by Alison Lurie
Aye, faithful to Little Boy Blue they stand,
Each in the same old place—
Awaiting the touch of a little hand,
The smile of a little face.13
The same sort of sentimental impulse appears in some of the rhymes that have entered oral tradition, like “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and “Three Little Kittens.” It is no accident, I think, that both these poems are about animals: contemporary children’s magazines and annuals were full of verses about birds and beasts, expressing sympathy for what were then called “Our Dumb Friends” and often pointing a gentle SPCA moral.
The mid- and late nineteenth century was the heyday of the storytelling poem, often used as a recitation piece in school or at family gatherings. If you were born more than fifty years ago, you may have read or even recited some of the best-known of these poems like Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride” and Whittier’s “Barbara Frietchie—patriotic themes were especially popular. The most famous of them, the classic “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” long attributed to Clement Clarke Moore,14 is often read aloud in schools today.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, when America was becoming increasingly urban and industrial, there was a flood of nostalgic verses celebrating rural childhood and the rural past, sometimes in dialect. Those of James Whitcomb Riley, such as “Little Orphant Annie” and “The Raggedy Man,” still appear in some modern collections of poetry for children.
In the early twentieth century there was a fashion in children’s poetry for what now seems a particularly cloying sort of supernatural whimsy: fairies at the bottom of my garden and practically everywhere else. Most of this verse was British, and it is underrepresented in Donald Hall’s anthology, though he includes Morris Bishop’s brilliant counterattack, “How to Treat Elves”:
I met an elf man in the woods,
The wee-est little elf!
Sitting under a mushroom tall—
’Twas taller than himself!
“How do you do, little elf,” I said,
“And what do you do all day?”
“I dance ’n fwolic about,” said he,
“’N scuttle about and play, . . .
“N then I play with the baby chicks,
I call them, chick chick chick!
‘N what do you think of that?” said he.
I said, “It makes me sick.
“It gives me sharp and shooting pains
To listen to such drool.”
I lifted up my foot, and squashed
The God damn little fool.15
The anthologies and magazines of the 1920s and 1930s attempted to introduce children to modern poetry, particularly imagism and free verse, without great success, to judge by my own experience and that of my friends. Children don’t have much interest in poems that lack rhyme, rhythm, action, and humor, though a few of these verses, such as Carl Sandburg’s “The fog comes / on little cat feet” still appear in modern collections. What they like is drama, rhythm, and rhyme, and especially humor. When it came time to choose poems for classroom recitation, we passed up Sandburg and Pound and H. D. in favor of Vachel Lindsay and Laura E. Richards. I remember a tearful struggle over who would get to recite Richards’s “Eletelephony,” which begins:
Once there was an elephant
Who tried to use the telephant—
No! No! I mean an elephone
Who tried to use the telephone—16
In the 1930s social consciousness entered many collections of verse for children. They included poems such as Vachel Lindsay’s “Factory Windows Are Always Broken,” and for the first time contained a representative selection from black writers. Toward the end of the decade and through World War II there was a resurgence of patriotism. Nineteenth-century favorites were dusted off and reprinted, and selections from Stephen and Rosemary Benét’s brilliant A Book of Americans found their way into many anthologies.
The collections of the 1950s and early 1960s, as might be expected, tended to be conservative; but the late sixties and the seventies brought a flood of radical and counterculture anthologies of children’s poetry. Some of them discarded most of the work of the past in favor of brand-new, not always name-brand verse recommending free expression, hugging, sexual equality, and a mystical attitude toward nature. There is not much poetry of this type in Hall’s anthology, but it is well represented by John Ciardi’s “The Man Who Sang the Sillies,” which celebrates a sixties sort of childlike euphoria, concluding:
. . . That The Luckies are The Happies, and the
Happies are the Sillies
And the Sillies are the sweetest that I know.17
It is perhaps too early to characterize the children’s poetry of the eighties and nineties. The most striking change I have noticed in looking through recent collections is a shrinkage in the length of the poems. A hundred years ago a grade-school child was thought quite capable of reading a serious, even tragic thirty-five-stanza poem like Celia Thaxter’s ballad about the slave trade, “The Cruise of the Mystery”; more recently poems by Ogden Nash that ran to fifteen or twenty stanzas were widely reprinted. Today, children’s attention span is assumed to be incredibly short, and they are also thought not to have much interest in poems about heavyweight social issues. I wonder if we are not underestimating them—or, even worse, creating the kind of disinterest we assume.
In the introduction to his anthology, Donald Hall speculates on these matters, remarking that very likely “our contemporary fashions in children’s verse, which favor humor and nonsense, will one day seem as quaint as pieties about dead children.”18 It is hard to think he may be right, but you never know.
LOUDER THAN WORDS:
CHILDREN’S BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS
ONCE upon a time, the only illustrations of nursery rhymes and fairy stories were the ones that appeared in the minds of their audience: children to whom their parents recited the old verses about Jack and Jill or the cow that jumped over the moon, and people of all ages who heard the classic tales told aloud, perhaps on winter evenings around a cottage fire, or on a summer night that was too warm and star-sprinkled for sleep.
Those days are over. Today, we don’t need to visualize these tales and rhymes for ourselves; others have already done it for us—sometimes brilliantly and sometimes badly. As children, when we sat in a circle for story hour, or were read to at bedtime, we were shown the pictures that “went with” a fairy tale or a Mother Goose rhyme. Before we heard “Cinderella” we saw her picture on the cover of the book or Disney video. And since we were children, we assumed the portrait was accurate; we didn’t realize that it was only one person’s idea of what the heroine and her fairy godmother and the prince looked like.
It is natural, perhaps, to wish sometimes that we still lived in an oral culture, and could form our own pictures of the classic stories and rhymes. But illustrations can add something as well as take it away. The coming together of a gifted artist and a great children’s classic is always interesting. If the union is successful, the work will be reinterpreted, given not only new life but also a new and different meaning. It may even be, essentially, reborn, rising like a new-fledged phoenix from the ashes of an earlier incarnation.
Each age, of course, gets a different species of phoenix. The style of children’s book illustration is a changing guide, not so much to what children are like in any generation, but to how adults perceive them, or would like to perceive them.
Printed versions of fairy tales have been appearing for more than three hundred years, but the earliest ones had few or no pictures. When Perrault’s tales first appeared in 1697, there was only one small, simple woodcut illustration for each story. Some of them were inaccurate; the woodcut that accompanied the first edition of “Red Riding-Hood,” for instance, shows an undisguised wolf leaping onto the bed of a woman who is far too old to be Red Riding-Hood and too young to be her grandmother.
Pictures like these are unlikely to have interfered much with mental images of
the stories. The words were still what counted, as the frontispiece of the book makes clear: it shows an old woman in peasant costume sitting by a fireside, telling a story to three children. A sign on the wall behind her reads: Contes de Ma Mère l’Oye (literally, “Tales of My Mother the Goose”). It was under that title that the book appeared in early English editions, with the same kind of small, crude woodcuts. In 1861, however, there was a French edition of Perrault’s tales in which the pictures dominated the stories, and presented alarming visions of their worst moments. For this deluxe volume Gustave Doré, who was already famous for his editions of Rabelais and Dante, created full-page black-and-white illustrations that seem likely to terrify any child. It is true that many classic fairy tales are intrinsically frightening, and not only those of Perrault. Hansel and Gretel are imprisoned by a cannibalistic witch, Snow-White’s step-mother plots her death, and a whole series of giants try to kill Jack. But Doré underlines the horror. His “Puss in Boots” is larger than any real cat; he has sharp teeth and dangerous-looking claws, and wears a huge plumed hat and a necklace of mouse skulls. The swollen, pop-eyed ogre in “Hop-O-My-Thumb” leans threateningly over the head of the bed in which his five little daughters sleep; he holds a huge knife with which he will cut their throats. Even more disturbing in some ways is Doré’s famous illustration for “Red Riding-Hood.” It shows the wolf, wearing the murdered grandmother’s ruffled cap, in bed with a wide-eyed, half-naked little girl who seems to have just realized that she is about to be eaten or raped or both. These are frightening stories, Doré is telling us: children, especially girls, are in great danger. Brilliant though these pictures are, it is no wonder that they are seldom reprinted in modern collections.
After Doré, most illustrations of the classic fairy tales provided a softer and less frightening vision. Though the best-known stories often contain violent events, artists tended to avoid depicting them. Instead they chose earlier moments in the plot, when danger is only hinted at. For “Red Riding-Hood,” for instance, most nineteenth- and twentieth-century illustrators show the heroine meeting the wolf in the forest. If they picture her in her grandmother’s cottage, she is fully dressed and standing at a safe distance from the wolf. She does not look frightened yet, but stares at him with a blank or puzzled expression.
Two of the most famous early-twentieth-century illustrators, Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac, followed this pattern in their illustrations to the classic fairy tales. They emphasized the beauty, charm, and mystery of the stories, avoiding any suggestion of violence. In Rackham’s illustrations to “Hop-O-My-Thumb,” for instance, the ogre is asleep, and he looks skinny and foolish rather than threatening. In Edmund Dulac’s version of the stories, everything is bathed in a romantic blue mist. Ogres do not appear, nor do Cinderella’s cruel stepmother and stepsisters. Dulac’s Bluebeard scowls at his disobedient wife, but he is unarmed, and she seems embarrassed rather than frightened.
“Bluebeard” is in many ways the most disturbing of Perrault’s best-known stories, because the murderous villain is not a wolf or an ogre but the heroine’s own husband. In many late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century editions this story is set in the Near East, and the translation is sometimes altered to fit. In both Rackham collections, Bluebeard’s castle is a Moorish palace, and his formerly anonymous wife is called “Fatima.”
Of course, the farther the setting of a fairy story is from our own world, the less disturbing its dark side seems. Perhaps this is one reason why many illustrators not only choose a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century background for the fairy tales, but portray every castle and court as a kind of aristocratic dream-Versailles. Edmund Dulac’s Good Fairy and Arthur Rackham’s Cinderella both wear eighteenth-century ballgowns, and Cinderella has a tall powdered Marie Antoinette hairdo. Later artists, especially in America, have sometimes set the tales even farther in the past: Trina Schart Hyman, for instance, locates her alluring 1977 version of “Sleeping Beauty” in the early Renaissance.
Terrifying or enchanting, beautiful or grotesque, most illustrations of the classic fairy tales in the nineteenth and early twentieth century had one thing in common: they pictured a three-dimensional world, full of realistically depicted people, trees, cottages, beds, shoes, pumpkins, and mice. When supernatural beings appeared, they too were portrayed in realistic detail. These pictures were complex and fascinating; it was possible to return again and again to them, finding new things each time.
But in the mid-twentieth century a new kind of fairy-tale illustration appeared, when comic books and the Walt Disney studios made these old stories even more famous as animated cartoons. In the process, however, they often turned their characters into two-dimensional caricatures. Disney also reintroduced or even emphasized the occasional cruelty and violence of the tales. Cinderella’s stepmother, so seldom pictured by earlier artists, reappears in the Disney version, looking angry and cruel, and accompanied by sneering ugly sisters and a nasty tomcat. The evil fairy in “Sleeping Beauty” is a blue-skinned black caped villainess who soon becomes a thirty-foot fire-breathing dragon.
The flat, simple colors and shapes of the Disney illustrations may have helped to moderate these frightening images. But the final effect was to trivialize the fairy tale. Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and Snow-White become doll-like figures, apparently made of the same colored plastic as their clothes and furniture, and the settings look like painted backdrops. Perhaps to counteract this unreality, the period of the stories has often been moved forward. In the Disney version Cinderella and her relatives wear the fashions of the 1890s, and Sleeping Beauty has a 1950s hairdo and party dress. Disney also softened the tales by adding moments of contemporary cuteness: Snow-White is taken in by comic dwarves, Cinderella is befriended by cartoon mice and birds, and Sleeping Beauty’s powerful fairy godmother becomes small and fat and ridiculous.
Where gifted artists like Doré and Dulac and Rackham made supernatural figures seem real, the Disney studios reduced even human beings to cartoons. The effect of this, of course, was increased by the fact that animated films, instead of illustrating one or two moments from each fairy tale, encouraging the reader to visualize all that went before or after, necessarily picture the whole story, leaving no space for the imagination. Popular as they are, such films have made it even harder—perhaps impossible—for children to find their own way into a magic world.
The first surviving collection of nursery rhymes was published in London in 1744, and in this and most later eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century collections they were illustrated only with small woodcuts—sometimes with whatever woodcuts happened to be on hand in the print shop, without much relevance to the verses. Usually these pictures showed contemporary landscapes and costumes. But in the mid-nineteenth century, as printing techniques improved, the illustrations began to grow in size and number, and eventually to overwhelm the brief texts. As with the folktales, there were three dominant styles: realistic, fantastic, and comic.
Most common, especially at first, were realistic illustrations, one classic example of which is what is now called the Original Mother Goose (1916) illustrated by Blanche Fisher Wright, still in print and widely available. Many similar editions have appeared since, and more continue to be published.
The pictures in these books are often attractive, though they sometimes give the impression of having been drawn from life by a not very original student artist. Jack and Jill are real children climbing a three-dimensional hill. The cow does not jump over the moon, she only appears to; artists explain away the fantasy by providing a low viewpoint and a moon low on the horizon, and a human figure who runs away with both the dish and the spoon. The implied message of such illustrations is that the rhymes take place in a world much like that of the child who is reading the book, and that the events in them might in fact occur. Collections of this type often seem to emphasize the pedagogical nature of some of the verses; they become warnings against theft:
Tom, Tom, the piper�
��s son
Stole a pig and away he run.
The pig was eat and Tom was beat,
And he went crying up the street.
or against telling tales (“Tattle-tale Tit, thy tongue shall be slit”), or whining:
“Baa baa, black sheep, have you any wool?”
“Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full.
One for my master and one for my dame,
But none for the little boy that cries in the lane.”
They recommend conventional good behavior:
Early to bed and early to rise
Makes a man healthy and wealthy and wise.1
As any parent knows, some of the classic rhymes, like folktales, may be frightening. Mice have their tails cut off, beggars are invading town, the ladybird’s children are burned up, and Cock Robin is dead. Realistic artists found various ways to soften the dark side of these verses. One common strategy was to set the scene in the past.2 The custom started early: almost everyone in the popular nineteenth-century nursery-rhyme books of Walter Crane and Randolph Caldecott wears eighteenth-century fashions. In Kate Greenaway’s Mother Goose, which first appeared in 1881, the children inhabit a preindustrial village world and have high-waisted Regency clothes and hairstyles. Ever since then it has been common for realistic illustrations to picture nurseryrhyme characters as living in an earlier time: Tasha Tudor, for instance, sets her pictures in Colonial America.3
