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Fairy Fever in the aftermath of the First World War

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In this post, Alice Sage takes us on an intriguing, sumptuously illustrated journey through the outbreaks of fairy fever in Britain after the First World War. Discover how and why fairies created their own pandemic through the astonishing spread of books, art, photographs, and artefacts in this period. Unless otherwise noted, all images of books are taken from items in the collection of the Museum of Childhood, Edinburgh.

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Our current predicament has drawn attention to the Spanish Flu pandemic that engulfed the world from 1918—1920, but there was another contagion which spread unchecked through Britain in the wake of the First World War: fairy fever.

Fairies were everywhere: in children’s books and plays of course, but also in grown-up poetry, and even newspapers. One stricken theatre reviewer wrote, ‘Now that we no longer believe in fairies, we are vastly interested in what they are like’ (‘Blue Fairies, A Midsummer Nights Dream,’ The Era, 14 November 1923).

The symptoms of fairy fever included fascination, obsession, and a suspension of disbelief. Passion overcame rationality. Sufferers might be seized with inspiration to write fairy poetry and drama, choreograph fairy ballets, or craft elaborate costumes from tulle, tinsel and spangles. These eruptions inevitably spread the contagion.

Some sources identify Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle as ‘patient zero’ for the postwar outbreak, and Carol Silver has blamed his publication of the Cottingley Fairy Photographs in December 1920 for the spread of ‘temporary fairy fever’ (Silver 56). However, Doyle was far from an isolated case. This article offers a brief epidemiology of fairy fever during and after the First World War, using evidence found in the book collection of Edinburgh’s Museum of Childhood and elsewhere.

 

Population at risk

The long history of fairy fever falls outside this case study, suffice it to say that belief in fairies, trouble with fairies, and real physical harm caused by their enchantments, were an everyday part of life prior to the 19th century.

The Victorians seemed determined to stamp fairies out, through their typical methods of colonisation and confinement. The middle class nursery acted as an isolation ward for fairies — restraining them within children’s stories and poems. Fairies shrank in size, becoming almost as tiny as germs, which had started to appear under the microscope around this same time. Like chicken pox, most people got fairy fever out of their system in childhood.

Victorian fairies

The silliness of late-Victorian fairies. Detail from Fairies Elves and Flower-Babies, illustrated by Marion Wallace-Dunlop (1899).  Unless otherwise noted, all images of books are from items in the collection of the Museum of Childhood, Edinburgh.

 

In adults, though, a preoccupation with fairies could be a serious affliction, especially when combined with other mental and physical illnesses — as in the cases of fairy painters Richard Dadd and Charles Altamont Doyle. In both these cases the obsessions with, and visions of, fairies were presenting symptoms of underlying issues. Dadd’s delusions led him to kill his father, and he spent most of his life painting in secure hospitals; Doyle’s deterioration, usually attributed to alcoholism, saw him resident in a number of Scottish asylums. Both these men left unique records of fairy fever in their artwork.

In less serious cases, if middle-class men could sublimate their fairy fever into their work, they might be hailed as geniuses — see the work of sometime collaborators J. M. Barrie (author of Peter Pan) and illustrator Arthur Rackham. Importantly though, these fairy works were framed as children’s books – even if their darkness appealed to adults too.

Fairies for 'adults'

St Giles His Bells by Charles Altamont Doyle (1880s). This painting shows fairies swirling around the distinctive crown steeple of Edinburgh’s St Giles’s Cathedral, which is just over the road from the book collection at City Chambers. Image: Wikicommons

 

Detail from Imagina by Julia Ellsworth Ford, illustrated by Arthur Rackham (1914). Image: Art of Narrative.

 

Wartime outbreak

A new mutation of fairy fever emerged in wartime London around 1916 — and soldiers were particularly susceptible. Looking back, it seems that the stress of wartime had lowered the population’s defenses. Early signs included stockpiling of fairy images. Estella Canziani’s painting of fairies in a forest glade, Piper of Dreams or Where the Little Things of the Woodland Live Unseen, sold 250,000 reproductions in 1916 — the year that conscription was introduced for British men aged 18-41 (Atkinson, 42).

Piper of Dreams, by Estella Canziani (1915). Author’s collection.

 

In May 1916, a charity which sent food parcels to prisoners of war styled themselves as ‘Good Fairies for Unfortunate Fighters’, and described how:

soldiers who have fought and suffered for their country, turn to us, like children, for the one small pleasure they are allowed. Beneath the unromantic string and brown paper covering Parcels for Prisoners lies a whole world of dreams and memories.

                                                       (‘Parcels for Prisoners’, The Graphic, 13 May 1916)

Men perceived as childlike, and hope taking the form of an administering fairy? Fairy fever had clearly jumped into the adult population.

Fairy fever spread among packed theatre audiences. Bluebell in Fairyland, a spectacularly frivolous Edwardian pantomime, was revived to great acclaim in the West End. The Old Vic, whose charter was to provide ‘recreation for the working classes’, drew large crowds to fairy-filled productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream throughout 1916. 

Peter Pan (first performed in 1904) was a perennial staple of pantomime season. Soldiers on leave sold out the play’s London performances, and seats were booked months in advance (Purkiss 280). J. M. Barrie’s play promised that children might not die like adults, but instead pass into a fairy-filled Neverland or limbo, from where they might occasionally visit the living. In Peter Pan, death is not final; Peter shouts that ‘to die would be an awfully big adventure’, and several times, characters in the play die and return to life, including the fairy Tinkerbell. During the First World War, this hopefulness resonated with Britain’s conscripted young men and their worried parents.

In a more serious mode — and certainly not intended for children — poet Robert Graves’  Fairies and Fusiliers (1917) promised young men in the ‘soul deadening trenches’, ‘you’ll be fairies soon’. Nicola Bown suggested that fairies could have a cathartic effect for soldiers ‘marooned in the present’, who ‘took to dreaming of, and weeping for, the lost world of fairies’. Was the wartime fairy fever an escapist and nostalgic side-effect of the horrors of conflict?

The Magic Kiss by Christine Chaundler (1916)

The Magic Kiss included fairies in fashionable Pierrot costumes.

Fairies continued to thrive in children’s books during the war years, sometimes in escapist forms — for example, The Magic Kiss by Christine Chaunder — but often with a new belligerence. The rather unlikely Navy Book of Fairy Tales (1916) had a foreword by Admiral Jellicoe and included autographs of the Admirals of the Battle of Jutland alongside fairy pictures (The Globe, 11 Dec 1916, p. 3).

The War Fairies by Eleanor Gray (1917) told the tale of two fairy creatures so small they struggle to be seen, yet they’re determined to help in the war effort. In Rose Patry’s Britain’s Defenders, Or Peggy’s Peep into Fairy Land (also 1917), the fairy Queen is named Britannia and she marshals personified elements of wind, sun and rain to defeat the Germans. These publications did not evade the question of the war, but confronted it directly. Fairy fever-dreams were patriotic fantasies in which even the elfin realm pledged allegiance to the British forces.

The Navy Book of Fairy Tales, Hilda Pearce. Image: Ebay

New local variants developed — such as Donald Mackenzie’s Wonder Tales from Scottish Myth and Legend (1917) — and arrived from overseas.

Wonder Tales from Scottish Myth and Legend by Donald Mackenzie, illustration by John Duncan (1917)

Illustration by John Duncan from Wonder Tales

For Christmas 1916, children were likely to receive Edmund Dulac’s Fairy Book, illustrating ‘fairytales of the allied nations’, including Russia, Italy, Belgium and Serbia. Or perhaps Mabel Lucie Attwell’s Children’s Stories from French Fairy Tales which promised ‘stories of fairyland which are most loved by their French friends and allies’. Attwell had her own particular style of fairy — minute, kewpie-like creatures with antennae, these little bugs crawled over all her illustrations. In the Fairyland compendium (1917), Attwell’s little fairies swarm around Little Red Riding Hood and get under Cinderella’s feet, with little regard for the content of the story.

Fairyland illustrated by Mabel Lucie Attwell (1917)

Illustration from Attwell’s Fairyland

 

A photograph in The Sphere in January 1918 showed fairies among soldiers at a London hospital.

The Sphere, January 1918. Author’s Collection.

Two fairy-children stand among a big group of adults, including many uniformed soldiers. The fairies are being shown a doll’s house: the ultimate fantasy of tiny, fragile domesticity. The military man’s pointing finger is significant; as the war reached its final months, fairies did indeed return to domestic settings. Rose Fyleman’s bestselling poetry collection Fairies and Chimneys (1918) described fairies in chimney smoke, in motor cars and on Oxford Street buses. Fairy fever had settled on the Home Front.

Fairies and Chimneys, Rose Fyleman. 28th Edition (1928)

 

Post-War Years and the Cottingley Fairies

Anyone skeptical about fairy fever could not deny it after December 1920, when the Strand magazine published some now infamous photographs which claimed to prove — for the first time — the existence of fairies. The photos had been taken by two cousins in Yorkshire, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, who claimed that they ‘continually saw fairies in the wood and had come to be on familiar and friendly terms with them’.

Fairies Photographed: An Epoch-Making Event, Arthur Conan Doyle, Strand Magazine, December 1920. Image: Science Museum Group

 

The accompanying article was written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the world-famous creator of Sherlock Holmes, and an evangelist for Spiritualism. Doyle believed that life existed on different planes of vibration, and that fairies (and spirits) lived at a different frequency to humans, which made them invisible. Sometimes, though, fairies might manifest at the margins of perception and become visible to certain gifted humans.

Fairy fever ran in Doyle’s family. I have already mentioned his father, Charles Altamont Doyle, who saw fairies and spirits all around him, first at Blairerno House ‘intemperance’ hospital, and from 1885 at Montrose Asylum.

Charles’s brother, Richard ‘Dicky’ Doyle, also made fairy paintings and books, including his masterpiece of illustration, In Fairyland (1870). When Dicky Doyle died in 1883, his nephew Arthur wrote the poem ‘In Memorium’ (1883), considering the tragedy from the point of view of his beloved fairies:

 

The little elves upon the walls

Cried, “What is this before us?

“Why should the Master lie so still,

“And why should he ignore us?

“Oh what is this, and why is this?”

They whispered in a chorus.

Details from In Fairyland, written by William Allingham, illustrated by Richard Doyle (1870)

Details from In Fairyland, written by William Allingham, illustrated by Richard Doyle (1870)

Details from In Fairyland, written by William Allingham, illustrated by Richard Doyle (1870)

 

When Arthur Conan Doyle encountered the fairy photographs, he was predisposed to believe them. His long-standing commitment to Spiritualism had redoubled after the death of his son Kingsley in 1918, and any hint of supernatural or post-mortal life gained extra, personal significance. He hoped that the Cottingley Fairy Photographs, would ‘jolt the material twentieth-century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud, and will make it admit that there is a glamour and a mystery to life’.

Although the Strand article in December 1920 did not start the fairy fever, it might be considered a superspreader event. Doyle’s worldwide fame and reputation attracted huge attention to the Cottingley Fairy Photographs, and he was able to transmit his optimistic fairy fever to many people in the aftermath of the war who shared his hope for glamour and mystery. More fairy sightings were reported. The Shipley Times and Express revealed that a Manningham girl had seen a troop of gnomes pass through a wood where she was, and a Mrs Rose reported that ‘Fairies … constantly congregate in a certain shrubbery at Southend’. The Globe newspaper acceded, ‘we must believe, whether we like it or not’ (‘A Bevy of Fairies’, The Globe, 25 November 1920; the editor had a preview copy of the original Strand article).

There were also many who didn’t share Doyle’s certainty, who were perhaps, immune to fairy fever. ‘Which is the harder of belief, the faking of a photograph or the objective existence of winged being being eighteen inches high?’, wrote Maurice Hewlett in John O’London’s Weekly. Truth magazine labelled the episode ‘an exposition of human credulity in the twentieth century’ — though they happily filled pages of several issues denouncing the believers (Truth Magazine, 9 March 1921 and 12 September 1922).  Indeed, the true winners in the debate were the newspapers, who offered analysis of every new detail and printed all the angry letters they could get hold of.

Again, in circumstances which might seem familiar today, believers and sceptics both claimed to have the objective support of ‘science’. Doyle’s Spiritualist language of vibrations, ether and light waves referred to cutting-edge physics, as practiced by his friend, the radio pioneer Oliver Lodge. Scientific seances were carried out at Cottingley Glen by the Society for Psychical Research, and the scientific method was followed in attempts to replicate the photographs.

Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 1 January 1921

 

Decades later, Elsie revealed that the fairies were paper cut-outs, inspired by an illustration in Princess Mary’s Gift Book (1915). Throughout the war, Gift Books had been sold to raise money for a host of charities, and this particular book was a collection of short stories, poems and illustrations by prestigious names — including Arthur Conan Doyle himself — in aid of the Queen’s ‘Work for Women’ Fund. More evidence, if it were needed, that books were a powerful mode of fairy-transmission.

Detail from Princess Mary’s Gift Book, illustrated by Claude Shepperson (1915)

The Queen’s Gift Book (1915)

Princess Marie-José’s Children’s Book (1916).

 

Fairy Fever in Numbers

One way of measuring the growth and spread of post-war fairy fever is through book publishing, using the British Library catalogue. Since the BL is a legal deposit library, collecting every book published in the UK, this data can be used to build a picture of publishing trends.

This graph shows the number of fairy books published per year between 1901 and 1939 (this is number of different titles, not the total number of copies. Therefore, this measures diversity of the fairy output, not popularity). There is significant variation year on year, but the overall pattern is clear: fairy books were on an upward trajectory in the lead-up to 1914, when numbers slumped sharply. Numbers were low during the war years, and then shot up in 1920 to the highest level on record. The numbers of titles only seriously decreased after 1926, and steadily fell until 1939.[1]

The wartime slump affected all forms of publishing, and we must not forget that many fairy books were repackaged as ‘gift books’ during those years. Over 350 fairy books were published during that peak of 1920—25, demonstrating how publishers responded to the post-war appetite for fairy poems and stories, old and new. A large proportion of these books were intended for children, but we must remember that it is adults who write, illustrate and publish books — and adults, therefore, who transmitted fairy fever.

It was certainly adults who bought other fairy-related products, for example Wedgwood’s indulgent fairy lustreware, designed by Daisy Maekig-Jones. The series had launched in 1915 but reached peak popularity in the early-1920s.

Fairy Lustreware, produced by Wedgewood. Image: wikicommons

The books published in those feverish years included Doyle’s The Coming of the Fairies (1922), in which he wrote that fairies, ‘may have their shadows and trials as we have, but at least there is a great gladness manifest in this demonstration of their life’. New authors included Enid Blyton, whose book of poems, Real Fairies came out in 1923, followed by The Enid Blyton Book of Fairies in 1924. Cicely Mary Barker’s first book, Flower Fairies of the Spring (1923), captured the mournful optimism of the time:

The World is very old,

And sometimes sad;

But when the daisies come

The World is glad.

 

The World is very old;

But every Spring

It grows young again,

And fairies sing.

Flower Fairies of the Spring, Cicely Mary Barker (1923)

 

Ruth Fyleman’s Fairies and Chimneys reached twenty editions by the end of 1925, including a school edition every year from 1920 to 1925 — ensuring that every child was exposed to fairy fever. The Edinburgh publishing house Nelson brought out new illustrated of old stories, the Andrew Lang coloured fairy books came in new editions, and the Grimms’ and Hans Christian Andersen were ‘retold’, ‘adapted’ and ‘selected’.

But as reflected in the graph, eventually the fever broke, and many adults awoke from their fairy fever-dreams. No more fairies could be seen in Cottingley, or anywhere else. The reason for their disappearance was as mysterious as their emergence. Some blamed modern education. Other more scientific minds regretted that ‘a seam of coal had been found in the fairy glen, and it had been greatly polluted by human magnetism’.

By the end of the 1920s, fairy fever had ceased to be such a concern. It lingered, of course, in the tiny creations of Mabel Lucie Atwell, Ida Rentoul Outhwaite, and the succession of women illustrators who produced children’s books between the wars.

In 1944, the Yorkshire Post looked back on the Cottingley Fairy episode, and sighed, ‘it was fun while it lasted’.

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[1] Data from searches of the BL catalogue for titles including the words fairies or fairy* (which would include fairyland, fairytale etc).

References

Maggie Atkinson, ‘Visions of “Blighty”: Fairies, War and Fragile Spaces,’ Libri & Liberi 6, no. 1 (2017)

Nicola Bown, Fairies in Nineteenth Century-Art and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)

Diane Purkiss, Troublesome Things: A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories (Penguin, 2001)

Carole G. Silver, Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)

Alice Sage

Alice Sage is a cultural historian, interested in fantasy and feminism. She has made exhibitions about dolls’ houses, bedtime stories, quilts and the Clangers, and has a small press, Wide Open Sea, publishing art and writing from interesting, wild women. She’s just finishing her PhD investigating children’s performance in the 1920s and is open to new collaborations. alice.emma.sage@gmail.com 

Alice has curated an exhibition about the Cottingley Fairies, which can be seen online:
Photographing Fairies at Stills, 19 February – 19 August 2021. 

 

 

Christine Orr’s ‘Talks and Tales’: children’s magazine writing in early 20th century Edinburgh

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Christine Orr (1899-1963) was a prolific novelist, poet, playwright and theatre-activist whose influence on Scottish cultural life in the first half of the 20th century is finally gaining recognition. Here, Susan Gardner, curator at the Museum of Childhood in Edinburgh, introduces the creative and collaborative work of the young Christine through the magazine, Talks and Tales, produced from her Edinburgh home, and now the subject of a fascinating exhibition at the Writers’ Museum.

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Few children today would choose to spend their spare time producing a magazine. But this is what Christine Orr did between the ages of eleven and sixteen (1911-1916). Her magazine, Talks and Tales (now part of the Museum of Childhood’s collection), was produced in monthly or quarterly editions with contributions from friends and family in the form of short stories, poems, pictures, factual articles, jokes and puzzles. Christine edited and compiled the magazine, as well as writing a great deal of the content, before sending it through the post to readers both in Edinburgh and further afield.

Talks and Tales has taken on a particular significance since the discovery that Christine Orr went on to write professionally, publishing 18 novels as well as poems and plays. We can see the embryonic talent of a future author and trace her early interests which were to feature in later published works. However, the magazines are, in themselves, a fascinating glimpse into the lives of those who produced them and just one example of a popular pastime for children in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Museum of Childhood has several sets of magazines made by children, such as The Evergreen Chain (1892-99), The St. Bernard’s Budget (1892), Chuckles (1905) and The Pierrot (1911-15). Perhaps this creativity was inspired by school magazines or encouraged by competitions in publications such as Little Folks and Arthur Mee’s My Magazine? We know that the young Enid Blyton (born 1897) produced a magazine with two school friends —  she wrote the stories and they contributed poems and illustrations. She became a famously prolific writer, and it seems that Christine Orr had a similar compulsion to tell stories.

Christine was certainly the driving force behind Talks and Tales. I’ve yet to identify all the other contributors but some were friends that she met at St. George’s School in Edinburgh — certainly Patricia Greig, Cicely Steven and Isabel Thomson – and some were relatives, such as Helen Orr, Hugh Millar and Grant Millar. Christine’s parents also contributed occasionally, taking an active interest in the hobby of their only child. Inevitably, the magazines reflect the lives of all these people and that’s what fascinates me most — this window into middle class Edinburgh in the early 20th century.

In 1911 Christine’s mother wrote an account of a reception at Holyrood Palace hosted by the newly crowned King George V and Queen Mary. She describes how earlier in the day “decorations were hastily completed, banners, flags and flowery wreaths hung out, and citizens rich and poor, old and young, hastened to don their best and rally in their hundreds to the streets through which the Royal couple, with the Prince of Wales and Princess Mary, should drive on their arrival in the evening.” Having set off for Holyrood at 7pm (and started getting dressed at 4pm!), there is a great deal of queuing and waiting until the ladies finally arrive at the ante room to the Throne Room two hours later, “a brilliantly lit apartment full of a dazzling, laughing throng representing the cream of Scottish nobility”. Mrs Orr’s presentation to the King and Queen takes on a dreamlike quality and she is overawed by “feelings of profound reverence and loyalty”.

In 1913 Christine contributed an account of the General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland, describing in detail the United Free meeting on the Mound.

            “It was an impressive sight – the huge sea of faces on every side, the stately moderator in his gown and fine lace ruffles; and then the grand music as a thousand voices rose on the old Scottish psalm, ‘When lion’s bondage God turned back’, unaccompanied but led by the venerable precentor, Mr Fraser. Then followed many stimulating addresses and the dedication of the young missionaries when all sang to its most beautiful tune, ‘The Lord bless thee and keep thee’.”

       During the production of Talks and Tales lives everywhere were overshadowed by World War One and this is reflected in the children’s writing and drawing. There are poems and pictures on the theme of war interspersed with other stories and articles, all patriotic and positive in spirit, no doubt the prevailing attitude in their homes and schools. In May 1915 there is mention of a Soldiers’ Refreshment Lounge being provided in Edinburgh while Christine and some of the magazine contributors performed scenes from Shakespeare’s Henry V to raise funds for hospitals in Serbia.

In 1916 Christine begins the year with a stirring editorial message:

“A Happy New Year to all our readers, and may 1916 bring with it Peace! I think that is the uppermost wish in all our hearts this January, especially with those who have fathers, brothers or friends fighting in our Army and Navy. We at home can do our part best by working steadily & keeping cheery. It is to be hoped that ‘Talks & Tales’ may be a means, however small, to the latter end!”

Most of the content of Talks and Tales consists of short stories, serial stories and poems. The stories are a mixture of adventure and romance, often featuring children as the main characters. For short stories some of them are very long indeed! Presumably, the children were inspired by the books and magazines they were reading and this is a subject which is ripe for further investigation. In a feature called ‘Bedroom Book-Shelf’, Christine mentions her copies of Tennyson, Browning and Shakespeare, Miss Proctor’s Poems, A Child’s Garden of Verses and an anthology called English Poetry for the Young as well as George MacDonald’s fairy tales.

We know from an article written in 1915 that Christine was very familiar with Edinburgh’s literary heritage. She talks about Allan Ramsay, Sir Walter Scott, Dr. John Brown and Robert Louis Stevenson:

“Were there space and time we could go on indefinitely, recalling Edinburgh’s men of letters – ay, and women too, who lived and wrote long ago. The old streets are grey and dull now but what must it have been like to see and speak with these wonderful folk! Imagine a chat with Sir Walter or a ramble out by the Pentlands with RLS! They are gone alas! But they have left us a rich and goodly heritage.”

Christine Orr also left us with a rich heritage of novels, plays and poems, and I hope that many more people will be able to discover and enjoy her work in future.

                                                                            This post by Susan Gardner

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Susan Gardner has worked as a curator at the Museum of Childhood, Edinburgh since 1993. During that time she has built up an in-depth knowledge of the museum’s collections which chart the experiences of British children from the early 19th century to the present day. She has produced exhibitions on gender stereotyping in girls’ toys, children’s diet, developmental toys for babies and toddlers, outdoor play, fairy tales, school stories and needlework samplers among many others. She is very excited to have discovered material in the museum’s collection recently relating to Edinburgh author, Christine Orr, and is delighted that SELCIE are helping to share this new information.

Talks and Tales: the childhood writing of Christine Orr is showing at the Writers’ Museum until 22 March 2020. The exhibition features two volumes of Talks and Tales as well as some of Christine’s personal possessions and examples of her published works.

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Behind the Scenes at Edinburgh’s Museum of Childhood: A Look at the Technical Side of Accessing Collections

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What secrets can the skills of a cataloguer unlock about a book collection? In this blog, Kathryn Downing, MSc student in Book History and Material Culture at the University of Edinburgh, shares some fascinating insights from her experience working with some of the oldest books in the Museum of Childhood’s archive in the ongoing process of making its treasures more accessible.

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One of the biggest barriers to conducting research can be an un-catalogued collection. It is not often – if ever – that libraries and museums let you peruse their stacks or stores to your heart’s desire. Researchers, then, often become experts at navigating catalogues and databases in an effort to locate the right resources. In many cases, the strength of someone’s research is dependent on the strength of the records they can access.

If you’ve been following SELCIE’s work at Edinburgh’s Museum of Childhood, then you’ve witnessed one of those rare times when a museum does let researchers into a store to peruse its contents. During the SELCIE team’s time collaborating with the museum, they have produced a publication and an exhibition in addition to pursuing individual research topics. More valuable than even these tangible outcomes, however, is the process they began of sorting and organising the thousands of books residing in the City Chambers. Simply knowing the extent of the collection is the first step towards facilitating public access to it.

Although SELCIE has made great strides in uncovering the treasures of the City Chambers book store, much still remains hidden. The sheer extent of the Museum of Childhood’s book collection (an estimated 15,000 items) has means that many important details associated with the books remain unrecorded. While publications and exhibitions are a fantastic way to bring collections to the community, knowing what to write or display next can be challenging when there are thousands of items and no way to search through them efficiently.

Enter the cataloguer! Continue reading →

Book Launch

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SELCIE is delighted to announce that a new publication –  The Land of Story-Books: Scottish Children’s Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Sarah Dunnigan and Shu-Fang Lai (Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2019) –  will be launched on Friday 14th June at 5pm at Edinburgh University, kindly hosted in association with the Department of English Literature’s SWINC [Scottish Writing in the Nineteenth Century], alongside the launch of Edinburgh University Press’s Commemorating Peterloo. Please join us for this joint celebration.

Location: 50 George Square, second floor, in the space outside room 2.43.

Please contact Sarah for more information: s.m.dunnigan@ed.ac.uk

For details on the 1819 symposium which precedes the event, see  http://www.swinc.englit.ed.ac.uk/events/scotland-in-1819/  

 

This collection of twenty essays is the first extensive study of the range and diversity of Scottish children’s literature in Gaelic, Scots, and English, encompassing chapbooks, poetry, popular fiction, fairy tales and more by both well-loved and unknown writers. It also includes a chapter by some of our very own SELCIE team on some treasures from the Museum of Childhood’s archive. Beautifully illustrated, it brings to life the materiality of children’s reading lives and culture in the period.

 

 

Children Pictured in Children’s Literature

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In this blog post, I will explore how many factors – both technological and ideological – have affected changes in the development of the illustration of children’s books. Within contemporary children’s literature criticism, it is argued that ‘children’s books’ can be for readers of any age (Beckett 2008). This age crossover is obvious in the case of popular fiction titles across centuries, such as Robinson Crusoe, which has been adapted to children’s fiction, a pop-up version of which can be seen below. Whereas literature marketed primarily to adults has traditionally been adapted to the child audience, in more recent decades, children’s books have been making their way into the adult market[1] . But, how did a literature for children emerge and how do past messages contained in children’s books inform manifestations of books made specifically for children today?

A pop-up version of Robinson Crusoe on display in the Growing Up With Books exhibition at Edinburgh’s Museum of Childhood

Through my position as Artist-in-Residence at the children’s literature archive in the Museum of Childhood, I have been lucky enough to be able to explore this question for my personal research. As a starting point for this topic, I examined chapbooks held in the archive at the Museum of Childhood, which has bindings from the seventeenth century. Chapbooks were the first articles of printed literature that were affordable for families in Britain and had influence in their daily lives. The content was varied and covered many subjects and stories including nursery rhymes, morals and fairytales, but also, crude jokes and stories of an adult nature (more information here). These chapbooks were not usually made for a specific age of audience, it was only in novels of the twentieth century that illustration began to be omitted from books for adults (Michals 2014). Therefore, up until fairly recently, illustration was a part of most literary prints for all ages.

Illustration both for chapbooks and bound books had until the early nineteenth century been printed using woodblocks, which, though often skilful, were sometimes crudely printed. In the case of chapbooks, the woodblocks could often be worn and mismatched with colour sometimes painted by hand. Three examples of woodblock-printed chapbooks from the archive are shown below:

Chapbooks on display at the Growing Up with Books exhibition on display at the Museum of Childhood

The presses that were used to print such chapbooks were forms of the Gutenberg press, which uses a flat ‘platen’ and screw mechanism to exert pressure evenly on the paper below. The Gutenberg and similar designs of press that would have printed chapbooks were originally made from wood; later, they were made from cast iron, which made more precise prints. An example of a press used in Edinburgh is the Columbian Press; one of these presses is on display in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, pictured below:

Colombian Press at the National Museum of Scotland

As printing production technologies advanced, the illustration of children’s books became more detailed and explorative. By the late eighteenth century, illustrators’ drawings could be reproduced in books using the more refined process of metal-plate etching, a method capable of achieving finer detail than the previous woodcut (Whalley & Chester 1988). Etching, or ‘intaglio’[2] printing, could provide a reproduction of a much finer pen and ink drawing made by the illustrator, which would have been transferred to a copper plate by the engraver, and then printed using a ‘mangle’ type press. Colour could also be added using woodblocks to give hue and tone to the intricate linework achieved through the intaglio process (Salisbury & Styles 2012).

The results of these new reproduction processes enabled representations of stories depicted in books to become more exact and specific. Illustrators were able incorporate popular stylistic trends from the fine arts, such as in the art of Victorian illustrator and book designer Laurence Housman, who used of art nouveau in his drawings for Goblin Market (Rossetti 1862) seen below:

Goblin Market (1893)

As the nineteenth century progressed, a process of printing using oil-based ink and water-resist was invented called ‘lithography’. Lithography allowed for both linework and colour to be printed more quickly and efficiently. Printing as an industry boomed with steam-powered presses, and, alongside these technological advances, how society thought of children in the nineteenth century was also rapidly changing.

Generally speaking, before the Enlightenment period, children worked alongside their elders from the age of eight and assumed adult responsibilities and dress (Cunningham 2012). This changed as a consequence of industrialisation and urbanisation; campaigners began to seek to protect children from dirty and dangerous labour. Children began to be thought of as part of nature and, through the process of ‘becoming social’, joined the civilised, adult world (Prout 2005, p. 67). This idea was expounded by Rousseau (1762), who likened childhood to primitivity and argued that children are inherently ‘good’ and adult society corrupted (Whalley & Chester 1988).

An example of the art included in books for children in Children’s Stories from Shakespeare

Interestingly, Chester and Whalley point out that there is a visual change in the depiction of children in literature from the first publications during the nineteenth century:

“In the earliest books, children were shown as young adults … At the beginning of the 19th century they were depicted more as children … by about the 1840s, or even earlier, we sometimes get the feeling that the artist was making a conscious comment on the child: ‘See how quaint – cute – amusing – pretty’ he is saying to us, the onlookers’” (1988, p. 53).

As described by Chester and Whalley, examples shown in the pictures below show how illustration coded attitudes towards childhood by othering the audience they were made for. This change in adults’ view of young people is linked to children’s exclusion from the workplace and, the stress of living in close, dirty cities away from nature, as was described earlier.

Divine and Moral Songs (1830)

Divine and Moral Songs (c.1899)

In the first woodcut image by an unknown wood engraver, the child is dressed similar to the adult and their posture is similar; it shows the child learning from the adult, but does not portray the youth as naive. However, in the latter illustration by Mrs. Arthur Gaskin (c.1899) the children look almost like dolls; their dress is extravagantly floral and their faces are flushed with innocent expressions that looked oddly blank. Though the woodblock engraver was restricted in terms how detail and colour, it is a striking difference from the vision of childhood shown in Gaskin’s illustrations.

The romantic concept of childhood remains evident in the censoring of children’s books today, though there are signs of a changing notions of what childhood is in the twenty-first century. Notably, I Want my Hat Back by Jon Klassen alludes to the insincerity that children are aware of and perform in the same way as adults. This picturebook ends with the audience sharing in a sinister joke that the bear ate the rabbit and is guilty (Klassen 2011).

I Want My Hat Back (2011)

In today’s busy, scheduled lifestyles in modern, urban society, it is interesting that books such as Klassen’s are extremely popular. They appear to acknowledge that children are not faultless and are able to make moral decisions. This attitude to childhood is reflected by sociologist Alan Prout: “… the appeal of the idea of children as active and socially participative can be traced to the obvious advantage that such children would have in the everyday management of household timetables” (Prout 2005, p. 24). Additionally, this book and others by Klassen are bought for adult-reading too:

“The negotiations between what grown-ups and children want, and between what adults are familiar with and children are still apprehending, provide the tension that makes children’s books possible” (Sutton 2012).

These ideas challenge the long-established Rousseauian, Western view of childhood as innocent, as inferior and in need of civilising. The concept of contemporary childhood, then, has a direct effect on the way illustrators construct images for picturebooks.

To summarise, as is evidenced in Edinburgh’s Museum of Childhood archives, literature made for children is continuously adapted to new demands and challenges within society. Contemporary books for children, such as Klassen’s, act as sites of tension between preceding generations and the next, exploring new ways of viewing and defining what it means to be a child. A selection of books from the archive are currently on display in the exhibition Growing Up With Books, open until December 9th!

This post was written by SELCIE Artist-in-Residence Katie Forrester

Works Cited

Beckett, Sandra (2008) Crossover Fiction: Global and Historical Perspectives. New York, USA & Oxon, England: Routledge.

Cunningham, H. (2012) The Invention of Childhood. London: Random House.

Maclean, Robert (2012) “Book illustration: engraving and etching.”  https://universityofglasgowlibrary.wordpress.com/2012/08/28/book-illustration-engraving-and-etching/

Michals, Teresa (2014) Books for Children, Books for Adults: Age and the Novel from Defoe to James. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Prout, Alan (2005) The future of childhood: towards the interdisciplinary study of children. London, New York: Routledge.

Salisbury, M. & Styles, M. (2012) Children’s Picturebooks: The Art of Visual Storytelling. Laurence King Publishing.

Sutton, R. (2012) “Little Tug” and “This Is Not My Hat.” The New York Times. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/books/review/little-tug-and-this-is-not-my-hat.html.

Whalley & Chester (1988) A history of children’s book illustration. London: J. Murray with the Victoria & Albert Museum.

For more information on book illustration: 

https://lithub.com/a-brief-history-of-book-illustration/

http://www.designishistory.com/1450/printing-techniques/

https://www.nls.uk/collections/rare-books/collections/chapbooks

[1] Most notably fantasy fiction authors such as JRR Tolkein, Phillp Pullman and JK Rowling.

[2] ‘Intaglio encompasses a variety of different techniques including engraving, etching, stipple, aquatint and mezzotint. While each of these techniques implies a different method of making impressions in the metal (usually copper) plate, they all share the same basic principle: an image is transferred to paper, under pressure, from the incised ink-bearing grooves of a metal plate’ (MacLean 2012).

Illustration Research with SELCIE Artist-in-Residence

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I became involved in SELCIE when member of the group, Sarah Dunnigan, kindly invited me to have a look in the museum of childhood archives held at the city chambers, where I met the rest of the team and joined the journey! In the basement, there is a room full of boxes the team have catalogued and another room with older books and chapbooks dating back to the seventeenth century. Over the last year, I have been privileged to have the opportunity to sketch from some of the books in the archive as SECLIE’s artist-in-residence and to inform my doctoral research on cultural representation in picturebooks.

Through my research, I found that the concept of childhood, and so the tradition of printing books for children in general, is part of Western tradition. In the archives, I search for clues of ideological bias that underpins illustration in children’s literature and how this has changed over time.

For instance, among the first adult books redacted for children were ‘adventure’ stories in the late eighteenth century that embedded colonialist messaging. I found versions of  adventure stories such as Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe and Gulliver’s Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift redacted for a  child audience in chapbooks held in the Museum of Childhood archive:

Notes and typographical layout from chapbook of Gulliver’s Travels (1819)

I made a note of the following quotation from a version of Robinson Crusoe found in a chapbook in the archive:

“After this, Crusoe sailed to the Brazils, and recovered much of his property and plantations, and returned to England very rich. He sailed to his beloved island in a ship he had given to his nephew, and took many useful articles for the inhabitants, divided the island among them, and recommended religion and good fellowship as their guide.”

In this excerpt, it is evident that colonialism was socially-accepted in the UK at the dawn of children’s literature and normalised the hegemony of European cultures over their colonies.

Soon, stories appropriated from colonised parts of the world were commonplace in children’s literature in the UK as collectors of fairy tale began to redact folktales originating in other traditions and cultures. Andrew Lang, for instance, in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, included tales from many sources, for example, the Brothers Grimm, Madame d’Aulnoy, and Antoine Galland’s translation of One Thousand and One Nights from Arabic. I found The Yellow Fairy Book (1899) in the archives, and in it, Lang uses stories from countries including Norway (East of the Sun, West of the Moon); North America (The Boy and the Wolves, or the Broken Promise); and Russia (The Story of King Frost).

Cover of The Yellow Fairy Book (1889)

I made some sketches of the illustrations in The Yellow Fairy Book by Henry Justice Ford, which are included below:

East of the Sun West of the Moon

The Boy and the Wolves, or the Broken Promise

The Story of King Frost

This western bias in children’s literature began to be challenged in the mid-twentieth century during the civil rights movement in America, which influenced US and UK  illustrators to  include representations of a wider range of ethnicities in picturebooks (Whalley & Chester 1988). For example, Italian illustrator Gianni Benvenuti illustrated Russian Fairy Tales, translated by Marie Ponsot and published in New York in 1960:

Russian Fairy Tales

In the 1960s and 70s the move toward inclusiveness in children’s literature, encouraged by the tragedies of the Second World War and ethos of the civil rights movement, had an affect on how children were taught about cultural diversity. As a result, more illustrators experimented with styles that took inspiration from the folk art and crafts of other countries to illustrate collections of folktales. However, it can be argued that Western illustrators arguably often appropriated the vernacular of foreign cultures and so repeated colonial tendencies.

A sketch of a title illustration from page 11 of Russian Fairy Tales

 

Supported by sketches and notes made on visits to the SELCIE archive, I found the fairy tale narrative to be adaptable to changing social environments, while the essential elements of the story stay recognisably intact. In this way, fairy tales are one-dimensional enough to be remembered and retold, but expansive enough to take on ideas and meaning of a multitude of cultural contexts. My own artwork aims to be open to interpretation, giving more narrative voice and agency to readers. I try to provide further scope for readers’ imaginations to be unhindered by pictorial detail, as the fairy tales are able to evade specific descriptions of time, place and character in the text, enabling them to be malleable narratives, and so forever relevant.

Mulan leaves home (2018)

Battle on the Black Mountain (2018)

 

The SELCIE archive has been a very important part of my research project and continues to influence my illustration work, such as in the snippets from a recent illustration I made based on The Ballad of Mulan (c.5-6th CE), above, which I close this article with. Thank you for reading!

References

Anon, http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/ps/china/mulan.pdf

Chandler, D. & Munday, R., 2011. A Dictionary of Media and Communication, Oxford University Press.

Harding, J. & Pinsent, P., 2009. What Do You See?: International Perspectives on Children’s Book Illustration, Cambridge Scholars.

Lang, A. & Ford, H.J., 1903. The yellow fairy book, Longmans, Green.

Luthi, M., 1976a. Once upon a time. On the Nature of Fairy Tales (Bloomington, 1970), pp.85–86.

Nodelman, P., 1992. The Other: Orientalism, Colonialism, and Children’s Literature. Children’s Literature, Association Quarterly, 17(1), pp.29–35.

Pinsent, P., 1997. Childrens Literature and the Politics of Equality, David Fulton.

Rose, J., 1984. The case of Peter Pan, or, the impossibility of children’s fiction, London: London : Macmillan.

Whalley & Chester, 1988. A history of children’s book illustration, London: London : J. Murray with the Victoria & Albert Museum.

This post written by Katie Forrester, SELCIE artist-in-residence

Science, Nature, and Children’s Books: finding Jane Marcet in the archive

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Our hours spent happily in the Museum of Childhood’s archive revealed the richness of its collection of nature and science books written for young people, and confirmed the magnitude and diversity of women’s writing for children. Both elements will be on show in the Museum’s forthcoming exhibition, Growing Up With Books, which opens on June 1st!

A detail from the cover of one of the loveliest nature books in the collection!

But they are strikingly combined in a very particular mode of writing —  one which combines a flourishing culture of science writing for children and young people in the c19th century with the creative and intellectual interests of women in scientific developments. Beatrix Potter is not alone in being a children’s writer with a keen fascination for natural science.

This was crystallised one day when we picked up a book called The Seasons written by a woman called Jane Marcet, first published in 1832.  Though its familiar-sounding title might echo Romantic literature, this is in fact a collection of stories intended  for ‘very young children’ . These present a world in which nature unfolds through the year’s natural cycle in active and participatory ways for the volume’s fictional child protagonists who are a boy called Willy and his sister Ann.  Encouraged by his mother — ‘You must open up your eyes, Willy, and observe as well as you can’ —  the child peers inside a bud picked from a horse-chestnut tree.

A portrait of Jane Marcet

In another chapter, a little mouse intrudes through a hole in a corner of the nursery to enchant Willy at first, then to provoke him to ‘tantrums’ when the terrified housemaid suggests feline intervention! A fairly happy compromise for all is reached by the end  –  but along the way the story suggests that children’s sympathy for, and kindness towards, animals should be combined with respect for their natural instincts and habitats. It implies a rhythm and harmony existing both within nature and the domestic order which even the nicest of little mice shouldn’t disturb.

Such miniature nature narratives are sprinkled with a dose of moral conservatism. But they also try to teach their young readers to engage in close and empirical observation of the creatures, plants, and living things which encompass their world. The children’s curiosity leads them to discover everyday lessons about physiology, botany, the weather, and even the redness of robin feathers…

Illustrative detail from *The Child’s Zoological Garden*

Jane Marcet (1769-1858) passionately believed that science should be made accessible. With her husband, a medical graduate of Edinburgh University, she belonged to a scientific and intellectual community which had diverse creative and educational interests. She knew Maria Edgeworth, novelist, educationalist, and children’s writer (the Museum archive holds a number of her books), and the extraordinary Mary Sommerville —  the scientist, mathematician, and astronomer who came from the Borders and spent her girlhood in in Fife and Edinburgh.

As her extensive publications attest (such as the Conversations on Chemistry which took place between a teacher and her two female students), Marcet believed in the democratisation of knowledge. Her books reached a variety of readerly communities who usually suffered from various forms of social and cultural exclusion —  children and young people; women; members of mechanics’ institutes. And they were famously read by a youthful Michael Faraday when he worked as an apprentice bookbinder.

Marcet seemingly turned to writing for children and young people later in life. Ever mindful of the potential dullness of any subject, she enriched a grammar book by references to fairy tales and sponge cakes! For her younger readers, her enduring aim was to make science ‘familiar’. This intimacy can be seen in The Seasons where the child-worlds of garden and home become a playground for scientific revelation, and the mother is portrayed as a figure of learning as well as nurture.

In one way, this might be construed as a way of ‘talking down’ to children yet in another as simultaneously respecting and expanding a child’s worldview. Whilst obviously very different in form and style, one can see a connection between her work and Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales which so vividly convey a sense of wonder and life in natural things. [As demonstrated above in SELCIE’s banner image, taken from the botanically-themed front cover of an Andersen edition!]

And it also brings to mind the beautiful nature illustrations of Jemima Wedderburn (1823-1909), the Edinburgh-born artist, ornithologist, children’s illustrator, and constructor of scientific toys.

Jemima Wedderburn – painstaking artist of the natural world, and cousin of the Edinburgh physicist, James Clerk Maxwell

In such ways, then, a single book chanced upon by the SELCIE team in the Museum archive opens up a world of interconnecting skeins between scientific creativity, children’s books, and the women who were so frequently their makers and illustrators.

                                                                                    This post written by Sarah

Further reading

Debbie Bark, ‘Science for Children’, in The Routledge Research Companion to Nineteenth Century British Literature and Science, edited by John Holmes and Sharon Ruston (2017)

Elizabeth J. Morse, ‘Jane Haldimand Marcet’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Kathryn A. Neeley, Mary Somerville: Science, Illumination, and the Female Mind (2001)

‘Jane Marcet’, Science History Institute, https://www.sciencehistory.org/historical-profile/jane-marcet

The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science. Pioneering Lives from Ancient Times to the Mid-Twentieth Century, edited by Marilyn Ogilvie, Joy Harvey and Margaret Rossiter (2000)

Katie Morag goes to Edinburgh University

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The little red-haired girl who lives on the Hebridean island of Struay, always attired in her welly boots and Fair Isle jersey, is an icon of contemporary Scottish children’s literature. This, of course, is Katie Morag, the much loved creation of Mairi Hedderwick.

SELCIE was therefore delighted at the news that Edinburgh University had awarded the writer and illustrator an Honorary Degree at a graduation ceremony held at the University of Edinburgh on Monday 27th November. Every one of Hedderwick’s stories opens up a vivid world world for its young reader; in Katie’s companionship, the distinctive culture and heritage of Scottish island life is also brought to life. And Hedderwick’s illustrations also capture a child’s perspective of landscapes, weather, and environment. This striking combination of the visual and verbal was adapted for television in 2013, and a new generation of children discovered Katie Morag in a new medium.

Interestingly, though, the stories didn’t come directly from Hedderwick’s own childhood. The nearest she came to island life was the view through the window of her Gourock home across the Firth of Clyde to Dunoon and the Cowal peninsula: ‘I knew I wanted to go there, across the water and over the hills and far away’, she has remarked. As a student she studied mural painting and ceramics at the Edinburgh Art School (now ECA), graduating in the early 60s. It was an experience that would give her ‘sudden freedom […] It was totally classless […] You had room to develop your personality’.

During this time, she first visited Coll, the small Hebridean island lying to the west of Mull and the real-life inspiration for Katie’s island. Working as a ‘mother’s help’ to the laird’s family, she lived without electricity or drinking water but it was still ‘joyous’, she recalls. She subsequently returned and stayed for ten years where she raised a young family and began her career as an illustrator of children’s books by writers such as Rumer Godden and Jane Duncan, and of collections of Gaelic stories and Scottish folktales. Though the family left Coll in the early 70s, its inspiration was deeply seeded, and the first of the Katie Morag series appeared in 1984.[i]

It forms one strand of a rich body of work which encompasses other stories for children (as well as her travel writing which often draws on this rich seam of island experience). Thanks to Hedderwick’s captivating blend of word and image, the material presence of Katie Morag’s world is everywhere — not just in bookshops and television but in cups and calendars. The books belong to the classroom too, and Hedderwick herself is a regular and popular visitor (along with Katie’s teddy bear!) to primary schools and local book festivals; as she herself has said, ‘storytelling [is] a shared activity’.

These stories have become an intimate, homely presence in children’s lives — a vital contribution to a longstanding tradition of Scottish children’s writing, all the way back to Robert Louis Stevenson and A Child’s Garden of Verses, which so memorably captures a child’s view of the world. And, happily, that tradition is still flourishing across the  diversity of contemporary Scottish children’s literature, and the small, independent publishing houses which so often nourish and sustain it.

                                                               This post written by Sarah

[i] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-26483303

Dear Mrs Shillabeer

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While working in the book archives of Edinburgh’s Museum of Childhood, we sometimes find books that hold traces of their authors. This usually takes the form of an authorial inscription, as is the case with the charming Mr Barnacles and His Boat book that appeared in a previous blog post. It is also always very exciting when we find traces of illustrators, as was the case recently when we found this 1960 copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses: 

Child's Garden of Verses Cover

This edition is illustrated by Mary Shillabeer, who was based in Edinburgh. She was known both for her children’s book illustrations and for her beautiful marionette puppets, which you can see here and here, for example. Our own Museum of Childhood here in Edinburgh even holds some of her puppets! She also sketched and painted Edinburgh’s Rehearsal Orchestra for many years; you can see some of those paintings here. The book we found certainly shows how skilled she was:

Shillabeer illustrations

However, the most interesting thing about this book is that it was owned by Mary Shillabeer herself. Tucked into the front cover is a letter from Martin Dent, the publisher. It is addressed to “Mrs Shillabeer” at her address in Edinburgh:

Letter to Mrs Shillabeer

The letter contains the publisher’s opinion about a “question of colour”; he states that he “will happily leave it for you to put it right in whatever way you wish after Christmas”. This is a lovely little glimpse into the life and work of this talented illustrator that we were very happy to find. As the season approaches for us to start wishing each other “a very happy Christmas”, we hope that you find this as interesting as we do!

Shillabeer illustrations

This post written by Danielle

Picture This

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Picture This 

What’s the relationship between text and image in illustrated children’s books? In this blog, Niamh reflects on this question, thrown up by having to choose between a multitude of beautiful different editions of the same text for our ‘Growing Up With Books’ exhibition.

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As you know, the SELCIE group has been deciding which books will end up in the exhibition and the catalogue next year. I have no need to tell you how hard it is to making such choices. However, during this time, I have come across a difficulty that I had not really thought about until now: how to evaluate volumes that contain the same text but have differing illustrations.

Dr Sarah Dunnigan and I are putting together the “other world” cabinet, a box that will showcase magic, fairies and various other enchantments; we decided that, for this, the Scottish author J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan would grace us with its esteemed presence. However, in our numerous boxes, there are countless versions of the text. This got me wondering how far does illustration work in conjunction with the text of a book.

Some writers are particularly demanding in what they want the pictures in their books to demonstrate, as was the case of author Lewis Carroll and cartoonist-cum-illustrator John Tenniel: ‘The charts [Carroll] drew up for the sequence of llustrations [sic] include not only meticulous numberings, endlessly scratched out, redrafted and revised. … He wrote copiously to Tenniel to monitor his progress and control his interpretations’ (Warner). So many questions spring from these actions. To list a few: (i) How far do illustrations work independently of the text? (ii) What happens after the work no longer must be printed with these illustrations? (iii) How much power does the illustrator have over the narrative of the story? (iv) If the author has demanded a set of drawings be commissioned for his or her text, then does it become a different piece of work if other illustrations are used? I think these are very important issues, which demand close consideration but that does not mean I have any settled opinions on the matter.

If one were to argue that such things are unimportant then he or she would do well to consider the situation as applied to picture books or comic books: two components that work less with the written word and more with the illustrations. As one who is currently researching postcolonial paraliterature, including Hugo Pratt’s ‘Corto Maltese’ series, I would say that a lot of information is implicit in what appears in the frame, as opposed to what is explicitly declared in speech bubbles. Indeed, within a comic strip, ideas can subtly be diffused to and absorbed by the reader/viewer, in just as many ways as the written words of a text can be transmitted.

In choosing which Peter Pan text to exhibit, this idea of the importance of illustrations and their differing values and meanings has really come into focus for me. With that in mind, which volume of Barrie’s text should be chosen to show the general public? I am hoping that we can exhibit as many as possible, in part to manifest these ideas but, additionally, to give a showcase to as many different artists’ ideas as space allows.

References

Warner, Marina. ‘Curiouser and curiouser.’ Tate Etc. 1 Sept. 2011 <http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/curiouser-and-curiouser> Web.