Randolph Caldecott, 'Lord of the Nursery', and: Walter Crane as a Book Illustrator (review)

These two books explain the importance of Crane and Caldecott in the tradition of British book illustration. In introductions to each book, Engen gives a brief biography of the artist, including the various influences on him and the variety of illustration each did during his career. The books do not concentrate on the artists' reputations as illustrators solely of children's books, although such considerations are certainly included. And although Engen criticizes Crane's illustrations as being overly ornate and not as dramatic as Caldecott's line drawings in the Caldecott book, such criticism is not present in the Crane book. This seems to be a critical evasion on Engen's part.

After the introduction Engen includes a sizeable sample of the artists' illustrations, a fair representation of all the kinds of illustration that each artist did, as well as the classics, such as Crane's illustrations of Perrault's and the Grimms' fairy tales and Caldecott's John Gilpin and The Queen of Hearts. Some of the reproduction is not high quality; there are fuzzy photostats of some of the pictures in both books, and many pictures that should have been reproduced in color, like the original John Gilpin, show up in black and white, losing much of their effectiveness in the process. The shiny paper in the Caldecott book further detracts from inspecting the plates. Finally, the copy-editing is not adequate; a run-on sentence slips in (Caldecott, p. 12), for example, and part of the commentary for the illustration on p. 79 clearly belongs to the illustration on p. 76, which is wrongly labeled. But the arrangement of the commentary on the illustrations is certainly better in the Caldecott book, where the explanations are placed facing the pictures, than in the Crane book, where the explanations are grouped together, followed by pages of illustration with no comment. Useful appendices provide an extensive catalogue of the artist's work as well as bibliographical sources.

While the books are interesting for one unfamiliar with Crane's and Caldecott's work, they are not adequate if one wants to learn of the special contributions Crane and Caldecott made to children's book illustration.