The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature Read online

  Much of this survey has attempted to assert that the form in which authors’ works reach their readers is the result of activities of persons beyond the solitary figure crouched over the writing-desk or the keyboard. The rights of authors over their texts may be identified and asserted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, just as copyright protection in one form or another has subsisted since children’s books first appeared. But the composition of that text may owe something – much or little – to editorial control by the publisher, while the physical form in which it meets the reader’s eye (and hence engenders a distinct response) will owe almost everything to such features as paper, print, illustration or decoration, and binding, which are largely outside the author’s competence.

  It must also be borne in mind that, within periods of copyright, or in places where copyright has not been asserted or recognised, or where copyright has lapsed, many transmogrifications of text may occur. The Tale of Peter Rabbit again supplies a telling example. Beatrix Potter was a shrewd businesswoman and, quite early on in her authorial life, she realised that the popularity of her creations could lead to their exploitation outside the limits of her own authorisation, and in consequence she was at pains to extend her, and her publisher’s, control of such varied products as dolls, wallpaper friezes and ceramic ware. Indeed, it may well be that the successful merchandising of Potteriana provided a model for other copyright holders of popular children’s book characters who have mightily extended the procedure since the 1980s.14 But it does not end there. For, owing to what proved to be a culpable oversight, Frederick Warne failed to copyright Peter Rabbit in the United States when it was first published. As a result it has been open-season on that book for over a century in that country and nothing could be done to prevent all manner of abridgments, retellings and re-illustration of the original text, including its featuring in school textbooks, miscellaneous compendia, and as a pop-up book. (At almost the same date, the publisher Grant Richards failed to protect his own copyright in Helen Bannerman’s Story of Little Black Sambo (1899). The mass publication in the United States of editions with illustrations by other artists, with images more blatantly racist than Bannerman’s, was a critical factor in the opprobrium which the book met with from the 1960s onwards.15)

  Even where copyright control of a text is maintained, adjustments to both text and production values can be made – a factor again especially noticeable in the passage of texts in one direction or another across the Atlantic. The quality and character of book-papers, bindings and dust jackets will differ. Editors may require changes to spelling, to word-usage or even to the substance of a narrative to meet the different social or educational circumstances of their own market. More often, and more immediately observable, will be the commissioning of new illustrations for the same text.

  Books that publishers failed to copyright, or that have survived their period of copyright, become aligned with the works that could never have had such protection: the literature of tradition. Nursery rhymes, with whatever minor alterations, tend to be sacrosanct in their formal patterning (unless adapted for religious, political or advertising purposes); folktales though – existing as recognised clusters of types and motifs – may have a universal presence, but particular formulations or translations of them may well belong to, or be associated with, particular editors, translators and illustrators. In consequence there has developed a barely analysable range of variant treatments which come to be equally applied to the lengthier texts of ‘children’s classics’, those works which have left the territorial waters of copyright protection and, like folktales, are common property for whatever trawlermen or buccaneers they may encounter.

  Few authors offer themselves up as examples more obligingly than the hapless Hans Christian Andersen, who is often wrongly thought of as a purveyor of traditional folktales rather than – as is actually the case – works whose conception is entirely original. From the moment when his ‘eventyr’ first began to appear in English, in January 1846, he has suffered every possible indignity at the hands of the bookmakers. Only rarely was there any formal agreement with him in Britain or the United States over the publication of his stories. No-one, until as late as 1893, was concerned to assess the accuracy with which his storytelling voice was replicated (the tales were often translated from unsatisfactory German editions). Distortions and abridgments abounded. Indeed, the very first translation, Mary Howitt’s Wonderful Stories for Children (1846), included only an excerpt from ‘The Flying Trunk’ which was offered without explanation as ‘A Night in the Kitchen’. Almost every form of publication for varying quantities of tales was adopted: magazine publication, picture books, illustrated and unillustrated selections and attempts at ‘complete works’, broadsheet issues, versifications and all kinds of movable book.16

  The regularity and frequency with which such changes occur in the presentation of an author’s and/or an illustrator’s work suggest a central role for analytical bibliography in the study of children’s literature, harnessing that seemingly dusty subject to the critical process. If it is arguable that the reader – child or adult – responds not to an author’s unmediated creation but to ‘the word made flesh’ as a physical package, then the variant forms that that package may take will affect the response. In what ways will a reader’s view of Peter Rabbit, or the Tailor of Gloucester, or Pigling Bland, be affected by the form and the illustrations through which they meet the text? But there then arise wider and more delicate comparative issues: what treatment of the text comes closest to meeting critical demands for ‘an ideal copy’, the one which has most to offer the reader? Arguments to and fro may not be unduly onerous where Peter Rabbit is concerned but they take on an almost insurmountable – but ultimately fruitful – complexity in an analysis of, say, Hans Christian Andersen translations.

  The fruitfulness in that and many other instances lies in the stimulus given to critical thought through comparative arguments, which demand a close consideration of texts and their implications. Over the historic span of the making of children’s books one cannot help but glory in the evolution of production techniques and in the fluctuating success and ingenuity which has attended their application. On the very day that these words are written, the business commentary of The Times leads with an article on ‘the slow death of the book’, strangled by the digits of electronic publishing. Seemingly authoritative speculation is mounted on the likely transference of all texts to hand-held (and apparently single-format) screens.17 No doubt the words being floated across the ether will still be formatted in both familiar and new ways by editors and designers. No doubt technological change will continue to be an overriding factor in the way that readers receive and respond to text – the making of texts will remain a collaboration between composers and technicians, between those who imagine the text into being, and those who materialise it into readers’ hands. It remains to be seen, though, whether this new technology will encourage, or stifle, the wild diversity that has for centuries attended and illuminated the making of that three-dimensional artefact, the printed book.

  Notes

  1. For fuller accounts, see Leslie Linder, A History of the Writings of Beatrix Potter Including Unpublished Work (London: Frederick Warne & Co., 1971), pp. 92–110, and Judy Taylor, That Naughty Rabbit; Beatrix Potter and Peter Rabbit (London: Frederick Warne & Co., 1987).

  2. [Richard Johnson], The Oriental Moralist or the Beauties of the Arabian Nights Entertainments (London: E. Newbery, n.d.), pp. [i–ii].

  3. The guidelines are repeated in Sexism in Children’s Books: Facts, Figures and Guidelines (London: Writers and Readers Cooperative, 1976), pp. 45–56.

  4. Relevant sections of Johnson’s ‘day-books’ are transcribed in M. J. P. Weedon, ‘Richard Johnson and the Successors to John Newbery’, The Library, 5th series, 4 (1949), 25–63.

  5. Morton N. Cohen and Anita Gandolfo (eds.), Lewis Carroll and the House of Macmillan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
r />   6. Brian Alderson, Ezra Jack Keats: Artist and Picture-Book Maker (2 vols., Gretna, AL: Pelican Publishing Company, 1994 and 2002).

  7. For more detailed analysis, see Tomoko Masaki, A History of Victorian Popular Picture Books: The Aesthetic, Creative, and Technological Aspects of the Toy Book Through the Publications of the Firm of Routledge 1852–1893 (2 vols., Tokyo: Kazamashobo, 2006).

  8. For more on the significance of book jackets (too often neglected), see Alan Powers, Front Cover: Great Book Jacket and Cover Design (London: Mitchell Beazley, 2001), and Children’s Book Covers (London: Mitchell Beazley, 2003).

  9. See Jacqueline Reid-Walsh, ‘Eighteenth-Century Flap Books for Children: Allegorical Metamorphosis and Spectacular Transformation’, Princeton University Library Chronicle, 67 (2007), 751–89.

  10. Lawrence Darton, The Dartons: An Annotated Check-List (London: British Library, 2004), p. 334 (H93e).

  11. See Peter Haining, Movable Books (London: New English Library, 1979), and Julia and Frederick Hunt, Peeps into Nisterland (Chester: Casmelda Publishing, n.d. [2006]), pp. 291–344.

  12. See Kathleen Hale’s A Slender Reputation (London: Frederick Warne, 1994), pp. 211–14, for an account of her experiences with colour lithography.

  13. The Reminiscences of Edmund Evans, ed. Ruari McLean (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 56.

  14. See Brian Alderson, ‘“All the little side-shows”, Beatrix Potter among the Tradesmen’, in ‘So I Shall Tell You a Story. . .’: Encounters With Beatrix Potter, ed. Judy Taylor (London: Frederick Warne, 1993), pp. 154–67. Also Elizabeth Booth and Deborah Hayes, ‘Authoring the Brand: Literary Licensing’, Young Consumers, 7 (2005), 43–53.

  15. See Elizabeth Hay, Sambo Sahib: The Story of Little Black Sambo and Helen Bannerman (Edinburgh: Paul Harris, 1981), pp. 25–8.

  16. See Brian Alderson, Hans Christian Andersen and his Eventyr in England (Wormley: Five Owls Press, 1982).

  17. Antonia Senior, ‘Publishers are Braced for the Slow Death of the Book’, The Times, 13 February 2008, on-line at http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/columnists/article3359899.ece (accessed 25 February 2008).

  4 Picture-book worlds and ways of seeing

  Katie Trumpener

  The world in images

  When adults look back on their lives, Virginia Woolf argues in The Waves (1931), they ‘turn over these scenes as children turn over the pages of a picture-book’.1 Memories of childhood may become indelibly linked to early memories – visual, tactile, spatial – of reading picture books, whose ‘picture worlds’ may permanently shape readers’ worldview. Since the Enlightenment, illustrated books have aimed to teach children how to read, apprehend and make sense of the world. This chapter describes how an emerging picture-book tradition developed particular visual conventions, working both to initiate children into this tradition and to push them into autonomous seeing.

  Precisely because of its ambitions to represent the world itself, the picture book frequently understands itself as a Gesamtkunstwerk (a work integrating multiple art forms and appealing to multiple senses), and hence reflecting more general trends in visual, literary and intellectual culture. Unlike other forms of children’s literature, the picture book makes meaning largely through its visual format, the way its images relate to one another, to the verbal text, and to the space on (and physical layout of) the page. This chapter, accordingly, traces the history of several influential and enduring picture-book formats.

  In the seventeenth century, Moravian pastor/educator Jan Komensky (who published under the Germanicised and Latinised name of Johann Amos Comenius) developed a highly influential pedagogy through viewing. An advocate of universal education, Comenius believed aspiring learners needed to ascertain objects with their senses – particularly sight – before grasping them in words. His Orbis sensualium pictus (Nuremberg, 1658, translated as Visible World, or Picture and Nomenclature of all the chief things in the world, 1659) and the many ‘Orbis Pictus’ books it spawned demonstrated the world’s visual and species diversity in the form of educational tableaux, while fostering scientific methods of observing, classifying and recording (fig. 7). Nineteenth- and twentieth-century picture-book formats widened to incorporate elements from the naturalist’s sketchbook and from the panorama. Meanwhile, parodic cautionary tales began inviting children to savour the complexity and ambiguity of the image itself. And a wide range of experimental picture books (some influenced directly by various forms of visual modernism) worked to forge their own iconic systems or inculcate their own methods of parsing and making sense, their own ways of seeing.

  Figure 7. Johann Amos Comenius, Orbis sensualium pictus . . . Visible World, or Picture and Nomenclature of all the chief things in the world. London: J. Kirton, 1659, CXX ‘Societas parentalis’.

  Even more than other forms of children’s literature, the picture book is cosmopolitan in both its developmental history and its intended address. Because their appeal is partly non-verbal, picture books have frequently crossed, even challenged, linguistic and cultural barriers. Comenius’ Orbis sensualium pictus was bilingual, helping German-speaking children learn Latin (still Europe’s scholarly lingua franca). Pictures themselves functioned here as a universal language which could help students bridge linguistic divides, and align otherwise disparate language systems – a belief vindicated by Orbis’ rapid translation into English and many additional vernaculars, even as its picture dictionary format was adapted to teach other technical and specialised vocabularies. Forerunners of Denis Diderot’s illustrated Encyclopédie (Paris, 1751–77), Orbis Pictus books reflected a humanist belief in the transparency of language and universality of human experience; they remained widely popular throughout eighteenth- and nineteenth- century Europe, especially in Central Europe.2

  Key nineteenth- and early twentieth-century picture books were also distributed and translated internationally. Heinrich Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter (Frankfurt, 1845), for instance, was rapidly translated into English, generating many local spin-offs and topical parodies; picture books by Kate Greenaway, Walter Crane, Palmer Cox and Beatrix Potter (and Richard Felton Outcault’s Buster Brown cartoons) were rapidly translated into French. Thanks partly to such stimuli, distinctive picture-book traditions emerged in several parts of Europe, in many cases spearheaded by masterful renderings of foundational national tales, poems or legends: in England, Walter Crane and Randolph Caldecott’s picture-book versions of traditional nursery rhymes; in France, Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel’s hagiographic Jeanne d’Arc (Paris, 1896); in Russia, Ivan Bilibin’s renderings of Alexander Pushkin’s fairy tales and traditional folktales. Yet Crane and Bilibin’s illustrations often show strong influences from Japanese, Persian and Arabic art, an apparently nationalist choice of text thus offset by self-consciously cosmopolitan illustrations. Even outspoken French nationalist ‘L’oncle Hansi’ (Jean-Jacques Waltz), prosecuted by German authorities in 1913 for his picture books about the contested province of Alsace, derived his anti-German caricatures from Germany’s premier satirical journal, Simplicissimus.

  Early twentieth-century picture books frequently drew on the visual innovations – and shared the internationalism – of the modernist avant-gardes. Émigré artists facilitated this cross-pollination. Emigrants from the Soviet Union – most notably Alexandra Exter, Nathalie Parain and Feodor Rojankovsky – played a critical role in the resurgence of French picture book art in Paris during the 1930s, as well as in Germany.3 In the mid-twentieth-century United States, too, the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of picture books was shaped substantially by immigrant artists – including Rojankovsky, Roger Duvoisin, Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire, Ludwig Bemelmans, Miska Petersham and Tibor Gergely – from many parts of Europe, as by self-consciously ‘ethnic’ artists like Wanda Gág (raised in a German-Bohemian immigrant enclave in rural Minnesota).

  Some artists were immigrants several times over, their style reflecting international training and publishing careers. Siberian-born Esph
yr Slobodkina emigrated with her family to China during the Russian Revolution; moving to the United States in 1929, she worked as an abstract painter and published picture books, including many Margaret Wise Brown stories, and her own Caps for Sale (New York, 1940). Alexandra Exter studied art in Kiev and Paris, and lived in Petersburg, Odessa, Rome and Moscow; settling in Paris in 1924, she retained close ties to revolutionary Soviet Constructivists like Kazimir Malevich (and avant-garde Russian theatre and ballet) as to Picasso, Georges Braque and Fernand Léger. Jean Charlot was strongly shaped by Mexican modernism; son of a Russian émigré father and Mexican mother, he grew up in France, moved to Mexico City in 1921 (where he worked with revolutionary muralists like Diego Riviera), then, in the 1940s, to Hawai’i. Originally from Hamburg, German-Jewish émigré H. A. Rey lived successively in Rio de Janeiro, Paris (where Gallimard published his first picture books in the late 1930s) and New York (where he began publishing his Curious George series in 1940). Rey’s depictions of city life thus reflect not only American comics and movies, but also Berlin urbanism – Walter Trier’s illustrations for Erich Kästner’s Emil und die Detektive (Berlin, 1929) and 1930s French picture books by Jean de Brunhoff and Alexandra Exter.

  Their visual breadth made migrant and ethnic artists crucial to the American picture book. Growing up in Brooklyn, in a Polish-Jewish immigrant family, Maurice Sendak was steeped in comics and Anglo-American picture books, yet his own highly influential work manifests continuing preoccupation with Central European literary and visual traditions, encompassing Grimms’ fairy tales, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Yiddish fiction and Lothar Meggendorfer’s pop-up books. Post-war immigrants to the United States – including Peter Spier (who emigrated from Holland in the early 1950s), Peter Sís (who defected from Czechoslovakia in 1982) and Gennady Spirin (who emigrated from Russia in 1991) – continue to introduce novel perspectives. Sís’ recent work moves between recreating the lost visual world of Prague (The Three Golden Keys, New York, 2001), embracing the ethnic and visual diversity of his adoptive city, New York, and meditating on the long histories of global exploration and map-making. In such cases, émigrés’ international transits reinforce the picture book’s aspirations to create and show a world.