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The Development of Illustrated Texts and
Picture Books
Joyce Irene Whalley
Children learn to read pictures before they learn to read words. Pictures also form the
earliest records of man’s attempts at communication: cave paintings, church murals,
stained glass windows—all testify to the importance placed on pictorial representation.
It is surprising therefore to realise how long it took for due significance to be placed on
the illustration of children’s books. Early books for the young were not without pictures,
but they were not illustrated books.
What is the difference? A good illustrated book is one where the accompanying
pictures enhance or add depth to the text. A bad illustrated book is one where the
pictures lack relevance to the text, or are ill placed and poorly drawn or reproduced —
these are books with pictures rather than illustrated books. In this outline study of
illustrated children’s books we shall trace the rise of the importance of pictures and the
improvement in standards of illustration, until on occasions the pictures assume greater
significance than the text—or even replace it.
The emphasis in this study is on books for children’s leisure reading, not text books.
Nevertheless, the first illustrated book of any significance for children was in fact a Latin
text book. This was Orbis Sensualium Pictus, by Johann Amos Comenius, published in
- There had been many Latin text books before this, but Comenius, an
educationalist from Moravia, was among the first to realise that children best remember
things they have seen rather than merely read about. His book was translated into
English by Charles Hoole in 1659. It consisted of a picture at the top of every page, with
the name of each object depicted in it listed below in Latin and then in English. The
crude little woodcut illustrations covered a great variety of topics, both familiar and
unfamiliar, and so provided the widest range of pictures for the young then available.
The book was popular throughout Europe and remained in use in schools for many
years. A popular imitation in English was James Greenwood’s The London Vocabulary,
which by 1771 had reached its sixteenth edition.
But the point about all these books, to our eyes at least, is that the illustrations were
so crude. This was not because good illustration was impossible in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, although England did not have a school of illustrators such as
existed in France at the time. There were, however, many competent engravers who
rendered their French models very finely, as we can see from contemporary adult books.
But the models for children’s book illustration were taken from the lower end of the
market, from chapbooks and broadsheets, selling to a partially literate readership at a