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There are many precursor texts to the Victorian picturebook. Comenius’s pictorial encyclopedia Orbis Sensualium Pictus (1658) is sometimes called the first picturebook for children. In the eighteenth century, harlequinade lift-the-flap books offered integrated interactions between words and pictures (Figure 4.1; see Reid-Walsh 2017). From 1801 onwards, John Harris’s adaptations of the then-dominant form of illustrated literature – the chapbook or popular pamphlet of folktales, ballads, etc. – for children foreshadow favorite subjects for the picturebook, such as nursery rhymes, and favorite gestures, such as the soliciting of young readers’ participation, as in a frontispiece illustrating the opening line of The Butterfly’s Ball: “Come take up your hats & away let us haste” (Figure 4.2; see Moon 1992; Schiller 1973). Around the time of Victoria’s coronation, Felix Summerly (Henry Cole) sought “to place good pictures before my own and other children” in his Home Treasury (quoted in Summerfield 1980, p. 48). The success of this project is visible in dynamic illustrations from the series, such as Jack dangling from the beanstalk (Figure 4.3). Nonetheless, not all of these works are children’s picturebooks proper. They may be variably aimed at adults as well as children. They may have too many words and too few pictures. Moreover, their high quality may contrast with many of the colored toy books – toy book is the Victorian synonym for picturebook – which would follow (Masaki 2006).

Figure 4.1 The harlequinade is one precursor to the Victorian picturebook. Source: Queen Mab 1771, n.p. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.

Figure 4.2 Children are invited into the book. Source: Roscoe (1808), frontispiece. The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

Figure 4.3 Jack evades the giant’s grasp in the Home Treasury. Source: Summerly 1845, n.p. Children’s Book Collection, CBC PZ6 .C674tr 1845, Young Research Library, University of California, Berkeley.

By contrast, in the 1840s, the picturebook’s burgeoning status is clear from a single text: Heinrich Hoffmann’s Lustige Geschichten und drollige Bilder (Merry Stories and Funny Pictures), later known as Der Struwwelpeter (Shock-headed Peter). This immensely popular work, first published in Germany in 1845, had been translated into English by 1848 as The English Struwwelpeter (Brown and Jones 2013). While critics often focus on Hoffmann’s moralism – ironic or otherwise – the book’s alternate importance lies in its design and synthesis of word and image (Metcalf 1996). Alderson (1986) points out the varied uses of the page across the volume, which configure narrative illustrations in many different ways. Illustrations bisect the text, march above it, and appear in sequential rows that evoke the comic book (Figure 4.4). The Struwwelpeter phenomenon is also significant because it shows the nineteenth-century picturebook as an object circulating between multiple countries. One of the best-loved Victorian picturebooks – a pattern for what was to follow – was a German import that demonstrates the form’s transnational character.

Figure 4.4 Flying Robert being swept into the air. Source: Hoffmann [between 1850 and 1852], p. 24. Bryn Mawr College Libraries, PA.

The popularity of The English Struwwelpeter led to the publication of numerous other picturebooks, sometimes advertised as uniform with it in size (Alderson 1986). Where these works are concerned, it is illuminating to look at particular publishers as well as particular author–illustrators, because publishers played a substantial role in producing and popularizing picturebooks (cf. Alderson 2009; Paul 2011). Tomoko Masaki (2006) has presented a meticulous account of every toy book produced by George Routledge and Co. from the 1850s onwards. These proliferating series began with Aunt Mavor’s Picture Books for Little Readers in 1852. The eleventh title in the 14-book series, Uncle Nimrod’s Third Visit, is indicative of the format. On each illustrated page, fairly extensive passages of text accompany hand-colored images (Figure 4.5). The framing conceit is a visit to the Great Exhibition of 1851, so the illustrations present a miscellany – elephants and chess boards, fine china and bells – as does the text, which gives “facts” about different nations: “Spain is an idle country, I am sorry to say” (Uncle Nimrod [1852], p. 7). Including this series, which comprised multiple titles about the Great Exhibition as well as alphabet books, Aesopica, and original animal stories, Routledge published some five hundred toy books between 1852 and 1892. Other important bibliographies chart the picturebooks and associated educational toys produced by the publishing firms associated with the Darton family (Darton 2005; Shefrin 2009). While the Dartons began to publish in the late eighteenth century, they were active into the 1870s. There is yet further work to be done in considering producers whose picturebooks present an almost befuddling variety, such as Dean and Son, the prolific publishing house most famous for novelty and movable picturebooks.

Figure 4.5 A basketwork elephant from India at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Source: Uncle Nimrod’s Third Visit [1852], pp. 3–4. Courtesy of Toronto Public Library.

Masaki’s work discusses, but emphatically does not center, three prominent picturebook illustrators active in the mid-Victorian period: Caldecott, Walter Crane, and Greenaway. These creators were integral to the development of the toy book, as most canonical historical accounts insist (see, e.g., Darton 1982; Muir 1954), and all three worked with Routledge. Of the group, Caldecott – whose work I discuss substantially in the next section – is usually acknowledged as the superior picturebook auteur. Caldecott was born in 1846 and began to work full time as an illustrator in his mid-twenties, escaping the financial career that his father had wished him to pursue. His illustrations appeared across popular periodicals including the Graphic and the Illustrated London News, popular novels such as a new edition of Frank Mildmay (1829) by Captain Marryat, and popular publishing forms such as the gift book. From the 1870s onward, he worked predominantly on picturebooks. The Diverting History of John Gilpin and The House that Jack Built were published in 1878, and the later named series R. Caldecott’s Picture Books continued to appear until his premature death in 1886 – Caldecott’s last picturebooks were An Elegy on the Glory of Her Sex, Mrs. Mary Blaize and The Great Panjandrum Himself, both from 1885. Caldecott’s varied and humorous manipulation of the gap between words and pictures, use of negative space on the page, and economical draftsmanship – he famously described illustration as “the art of leaving out” (Caldecott quoted in Blackburn 1886, p. 126) – have endeared him to twentieth- and twenty-first century commentators. Alderson (1986) sees him as establishing a quintessentially English model of the picturebook in which line is more important than color. Sendak (1988) gives him pole position in the title of his collection of essays on children’s literature: Caldecott and Co. More recently, an acclaimed juvenile biography insists on his relevance to new generations of child readers (Marcus 2013).

Walter Crane preceded his friend Caldecott in producing toy books from the 1860s onwards. Writing at the end of the century, Crane echoed Cole’s earlier denunciation of the quality of illustrated children’s books at the time he began work: “These were generally careless and unimaginative wood-cuts, very casually colored by hand, dabs of pink and emerald green being laid on across faces and frocks with a somewhat reckless aim” ([1896], p. 156). (How Mathews, who worked as a child hand-colorer in the nineteenth century, did once confirm he could color a pair of legs in a single stroke; see Speaight 1969.) Contrasting with such “careless” output, Crane’s picturebooks were exquisite design objects that aimed at the child’s aesthetic education. This took place through elaborate book and page design, with painstaking attention to the grammar of ornament (Hutton 2010), as well as the inclusion of a range of approved aesthetic objects in the illustrations. For example, peacock feathers adorn a page opening in The Baby’s Own Æsop (1887) and elsewhere Beauty faces the Beast while holding a Japanese uchiwa fan (Figure 4.6). Crane attributed his use of “strong outlines, and flat tints and solid blacks” in his picturebook illustrations to a set of Japanese prints given to him by a friend ([1896], p. 156).

Figure 4.6 A sumptuous, aestheticized rendering of Beauty and the Beast. Source: Crane [1875], n.p. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.

Greenaway’s success as a picturebook creator was almost viral. She spawned imitators and garnered high-profile admirers such as John Ruskin (Hearn 1980; Lundin 1998). She earned £2,000 per book when it was rare to receive more than £200 (Muir 1954). Her picturebooks inspired a wealth of other objects, including greeting cards, calendars, wallpaper, ceramics, and children’s clothes. Unlike Crane and Caldecott, Greenaway wrote the whimsical texts for as well as illustrated her most famous picturebooks, which include Under the Window (1879) and Marigold Garden ([1885]). In later years, Greenaway’s depictions of cute, feminized children have been viewed as stultifying. For example, Carolyn Burke (1996) imagines the modernist poet Mina Loy oppressed by her Greenaway wallpaper: “The charming melancholy of the Greenaway girls … had a depressing effect over time” (p. 21). However, as Anne Lundin (1998) points out, Greenaway remained a high-profile artist throughout her 20-year career, despite the mainstream lack of interest in children’s literature at this time. Some of her page designs remain striking, too, as when Peggy and Susie defy their nostalgic Regency costumes to climb up the page in Marigold Garden (Figure 4.7).

Figure 4.7 Page for the rhyme “To Mystery Land.” Source: Greenaway [1885], p. 17. Te Puna Rakahau o Macmillan Brown/Macmillan Brown Library, Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha/University of Canterbury, Ōtautahi Christchurch.

The yoking-together of Caldecott, Crane, and Greenaway has drawn criticism (see Alderson 1990), and there are many differences between their picturebooks in terms of favored subjects, tone, and even artistic ability. However, as when Masaki (2006) focuses on Routledge or Lawrence Darton (2005) on the Dartons, this grouping has the advantage of emphasizing the impact of those involved in Victorian picturebooks beyond authors or illustrators. In the case of Caldecott and Co., Edmund Evans printed or published works by all three (Lundin 2001). Evans popularized color printing, usually working as a wood engraver and eventually supervising the output of multiple apprentices (Alderson 1986). His role was important enough to be noted in large letters on the title pages to many of the books he printed, and he commissioned works including Under the Window and Crane’s Baby’s Opera (1877). Evans is as much responsible for the development of the nineteenth-century picturebook as any author or illustrator – perhaps more so, given that he printed works by many creators. The uniting of Caldecott, Crane, and Greenaway in part reflects the fact that printing techniques, and Evans’s success as a color printer, were the “handmaidens” to the Victorian picturebook (McNair 1986–1987).

The form’s decline can also be linked back to printing techniques. A greater number of impressions could be made from lithographic stones than from woodblocks, and from mid-century, large chromolithographic printing works (often on the continent) produced substantial numbers of picturebooks. Take as an example the firm of Ernest Nister, established in 1877 in Nuremberg. Nister worked with a stable of illustrators and authors (some of them celebrated – E. Nesbit contributed to Nister titles) to produce picturebooks in English as well as in German. The firm later distributed these works in the United States through E.P. Dutton. Many Nister picturebooks took an anthology format, with contributions authored by multiple authors and with illustrations remixed and repurposed; the firm also became known for its movable books (Hunt and Hunt [2006]). Such working practices led to “pictures for the sake of pictures” (Alderson 1986, p. 101), mitigating against the careful attention to the relationship between word and image that is often viewed as the key ingredient in the best picturebooks. It is worth noting, nonetheless, that the period concludes with a return to form: the release of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit in 1901, the year Queen Victoria died. Potter’s picturebooks represent nineteenth-century mores while also looking forward to the twentieth century (Chandler 2007). Their cool and ironic narration, small size, and interest in the gap between words and pictures is a harbinger of what is to come but also a culmination of the great Victorian picturebook tradition – Potter was a keen admirer of Caldecott and Crane, for example.

There are many new directions of travel in the historical study of the picturebook. Robert Kirkpatrick (2019) has charted the period’s less-often discussed children’s illustrators, including some picturebook creators. The role of neglected picturebook genres has been recognized, as in Victoria Ford Smith’s (2015) article on the nineteenth-century painting book. Robin Bernstein (2011) examines how the material culture of childhood constructs and polices race, including substantial discussions of some nineteenth-century American picturebooks. Her ideas have spurred new scholarship on the intersections between picturebooks and toys (Bak 2020; Field 2019). These critical works present specifically nineteenth-century permutations of the interest in intermediality that important commentators such as Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer (2014) see as defining picturebook studies. Other new research has considered how Victorian picturebooks visualize race for their imagined white British child readers, with specific case studies of racist caricature in picturebooks by Lothar Meggendorfer (Brian 2014, 2017), on visualizations of the Great Exhibition for children (Lathey 2017), and on imperialism and ambiguity in the alphabet book (Norcia 2017). While there is still much to be done, these recent publications point to a flourishing field in which nineteenth-century picturebooks merit sustained attention.