The Moral of the Victorian Children’s Story

The Nation journal observed in 1879 that ‘every holiday season brings a fresh assortment of stories for the young which, as being new, recommend themselves as gifts and do their share in the cultivation of juvenile ethics’. The idea that literature should play a part in the moral education of young readers was nothing new. The first picture book aimed at children – A Little Pretty Pocket Book – was published in 1744 by John Newbery, with a frontispiece that announced its aim: ‘Instruction with Delight.’ However, with the arrival in the 19th century of high-quality colour printing, picture books began to play their part in the cultivation of juvenile aesthetics, too. As the Graphic magazine announced approvingly in 1881: ‘Children of the nineteenth century ought to grow up with well cultured artistic tastes if they profit by the daintily illustrated books provided for their delectation.’ Over the course of the century, children’s books were transformed from utilitarian fare to objects of art, with the Art Journal declaring in 1881: ‘Art for the nursery has become Art indeed.’ 

Instrumental in this process was the pioneering work of the wood engraver and colour printer Edmund Evans, who believed that beautiful picture books could be created and sold inexpensively if printed in the correct quantity. By perfecting his own colour woodblock printing technique, Evans was able to craft a high-quality artistic book, with stunning illustrations. Evans collaborated with three artists: Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway. The triumvirate of Evans, as they became known, were among the most influential children’s book illustrators of the era. While they did not all work exclusively with him – Crane was an established artist and engraver and Caldecott was a well-known political cartoonist – their names became synonymous with the nursery and toy books of the late 19th century and their illustrations of nursery rhymes, fairy tales and fables became emblematic of the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of picture book illustration.

Cult of the child

Evans, along with publishers such as George Routledge and Frederick Warne, tapped into a commercial appetite for beautiful picture books that would please not only children, but their parents, too. The Victorian era saw the emergence of ‘the cult of the child’, an idealised view of childhood that proved popular with middle-class consumers and which fuelled a demand for sentimental, childhood-inspired commodities. New trends in home decorating focused on the importance of the nursery as a place where the tastes of the young art connoisseur were formed. This was of particular concern for home interior magazine writers, such as H.C. Gaskin, who declared: 

It is only too common to banish to the nursery every picture that is not likely to stand the fire of criticism to which it would be exposed elsewhere. This is an outrage upon innocence. Because the child knows nothing of art, it should not have its first perceptions awakened by false representations of art.

Though the nursery was primarily intended as a space where the children of the well-off could be cared for by governesses and nursemaids out of sight of the rest of the household, it came to function as an important indicator of taste in the homes of discerning Victorians and the objects and pictures on display were expected to be chosen with care. The picture books of Crane, Caldecott and Greenaway were ideal choices, capable of delighting both the young occupants of the nursery and their aesthetically conscious parents. The renowned Victorian actress Ellen Terry remarked that her children ‘were allowed no rubbishy picture-books, but from the first, Japanese prints and fans lined the nursery walls. If injudicious friends gave the wrong sort of present, it was promptly burned’.

The eye-catching pages of luxury picture books subtly referenced the latest trends in home decorating. In Walter Crane’s illustrations, characters from fairy tales appeared in fashionable, contemporary interiors. The art tiles that adorned the fireplace of Cinderella’s kitchen, as well as the ornate dresser lined with willow-patterned china in The Frog Prince, epitomised the Queen Anne Revival style seen in fashionable homes. The sumptuous chamber of Princess Belle Étoile, with a bay window embellished with leaded roundel patterns in stained glass, referenced the design motifs of the Arts and Crafts movement, which found expression in the domestic architecture of figures such as Norman Shaw. The luxurious rooms of Crane’s Beauty and the Beast were filled with delicately carved Queen Anne furniture, William Morris-style wallpaper and Victorian bric- a-brac, which would have been familiar to readers of contemporary home decoration catalogues and magazines such as Beautiful Houses and Fashionable Furniture.

Appropriate appropriations

The Victorian taste for the exotic was acknowledged throughout Crane’s work. Japanese art, in particular, was hugely influential. Following the first trade agreement between England and Japan in 1859, Japanese prints, fans, books and textiles flooded the European market. In Aladdin (1875), Crane depicted princesses draped in kaleidoscopic kimonos. In Buckle My Shoe (1869) an ‘aesthetic’ home was depicted, with a mother sitting in an ebonised Anglo-Japanese style chair of the kind created by the architect and designer E.W. Godwin. She holds a Japanese fan and behind her is a screen decorated with a Japanese woodblock print. Crane’s own style developed under the influence of Japanese art, having received some Toyokuni prints from a friend returning from Japan around 1867. He later expressed an admiration for the ‘definite black outline and flat brilliant as well as delicate colours, vivid dramatic and decorative feeling’ of these prints. His illustrations for The Three Bears (1873) attempted to capture their style; Crane depicted the figures of Goldilocks and the three bears, seen through a window, as flattened, simplified forms, while the beds, table and chairs are shown from a bird’s-eye view. 

The success of luxury picture books by Crane and his contemporaries was reflected in a demand for nursery-themed merchandise, including wallpapers that featured their illustrations. Greenaway’s immaculately dressed, cherubic infants in English country gardens enjoyed immense popularity and prompted a consumer appetite for ‘Greenaway style’ merchandise, including figurines, dolls and painting books. Crane’s fairy tales were reproduced as wallpaper designs by the internationally renowned manufacturer of luxury ‘art’ wallpaper, Jeffrey & Co.

Fairy tales and fables were not just put to use in the service of decorating aesthetically pleasing nursery rooms, however. With the growing scholarly interest in the documentation and preservation of the folk tales of Britain and continental Europe writers and illustrators repurposed the old stories to convey political, social and moralising commentary on life in 19th-century Britain. In 1853 George Cruikshank, illustrator of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, began to publish a series of traditional tales revised as a stern campaign for teetotalism. A reformed alcoholic, Cruikshank had become a strong advocate of abstinence and published The Bottle and The Drunkard’s Children, which told of a family’s ruin due to drinking. In the fairy tale Hop O’ My Thumb Cruikshank depicted Hop’s father as a count who had lost all his money through drinking. In Jack and the Beanstalk he admonished the alcoholism of the giant, while in Puss in Boots the ogre was transformed into a drunkard. 

Cruikshank’s Fairytales drew the ire of Dickens, his collaborator and friend. In an essay entitled Fraud on the Fairies, published in 1853 in his weekly magazine Household Words, Dickens denounced Cruikshank’s appropriation of popular old stories for moralising ends. ‘To preserve them in their usefulness’, Dickens wrote: 

they must be as much preserved in their simplicity, and purity, and innocent extravagance, as if they were actual fact. Whosoever alters them to suit his own opinions, whatever they are, is guilty, to our thinking, of an act of presumption, and appropriates to himself what does not belong to him. 

Undeterred, Cruikshank continued to use fairy tales to preach his message of abstinence. His Fairy Library (1853-64) was not a commercial success.

Socialist vision

For Crane, a politically engaged figure who had been active in the socialist movement in England throughout the 1880s, the fairy tale provided an opportunity for political expression. Crane’s picture book illustrations blended image with story to reflect the artist’s support for the socialist cause. His version of Jack and the Beanstalk was a political allegory of the triumph of socialism, in which the hero, Jack, sporting the red Phrygian cap and silhouetted against the rising sun – potent socialist symbols – defeats the monstrous giant who hoards his wealth in his castle. In Baby’s Own Aesop (1887) Crane reworked the ancient fable ‘The Bundle of Sticks’ as an allegory of modern socialism. In an effort to unite his quarrelling sons, a father asks them to break a bundle of sticks. When they fail to do so, he takes the bundle apart and gives them each a single stick, which they break easily. The moral of the story – ‘strength is in unity’ – echoed the trade union movement’s slogans of solidarity. The red cap of liberty appears again, worn by the figure breaking the twig in half. Crane would go on to produce illustrations for The Child’s Socialist Reader (1905), which included a fairy tale entitled ‘The Happy Valley’, featuring a villainous giant named ‘Monopoly’ and his accomplices, ‘Capital’ and ‘Competition’. 

The illustrations of Randolph Caldecott reworked the fables of ancient Greece to reflect on contemporary political issues of the day. The Chester-born artist had completed an edition of the tales alongside his brother, the Reverend Alfred Caldecott in 1883. The frontispiece of the volume announced: ‘Some of Aesop’s Fables with Modern Instances shewn in designs by Randolph Caldecott.’ A prolific cartoonist, who had been employed as a humorous artist on the magazine London Society as well as contributing to Punch, Caldecott used the fables to parody aspects of British society as well as political issues. 

For example, in his illustrations for The Frogs Desiring a King Caldecott caricatured the Irish Home Rule movement, a major issue in 19th-century British politics. A group of frogs ‘grieved at their own lawless condition’ are depicted pleading with Zeus to send them a king. Zeus, ‘perceiving their simplicity’, sends them a log of wood. After a while, the frogs, seeing the log remain motionless, demand that Zeus give them a new ruler. Zeus, exasperated, sends them a stork, which immediately devours them all. The subsequent illustration depicts ‘the modern instance’ of the fable: the frogs have been transformed into human figures on the shores of Ireland; the log bears the inscription ‘Land Bill,’ while the words ‘Give us Home Rule’ are seen scrawled in the sand. 

The volume was commercially unsuccessful, however. Caldecott himself expressed disappointment with his contribution, writing to a friend: ‘Do not expect much from this book. When I see proofs of it I wonder and regret that I did not approach the subject more seriously.’

Such works demonstrate the extent to which children’s book illustrators were simultaneously catering to an adult, politically aware audience, as well as to the young readers for whom picture books were nominally intended – sometimes pleasing neither. While the children of the privileged middle classes doubtlessly enjoyed and benefited from the supply of beautifully illustrated reading material available, the adult was both producer and consumer. In The Child and His Book (1891) Mrs E.M. Field noted that: 

The nursery picture-book has a curious tendency to find its way to the drawing-room table and to the smoking-room lounge, even perhaps to the serious study-room shelf. And uncles and aunts who buy these charming productions ‘for the children’ are frequently discovered to be themselves gloating over them in a corner.

Many adults were drawn to the idealised world represented in the illustrations of children’s picture books. Greenaway’s idyllic rural settings – where well-behaved children play serenely – provided a fantasy world of eternal childhood for Victorians. Key to the success of Greenaway’s illustrations was the costume in which she dressed the inhabitants of her make-believe world. She created her own miniature fashions, based on the Regency style of the late 18th century. These designs inspired a line of children’s clothing by the London department store Liberty’s. 

Demand for Greenaway-style costumes was fuelled by the Victorian passion for ‘fancy dress’. Magazines such as Good Housekeeping suggested outfits for Greenaway-inspired parties. Despite their associations with children, such parties were often intended for adults. Popular publications such as Mrs Herbert B. Linscott’s Bright Ideas for Entertaining (1905) dispensed advice on organising parties and social gatherings tinged with childish charm; a New Year’s Eve party, for example, might involve ‘a young man dressed as a baby, in a long white dress’, whose appearance would signal the new year.

Greenaway’s picture books achieved enormous commercial success; her first book, Under the Window, had sold 100,000 copies by the close of the century. Her work received high praise from prominent intellectual critics and scholars, such as John Ruskin and Marion Spielmann, who saw in her illustrations an escape from the modern world and the perceived ills of industrialisation. In his Oxford lecture of 1880 entitled Fairy Land Ruskin marvelled at Greenaway’s invented idyll:

There are no railroads in it, to carry the children away with, are there? No tunnel or pit-mouths to swallow them up, no league-long viaducts – no blinkered iron bridges? There are only winding brooks, wooden foot-bridges, and grassy hills without any holes cut into them! 

Privately, Ruskin engaged in a lengthy correspondence with Greenaway in which he urged her to develop her technique and persistently requested drawings of what he referred to as ‘girlies’. Ruskin’s letters reveal a troubling fixation on Greenaway’s pre-pubescent female characters. In a letter from July 1883 Ruskin asked Greenaway to furnish him with drawings of her girl figures unclothed:

Will you – (it’s all for your own good – !) make her stand up and then draw her for me without a cap – and, without her shoes, – (because of the heels) and without her mittens, and without her – frock and frills? And let me see exactly how tall she is – and – how – round. It will be so good of and for you – And to and for me. 

Intercepting the letter, Ruskin’s cousin and caretaker Joan Severn, in apparent alarm at the request, pencilled an instruction to Greenaway to ‘Do nothing of the kind’.

Bad examples

Ruskin’s fixation on Greenaway’s delicate drawings underscores some of the uneasy contradictions upon which the Victorian conceptualisation of childhood – and in particular, girlhood – rested. While childhood was glorified as a state of innocence, children were also commodified and fetishised as never before. Victorian literary figures celebrated the purity and innocence of the figure of the child while simultaneously eroticising it. Lewis Carroll’s carefully staged photographs of Alice Liddell, styled in various costumes, appear to the contemporary viewer as troublingly sexualised and epitomise the objectifying adult gaze that is so prevalent in Victorian culture. As the poet Ernest Dowson – one of many eminent Victorian literary figures known to have pursued children as sexual partners – remarked in his 1889 article ‘The Cult of the Child’: ‘There are an ever increasing number of people who receive from the beauty of childhood, in art as in life, an exquisite pleasure.’

The dual readership of picture books was recognised and accepted by Victorian audiences, as contemporary reviews show. The Art Journal in 1881 referred to high-class picture books, ‘nominally intended for the little ones, but also catering to the grown-up folks’, while the Atlantic Monthly described the trend in 1894 as ‘not juvenile literature but books for the big about the little’. The illustrators of the period were aware that the commercial success of their picture books depended on their appeal to adults, equally, if not perhaps more so, than to children. As illustrators of luxurious, colour picture books, they were highly receptive to the tastes and sensibilities of their middle-class market and the people and places they depicted reflect this. 

Many Victorians believed firmly in leading by example. As Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help urged: ‘Example is one of the most potent of instructors, though it teaches without a tongue.’ Children’s books were important instruments through which to channel Victorian values and ideals. As Smiles put it: ‘The nation comes from the nursery.’ In seeking to shelter readers from all that was deemed unpleasant in Victorian society, they allowed adults a form of escapism and a means to see the world through the eyes of children while encouraging young readers to see the world through an adult gaze.

Lucie Duggan is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Southern Denmark.