A Doll’s Life

Posted on August 25, 2017 by Sarah Dunnigan

The book vault of the Museum of Childhood spans the globe both imaginatively and geographically. Russian fairy tales and handmade Japanese books nestle in boxes alongside home-grown favourites such as Peter Pan or Treasure Island. This often makes our task of sifting through the archive one of curiosity and unexpected delight. And the common thread that links these volumes is that each has somehow made a journey to the Museum’s collection. In that sense, there is always a local connection to each book, no matter how far-flung or remote it might seem.

Part of our exhibition, ‘Growing Up With Books’ (opening June 2018), will celebrate the well-travelled nature and diversity of the Museum’s archive — a little history of the binding and interconnected story of children’s literature. In today’s blog, Sarah presents a ‘taster’, or miniature, of that aspect in describing a small illustrated French book which we pulled out of a box one day. Continue reading →

A thousand years of Star-Eyed Deirdre

Posted on July 29, 2017 by Sarah Dunnigan

In this post, Kate Mathis explores the significant achievement of Louey Chisholm’s *Celtic Tales Told To the Children* (1910) — a portrait of Deirdre which preserves some of the intricacy, danger, and violence of a thousand-year-old Gaelic tale…

Sarah’s recent post on Ella Young (1867-1956) introduced us to her best-known, beautifully-illustrated work, Celtic Wonder Tales, published in 1910 in collaboration with Maud Gonne. The copy belonging to the Museum of Childhood, owned formerly by our elusive reader, Dora Rose, contains two of the loosely-linked group of tales known to scholars of medieval Gaelic literature as ‘The Three Sorrows of Storytelling’, whose origins extend at least as far back as the fifteenth century. Ella included ‘The Children of Lir’ as well as ‘The Eric-Fine of Lugh’ (a simplified version of Oidheadh Chloinne Tuireann, ‘The violent death of Tuireann’s children’, in which three brothers attempt, unsuccessfully, to placate the king of the Tuatha De Danann), but she omitted the other, which is of even greater antiquity and by far the most famous of the three.

Often referred to, erroneously, as ‘the story of Deirdre’, it is more than a thousand years old, composed in Ireland during the eighth or ninth centuries, written down in the twelfth (as Longes mac n-Uislenn, ‘The exile of Uisliu’s sons’), and a regular source of inspiration to historians of the Gaels like Seathrún Céitinn (ca. 1569-ca. 1644) as well as to their poets and seanchaidhean (tradition-bearers). The prominence of Deirdre, by no means the tale’s original focus, was developed most notably during the Celtic Revival (ca. 1880-ca. 1920), when the various tragedies of her short-lived life were explored, by both Scottish and Irish writers, in nearly thirty plays, novellas, and epic poems. One of these authors, ‘Fiona Macleod’ (alter-ego of Paisley-born critic and travel-writer William Sharp), exclaimed approvingly that “the name of Deirdre has been as a lamp to a thousand poets”. Continue reading →

Mona Margaret Noel Paton (1860-1928), ‘a gifted teller of tales’

Posted on July 14, 2017 by Sarah Dunnigan

A visit to the Museum of Childhood’s archive one afternoon uncovered a forgotten Scottish Victorian children’s writer. Here, Sarah introduces the fairytale, folkloric worlds of Mona Paton…

In 1871, Charles Dodgson, or Lewis Carroll, paid a visit to the island of Arran to see the Edinburgh painter, Joseph Noel Paton, bearing a letter of introduction from George MacDonald. Paton had a reputation as a distinguished artist of religious and mythic subjects but it was as a painter of beautiful and bizarre fairyscapes that he had piqued Carroll’s interest. Though John Tenniel’s images for the Alice books are now much loved, it was Paton whom Carroll had initially wanted as an illustrator for Wonderland’s first publication two years prior.

Mona’s father, the painter Joseph Noel Paton; the family lived at 33 George Square, Edinburgh

One of Paton’s most famous fairy paintings, The Reconciliation of Oberon and Titania (1847)

Despite it being a ‘rainy and misty’ September day, Carroll records that he had a delightful time with Paton, his wife, Maggie, and their large family who were holidaying, as they frequently did, on Scotland’s west coast. This marked the beginning of a long-standing acquaintance with one of Paton’s daughters, Mona Margaret Noel (1860-1928), who was then eleven years old.[i] In a later memoir, Joseph Noel Paton’s granddaughter gives this lovely description of Mona as having:

more than her share of artistic temperament (the ‘DAT’ as those of the family who suffered from it most, called it). High-spirited, determined (sometimes pigheaded), a gifted teller of tales, a not unaccomplished pianist, a sweet singer, a clever mimic, Mona also had ‘the sight’. She grabbed life with both hands and thereby suffered much. Her appearance was striking. She adored her father and, with hair waving crisply back from her forehead, appears in a number of his paintings, sometimes as angel, sometimes as devil’.[ii]

Mona, for instance, is known as ‘the curly headed imp’ who appears as a group of wild yet cherubic fairy children (three of her siblings) in one of Paton’s most popular paintings, ‘The Fairy Raid’.[iii]

Eighteen years later Mona would have a volume of fairy tales published by a small Edinburgh printer — retellings of Beauty and the Beast and Jack the Giantkiller. The former is essentially drawn from the literary fairy tale culture of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, particularly associated with women writers, though stories of forbidden, ‘monstrous’, or cross-species desire go deep in terms of cultural and historical lineage (the tale of Cupid and Psyche, for example). The latter, on the other hand, springs out of indigenous folkloric and popular tale traditions of the British Isles.

This is a beautiful book — sharp, funny, tender, and bizarre — but scarcely well-known, forgotten amongst a plethora of Victorian fairytale literature. But amidst the depth of a dusty box in the Museum of Childhood’s archive it surfaced one day. With a pale ivory background, text and image in what might best be termed a ‘rusty’ or garnet-coloured ink, and marginal embellishments at the top and foot of each page in neo-Celtic design, Paton’s book was designed to have an ‘antique’ feel even then. Read in an afternoon, it convinced us that Mona Margaret Noel Paton deserves her own place in the history of Scottish children’s literature.

Here, then, is a little taste of how she reimagines such two ‘very old’ fairy tales…. Continue reading →

The beauty of pawprint tracking: c19th nature books for children

Posted on June 2, 2017 by Sarah Dunnigan

One recent box-unpacking afternoon led Niamh to discover the Museum’s extensive collection of nineteenth-century naturalist writing for children. Here, she reflects on the beauty and vibrancy of these books which encouraged their child readers to be keenly alert to, and understanding of, nature’s wonder and diversity. Something more than ever worth being reminded of, given the fragility of our own world – and all our connections to, and within, it.

Just the other day, while rummaging around the boxes deep in the bowels of the City Chambers, I came across some books on wildlife. Their covers were far from all-singing, all- dancing but I am a real sucker when it comes to things that seem all too neglected.

The Museum’s copy of a volume by Eliza Brightwen, published in 1897; the self-taught Aberdeenshire-born naturalist illustrated her own writing

J.A. Atkinson's *British Birds, Eggs, and Nests* (1861)

John Christopher Atkinson’s *British Birds, Eggs, and Nests* (1861); both naturalist and children’s writer, he was also fascinated by the local legends, lore, and dialects of his Yorkshire parish

On opening one of them, I was rewarded for my taking pity; this volume had been awarded as a prize for Physics. The choice of books awarded for scholastic achievement is often very indicative of the values that Victorian schools, and thus that society, held dear. Natural History occupied a very privileged place in the education of that group. It was a discipline that ‘fascinated the Victorians … [it] was a fashionable activity and significantly participated in the construction of a bourgeois ethic’ and for the Victorians was key to exploring ‘ways in which … literary tales are informed with natural historical knowledge’ (Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, Fairy Tales, Natural History, and Victorian Culture [2014], pp. 1, 3). This branch of learning, once rather mainstream, has dwindled; it is now a discipline largely reserved to those who have chosen this aspect of science.

William Wright of George Heriot’s school, Edinburgh, was awarded Brightwen’s book in 1893 for coming second in his Physics class

It seems, to me, more and more important that we look back, not in a nostalgic misty-eyed way, but in a spirit of reassessment of our current situation, in order to live better, that is to say truly to live. Slowly, slowly, as a species, we are letting technology exert more and more influence over our day to day existence. This is not wholly lamentable but it does strike me that there is need to take stock. A people glued to social media may be more informed about certain things but they will miss out on the beauty of life all around them. Surely, a world viewed in the raw and unprocessed is one that is much more beautiful than one subjected to the filters and tints of technology because it is all the more real.

Tracking paw-prints! c19th naturalist writing taught children to be keen readers of the visible life within their landscapes

This post written by Niamh

Chapbooks for Children: the missing link in the history of Scottish children’s literature?

Posted on April 21, 2017 by Sarah Dunnigan

‘The Entertaining and Instructive History of Little Jack’. Courtesy of GUL Special Collections

Children’s literature has a long history of being ‘entertaining and instructing’. I’ve taken this week’s blog title from a specific chapbook: The Entertaining and Instructing History of Little Jack. This copy belongs to Glasgow University Library’s Special Collections, and I am very grateful for their permission to include some images from their Scottish children’s chapbooks here.

The story of Aladdin was a favourite amongst Scottish chapbook makers! Courtesy of GUL Special Collections.

I first came across children’s chapbooks myself while working alongside David Hopkin, on chapbooks and broadsides for adults. As part of a teaching project, we digitised two hundred items from the David Murray collection: http://www.gla.ac.uk/0t4/~dumfries/files/layer2/glasgow_broadside_ballads/. I noticed one or two titles which might appeal to children—a version of ‘Cinderella’, for instance, as ‘Catskin’, and mentions of pieces such as ‘Aladdin, or the Magical Lamp’.

Continue reading →

Introducing Katie Forrester, our artist-in-residence!

Posted on March 24, 2017 by Danielle Howarth

This special blog post has been written by our new artist-in-residence, Katie Forrester. Katie is a PhD research student of Illustration at Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland, UK. You can find her blog, ‘Katie’s Illustration’, here.

Scotland’s Early Literature for Children Initiative (SELCIE) is an organisation which aims to rediscover Scotland’s heritage of publishing for children. Founding member, Sarah Dunnigan, kindly invited me to have a look in the Museum of Childhood archives held at the City Chambers, which I have been planning to do for a while and finally got the chance! In the basement, there is a room full of boxes which Sarah and her team have catalogued and another room with older books and chap books dating back to the seventeenth century.

The collection provides a historical context to my research project on cultural diversity in picture books made for children. In the archives, I am looking for clues of what ideologies may be included in children’s literature and how this may have changed over time. One of the books that caught my eye was a binding of Hungarian folk tales, which has a cornflower blue cover printed with yellow, green and red folk-style decorations (there is a picture below). It has a very orientalist (in the pejorative sense) preface written by Leo Sarkadi: “During all these centuries they [Hungarians] were the key to Europe, and as such often a mighty stronghold that held the wild eastern hordes at bay” (Pogany, 1913). At the time of publishing if this book, expanding empires were striving for cultural domination, which may be why Sarkadi describes these nations derogatorily and collectively as ‘eastern hordes’.

Cover to The Hungarian Fairy Book, by Nandor and Willy Pogany

Clues to a propaganda against non-western civilisations- such as the Ottoman Empire – were evident in literature as can be deduced from this excerpt. It reveals a glaring example of western hegemony embedded through the subversive power of literature. The characters illustrated by Pogany allude to charming tales told by wholesome and well-meaning storytellers such as the sketch I made below of a Hungarian woman below who is carrying baskets as if after a harvest – a familiar and modest role. However, the preface suggests the agenda of the book may not be as apolitical as it seems, instead it suggests certain cultures are of higher value than others, as well as that a conformist nature is a virtuous trait.

My sketch of a Hungarian lady (maybe the source of the original stories?) who ornaments the end of some of the folk tales printed in ‘The Hungarian Fairy-Book’ by Nandor Pogany and illustrated by Willy Pogany

I also found an edition of Goblin Market (1893) by Christina Rossetti and illustrated by Laurence Housman with very intricate and spindly art-deco styled illustrations.The Goblin Market is a poem about two sisters, one of whom is seduced by the fruit of the goblins, and how they manage to overcome their ill-fate with sisterly care. I copied the typography on the front and a little goblin-like creature that seems to be hunched up in the heart of a chestnut:

My sketch of the typography and a goblin on the cover and front page of ‘The Goblin Market’ by Rossetti and illustrated by Housman (1893)

The illustrations by Housman are very decorative and, like the poem, heavy with symbolism and visual meaning. Christina Rossetti and Laurence Housman were both part of the Pre-Raphaelite movement which reacted against realism by revivifying medieval ideas of chivalry and romance, drawing heavily on archetypal imagery common in folktale and medieval romances (Roe, [online]). Archetypal imagery, or motif, is a subject I am particularly interested in as it tends form links between tales originating in disparate places (Propp, 1990 [1968]). For this reason, I use storytelling motifs to make illustration with the aim to create intercultural picture books. The SELCIE project allows me the opportunity to see how former illustrators have used symbol and engineered it to carry cultural meaning, which allows me in turn to question what ideological issues arise from my own work.

The binding for The ‘Goblin Market’ designed by Housman

References

Images:

Figure 1: Laurence Housman’s cover design of The Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti (1983) [online] http://www.victorianweb.org/art/design/books/cooke8.html Accessed 17/03/2017

Figure 2: My sketch of a Hungarian woman (possibly harvesting, perhaps the storyteller).

Figure 3: My sketch of Housman’s typography and illustration for The Goblin Market by Rossetti.

Figure 4: Cooke, Simon (2014) Laurence Housman as a book binding [online]
designer http://www.victorianweb.org/art/design/books/cooke8.html

Text:

Pogany, Nandor and illustrated by Willy Pogany (1913) The Hungarian Fairy-Book
London: T. Fisher Unwin

Propp, Vladimir (1990 [1968]) The Morphology of the Folktale USA: University of Texas Press

Roe, Dinah The Pre-Raphaelites [online] https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/the-pre-raphaelites Accessed: 17/03/2017

Rossetti, Christina and illustrated by Laurence Housman (1893) Goblin Market London:Macmillan

Said, Edward (2001, [1978]) Orientalism UK: Penguin

http://www.edinburghmuseums.org.uk/Venues/Museum-of-Childhood

Tales from Catland

Posted on February 24, 2017 by CHSS Web Team

The treasure that emerged from today’s investigations of the Museum of Childhood book collection was a small red book with gold writing tooled on its binding announcing that it contained Tales from Catland. While kittens and cats are currently the most popular posts on the internet and social media, this popularity is not a new phenomenon. During the Victorian era cats were very popular as the subject of books, cards, paintings and even stuffed and displayed in cases with humanistic poses.

Christmas card with festive cats and mice

A Christmas card from the Museum of Childhood collections c.1860-70

Inside the small red covers is a dedication to ‘Eliza Hewat from her affectionate Uncle Alexander 1851’. The Victorians were, of course, very enthusiastic celebrants of Christmas and the custom of giving children presents for Christmas really took off at this time. Many of our festive traditions today are rooted in how the Victorians celebrated, especially after Queen Victoria and Prince Albert appeared in an engraving celebrating Christmas at Windsor around a tree adorned with gifts at Windsor published in 1848 in the Illustrated London News.

Continue reading →

Lions and tigers and unicorns?

Posted on January 13, 2017 by Danielle Howarth

Happy New Year! We thought we would start off 2017 with a closer look at this 1759 edition of A Description of Three Hundred Animals. We were very excited to find this lovely book on a trip to the Museum of Childhood’s stores late last year. Alongside the descriptions it features some amazing illustrated animals.

A Description of Three Hundred Animals, 1759

Many of the animals are quite charming, like this duck and his friends:

illustrated animals (duck)

There are also some strange ones, such as this chameleon that looks like a monkey:

Illustrated animals (cameleon)

Even stranger is the elephant with human toes:

Illustrated animals (Elephant)

Our hands-down favourite, however, had to be ‘an unicorn’, which is featured right at the start of the book, alongside the rhinoceros!

Illustrated animals (unicorn)

We find a lot of nineteenth-century treasures in the stores, and have found some eighteenth-century gems in the past as well. However, this one will remain a firm favourite. Nothing beats finding an unicorn!

This post written by Danielle

Scotland's Early Literature for Children Initiative

Category Archives: illustrated books