fraction of the cost of the better class adult book. This fact is in itself indicative of the
attitude at that time to children’s books, their production and illustration.
It is appropriate here to consider the methods available in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries for the actual reproduction of illustrations, which were of course
largely manual processes. For children’s books in particular, the most important method
of reproducing illustration was by woodcut—a process that goes back to the late
fifteenth century. In this method, everything that was not required to print was cut away
on the block so that the resulting illustration was one of mass rather than line. Such
illustrations lacked subtlety, especially in the small size common in children’s books.
But the method was cheap and the blocks could go through the press at the same time
as the type, so that in an illustrated book text and pictures could be printed together.
Children’s books have always been required to be cheaper than adult books, and in a
society where such books were little regarded, this form of simplified—or crude—
illustration was considered quite suitable. It was also the method used in the production
of chapbooks and broadsheets, which themselves lay at the cheaper end of the market.
A superior form of illustration, and one used in technical books and the more
expensive eighteenth-century adult works, was engraving. This is an intaglio process, by
which the line of the drawing is engraved onto a copper plate, which is subsequently inked
for printing. To reproduce this incised inked line, the plate has to be put under great
pressure in a printing press, and cannot therefore go through at the same time as the
type, which is raised. As a result, any book using engraving as a means of illustration
either had to go twice through the press, or else it had its illustrations and text printed
separately (this was the more common method). Engraving was certainly used in
children’s books, especially in the more expensive ones produced towards the end of the
eighteenth century. It was also used by John Harris and William Darton in the mainly
didactic works produced by them in the early decades of the nineteenth century.
Engraved illustration permitted the reproduction of far greater detail in a picture, and a
good engraver could produce very fine effects of line as well as of mass, giving much
greater variety to the illustrations.
But the use of this more expensive process of illustration indicates that a change had
taken place in the course of the eighteenth century in the whole attitude to children and
their books. This change was initiated to a large extent by one man, John Newbery, who
in 1744 set up his shop in St Paul’s Churchyard, London, where he produced a wide
range of children’s books. He was not the first to do this —Thomas Boreman had
preceded him in this new approach to children’s books. But Newbery was the first to
appreciate, and to exploit commercially, the market in illustrated children’s books. He
realised that his new product had to be reasonably cheap and so his books were small—
no disadvantage in young eyes—and certainly illustrated, but by the cheapest method,
namely the woodcut. Few names of the artists employed by Newbery are known, and
many of the pictures he published were used again and again, in his own or other
publishers’ books. This was made possible by the general nature of the pictures: two
children in a garden, a coach and horses, a lady and a child in a room. Such basic
pictures could easily have stories written round them, though of course there were even
at that date illustrations specially commissioned for specific books.
218 THE DEVELOPMENT OF ILLUSTRATED TEXTS AND PICTURE BOOKS