Читать книгу A Companion to Children's Literature - Группа авторов - Страница 34

Hannah Field

The Victorian period marks the birth of the children’s picturebook as we know it, that is, the book in which “words are left out – but the picture says it. Pictures are left out – but the word says it” (Sendak 1988, p. 25). Indeed, two of the most major national awards for children’s illustration, the Caldecott Medal and the Kate Greenaway Medal, are named after Victorian illustrators.¹ Picturebooks from this period share many constitutive features with present-day examples of the form, including colorful images, the use of the page opening as a unit, and often comprehensive attention to book design (Masaki 2006). As such, they provide an excellent case study for how contemporary picturebook theory can be placed in dialogue with historical examples.

This chapter approaches this task in two sections, one providing a historical overview, the other a close reading. The first section summarizes key milestones in the period. I discuss canonical picturebook creators such as Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, briefly analyzing examples of their work, but also stress the importance of printers and publishers, which play roles of comparable importance to authors and illustrators as they influence how picturebooks meet their readers and which picturebooks are published at all. This zoomed-out treatment gives way in the second section to a sustained account of a succession of pictures by Caldecott, the period’s most illustrious figure. Caldecott’s “Baby Bunting” illustrations exhibit two aspects of the picturebook important to contemporary theory: the sequence and the gap. At the same time, I recognize the sui generis nature of these illustrations – their departure from many of the pictures in rival texts. I conclude the chapter with a brief survey of new initiatives that bring nineteenth-century picturebooks out of the special collections reading room and into the public purview.