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Figure 4.13 Facing pages from “Baby Bunting.” Source: Caldecott [1882], pp. 18–19. Baldwin Library of Children’s Historical Literature, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL.
From this point onwards, the “Baby Bunting” sequence uses pictures and words complementarily (see Nikolajeva and Scott 2001), as the pictures substantially inflect the words’ meaning. The next page opening, again comprising two monochrome illustrations, displays the first confident horseback pursuit we have seen as Father gallops from left to right on the verso (Figure 4.14). As the eye scans the page, the image reveals a bathetic destination: not a remote wood or a rugged hilltop, but a village with a church tower on the horizon. The facing page clarifies that Father has indeed visited a fur trader in order to purchase the rabbit skin that is the rhyme’s central object: beneath a sign reading “Dealer in Hare & Rabbit Skins,” a woman holds out a floppy fur. In what Alderson (1986) calls Caldecott’s “famous device of introducing a pictorial sub-text to the main narrative” (p. 80), the illustrations ironically undermine the central action in the rhyme – the hunt. The image amplifies the ambiguity of the verb “fetch,” which could mean hunt, kill, and skin or simply purchase. On the next page opening, the two illustrations both show Baby Bunting in her new rabbit skin, which has been converted to the costume of the half title (Figure 4.15). At left, in a colored illustration, Father reaches out to scoop up the baby, hands outstretched. He discards his riding gear at the front of a picture that recalls the nursery with the kicked-off shoes. The backdrop shows a further lived-in scene, with the baby’s brother running out an open door leaving his dinner and his mother behind him. In the facing monochrome page, the illustration shows Baby Bunting once more in her chair, standing up, as her mother gets ready to go out by putting on gloves.
Figure 4.14 Facing pages from “Baby Bunting.” Source: Caldecott [1882], pp. 20–21. Baldwin Library of Children’s Historical Literature, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL.
Figure 4.15 Facing pages from “Baby Bunting.” Source: Caldecott [1882], pp. 22–23. Baldwin Library of Children’s Historical Literature, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL.
The final image, which has no text, adds a new dimension to the ironic pictorial complement (Figure 4.16). The baby is shown walking with her mother outside. The mother’s coat is trimmed in ermine, and the baby wears her rabbit-skin costume. Querying the boundaries between human and animal, the baby stares across at a colony of rabbits on a nearby mound. Sendak (1984) remarks of this parting illustration:
Figure 4.16 Final illustration to “Baby Bunting.” Source: Caldecott [1882], n.p. Baldwin Library of Children’s Historical Literature, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL.
Baby is staring with the most perplexed look at those rabbits, as though with the dawning of knowledge that that lovely, cuddly, warm costume he’s wrapped up in has come from those creatures. It’s all in that baby’s eye – just two lines, two mere dashes of the pen, but it’s done so expertly that they absolutely express … well, anything you want to read into them. I read: astonishment, dismay at life – is this where rabbit skins come from? Does something have to die to dress me?(p. xi)
Sendak draws attention to the ethical ambiguity of Caldecott’s final illustration, which uncovers the brutal realities beneath the baby’s fine goods. Also significant to my mind, though, is the upending of a familial hierarchy: the baby and her mother can find rabbits, the father cannot. (Remember, too, that the fur dealer is a woman.) Baby comes out on top.
The meanings discussed in the preceding paragraphs emerge from the gap between words and pictures. Clémentine Beauvais (2015) has noted that the gap is the central concept of contemporary picturebook theory: a normative as well as a descriptive property, in that “‘good’ picturebooks are understood to be ones with gaps and more gaps make better picturebooks” (p. 2). I have treated the gap in this way in the very first sentence of the chapter, where I offered a definition of the picturebook from Sendak which positions the dynamic interplay between word and picture as the form’s definitive feature. The privileging of the gap in picturebook theory also dictates the elevation of Caldecott that I noted in the previous section: his works are the “gappiest” of the Victorian period. By contrast, Muir (1954) asserts Greenaway’s primacy over her competitors at a time when other picturebook attributes – wistful charm, for example – held sway.
However, it is important to note in concluding this chapter that many nineteenth-century picturebooks do not carefully curate the gap between words and pictures over a building sequence. Instead, they represent the larger “disharmony” of Victorian illustrated books, in which words and pictures vie against one another (Thomas 2004, p. 8). Sometimes such disharmony is a technical feature, as at different times the need to print pictures separately precluded a smooth integration of words and pictures. The nineteenth-century picturebook’s debt to the chapbook, in which pictures were reused and recycled, also offers a period-specific manifestation of the gap in that pictures might not be designed for a single text but rather as multipurpose decorations (see Masaki 2006). For every breathtaking Caldecott design, there were many Favourite Riddles and Rhymes (1896), where an anonymous illustration – seemingly stock – shows Baby Bunting held by a small boy in an incongruous top hat (Figure 4.17). Such an image adds little to the rhyme. Although I have focused in this section on how Caldecott’s Baby Bunting makes sophisticated use of the picturebook form, reckoning with the Victorian picturebook means thinking about such works, too.
Figure 4.17 Anonymous illustration to “Baby Bunting.”Source: Favourite Riddles and Rhyme [1896], p. 30. Baldwin Library of Children’s Historical Literature, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL.
Conclusion
Much of my work as a critic of children’s literature has been completed with ready access to the rare book rooms where the lucky few can consult Victorian picturebooks. I wrote this chapter, by contrast, during the COVID-19 pandemic from Aotearoa New Zealand, where the numbers of Victorian picturebooks are limited at the best of times. I wish to conclude, then, by noting that initiatives making early picturebooks available online are indispensable in allowing scholars to fill the many remaining lacunae in our knowledge, even from a distance. Some important collections, such as the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature (University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries n.d.), have digitizations freely available. New scholarly projects on the early picturebook also involve digital humanities components. “Nineteenth-Century European Picture-Books in Colour” (PiCoBoo), a project led by Francesca Tancini (n.d.) in conjunction with Matthew Grenby, provides invaluable information about early picturebooks along with page images of some books and a field-defining insistence on the colored picturebook’s
