illustrator. This is particularly evident in his ‘toy books’, where contemporary motifs—
the fan, the sunflower, the general air of japonaiserie— manifest themselves on nearly
every page. If we look at Crane’s Sleeping Beauty, for example, we find the whole of the
centre page spread covered in illustration and design, and looking more like a decorative
tile than a book picture. The same is equally true of his illustrations to Goody Two-
Shoes and Aladdin.
By contrast, Randolph Caldecott made great use of space in his illustrations, allowing
his line to speak for itself, and his pictures to enhance the (often traditional) texts he
chose to illustrate. In The Queen of Hearts for example, the simple basic nursery rhyme
is ‘expanded’ by the pictorial comment of the cat who has seen the knave steal the tarts
—no text is used, or indeed needed. The same is equally true of his other ‘toy books’,
such as The House that Jack Built or The Three Jovial Huntsmen.
Kate Greenaway, however, was to some extent in a category of her own, and for the
most part she chose to write and illustrate her own poems—Under the Window and
Marigold Garden are perhaps her best known books. She ‘invented’ a style of dress and a
‘never-never’ period of her own, in which she placed her elegantly clad and immaculately
clean children. Her work was highly stylised and very popular— although not very well
drawn (her figures tend to have no bodies under their clothes)—and this popularity has
remained firm to the present day. These books were not cheap, with their fine colour
printing and high-quality illustrations, but they formed a small if influential section of
the children’s book market.
By contrast there was a great outpouring of muddy coloured and indifferently
illustrated works, often printed in Germany (Bavaria for the most part), which have
survived in large quantities to show how widespread they were. These frequently
contained not the traditional nursery rhymes or folk-tales used by Caldecott and Crane,
but ad hoc verses and short tales made to accompany pictures —one can hardly call
them illustrations. The use of photographic methods and of the three-colour process led
to a lowering of standards, while at the same time providing school and Sunday School
prizes and Christmas and birthday gifts in plenty. Such books demanded little from the
child, and indicated their level of approach by their titles: Our Little Dots or Little Chicks
are examples—and their poorly drawn and indifferently coloured pictures matched their
titles.
In the early years of the twentieth century the highly sophisticated type of work by
Kate Greenaway, for example, was carried to extremes by the productions of several
artists whose books lie on the border line between those for children and those for
adults. Kate Greenaway’s books had been intended for children, with their simple
rhymes and games, but illustrators like the Frenchman Edmund Dulac, Kay Nielson
from Denmark, and Arthur Rackham offered a fantasy world which was scarcely that of
the child. Of the quality of their illustrations to well known works like Cinderella, Hans
Andersen and others, there can be no doubt, and the lavishness of production ensured
that the books were duly treasured, but they stand to one side of the general production
of children’s books.
Although the names of Rackham, Neilson and Dulac may be linked together as
indicating a particular type of lavish book for children, their styles were very different.
Of the three, Rackham was possibly the most significant because of the stories he chose
224 THE DEVELOPMENT OF ILLUSTRATED TEXTS AND PICTURE BOOKS