Caldecott and the English Picture Book Tradition

"Blake . . . credits children with the imaginative gift of Elucidation which may draw unsuspected wonders of storytelling from these pregnant images," Brian Alderson comments on a plate from Blake's emblem book For Children: The Gates of Paradise. For Alderson, it is "an inscrutable work," but he implies that its seventeen plates accompanied, in the first version, by minimal text may present fewer problems to children than to adults. For children have resources—including a happy capacity to grasp the wrong end of the stick—denied to their elders. One remembers George Livermore's description of a child of the last century (later to become a Harvard professor) who used to scrutinize the enigmatic thumbnail cuts which passed for illustrations in The New England Primer and formed his own interpretation of the one that accompanied the couplet for "T" in the alphabet rhymes "Young Timothy Learned Sin to Fly." Here Sin is represented as a small devil, and the boy who became the professor dreamily used to suppose that Sin ("a strange-looking biped with a switch tail and wings") was a little dog whom he had fitted with wings and was teaching to fly. Crude and blurred though these drawings were, they did have mystery for their early readers for whom, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries at any rate, there might well have been no other illustrated books.

But not only do children, by missing the point, create new points of their own; by and large their taste is, to put it politely, undeveloped. Given a choice, they prefer the garish to the chaste, the obvious to the subtle. Alderson uses the William Nicholson illustrations to The Pirate Twins, with their limited and subdued coloring and great economy of effect, as an example of the "reticent geniuses" of this century, yet these are not what most children would choose for themselves. He quotes Ruskin's fulminations against a toy book he had just bought: "one of the things got up cheap to catch the eyes of mothers at bookstalls—Puss in Boots, illustrated: a most definite work of the colour school—red jackets and white paws and yellow coaches as distinct as Giotto or Raphael would have kept them. But the thing is done by fools for money, and becomes entirely monstrous and abominable." To which Alderson appends the sad comment that the passion of Ruskin's outburst stemmed, as much as anything, from "his frustrated recognition that the public (including children) needs must love the lowest—or the brashest—when they see it."

It is a melancholy conclusion to reach in a book that celebrates the English picture-book tradition through the exhibition mounted by the British Library during the winter of 1986-87 as an act of homage to Randolph Caldecott on the centenary of his death—Sing a Song for Sixpence being the title of one of his picture books. The book, like the exhibition, commemorates the best. There is virtually nothing that is meretricious, showy, or brash—the sort of qualities, in short, that naturally attract children. So why do the best illustrators, and indeed writers, go to such trouble for a market so unappreciative of their efforts? And, more to the point, why do publishers encourage them to be fastidious? It says much for the integrity of those who derive money from this particular child market that a substantial group has persisted in aiming at the best; the vast juvenile book industry may be a parasite battening on the child-host, but at least it has ideals.

The British Library exhibition and Brian Alderson's book therefore represent only one aspect of children's picture books—high quality—and only one Victorian example of the down-market is included. This is an early, anonymous, and most unlikely Kate Greenaway version of "Hop O' My Thumb"—"an example of a typical Victorian toy book where the character and quality of the illustration are subordinated to the publisher's demand for busy pages packed with colour." Alderson has linked the...