Bitter-sweet
Benny Green
The Randolph Caldecott Treasury Ed Elizabeth Billington (Warne £12.40) There are a few creative artists who penetrate the cerebral defences before any awareness is upon us that such creatures as creative artists exist at all. Dickens is certainly one of them, Carroll another, Hans Anderson probably a third. That for English-speaking readers Randolph Caldecott is part of this select company there can be no question. Even if we do not always know him by name, we recognise instantly the contours of the country he created. One glance and immediately we are at ease within its boundaries, know its every crook and nanny, gaze on the colourations and configurations of its landscape with the mingled sadness and affection of a traveller coming home. During the last hundred years there can hardly have been a British child who has not been confronted by a Caldecott illustration, and being confronted, has accepted the delightful challenge of exploring it from margin to margin. Caldecott's 'Hey Diddle Diddle', his 'House That Jack Built', his 'John Gilpin' have become an intrinsic part of our awareness of the world, and of ourselves.
And yet I have reservations about the latest, most ambitious attempt to pay tribute to his highly gifted man. The editor's essay 'A Quest for Caldecott' which provides the bulk of the text, is a shade too arch and breathless for an artist of Caldecott's sophistication, and there are moments when Miss Billington steers dangerously close to the unconscious echo of Pooterism: On my return to London I set off to find 24 Holland Street in Kensington, where the Caldecotts had lived for 5 years. I discovered a small Georgian house with a crown-glass door. However, the present occupants were not at home, so I was not able to see the inside of the house.
What follows are 200 pages of illustrations, many of them in colour, most of them at least vaguely familiar even to those readers who have not picked up a Victorian children's book since themselves leaving the estate of childhood. This is where Caldecott's power to evoke resides, in the fact that even if we happen not to find his illustrations attractive, they have become so deeply embedded in our consciousness that we cannot help responding to them. They are the very stuff of childhood, and are not to be sloughed off on some hypercritical intellectual level.
There are two cavils about Miss Billington's exceedingly handsome book. The first concerns the curious fact that Caldecott had two quite distinct manners, and that it is the second one, the lesser-known one, the one not generally associated with his reputation, which is by far the most dynamic and which will almost certainly be the more appealing to the 20th-century eye.
In an interesting prefatorial address by Maurice Sendak, we read that in the Nursery rhyme illustrations, Caldecott was saying to the child reader, 'Yes, it is sad, but such things do happen — that is the way the story ended, it can't be helped. But you have us. Hold on, everything is all right.' It is these intimations of mortality which distinguish Caldecott from his most famous contemporary, Kate Greenaway, whose current popularity is perhaps less to do with her draughtsmanship than with her pandering to a very English dream of milkmaids in an unruffled rustic paradise. I think that Caldecott achieved this tincture of melancholia through his skies, which are almost never coloured an uncompromising azure blue, but hold hints of dusk that a child can sometimes find bitter-sweet.
The other Caldecott, the black-and-white sketcher, the man who was so bubbling with anecdotal vitality that he could not constrain himself from festooning the most casual note to a friend with vivid squiggles and doodles, seems to me one of the most charming sketchers of the comic view who ever told a story in drawings. There is plenty of this other Caldecott in Miss Billington's book, but we learn little or nothing of him. Fortunately three years ago Michael Hutchins edited a volume of Caldecott's letters, Yours Pictorially, in which the journalisticanecdotal side of Caldecott's work dominates. Here we find him in complete mastery of the art of showing a carthouse between the shafts, or a hiker on a windy day, or an ice-skater unsure of his foothold, or a well-built couple braving the breakers at the seaside, armoured against fate by a brace of striped costumes. In other words Caldecott always succeeded, apparently without trying, in the task at which Weedon Grossmith so signally failed when illustrating The Diary of a Nobody, that is, to convey the comicality of day-to-day existence. It is this Caldecott who seems to me much the more attractive of the two. As to my second complaint, it is that although she shared the same publishers as Mr Hutchins, Miss Billington nowhere mentions his book and does not even include it in her bibliography.
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