to illustrate, and also because his very personal style invited imitation. Even today it is
possible to describe a woodland scene as ‘Rackhamesque’, and the picture which arises
in the mind’s eye is revealing. For Rackham made good use of line as well as colour, at
the same time using both to convey a twilight fairy world, based on the factual (trees,
flowers, buildings), but to which his art added an air of fantasy, sometimes even of the
grotesque and the eerie. Although a frisson of fear does not come amiss to some
children, as Charles Lamb pointed out in his essay ‘Witches and other night fears’
(Essays of Elia, 1823) the more sensitive child may be greatly alarmed by illustrations,
even in so-called children’s books. Both Nielson and Dulac relied more on a subtle use
of colour rather than line, and both made use of oriental and other exotic touches to
conjure up the romance in the children’s books they illustrated.
Almost contemporary with these illustrators, and with a stronger touch of the real
world, was Beatrix Potter. This writer, like Charles Henry Bennett, was also her own
illustrator, and as a result her artistic creations have a homogeneous quality with her
text. Unlike the fine (and expensive) colour books mentioned above, Beatrix Potter was
determined that her books should be of a size and price to suit children—she saw her
books as quite definitely aimed at the child reader, and many of her stories were first
tried out on young relatives or friends. She was particularly concerned that picture and
text should match each other on the page, and that both should progress from page to
page with the story. Although she used only back-and-white sketches in her privately
printed The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1901), the commercial edition subsequently issued by
Frederick Warne (1902) was coloured, and the vast majority of the pictures in her
subsequent books were in colour. Where black-and-white was used, it was usually
subservient to the colour pages. Beatrix Potter based her art on the real world—she
made many detailed studies of animals, flowers and scenes before she began to
illustrate each story. Her tales are of course fantastic—but in quite a different way from
those artists whom we have just been considering. There it is the trappings of their art
that give rise to the fantasy—it lies in the colour, the line, the mystery. But Beatrix
Potter takes identifiable places and animals, and, without comment, gives them lives
and speech which make them live and move in a world which is both ours and theirs. It
is probably this mixture, together with the concern for the physical make up of the little
books, that has kept her work among the foremost of the twentieth-century illustrated
books.
But the first two decades of the twentieth century saw a great outpouring of books of
all kinds for children in Britain. The Education Acts of the previous century and the
provision of a public library service all ensured a good reading public—though not
necessarily a public for good books. There was much ‘run of the mill’ illustration in
weekly comics and in the popular Christmas annuals and ‘bumper books’. But a lot of
good work was also being provided for children, often in black-and-white to ensure
relative cheapness. The Robinson brothers produced a wide range of good quality
illustrations during the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first two of the
twentieth century. William Heath Robinson in particular gave new interpretations to the
work of Hans Andersen and others, as well as illustrating his own stories for children.
Although his best work is perhaps in his black-and-white drawings, he too was a subtle
master of the three-colour process. One interesting feature of early twentieth-century
TYPES AND GENRES 225