captions the image. At the same time, the page offers Caldecott’s signature visualization of the rhyme – the baby dressed up in the rabbit skin, rather than draped or wrapped in it. Caldecott was not the first illustrator to represent Baby Bunting in this way; Crane, for example, adopted a similar conceit in an illustration he produced some years prior (Figure 4.10). However, Caldecott is distinctive in blending baby and rabbit: one ear of the rabbit costume tilts, ready to listen attentively to the upcoming rhyme, while the baby’s frilly gown and black shoes peek out from underneath, attesting to some retained human qualities. Once more Caldecott prefigures key elements of the picturebook’s later history, including a fascination with animal characters, with the relationship between children and animals, and with dressing up.
Figure 4.9 Half title from “Hey Diddle Diddle.” Source: Caldecott [1882], p. 13. Baldwin Library of Children’s Historical Literature, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL.
Figure 4.10 Alphabet page with Baby Bunting and father standing for B. Source: Crane [1900], n.p. Ingalls Library and Museum Archives, Cleveland Museum of Art, OH.
The first page proper puts the baby in clothes: a gown with sash (Figure 4.11).3 She appears in the foreground of the monochrome illustration, her nursemaid chasing her from the rear in a nod to the traditional context for the rhyme, which was often sung by nurses (Opie and Opie 1997). The Opies also document bunting as an obsolete endearment meaning plump (see also OED), and this baby has round cheeks. She waves two swallowtail flags in a visual pun on the word bunting, as in flag. Caldecott’s innovation is in making the baby mobile, herself the object of a chase – a more successful chase than the rhyme’s principal one, as we shall see, because the baby has been caught by the facing page while the father never manages to catch a rabbit.
Figure 4.11 Facing pages from “Baby Bunting.” Source: Caldecott [1882], pp. 14–15. Baldwin Library of Children’s Historical Literature, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL.
A clock on the wall in this first illustration shows five past six. In the colored illustration on the facing page, contrasting with the spotless children’s spaces often depicted by Crane and Greenaway, the nursery appears at the moment the children are getting ready for bed: nightgowns warm in front of the fire. Baby Bunting is undressed on her mother’s knee; her elder brother wears only striped breeches and a riding helmet. The shoes discarded at bottom left are a telling detail, a portal into lived-in space. The toys filling the nursery include a doll, a dollhouse, a hobby horse and miniature riding gear, images of exotic animals on the walls, a windmill, and what looks to be a Noah’s ark sitting atop a chest of drawers. Caldecott’s depiction is up to date: Noah’s arks were popular Victorian toys, and the nursery as a separate space in middle-class homes was also a trend of the period. Elsewhere, though, the book can seem backward-looking, as, like Greenaway and other children’s illustrators, many of the costumes recall eighteenth-century garb (see Whalley and Chester 1988).
These first two illustrations point to aspects of the book’s sequentiality derived not just from the content of the pictures but also from the color printing: spare monochrome line drawings intersperse with intensely filled-in and sumptuous full-color pages. (Some Caldecott picturebooks had colored doublespreads, too.) The rhythm of Caldecott’s picturebooks thus relates to a play of monochrome and color, which contributes to the “quickening” pace of his works (Cech 1983–1984, p. 116). The key wood-engraving block was printed in sepia, filled in with five shades – yellow, blue, flesh pink, red, and grey – for the colored pictures (see Masaki 2006). If the line drawings represent Caldecott’s “art of leaving out,” the colored illustrations present an alternative art of putting in; color is associated with the nursery’s abundant material goods – not to mention the sensuous appeals of the picturebook itself.
The next page opening contains two monochrome illustrations, one for each of the words “Father’s” and “gone” (Figure 4.12; Caldecott [1882], pp. 16–17). These pages offer what Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott (2001) call a symmetrical relationship between words and pictures: “The words tell us exactly the same story as we can ‘read’ from the pictures” (p. 14). Here, this is the father’s appearance and actions. While the illustration of the slightly rumpled father in his formal hunting attire reprises the single focus of the exhibit book, the illustration that accompanies “gone” is more sophisticated. Caldecott reduces the scene to what Perry Nodelman (1988) considers the picturebook’s most characteristic depiction of movement: the foot lifting from the ground. The reader must connect the father’s foot as it disappears around the corner to his personage in the preceding page. The spaniel that follows him draws the eye into the picture, round the corner into the next page opening and the hunt itself.
Figure 4.12 Facing pages from “Baby Bunting.” Source: Caldecott [1882], pp. 16–17. Baldwin Library of Children’s Historical Literature, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL.
The succeeding page opening demonstrates Caldecott’s facility in depicting hunting and horseback riding – subjects he returned to often in works including John Gilpin and The Three Jovial Huntsmen (1880). The monochrome illustration shows the father on horseback as he cleans his gun, the spaniel also pictured in medias res as it sniffs, tail up, in a briar (Figure 4.13). The colored illustration is a more heroic depiction of the father in hot pursuit, gun cocked. Once more, the relationship between words and pictures is fairly symmetrical – the pictures represent hunting. However, Caldecott’s wonted manipulation of directionality (see Cech 1983–1984) implies a less than successful quarry. Father seems to return the way he came in search of the rabbit, as left to right cancel each other out by meeting in the gutter – literally, in the case of the spaniel who disappears into the frame of the colored recto picture. These illustrations, with their depiction of rolling downlands, show the large-format picturebook’s potential for representing expansive spaces (see Trumpener 2002). They also reflect the switch from portrait to landscape orientation in Caldecott’s picturebooks that took place in 1882. (The book measures
