can be attributed to known illustrators, and some must have been done by hack
workers employed for the job. But these booklets were cheap and colourful, and covered
a wide range of topics in a very basic way, whether it was a summary account of the
story of Red Riding Hood or Robinson Crusoe, or a brief description of the wonders of
the world. These books were at first hand-coloured, often by children employed as cheap
labour, but they were also among the earliest to bring colour printing—of a sort—to the
mass market of child readers. In the hands of a master they could indeed become works
of art in their own right, as we shall see towards the end of the century.
As we move into the 1860s we reach the peak period of British book illustration for
children and adults alike, since by now the illustrators worked equally for both the
juvenile and the adult market, boldly putting their names with those of the authors on
the title page. Indeed not only were some artists their own story writers, as we have seen,
but sometimes the artist could even dominate the book—Harrison Weir, the famous
animal artist, was one such example; the text had now become subsidiary to the
pictures.
Not only did Britain now produce black-and-white illustrators of very high calibre, but
these also had the satisfaction of being much in demand, so that security further
encouraged them to work to the highest standards. The spread of popular illustrated
papers continued, while the increase in the actual reading public, and a middle class
with more leisure, all encouraged the production of books of all kinds. This was the era
of Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Trollope, and also of the gift book (the Victorian equivalent
of the ‘coffee-table’ book)—and all these works were lavishly illustrated, providing plenty
of work for the book artist.
Although colour was now more prevalent and improving in quality, it is interesting to
note that the best illustrators of the period still preferred to work in black and white, in
the method of wood engraving derived from Thomas Bewick. But we should always
remember that in the production of these illustrations two sets of hands were at work—
the artist who drew the original art work, and the engraver who engraved it on the block
ready for printing. But here too in Britain at this period a good school of engravers had
developed, the best-known often working for the firm of the Dalziel Brothers. Artists
already mentioned, such as Richard (Dicky) Doyle, C.H.Bennett, and ‘Crowquill’, all
produced outstanding children’s books during this decade. There were new names, too,
at least as far as children’s books were concerned, who were often already artists in
their own right. One of these was John Millais, with his illustrations for books such as
Little Songs for me to Sing (1865), or Arthur Hughes, who produced the evocative
drawings for George Macdonald’s At the Back of the North Wind (1869), as well as other
similar high quality illustrations, all usually set spaciously on the page.
The book was now considered as a work of art in itself, and layout and cover were, in
the best instances, receiving as much care as the text and illustrations. Illustration
could also be much more sophisticated too, as we see in the often dramatic work of
Ernest Griset. Griset was for long a rather neglected artist, though much appreciated in
his own time. His illustrations to a work like The Purgatory of Peter the Cruel (1868), in
which the incidents are sometimes shown from an unusual view point, such as that of a
fly or a frog, and his melodramatic designs for Aesop’s Fables or Robinson Crusoe
(reminiscent of Gustav Doré), put him high on the list of mid-century illustrators.
222 THE DEVELOPMENT OF ILLUSTRATED TEXTS AND PICTURE BOOKS