Category Archives: Scottish writers

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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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.

 

 

“That Disturbing Element”: Angel-Mother As Mermaid in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan

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In this blogpost, Rosaleen Nolan shines a light into the darker corners of one of the most beloved nurseries in children’s literature…

 

“Wendy has not yet appeared, but she has been trying to come ever since that loyal nurse cast the humorous shadow of woman upon the scene and made us feel that it might be fun to let in a disturbing element” (Barrie Boy Castaways 84).

Despite a long and diverse career,[i] overwhelmingly the legacy of J.M. Barrie is inextricable from Peter Pan (1904). Primarily renowned for being the ‘troubled’ creator of this whimsical children’s drama, Barrie’s personal relationships even cast a shadow over his work. Yet possibly the only aspect of Peter Pan neglected by academic study is its presentation of ‘reality’. In the spaces of home enclosing this play, I will argue that Barrie exploits a cultural discourse prevalent throughout the long nineteenth-century, which positions the domestic world as an innately feminine space.

This gendered dichotomisation of the public (masculine) and private (feminine) spheres conveniently fits a late-Victorian/early-Edwardian narrative casting Barrie’s female characters as tragic, self-sacrificial heroines. Mrs Darling, Wendy and their daughters are seen to undergo a process of maturation that imposes a limit upon their worlds; their maternal and domestic instincts confine their ageing bodies to the nursery as, by way of contrast, Peter soars back to Neverland year after year. Yet, Roth surmises that; “despite the arguments put forth in almost every critical review and reading of the play . . . Peter Pan, [Barrie’s] most popular play and a hallmark of Edwardian boy-worship, begins and ends as the story of a little girl” (48; 52). Here, I argue that the Darling home is a space which simultaneously enshrines and deconstructs archetypes of femininity. A destabilising sub-narrative is threaded through the stage directions and non-verbal action of Barrie’s 1928 composite play-text; this alternative story offers a new perspective upon the conflicts, dangers and rebellions at work in that most sacred of domestic havens: the children’s nursery.

Flyleaf of *Peter Pan* edition, Museum of Childhood

A mid-c20th personalised copy of Barrie’s *Peter Pan* from the Museum archives


           They sat thus night after night recalling that fatal Friday, till every detail of it was stamped on their brains and came through on the other side like the faces on a bad coinage . . . They would sit there in the empty nursery, recalling fondly every smallest detail of that dreadful evening (Barrie Peter and Wendy 15).

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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)

Simon Sommerville Laurie: Edinburgh Educationist

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One of the more interesting recent finds from the Edinburgh Museum of Childhood’s book store is, perhaps surprisingly, a school book – The Sixth English Reading Book (fig. 1).

Figure 1

The book, which used to belong to Euphemia M. Millar, contains a timetable of various classes attended by the girl at school (fig. 2), as well as some cut out characters, objects and animals (fig. 3), possibly used as educational aids. All of this most wonderfully shows the owner’s use of the school book and suggests her interactive approach to learning.

Figure 2

Figure 3

Euphemia’s ownership, however, is not the only interesting story hidden within The Sixth English Reading Book. The book’s author, Simon S. Laurie, A.M., F.R.S.E., Professor of Theory, History, and Art of Education in the University of Edinburgh (fig. 4), may seem like one of many similar educational writers of the time, currently all but forgotten, if not entirely forgotten, but in his day he was an vigorous campaigner for various educational reforms.

Figure 4: Simon Somerville Laurie (1829–1909), by George Fiddes Watt, 1904
© reserved / courtesy of the University of Edinburgh’s Collections. See https://goo.gl/7tNH6B.

Edinburgh born and raised, Laurie eventually became secretary of the Church of Scotland’s education committee in 1855, and a year later a visitor and inspector in rural parish schools in the counties of Banff, Moray and Aberdeen. At the same time he began his writing career, which, along with his work as an inspector, made him Scotland’s leading expert on education by 1870, and in 1876 he was appointed to the university chair of education in Edinburgh.

Figure 5: 22 George Square – the house that used to belong to Simon S. Laurie. Currently University of Edinburgh School of Social and Political Science.

Perhaps through his work as an inspector, Laurie came to believe that teachers should be able to receive a university education, equal to other professions, such as doctors or lawyers, and he campaigned for it as the president of the Teachers’ Guild of Great Britain and Ireland (since 1891). As a secretary of the royal commission on Scottish endowed schools he worked towards the creation of a chain of secondary schools, and his project partially succeeded in 1878, with the newly-passed legislation. He also proposed a reform of educational ‘hospitals’, where a limited number of children could be enrolled on a charitable basis, which later influenced the foundation of large day schools. Last, but not least, in the 1860s, Laurie advocated the creation of higher education courses for Edinburgh women.

All of the above presents a portrait of a man thoroughly engaged in the betterment of both Scottish and national education system, who understood the importance of providing teachers with the best possible education, and the importance of higher education for all, including women. It seems fitting that one of Simon S. Laurie’s books used to belong to a young woman, whose education might have benefited through the reforms he proposed, and the changes his campaigning influenced.

Simon S. Laurie’s grave at the Grange Cemetery, Edinburgh.

Bibliography 

Anderson, R. (2004-09-23). Laurie, Simon Somerville (1829–1909), educationist. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Retrieved Jan. 2018, from https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/34422.

You can see this copy of The Sixth English Reading Book in our Growing Up With Books exhibition, opening June 1st, 2018!

This post written by Joanna Witkowska

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

Muriel Spark, The Very Fine Clock (London, 1969)

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Only four months away from the centenary of Muriel Spark’s birth, SELCIE celebrates her little-known children’s novel.

Gerard Carruthers guides us through its thoughtful quirkiness, complete with illustrations by Edward Gorey…
Illustration from A Very Fine Clock

Less well-known than Muriel Spark, the writer of novels or the short-story writer, is Spark the poet, Spark the writer of drama. Least well-known of all is Spark the children’s writer: she produced only one short book for children in the late 1960s, The Very Fine Clock. The text has the feel of the 1960s film industry’s take on the Victorian or Edwardian period. Think, for instance, George Pal’s The Time Machine (1960) or Lionel Jeffries’s The Railway Children (1970) for the general vibe. It is a genteel, moral tale written for the clever eight year-old who can get his or her reading-head (and tongue) round names like ‘Professor Sturge Baldwin Parker’ or ‘Professor Maximilian Rosmini’. These are two of four professors who visit the home of the central protagonist, Ticky, every week to confer with the Swiss clock’s owner Professor John on a range of profound matters. Out of goodness and in appreciation of his precise time-keeping, the professors come up with a proposal for elevating Ticky’s status and out of goodness Ticky refuses. Indubitably, he is a very fine clock.

Illustration from A Very Fine Clock

With rather gorgeous black and white illustrations by Edward Gorey (1925-2000), which are sometimes intriguingly arch, The Very Fine Clock is to be savoured by thoughtful kids. The only real places the text is dated is in the stereotypical depiction of the kitchen clock who ‘always lets her tongue run away with her’ and of academic life where ‘Professor John goes off in the morning to sit all day in his professor’s chair at the university.’

Illustration from A Very Fine Clock

This post written by Gerard Carruthers, University of Glasgow

Gerard Carruthers FRSE is Francis Hutcheson Professor of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. He is one of the organisers of the Muriel Spark Centenary Symposium,  1st & 2nd February 2018, a joint venture between the National Library of Scotland and the University of Glasgow. 

 

Gerard Carruthers

Dùsgadh agus Mosgladh: Catrìona NicGhille-Bhàin Ghrannd, Dùsgadh na Féinne (1908) & Calum Mac Phàrlain, Am Mosgladh Mòr (1914-15)

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This post written by Dr Sìm Innes, Oilthigh Ghlaschu

[English translation follows below]

Is iomadh uair ri linn an Athbheothachaidh Cheiltich a chualas gun robh na Gàidheil, neo na h-Albannaich gu lèir, air dùsgadh, no an impis dùsgadh, air neo gun robh an t-àm aca dùsgadh. Thug Lachlann MacBheathain (1853-1931) òraid do Chomunn Gàidhlig Inbhir Nis ann an 1896 air an robh ‘The Mission of the Celt’. Bha MacBheathain, a thogadh ann an Cill Taraglain, na fhear-deasachaidh air a’ phàipear The Fifeshire Advertister. Bha e ri eadar-theangachadh agus sgrìobhadh na Gàidhlig cuideachd.[1] Na òraid, thòisich e le bhith a’ toirt sùil air eachdraidh an Athbheothachaidh is thuirt e:

The Gael suddenly awoke to the alarming fact that his native tongue, which more than anything else was the distinguishing mark of his tribe, was dying out before the tongue of the Southron. The thought touched his sensitive and melancholy nature as nothing else could…. Having now glanced over this heaving tide of new Celtic life which has overflowed the fields of literature, music, customs, and social progress, it remains for us to ask, What of the future? The Gael are awakening to consciousness, and as a man when he becomes conscious, first asks, What am I? Whence am I? What am I here for? So the Gael must ask, What are we? What are our capabilities? What is our destiny? … Well, now, we have looked at these three curents of our times – the rising tide of Celtic revival among ourselves, the flow of Celtic sentiment and ideas in English life and literature, and the stream of Celtic blood into city life – and we should now be in a position to guess what is the mission and destiny of the Celt. It is surely by infusion of ideas and transfusion of blood to leaven modern civilization with its own awakening spirit.[2]

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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.

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

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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…

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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 →