Poems and PicturesNineteenth-century verse for children begins with the innocuous but long-remembered
verses of Ann and Jane Taylor, authors respectively of ‘My Mother’ and ‘Twinkle,
Twinkle, Little Star’ among much else, and the pleasantly non-didactic ‘The Butterfly’s
Ball’, by William Roscoe (1807), which owed much to illustrations by William Mulready.
Robert Browning’s Pied Piper of Hamelin has survived through the years since its first
publication in 1842. Lewis Carroll’s best-known verses are in the Alice books; Edward
Lear’s are in Nonsense Songs (1870) and Laughable Lyrics (1877), and the best of them
are at the same time comedy and strange, sad poetry. Christina Rossetti published
Goblin Market, an original fairy story in verse, in 1862, and Sing-Song, a collection of
short poems for young children, in 1872, and in 1885 came Robert Louis Stevenson’s
still-popular Child’s Garden of Verses.
In graphic art, the great Victorian innovation was the ‘quality’ picture book in colour:
not an illustrated text but a work in which the pictures were of the essence and usually
the dominant feature. Edmund Evans was a printer and engraver who brought colour
printing to a fine art, developed the picture book concept, and found the artists to put it
into effect. The leading names were those of Walter Crane, brilliant as a pictorial
designer and decorator, Randolph Caldecott, notable for a strong and wiry line and gift
for showing action, and Kate Greenaway, whose pretty, prettily-dressed children created
a new dream of childish innocence. A few years later, Beatrix Potter produced a score of
small masterpieces, portraying and telling the tales of Peter Rabbit, Tom Kitten, Jemima
Puddle-Duck and other very human animals.
Between Two WarsThe fifty or sixty years leading up to the outbreak of the First World War have been
called the golden age of children’s literature. In comparison with their richness, the two
decades between the end of that war and the beginning of the Second World War seem
impoverished. Children’s books had little status, and writing them professionally was not
an attractive pursuit for anyone who sought to be a serious writer. The perception in the
USA that children’s literature was a part of the national culture, and the corresponding
development of library work with children and use of recreational books in schools, was
slow to spread to Britain. It was beginning to do so by the mid-1930s; the Carnegie
Medal for an outstanding children’s book was instituted in 1937, fifteen years after its
American equivalent and inspiration, the Newbery. But routine publishing for children
ran to cheap ‘rewards’, bumper books, series books, annuals and endless production
lines of the tired old school and adventure stories. Financially, the great successes were
those writers whose books came in series about the same protagonists, were easy and
readable and made no demands on their readers.
The highlights of the 1920s and 1930s resulted from inspirations that struck
individual authors: most of them people who had not particularly meant to write for
children. Most successful of all were the Winnie-the-Pooh stories of A.A. Milne, which not
only established a still thriving literary industry but added to the small stock of books
that can be quoted or alluded to in the confidence that every literate adult will be
familiar with them. In this respect the Pooh books are probably second only to Alice.
674 BRITISH CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW