was known to be a friend of the Prince Consort, and later became the first Director of
the South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria and Albert Museum).
By the end of the 1840s, well known book artists were no longer reluctant to put their
names to their work in children’s books. The establishment of popular illustrated papers
during this period, The Illustrated London News and Punch among them, ensured a
regular demand for good illustrators and engravers, thus encouraging a native school to
flourish.
By the 1850s many of the artists whose names were to become well known in the next
decade were already producing notable work. In 1851 the Punch artist Richard Doyle
produced illustrations to accompany John Ruskin’s text The King of the Golden River, so
getting the new decade off to a good start. Others working in the 1850s were Hablot K.
Browne (Phiz), one of the Dickens’s illustrators, and ‘Alfred Crowquill’, a pseudonym for
the two Forrester brothers. George Cruikshank’s work spanned a large part of the
nineteenth century, starting with his illustrations for the Brothers Grimm’s tales in the
1820s, but in the middle of this decade he started to issue his own Fairy Library.
Whereas almost all the children’s book illustrators of this period used wood engraving,
Cruikshank used etching. This method, like engraving, is an intaglio process, but uses
acid to bite the line on the plate rather than a burin or graver; it too can give a fine
detailed picture as we can see from Cruikshank’s own pictures for his Cinderella of
- Also using etching, and writing and illustrating his own stories, was Charles
Henry Bennett, another Punch illustrator.
Having now reached the middle of the nineteenth century, it is a suitable point to
consider the state of children’s books, and how they differed from those of the beginning
of the century. In the first place there were far more of them. The prosperous middle
class now provided an extensive reading public, while the tremendous technical
improvements made good quality illustrated books more widely available and relatively
cheaper. The subject matter too had changed. Entertainment was much more to the
fore, and nonsense, folk and fairy tales, as well as longer stories, were now provided for
children’s reading. Other more subtle trends are noticeable in the illustrations of the
period. Following the popularity of Heinrich Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter in 1844, there
was a fashion for a more primitive or archaicising style, which would certainly amuse
the young, and a tendency to facetiousness. We can also see the beginning of the cult of
childhood, as the illustrators start to depict coy, quaint or sentimental children—
something almost unthinkable at the beginning of the century. Obviously didactic,
religious and moral books continued to be published—after all, even today children’s
books still have an underlying moral tone, even if it is scarcely noticeable.
The best illustration was still uncoloured, although some books were issued in two
kinds: plain or coloured. The colouring at this date, in children’s books at least, was still
by hand. But experiments were taking place to produce a commercially acceptable form
of colour printing—it was in fact already available, but it was expensive. Colour became
much more widely used from the 1850s onward, especially in the popular ‘toy books’.
The toy book had nothing to do with toys, but was basically a publishers’ description of
a paper-covered picture book. In its earliest manifestations it consisted of about eight
pages, with a minimum of text and a picture on each page, which was usually blank on
the back. Various artists obviously worked on the ‘toy books’ but few early publications
TYPES AND GENRES 221