“A Happy Heritage”: Children’s Poetry Books and the Twentieth-Century Wood Engraving Revival

O now that the genius of Bewick were mine,And the skill which he learned on the banks of the Tyne!Then the Muses might deal with me just as they chose,For I’d take my last leave both of verse and of prose.

—William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads (1800)

Each picture told a story: mysterious often to my undeveloped understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting … with Bewick on my knee, I was then happy.

—Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)

Surely, I thought, if I cooked his roast beef beautifully and mended his clothes and minded the children—surely he would, just sometimes, let me draw and engrave a little tailpiece for him. I wouldn’t want to be known, I wouldn’t sign it. Only just to be allowed to invent a little picture sometimes. O happy, happy Mrs. Bewick! thought I, as I kicked my heels on the blue sofa.

—Gwen Raverat, Period Piece: A Memoir (1952)

The attractions of Thomas Bewick, the eighteenth-century Newcastle engraver who revolutionized book illustration by applying the steel engraver’s tools to the dense end grain of a wood block, for his contemporary, William Wordsworth, are obvious. Bewick, like Wordsworth, memorialized a disappearing English countryside in his art, mourned urban and industrial growth, and produced a printed art whose pastoral forms came to represent an authentic national heritage for generations of English readers. Less obvious is the role Bewick’s miniature black and white images have played in the imaginary lives of English girls, from the fictional Jane Eyre, escaping from the abusive Aunt Reed by imagining her way into Bewick’s miniature worlds, to the very real Gwen Raverat, who grew up to become one of the most admired wood engravers and illustrators of the twentieth century. Raverat’s memoir, Period Piece, records her girlish fantasy of becoming Mrs. Bewick, happy, oh so happy, just to cook her husband’s beef, to perhaps create a little, unsigned wood engraving for him as part of what Virginia Woolf would have recognized as a centuries-long tradition of women’s art disguised by the label “Anon.”¹ The radical difference of Raverat’s life as a wood engraver and illustrator working in the Bewickian tradition from the gendered career path expected for girls of her background—expectations of marriage, modesty, and anonymity that she had clearly absorbed by the time she encountered Bewick’s vignettes—points to the ideological and formal puzzles that motivate my investigation into mid-twentieth-century British children’s poetry books illustrated with wood engravings.

Here I focus on the wood engravings of Raverat and her younger colleague, Joan Hassall, arguably the two most famous members of a large group of successful British women wood engravers who came to prominence during the interwar and war years, during what has been regarded as a revivalist period for wood engraving.² Central to Raverat’s and Hassall’s success, I will argue, is the overtly nostalgic, conservative appeal of their book illustrations, which were embraced by popular and elite audiences alike at a time of economic depression, social unrest, and world war. Faced in the 1930s with the reality of economic decline and in the 1940s with the possibility of national extinction, adult fears, rather than children’s desires, sustained the market for children’s books that, in Nicholas Tucker’s words, looked “backwards for contrasting and consoling images of a time before total warfare” (1). Raverat’s and Hassall’s pastoral wood engravings, with their quiet images of traditional and especially rural British life, worked out through sharp black and white contrasts, perfectly suited this urgent cultural need. In keeping with British children’s fiction of the period, which remained largely a parochial affair, untouched by more progressive American or avant-garde European influences, children’s poetry anthologies with wood engravings supported the “enduring conservatism” of British cultural life well after the war had ended (Tucker 1).³

That Raverat and Hassall were such skilled communicators of the kinds of meanings publishers and parents sought in their...