Bookworm Read online

  At the same time, the drawings remain as thoroughly and elementally satisfying as ever. Hargreaves drew, as far as both my three- and forty-three-year-old selves are concerned, the Platonic ideals of fried eggs, of shoes, of houses, trees, washerwomen and wizards. And his colours are right. Of course uppitiness is plum-purple. Of course happiness is yellow. And of course, of course, of course ticklishness is orange. I just wonder, 612 rereads into fifty books, what colour Mr Satisfactory Narrative Resolution would have been.

  The Birth of Illustrated Children’s Books

  Life, even including nursery school, had settled down nicely again. And then came Der Struwwelpeter, or Shockheaded Peter.

  Dad just brought home this book full of bloody thumb-stumps, deaths by drowning and carbonised children who played with matches, all in saturated colour and heavy black ink one day as if it was nothing. When in fact Heinrich Hoffmann’s 1845 creation, which he wrote for his three-year-old son one Christmas when he had not been able to find any book in the shops that he wanted to buy, was a hellscape from which parts of my wounded psyche are still struggling to emerge. The ear could no more refuse to hear the burrowing insistent rhymes (oh, the awful, insinuating cat chorus in ‘The Dreadful Story of Harriet and the Matches’! ‘“Me-ow!” they said, “me-ow, me-o, / You’ll burn to death, if you do so! Your parents have forbidden you, you know!”’) than the eye could drag itself away from the jagged, evocative, full-colour illustrations accompanying Shockheaded Peter and his companions’ travails. How Hoffmann’s own tender toddler responded is not recorded. Maybe they breed them tougher in Germany. I hope so.

  It came as no surprise to me to learn in later years that Hoffmann ran a lunatic asylum. At the time of my first exposure to this beast of a book, however, I had no recourse to facts that might validate my unease. I simply turned to the man who had brought it so carelessly into our lives and gazed at him with large, unblinking eyes, the better to let him read the horror now contained forever therein, until he closed the book and put it on a high shelf (‘No – higher. Higher again’) until I was much, much older.

  *

  Until Shock-Headed Peter arrived, the world of books my dad was reading to me had been divided neatly into two halves. One comprised the bright, simple books about cats, elephants, caterpillars and children dressed like me. And the other comprised books in more muted colours but full of much busier pictures. There was gilding. There were curlicues. There were more rhymes and less prose.

  When I got a little older I would label them the ‘Now’ and the ‘Then’ books. ‘Now’ meant modern. ‘Then’ meant what I would only come much later to understand were the lush fruits of the great nineteenth century collaborations between Edmund Evans, Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway. Together, they invented children’s picture books in the format we recognise today.

  Of course, there had been picture books – or at least books with pictures – for children before Evans and his gang found each other. Even the earliest books for children, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries generally managed to squeeze a few crude woodcut illustrations onto the pages, and in 1658 John Amos Comenius stepped things up a bit by publishing the Orbis Sensualium Pictus – a sort of early encyclopaedia, which had a picture of an object at the top of each page and its name in Latin and English below.

  But that was just the beginning of the good times.

  A New Lottery Book of Birds and Beasts for children to learn their letters by was published in 1771, with the letters on the left-hand side of every spread and a pair of suitable pictures for each on the right. These were woodcuts but done by the absolute master of the art, Thomas Bewick. His pictures bear as much relation to the massy, indistinct stuff children had been used to as Dr Scholl sandals do to Louboutins. When you look at them or the illustrations from his most famous book, A History of British Birds (intended for adults but doubtless pored over by children too) – the mind simply boggles to think that it is not done with pen, ink and hand but by drawing onto wood and carefully cutting away with infinitesimal care to different depths to leave the picture in relief and the block to take up (if, of course, the printer is as careful and as skilled at his craft as you are at yours) different amounts of ink in order to reproduce all the different gradations of blackness and bring all your precious details to life. As long as I don’t think about it, I could look at them forever. If I do, I very soon have to go for a lie down. Still, I hope the children of the eighteenth century appreciated his efforts. The Brontës owned a copy of A History of British Birds and by all accounts cherished it. Then again, so would you if it was the only thing available to take your mind off the TB-ridden siblings dropping all around you like flies.

  Then, in 1789, into this occasionally beautiful but defiantly monochrome world of woodcuts rode the poet and painter William Blake with nineteen poems collectively entitled Songs of Innocence, printed, elaborately illustrated and exuberantly hand-coloured by the author himself. It was perhaps the first book – if not for children, then still eagerly consumed by them – whose pictures did not simply reflect the words on the page but evoked and added to them. It is of course easier to do this in a book of poems about the innocence of childhood than it is in an ABC primer or natural history book. A ‘D’ is a ‘D’ and a duck is a duck. You would be looking at a mallard a long time before you were reminded of a numinous state of being. Nevertheless, Blake really went for it. Even coming from a Technicolor age as we do, the illustrations are still quite overwhelming, as perhaps befits a man who thought of the imagination as ‘the body of God’.

  I miss mad artists. There are times when Grayson Perry doesn’t quite cut it, you know?

  This new idea, of pictures enriching and adding to a story rather than straightforwardly depicting what was being said, wasn’t followed up right away. In the Victorian era, toy books became popular – sixpence or a shilling got you half a dozen or a dozen five-by-six-inch pages whose colourful illustrations dominated, not to say simply overwhelmed, the text (which was usually a fairy story or condensed adult tale like Robinson Crusoe).

  In 1865 the publishers Routledge & Warne hired Edmund Evans – a man whose talent and painstaking work in wood engraving and colour printing had made him a name to reckon with in the world of publishing – to make them some toy books. Little did they know they were inaugurating what would become known as the first golden age of children’s book illustration.

  Evans, a man with artistic vision as well as commercial nous, felt deeply that the still-crude pictures then being used to illustrate children’s books could be improved upon without impoverishing everyone involved and bankrupting firms. You simply had to be able to justify a big enough print run to provide sufficient economy of scale. Which meant producing something beautiful enough that people would want to buy in droves. Which would be expensive, but practicable if you could do a big enough print run. Which you could because you were producing something beautiful enough that … You get, I’m sure, the point.

  To this beautiful and economically sound end he first commissioned Walter Crane, an artist he had worked with on adult ‘yellow-backs’ (inexpensive books with yellow covers, for adults and sold at railway stations – also known as ‘penny dreadfuls’ or ‘mustard pla(i)sters’, they were often re-covered editions of previously unsold books. Evans realised you could shift them if you commissioned good enough artists to repackage them irresistibly). Crane shared Evans’ belief in the importance of giving children the best experience possible. ‘We all remember the little cuts that coloured the books of our childhood. The ineffaceable quality of those early pictorial and literary impressions affords the strongest plea for good art in the nursery and the schoolroom.’

  Between 1865 and 1886, they collaborated on around fifty books, starting with relatively simple affairs like the nursery rhymes ‘This is the House that Jack Built’ and ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ before moving onto richer, more fertile fare like the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast. The market
exploded. Evans had been right. If you print it, they will come. Especially if ‘they’ are a population beginning to feel the mind- and literacy-expanding effects of recent educational reforms, living in an era of growing affluence and characterised by a rising middle class desperate to spend their new-found wealth on further self-improvement. The late 1800s were a perfect picture-book-producing storm.

  By 1871 Crane had moved abroad, but he and Evans still managed to produce two or three books a year, exchanging illustrations, proofs and finished pictures by post, as if the process of transferring picture to wood block to page in full colour were not already laborious enough. Not for the first time you have to applaud the can-do, will-do, why-the-hell-would-we-not-do? spirit of the age.

  And by the end of the decade, Crane and Evans were flying and confident enough to produce books so elaborate that they barely qualified as toy books at all. In 1878 they published The Baby’s Opera (‘a book of old rhymes with new dresses’) made up of fifty-six pages (a nursery rhyme on each), a dozen of which are fully illustrated and all the rest of which have decorative borders round the rhymes and music.

  My own childhood picture books have, alas, long since vanished; victims, I can only presume, of my mother’s constant mission to maintain a house that shows no sign of human habitation. Even now, after 40 years in the same place, you would not be able to guess a single thing about the people who live there. Apart, possibly, from the fact that one at least must be a monomaniac who has forgotten more about decluttering than Marie Kondo will ever know.

  But when I looked up The Baby’s Opera online, its illustrations are so familiar that I think I must have owned a copy. Maybe as part of an anthology – I seem to feel a substantial weight in my hands as I scroll through them onscreen. Fruiting plants in delicate yellow, orange and green grow up the sides of ‘Oranges and Lemons’ while a row of children ring bells below. Children in clothes and a garden tinted an unmistakeable azure sit beneath ‘Lavender’s Blue’. A liberal scattering of cockle shells and smiling flowers answer the question of ‘How Does My Garden Grow?’ An intertwined gathering of crocodiles, puppy dogs and snails are similarly provided in response to ‘What Are Little Boys Made Of?’ It’s completely beautiful. No wonder it sold 10,000 copies in a month. Both it and its companion two years later – The Baby’s Bouquet: A Fresh Bunch of Old Rhymes and Tunes – look like miniature medieval illuminated manuscripts and went on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies.

  Eventually, however, the prolific Crane needed a rest and Evans brought in an illustrator called Randolph Caldecott, whose work he had admired in magazines. With Caldecott, children’s picture books took a giant leap forward.

  Crane’s drawings had been charming and immensely attractive, but as one contemporary put it, ‘He knows too much, and has not enough inspiration.’ There was a carefulness, a pedestrian quality to his pictures that you might not notice while you were being beguiled – until and unless, perhaps, they are set alongside Caldecott’s. Suddenly, Crane is static where Caldecott is vibrant and fluid – you can better imagine life for his creations continuing while Crane’s are consigned to oblivion once you’ve turned the page.

  Here was the man who could pick up where Blake left off, adding another layer of complexity to texts and deepening the delights on offer. ‘Caldecott’s work heralds the beginning of the modern picture book,’ wrote a man who should know – the writer and illustrator of his own and others’ books for children, Maurice Sendak – many years later. ‘Words are left out – but the picture says it. Pictures are left out – but the word says it.’ Sendak also noted that his pictures conveyed a subtle darkness. ‘You can’t say it’s a tragedy, but something hurts. Like a shadow passing quickly over. It is this which gives a Caldecott book – however frothy the verses and pictures – its unexpected depth.’ There is an expression on the face of the wife of the hardworking linen draper in the poem ‘The Diverting History of John Gilpin’ that demonstrates this perfectly. The verse explains that she laments the fact that they have not been on holiday ‘Though wedded we have been / These twice ten tedious years’. Her face is the face of benignly neglected and frustrated wives down the ages. Marriage, it says, is a long game, a mixed bag, an endurance test. More often than not, something hurts.

  All of which goes some way to explaining why there is a Caldecott Medal – with a relief of the cover of ‘The Diverting History of John Gilpin’ on the front and of four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie on the back, awarded every year by the Association for Library Service to Children to the illustrator of ‘the most distinguished American picture book for children’ – rather than a Crane medal. It commemorates the man who brought the genre to maturity.

  Caldecott published two books a year with Evans for nearly a decade, including a set of twelve books of nursery rhymes that sold nearly a million copies and made him internationally famous by the time he died in 1886.

  The third gilder of this golden age of illustration began her career as a poet. In the late 1870s, Kate Greenaway persuaded her father to show Evans her manuscript for a book of verse called Under the Window. ‘I was at once fascinated by the originality of the drawings and the ideas of the verse, so I at once purchased them,’ said Evans, and in 1879 persuaded Routledge to publish the book and engraved the necessary blocks himself. He then had 20,000 copies printed – an absurd number for an untried author/illustrator’s first book, and he was roundly ridiculed for it. But – whaddya know? They sold out before he even had time to reprint. But reprint he did, and on and on they sold – 100,000 altogether, kicking off ‘the Greenaway Vogue’ as more and more children and, crucially, their parents, fell in love with her pastoral portraits of an idyllic, timeless English countryside populated by endlessly innocent children clothed in her own – cod, if you were feeling mean, and if you are I suggest you go away and look at some more Kate Greenaway pictures until the feeling in your savage breast subsides – versions of late eighteenth-century and Regency fashions. ‘I do not know why I cared to draw children in old-fashioned dresses,’ she once wrote to a fan who enquired, ‘except that old-fashioned things were always very pleasing to me.’

  They were evidently pleasing to many others too. Her style became part and parcel of the liberal, arts and crafts fashion of the time, chiming with the contemporary reverence for (and hankering after) past simplicities and kinder times. In the 1890s the department store Liberty (the retail mother ship of overeducated late-Victorian bohemians) produced their first ever line of childrenswear based on her pictorial costumes and a whole generation of a certain type of mother delightedly mobcapped, aproned, pinafore-smocked and bonneted their daughters. How their daughters felt about this is not recorded. Her popularity soared with every book she published. She did two or three every year for Evans, usually with print runs of 150,000, the most famous of which included Mother Goose and The Pied Piper of Hamelin.

  Most critics then and since have agreed that as a poet Kate Greenaway was a very good artist. But her art too was not at the time, and certainly not since, universally adored. Caldecott, admittedly, she ain’t. As Beatrix Potter put it – ‘She can’t draw.’ Greenaway’s entry in the International Companion Encyclopaedia of Children’s Literature puts it slightly more kindly. ‘Her figures’, it notes, ‘tend to have no bodies under their clothes.’ The Kate Greenaway Medal for illustration was founded more in recognition of her popularity than her skill (though, I should point out, it’s not and never has been awarded on that basis).

  I see exactly what they mean and yet … And yet I know I would have been – I was, I am – a member of the masses who loved her unconditionally. I like to think I would have stopped short of forcibly mobcapping any offspring I had to hand but, oh! I want to live in her idealised, never-never world so much. If I had been a child immersed in their works during those golden years rather than just dipping into whatever anthologised bits and pieces I had that are now lost to memory I think I would have adored but eventually exhausted Cr
ane and only confronted his successor whenever I was feeling particularly alert and energetic. I would have been glad and grateful to have effectively two Caldecott books – words and pictures – for the price of one, but they would have been right only for special times and places. Greenaway would have had my heart. It is telling that when I have the chance of buying copies or prints of the three for Alexander I have only ever opted for Greenaway. She seems to be the middle ground, and perhaps that was some of the secret of her success – she offers a more detailed, immersive world than Crane but without Caldecott’s cleverness and shadows. She speaks to the escapist in all of us, who wants to be charmed not challenged. We’re a lazy, mobcapped mob. But it is all so lovely there.

  *

  Once Evans and his trio had pointed the way, other artists followed in their talented droves and the genre flourished. Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac and Kay Nielsen dominated the early decades of the twentieth century and gave birth to the tradition of the lavishly illustrated gift book for children. My adult eye cannot discern much difference between them, unless I see them side by side, when it becomes apparent that Dulac and Nielsen prefer more subtle colours and have a slightly more exotic touch to them. But my heart can still pick out a Rackham image at forty paces. I first came across his eerie, twilight faerie world in the study of a family friend (I was four or five and I think I must have been put there while the adults were drinking. We are still in the late 1970s at this point). I, with difficulty, opened a gorgeous, massively heavy book that was on the floor by the desk and was confronted by all manner of sinuous, twisted horrors, made all the worse by the fact I had no names for them. Gothic trees and grotesque spirits intertwined. All the women had too much hair and too much gown flowing round them. How did they think they were going to escape when the next wizened dwarf or bony beast extracted itself from the fearsome forest and came after them? Especially with all those sinister pools everywhere, bathed in even more sinister light from suns set too low in the sky.