The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature Read online

  In Maurice Sendak’s Belloc-inspired Pierre (New York, 1962), parents fail to subdue their son’s stubbornness and leave him home alone, where a lion eats him. Once again, familial efforts at bribery – if Pierre behaves, he may fold the folding chair – appear pathetic; juvenile misbehaviour stems partly from faulty disciplinary strategies. Given the adult’s misjudgment of both child psychology and interests, the joys of acting up exceed those of docility. Yet if rules of decorum seem anachronistic, Sendak suggests slyly, it might be an amusing reversal of expectations to follow them. Cautionary parodies indict such rules as over-regulating childhood, inculcating a literary approach to the world divorced from children’s psychology and curiosity. Most unexpectedly, such tales invite child readers to read their pictures as leverage against their texts. While their texts insistently draw moral conclusions, their pictures potentially spring children from the didactic cage.

  Crane’s late-nineteenth-century nursery books impart a similarly critical perspective on traditional children’s literature. His One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (London, 1867) consists of ten stately, even static tableaux. Yet, cumulatively, they offer a faceted view of domestic life, contrasting servants’ utilitarian basement sleeping and work spaces with their employers’ lush upstairs quarters. Alongside such visual and social contrasts, the volume’s pictures juxtapose several households. Even where there seems continuity, viewers are actually shown different, differently angled rooms. Reprising the book’s title image, Crane’s culminating tableau shows a lady dishing up dinner, while a housemaid serves a young child. Surrounding these figures and utterly flattening the picture space is a large screen depicting ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’. Another scene shows a genteel family in their Arts and Crafts living room, viewed from an unusual angle, and emphasising an elaborate Japanese fire screen, whose picture presents its own complex perspectives (fig. 9). Such japonaiserie is key to Crane’s own experiments with perspective and angle. British Arts and Crafts households offer fascinating new angles of vision to the children growing up there; for them, Crane suggests, the world takes shape under the influence of alternative, Asian ways of seeing.

  Figure 9. Walter Crane, 1, 2, Buckle My Shoe. London: Routledge & Sons, 1867. ‘11, 12, ring the bell’.

  The breakthroughs in chromoxylography which enabled Crane’s and Caldecott’s masterpieces spurred the mass printing not only of inexpensive, multi-coloured picture books, but of a new range of paper toys, dolls and board-games. Cut out and assembled by nimble-fingered children, one single printed sheet might produce a fully populated cityscape, castle (with movable drawbridges) or farmhouse (with paper animals and trees for dioramic grouping around semi-attached outbuildings); several such sheets might produce an elaborate paper theatre, with proscenium arches, and multi-layered, differentiated on-stage and back-stage spaces.

  Two-dimensional printed pages, children learned, potentially produced complex three-dimensional ensembles. Following related construction principles, pioneering illustrator-designers from Meggendorfer to Tom Seidmann-Freud (Sigmund Freud’s niece) developed pop-up and other movable picture books. Apparently flat pages unfolded or unfurled to create semi-panoramic, multi-planed visions, even (in books incorporating volvelles or more complicated ‘dissolving pictures’) continually moving picture worlds. Such books implicitly ‘break the binding’.7 With their movable parts, their magical ability to add extra dimensions to two-dimensional viewing surfaces, they rupture children’s sense of a static, fixed picture plane, metaphorising books’ capacity to intervene in everyday life.

  Using very different means, the long tradition of children’s ‘novelty books’ and the many picture books shaped by avant-garde art movements reshape the frame and content of childhood vision. Novelty books frequently collapse distinctions between books’ form, content and angle of perception. Peter Newell’s The Hole Book (New York, 1908) follows a bullet through a series of tableaux; a neat hole is drilled through the middle of the cover, and every page. Newell’s The Slant Book (New York, 1910), printed on sharply slanted pages, follows the precipitate downhill race of a baby carriage, upsetting all in its path. Eighteenth-century ‘harlequinades’ – early movable books in which the lifting of flaps created new scenes – challenged readers to anticipate how the image would metamorphose. Newer tactile books grounded stories of animal and human life in digital sensations: the feel of sandpaper adorning the father’s stubbly cheek in Dorothy Kunhardt’s Pat the Bunny (New York, 1940), or of fur binding Margaret Wise Brown and Garth Williams’ Little Fur Family (New York, 1946).

  Other books play with purely visual questions of scale, perspective, vantage point and transparency. Beatrix Potter’s Tale of Two Bad Mice (London, 1904), Wanda Gág’s Snippy and Snappy (New York, 1931), Marjorie Flack’s Angus and the Cat (Garden City, NY, 1931) and William Nicholson’s Clever Bill (London, 1926) view the human world from the stance of mouse, dog or tin soldier, sometimes bending or refracting perspective in the process. Margaret Wise Brown’s Noisy Books (New York, 1939–47, illustrated by Leonard Weisgard and Charles R. Shaw, and published by experimental children’s publisher William R. Scott) decouple and synaesthetically recombine the senses, as a blindfolded dog hypothesises his environment (fig. 10). Colour washes in Alvin Tresselt and Roger Duvoisin’s Hide and Seek Fog (New York, 1965), or onionskin overlays in Bruno Munari’s Nella nebbia di Milano (Circus in the Fog, Milan, 1968), simulate fog’s visual opacity.

  Figure 10. Margaret Wise Brown. Illustrated by Leonard Weisgard, The Noisy Book. New York: Scott, 1939, p. 1. ‘Then he heard the little noises’.

  Many early-twentieth-century picture books reduce or compress the visual complexity of the modern world into new kinds of pictorial allegory or vocabulary. In Edward Steichen’s First Picture Book (New York, 1930), black-and-white photographs of everyday objects and scenes are stylised into exquisite, decontextualised icons; constructivist primers like El Lissitzsky’s Suprematicheskii skaz: pro dva kvadrata (A Suprematist Tale of Two Squares, Berlin, 1922) reduce complex political processes into instantly recognisable geometric shapes, legible to illiterates as to small children.

  In Orbis Pictus tableaux, and in many later alphabets and primers, the illustrations are in part determined by the arbitrary rigour of alphabetical order, and startling, even incongruous, groupings of objects rarely found together in real life can emerge. Angela Banner’s Ant and Bee (1950) provides a good example of the way in which adherence to alphabetic logic creates an unrealistic isolation of visual elements and peculiar narrative juxtapositions. Mid-century American picture books, in contrast, often explore their own ability to generate meaning. Margaret Wise Brown and Leonard Weisgard’s The Important Book (New York, 1949) insistently stylises objects into essences: a spoon means roundness. Posed as one long visual riddle, Charles G. Shaw’s It Looked Like Spilt Milk (New York, 1947) demonstrates (and implicitly questions) children’s propensity for reading the world – even natural phenomena like clouds – as shaped, representational, meaningful. Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon (New York, 1955) shows a picture-narrative coming into being out of nothing, as a child’s line-drawing, random, accidental or deliberate, shapes a narrative world – and just as easily unmakes or negates it.

  As Norman Brosterman has argued, the Froebel kindergarten’s craft-centred curriculum, encountered in early childhood, decisively shaped the lifework and aesthetic philosophy of generations of influential modernists, from Frank Lloyd Wright to Paul Klee. Only a few modernist art movements (most famously, Russian Constructivism in the service of the new Soviet state) self-consciously undertook children’s visual education. Yet a wide range of picture-book authors (and visionary publishers like William R. Scott) were unofficial promulgators of a gospel of modernism, using a wide range of tactics to inculcate in children a modernist vision of the world.

  Many picture books explore the conceptual, perspectival and representational issues raised by modernist art. Against the background of impressionist
, Fauvist and Expressionist colour experiments, master watercolourists (Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel in France, K. F. von Freyhold in Germany) explored colour’s utopian possibilities. Other artists extended William Morris’ revival of the illuminated manuscript, envisioning the illustrated book as a multi-layered artisanal object. Conrad Felixmüller’s self-referential dedication page to ABC: ein geschütteltes, geknütteltes Alphabet in Bildern (Nonsense ABC, Dresden, 1925) shows the Expressionist artist carving a wood block to print the book, while his children look on. Prinz Lennarts A.B.C.-bok (Stockholm, 1912) and Franz Keim and Carl Otto Czeschka’s Die Nibelungen (Vienna, 1909) evoke medieval illuminated manuscripts as prototypes for the stylisations of Art Nouveau and of the Wiener Werkstätte. (From 1903, the Viennese Workshops produced distinctive book, textile, furniture and craft designs.)

  Some picture books explicitly promulgated Art Nouveau, cubist or Constructivist frames of reference. Von Olfers’ anthropomorphised images appear encased in elaborate, stylised frames; W. W. Denslow’s lavish illustrations for L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Chicago, 1900) repeatedly overprint text with image; Ivan Bilibin illustrates Russian fairy tales with complex layerings of image and patterning frame.

  Many Art Nouveau children’s books confront viewers with layer upon layer of design and history. Later picture books refract their vision. Lois Lenski’s The Little Auto (New York, 1934) and Virginia Burton’s Choo Choo (Boston, 1937) adapt cubist and futurist techniques to show movement. In the tradition of Crane’s One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, Esphyr Slobodkina’s Constructivist illustrations for Louise Woodcock’s Hiding Places (New York, 1943) and Clement Hurd and Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon (New York, 1947) push children to a cubistically oriented study of their own surroundings. As its child protagonist searches a room, Hiding Places offers different cross-sections of the same space, successively ‘panning’ across the room, each tableau offering subtly different perspectives on the same scene. Goodnight Moon’s repetitive, overlapping scenarios of nightly farewell, likewise, are attended by subtle shifts in the illustrations’ perspective and content; repeat readers are challenged to memorise the lulling story while spotting differences of verbal and visual iteration.

  Like Caldecott’s and Crane’s nursery books, Goodnight Moon and its companion volumes, The Runaway Bunny (New York, 1942) and My World (New York, 1949), delight in self-referential and cross-referential games. The little rabbit in Goodnight Moon’s Great Green Room has Goodnight Moon on his bedside table. The Three Bears picture above his bed incorporates a tiny black-and-white version of the picture (Cow Jumping Over the Moon) that hangs on the next wall; a miniature black-and-white image from The Runaway Bunny decorates the facing wall. In a book preoccupied with restating, rereading and re-seeing, such devices not only promote cross-reading but open shafts into parallel literary worlds.

  If Orbis Pictus tableaux proffered apparently unproblematic ways of organising the world, these modernist books emphasise the partial, perspectival, self-generated nature of their views. Yet they are also careful to keep child readers anchored in time, place and domestic routine. Postmodern picture books, in contrast, take pleasure in disorienting child readers temporally, spatially, generically, culturally, metaphysically. Some picture books thus relativise their own narrative and visual worlds as vertiginous meta-fictions. The wordless, quasi-cinematic worlds of Istvan Banyai’s Zoom and Re-zoom (New York, 1995) or Barbara Lehmann’s The Red Book (Boston, 2004) involve startling shifts of scale; the constant, retroactive calling-into-question of each book’s previous pictures; mise en abîme or moebius-strip constructions which defy logical parsing in their use of recursion, infinite regress or the mutual imbrication of narrative levels. Many recent picture books reflect, at least implicitly, on the nature of literary history and the visual repertoire – and with them, the future of the book.

  Orbis Picti presented scenes full of objects which gained meaning from being collected and categorised together. Twentieth-century picture books recreated seamless, panoramic vision, their intricate, often wordless tableaux inviting detailed, immersive (re-)seeing. Recent novelty books, in contrast, use densely detailed pictures to pose visual scavenger hunts.8 Judith Cressy’s Can You Find It? series (New York, 2002– ), co-published by and featuring paintings from the Metropolitan Museum, frames such activity as a first step towards appreciating complex artworks. Yet such framings also deny the significance of aesthetics and form, reducing paintings to sheer information, didactically anchored in their wealth of details, yet significant only in aggregate.

  Other picture books offer principled challenges to literary and artistic authority, eager to empower child readers and vindicate juvenile taste. Reinventing the eighteenth-century epistolary novel, Allen and Janet Ahlberg’s The Jolly Postman: Or Other People’s Letters (London, 1986) foregrounds its letters’ materiality through bound-in envelopes which enclose detachable missives; these letters offer demystifying glimpses into the romantic and economic lives of familiar fairy tale characters. In Chris Van Allsburg’s Bad Day at Riverbend (Boston, 1995), the stylised, black-and-white world of the Western is unexpectedly infused with sci-fi emanations (as broken streaks of colour appear on the sky) and finally relativised completely; the initial picture-narrative proves to be a colouring book, that lowest form of picture book, now being coloured by avid children in the world above. Van Allsburg’s narrative offers unexpected homage to the crayon marks ‘decorating’ many copies of children’s books. Generally read by adults and librarians as a sign that children have ‘ruined’ their own books, these marks function here as supernatural manifestations (children are the unseen gods of the colouring-book and picture-book worlds), as signs of reception visible inside the text itself, and as children’s attempts to collaborate in the picture-making process, infusing creative colour into often lifeless narratives.

  In fact, the picture book has always had a close relationship to mass cultural forms of print culture. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century picture stories often imitated the format of popular chapbooks, and reflected the influence of satirical cartoonists like William Hogarth, James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson. As picture-narrative and proto-cartoon, Wilhelm Busch’s Max und Moritz (Munich, 1865) influenced both the story and graphic form of the longest-running American comic-strip, Rudolf Dirks’ The Katzenjammer Kids (begun 1897 and still in syndication), as well as early Walt Disney cartoons. Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (New York, 1963) and In the Night Kitchen (New York, 1970), conversely, jump off from the characteristic closing panels of Windsor McKay’s spectacular Little Nemo comic strips (USA, 1905–13, 1924–6), yet develop more assertive child protagonists and depict different, Freud-inflected dream work. And while children’s librarians long banned comic books from their precincts, picture-book illustrators as divergent as Dr Seuss, Edward Ardizzone and Raymond Briggs adopted various aspects of the cartoon format, from its line drawing and speech bubbles to its narrative blocking.

  Many recent picture books celebrate an increasing convergence with comic books, manga and graphic novels. Yet others refute the apparent impending obsolescence of the codex, by reviving ‘extinct’ forms of book illustration: if illuminating and wood-block printing proved fragile artistic and artisanal forms apparently doomed by Gutenberg’s development of movable type, they remain fascinating aesthetic and cultural objects, many centuries later.9 Still others aspire to disentangle the picture book altogether from the history of bookmaking, to align it instead with alternative picture-narrative and performance traditions: stained-glass windows in Brian Gleeson and Robert Van Nutt’s The Savior is Born (Westport, CT, 1992); Persian miniatures in Diane Stanley’s Fortune (New York, 1999); Japanese screen painting in Odds Bodkin and Gennady Spirin’s The Crane Wife (New York, 1998); Javanese shadow-puppets in David Weitzman’s Rama and Sita (Boston, 2002); early cinema in Avi and C. B. Mordan’s Silent Movie (New York, 2003). As a century before, with Walter Crane and Ivan Bilibin, such experiments with alt
ernative pictorial vocabularies announce both a newfound cultural and historical relativism and the attempt to revitalise indigenous picture-book traditions.

  In 2008, Brian Selznick’s 550-page picture novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret (New York, 2007) made headlines, as the first novel ever to win the Randolph Caldecott Medal for most distinguished American picture book. Selznick’s Invention both enacts and historicises the current sense of epochal medial shift: its plot centres on the interwar rediscovery of Georges Mélies’ pioneering trick films, yet its psychological intensity stems from pictorial spreads – many graphic zooms – depicting 1931 Paris in iconography indebted to nineteenth-century images by Edgar Degas, Vincent van Gogh, Gustave Caillebotte and Adolph Menzel. In this latest incarnation, at least, the picture book crosses painting, novel, comic book and film, inhabiting several media and temporalities at once.