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The first part of this chapter surveyed the picturebook’s history in the Victorian period. This section, by contrast, dives deeply into a single picturebook sequence from the time in order to provide substantive and specific evidence of how these developments might appear to the reader. In considering the “Baby Bunting” illustrations from Caldecott’s “Hey Diddle Diddle” and “Baby Bunting” ([1882]), I respond to the important point that historical studies of the picturebook tend to treat pictures in isolation, thus ignoring the “specific sequential nature” of these works (Nikolajeva and Scott 2001, p. 3). This isolationist approach is partly practical, in that it is easier and cheaper to reproduce a single illustration and that it has been difficult to view images of many early picturebooks reliably. Focusing on single pictures may also demonstrate the importance exhibitions have had on the study of the early picturebook; the gallery mode of showing single pictures rather than sequences spills into the catalogs and books that accompany exhibitions (see Alderson 1986). Regardless, it is obvious that sequence is important to the picturebook and discussing one whole series can reveal the value and ingenuity of this period’s oeuvre.

At a basic level, Caldecott’s “Baby Bunting” shows the primacy of nursery rhymes in nineteenth-century picturebooks. This material was partly a reaction to the importance of religious and didactic subject matter in many earlier texts (Masaki 2006). Putting together “Baby Bunting” and “Hey Diddle Diddle” in one book reflects not just a miniaturization of the anthology mode but also the encouragement anthologies gave for picturebook creators to bring together different rhymes into one imagined pictorial universe: the title page shows Baby Bunting meeting the cat who plays the fiddle, while the nursery wallpaper behind the pair represents further characters from “Hey Diddle Diddle” (Figure 4.8).² Like the alphabet, the nursery rhyme can provide a loose structure for pictorial dilation. Thus, Caldecott breaks up the text as follows, with each of the following lines given a whole page:

Figure 4.8 Cover to “Hey Diddle Diddle.” Source: Caldecott [1882]. Baldwin Library of Children’s Historical Literature, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL.

Bye, Baby Bunting!

Father’s

gone

a-hunting,

Gone to fetch

a Rabbit-skin

To wrap the Baby Bunting in.

(Caldecott [1882], pp. 14–23)

In presenting only two rhymes, the volume also meets the picturebook criterion of brevity: in this case, 17 words for “Baby Bunting” and 30 for “Hey Diddle Diddle,” combining to 47.

The first illustration to the “Baby Bunting” sequence is a half-title showing the baby sitting on a chair (Figure 4.9). The image recalls the tradition of the pictorial encyclopedia for children, inaugurated by the Orbis Sensualium Pictus, or of the exhibit or rebus book: a straightforward equivalence where one short piece of text elucidates a single picture. The rhyme’s title captions the image. At the same time, the page offers Caldecott’s signature visualization of the rhyme – the baby dressed up in the rabbit skin, rather than draped or wrapped in it. Caldecott was not the first illustrator to represent Baby Bunting in this way; Crane, for example, adopted a similar conceit in an illustration he produced some years prior (Figure 4.10). However, Caldecott is distinctive in blending baby and rabbit: one ear of the rabbit costume tilts, ready to listen attentively to the upcoming rhyme, while the baby’s frilly gown and black shoes peek out from underneath, attesting to some retained human qualities. Once more Caldecott prefigures key elements of the picturebook’s later history, including a fascination with animal characters, with the relationship between children and animals, and with dressing up.

Figure 4.9 Half title from “Hey Diddle Diddle.” Source: Caldecott [1882], p. 13. Baldwin Library of Children’s Historical Literature, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL.

Figure 4.10 Alphabet page with Baby Bunting and father standing for B. Source: Crane [1900], n.p. Ingalls Library and Museum Archives, Cleveland Museum of Art, OH.

The first page proper puts the baby in clothes: a gown with sash (Figure 4.11).³ She appears in the foreground of the monochrome illustration, her nursemaid chasing her from the rear in a nod to the traditional context for the rhyme, which was often sung by nurses (Opie and Opie 1997). The Opies also document bunting as an obsolete endearment meaning plump (see also OED), and this baby has round cheeks. She waves two swallowtail flags in a visual pun on the word bunting, as in flag. Caldecott’s innovation is in making the baby mobile, herself the object of a chase – a more successful chase than the rhyme’s principal one, as we shall see, because the baby has been caught by the facing page while the father never manages to catch a rabbit.

Figure 4.11 Facing pages from “Baby Bunting.” Source: Caldecott [1882], pp. 14–15. Baldwin Library of Children’s Historical Literature, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL.

A clock on the wall in this first illustration shows five past six. In the colored illustration on the facing page, contrasting with the spotless children’s spaces often depicted by Crane and Greenaway, the nursery appears at the moment the children are getting ready for bed: nightgowns warm in front of the fire. Baby Bunting is undressed on her mother’s knee; her elder brother wears only striped breeches and a riding helmet. The shoes discarded at bottom left are a telling detail, a portal into lived-in space. The toys filling the nursery include a doll, a dollhouse, a hobby horse and miniature riding gear, images of exotic animals on the walls, a windmill, and what looks to be a Noah’s ark sitting atop a chest of drawers. Caldecott’s depiction is up to date: Noah’s arks were popular Victorian toys, and the nursery as a separate space in middle-class homes was also a trend of the period. Elsewhere, though, the book can seem backward-looking, as, like Greenaway and other children’s illustrators, many of the costumes recall eighteenth-century garb (see Whalley and Chester 1988).

These first two illustrations point to aspects of the book’s sequentiality derived not just from the content of the pictures but also from the color printing: spare monochrome line drawings intersperse with intensely filled-in and sumptuous full-color pages. (Some Caldecott picturebooks had colored doublespreads, too.) The rhythm of Caldecott’s picturebooks thus relates to a play of monochrome and color, which contributes to the “quickening” pace of his works (Cech 1983–1984, p. 116). The key wood-engraving block was printed in sepia, filled in with five shades – yellow, blue, flesh pink, red, and grey – for the colored pictures (see Masaki 2006). If the line drawings represent Caldecott’s “art of leaving out,” the colored illustrations present an alternative art of putting in; color is associated with the nursery’s abundant material goods – not to mention the sensuous appeals of the picturebook itself.

The next page opening contains two monochrome illustrations, one for each of the words “Father’s” and “gone” (Figure 4.12; Caldecott [1882], pp. 16–17). These pages offer what Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott (2001) call a symmetrical relationship between words and pictures: “The words tell us exactly the same story as we can ‘read’ from the pictures” (p. 14). Here, this is the father’s appearance and actions. While the illustration of the slightly rumpled father in his formal hunting attire reprises the single focus of the exhibit book, the illustration that accompanies “gone” is more sophisticated. Caldecott reduces the scene to what Perry Nodelman (1988) considers the picturebook’s most characteristic depiction of movement: the foot lifting from the ground. The reader must connect the father’s foot as it disappears around the corner to his personage in the preceding page. The spaniel that follows him draws the eye into the picture, round the corner into the next page opening and the hunt itself.

Figure 4.12 Facing pages from “Baby Bunting.” Source: Caldecott [1882], pp. 16–17. Baldwin Library of Children’s Historical Literature, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL.

The succeeding page opening demonstrates Caldecott’s facility in depicting hunting and horseback riding – subjects he returned to often in works including John Gilpin and The Three Jovial Huntsmen (1880). The monochrome illustration shows the father on horseback as he cleans his gun, the spaniel also pictured in medias res as it sniffs, tail up, in a briar (Figure 4.13). The colored illustration is a more heroic depiction of the father in hot pursuit, gun cocked. Once more, the relationship between words and pictures is fairly symmetrical – the pictures represent hunting. However, Caldecott’s wonted manipulation of directionality (see Cech 1983–1984) implies a less than successful quarry. Father seems to return the way he came in search of the rabbit, as left to right cancel each other out by meeting in the gutter – literally, in the case of the spaniel who disappears into the frame of the colored recto picture. These illustrations, with their depiction of rolling downlands, show the large-format picturebook’s potential for representing expansive spaces (see Trumpener 2002). They also reflect the switch from portrait to landscape orientation in Caldecott’s picturebooks that took place in 1882. (The book measures around eight by nine-and-a-half inches.)

Figure 4.13 Facing pages from “Baby Bunting.” Source: Caldecott [1882], pp. 18–19. Baldwin Library of Children’s Historical Literature, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL.

From this point onwards, the “Baby Bunting” sequence uses pictures and words complementarily (see Nikolajeva and Scott 2001), as the pictures substantially inflect the words’ meaning. The next page opening, again comprising two monochrome illustrations, displays the first confident horseback pursuit we have seen as Father gallops from left to right on the verso (Figure 4.14). As the eye scans the page, the image reveals a bathetic destination: not a remote wood or a rugged hilltop, but a village with a church tower on the horizon. The facing page clarifies that Father has indeed visited a fur trader in order to purchase the rabbit skin that is the rhyme’s central object: beneath a sign reading “Dealer in Hare & Rabbit Skins,” a woman holds out a floppy fur. In what Alderson (1986) calls Caldecott’s “famous device of introducing a pictorial sub-text to the main narrative” (p. 80), the illustrations ironically undermine the central action in the rhyme – the hunt. The image amplifies the ambiguity of the verb “fetch,” which could mean hunt, kill, and skin or simply purchase. On the next page opening, the two illustrations both show Baby Bunting in her new rabbit skin, which has been converted to the costume of the half title (Figure 4.15). At left, in a colored illustration, Father reaches out to scoop up the baby, hands outstretched. He discards his riding gear at the front of a picture that recalls the nursery with the kicked-off shoes. The backdrop shows a further lived-in scene, with the baby’s brother running out an open door leaving his dinner and his mother behind him. In the facing monochrome page, the illustration shows Baby Bunting once more in her chair, standing up, as her mother gets ready to go out by putting on gloves.

Figure 4.14 Facing pages from “Baby Bunting.” Source: Caldecott [1882], pp. 20–21. Baldwin Library of Children’s Historical Literature, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL.

Figure 4.15 Facing pages from “Baby Bunting.” Source: Caldecott [1882], pp. 22–23. Baldwin Library of Children’s Historical Literature, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL.

The final image, which has no text, adds a new dimension to the ironic pictorial complement (Figure 4.16). The baby is shown walking with her mother outside. The mother’s coat is trimmed in ermine, and the baby wears her rabbit-skin costume. Querying the boundaries between human and animal, the baby stares across at a colony of rabbits on a nearby mound. Sendak (1984) remarks of this parting illustration:

Figure 4.16 Final illustration to “Baby Bunting.” Source: Caldecott [1882], n.p. Baldwin Library of Children’s Historical Literature, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL.

Baby is staring with the most perplexed look at those rabbits, as though with the dawning of knowledge that that lovely, cuddly, warm costume he’s wrapped up in has come from those creatures. It’s all in that baby’s eye – just two lines, two mere dashes of the pen, but it’s done so expertly that they absolutely express … well, anything you want to read into them. I read: astonishment, dismay at life – is this where rabbit skins come from? Does something have to die to dress me?(p. xi)

Sendak draws attention to the ethical ambiguity of Caldecott’s final illustration, which uncovers the brutal realities beneath the baby’s fine goods. Also significant to my mind, though, is the upending of a familial hierarchy: the baby and her mother can find rabbits, the father cannot. (Remember, too, that the fur dealer is a woman.) Baby comes out on top.

The meanings discussed in the preceding paragraphs emerge from the gap between words and pictures. Clémentine Beauvais (2015) has noted that the gap is the central concept of contemporary picturebook theory: a normative as well as a descriptive property, in that “‘good’ picturebooks are understood to be ones with gaps and more gaps make better picturebooks” (p. 2). I have treated the gap in this way in the very first sentence of the chapter, where I offered a definition of the picturebook from Sendak which positions the dynamic interplay between word and picture as the form’s definitive feature. The privileging of the gap in picturebook theory also dictates the elevation of Caldecott that I noted in the previous section: his works are the “gappiest” of the Victorian period. By contrast, Muir (1954) asserts Greenaway’s primacy over her competitors at a time when other picturebook attributes – wistful charm, for example – held sway.

However, it is important to note in concluding this chapter that many nineteenth-century picturebooks do not carefully curate the gap between words and pictures over a building sequence. Instead, they represent the larger “disharmony” of Victorian illustrated books, in which words and pictures vie against one another (Thomas 2004, p. 8). Sometimes such disharmony is a technical feature, as at different times the need to print pictures separately precluded a smooth integration of words and pictures. The nineteenth-century picturebook’s debt to the chapbook, in which pictures were reused and recycled, also offers a period-specific manifestation of the gap in that pictures might not be designed for a single text but rather as multipurpose decorations (see Masaki 2006). For every breathtaking Caldecott design, there were many Favourite Riddles and Rhymes (1896), where an anonymous illustration – seemingly stock – shows Baby Bunting held by a small boy in an incongruous top hat (Figure 4.17). Such an image adds little to the rhyme. Although I have focused in this section on how Caldecott’s Baby Bunting makes sophisticated use of the picturebook form, reckoning with the Victorian picturebook means thinking about such works, too.

Figure 4.17 Anonymous illustration to “Baby Bunting.”Source: Favourite Riddles and Rhyme [1896], p. 30. Baldwin Library of Children’s Historical Literature, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL.