Talking of children's books
Night-lights of the old school
Reny Green
Who was the true begetter of Bill Sikes or the pMeek Turtle? You have only to glance at ‘',ratckshank's illustrations for Oliver Twist or "ribur Rackham's for Alice in Wonderland to Ztlise that in the case of the great marriages ween text and drawing it is usually the nsi ' of the artist rather than that of the thclonr which the reader takes through life with 1181ta, even though he hardly realises it. Hablot rMne's drawings for Dickens were perhaps the most perfect expression in line of literary 4nstraction ever achieved — except for Ten'Isles illustrations for Alice, which are so tuPerlative that Tenniel's one lapse of concentration, that woefully conventional drawing of the Puppy in The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill,' ,l-trles as a terrible shock to the child condi tioned to expect the bright, idiosyncratic world 2, the other drawings. Tenniel is the best '-)taMple I know of the perils of hiring a st,r°4-willed and gifted artist to illustrate your for it is Tenniel's model, the homely little "4.0nde Alice Raikes, which is now the world's Visual Alice, and not Carroll's inspiration, the xtinisitely beautiful brunette Alice Liddell. Stich are the pitfalls of finding the perfect 13artner. Is Toad of Toad Hall a citizen of ,Pneth Grahame's world or of Ernest 1TePard's? Do we retain a nostalgic affection L;.'r E. Nesbit because of the safe Victorianism of nurseries and night-lights, or because of the slit Victorianism of the nurseries and nightguts of H. R. Millar's drawings? These 4,1-lesti0n5 have no answers, but they keep 'king themselves for all that, and put us in vincI of the twice-blessed talent of Beatrix who tasted the joys of collaborating th herself. There is a general feeling among he casual readers of my own generation that t,"e Victorians ordered these things far better hfian we do, a false impression probably inspired hY the dominant shadow of Tenniel, and pee , Ps by a dream of an enchanted never-never World of midget swains propagated by that °rtent seductress, Kate Greenaway. And yet if (:lit at any collection of illustrations for the
children's books of, say, a century or more ago, I am struck by the inferiority of much of the drawing, which somehow has managed to inject into itself the crabbed responses of a world which thought not only that children should be seen and not heard, but they should also be made fully familiar with death, hellfire and all the rest of the comforting delights of conventional Christian theology.
1 suppose also that the Invention of photography had a great deal to do with the sudden disappearance from the child's world of horses Whose legs went the wrong way, of human beings whose limbs bent in peculiar places, of trains whose steam belched out in the decorous flow of a twist of plaited hair. Joyce Irene Whalley is to be commended for the quiet, scholarly efficiency of her survey of children's illustrated literature from 1700 to 1900*; the colour prints in particular are well reproduced and have been thoughtfully selected.
The unexpected reappearance, in facsimile form, of two other forgotten illustrated Children's cla,ssics" raises the old question of Who was first in the field with those politely Poised embryo adults which we tend to associate with Kate Greenaway, for Walter Crane's drawings so closely resemble Kate's that it is no wonder he was sensitive about it. Crane is a forgotten Fabian whose image lingers on in the knee-breeches still worn by Bunthorne in Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience, and whose idealism as an early Fabian was so intense that Shaw said of him, "He only does his best when he is working for nothing." Crane and Greenaway both came out as successful Illustrators in the 1870s, and Crane once dismissed the resemblances between them by saying that there were "great differences of
style and aims." However, as he never said what those differences were, posterity may be pardoned for continuing to bracket the pair of them together. Crane goes on to say that Kate "overdid the big bonnet rather, and at one time her little people were almost lost in their clothes." True, but then so were Crane's. No doubt fifty years from now posterity will envy us for having grown up with the button-eyed wonderment of Edward Ardizzone's marvellous children so pathetically dwarfed by the proportions of the adult world. And posterity will be right.
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