19th Century Golden Ages of Illustration:

Children’s Books and an Unsung Hero

Article 9 

by Lyn Lacy

3800 words

    The two 19th century Golden Ages of Illustration—one in England, one in America—began during the same period and were remarkably intertwined. This article takes the liberty of posing a hypothesis about an unsung hero on this side of the pond who might have precipitated children’s book illustrations by American artists that were equal in brilliance to those of their counterparts in Britain.

    That hero was Charles Parsons (1821-1910), well-respected at the time as a painter and lithographer but hardly a name that comes readily to mind alongside the greats of the Golden Age in the United States. However, a chronology of events suggest Parsons might have been the right man at the right time and place to have played a part in dramatic changes that were to occur in illustrations for children—unrecognized as it was at the time, even by himself.

    A brief review of what went before sets the stage for the Golden Age in America and the importance of that era for those who study illustrated children’s literature. History shows that for colonial children in a Puritan society, primers, hornbooks and chapbooks were published primarily as tools for instructional or inspirational purposes. Few of them had lighthearted texts or interesting pictures, and simple woodcuts in one publication often appeared in another with no relevance at all to text (New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature).    

    Early Americans often reprinted books that arrived with emigrants from England. In 1679 a London printer Benjamin Harris had published The Protestant Tutor, in which the alphabet was introduced by rhyming couplets inspired by the Bible and  accompanied by little woodcuts. When Harris himself emigrated to Boston, he revised and reprinted the Tutor as The New England Primer (c1690). After that, “many thousands of the Primer were printed by different companies, making it practically an institution” and although no copies before 1727 have survived, the text remained in print and was even used into the 20th century (abba.org/blog “The New Antiquarian”)

                    

    Also in England, the first purely entertaining chapbook was A Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744) by M. F. Thwaite and astute London publisher-editor-bookseller John Newbery (1713-1767). It included little toys with the book’s pictures of game, poems, proverbs and an alphabet song as the first in Newbery’s revolutionary “gift books.” Over forty years later (1787), newspaper publisher and author Isaiah Thomas in Worcester, Massachusetts, reprint Newbery’s chapbook as A Pretty Pocket-Book (Anne Lundin, 1994, The Library Quarterly). 

    

    In London, Newbery also collected English nursery rhymes for Mother Goose’s Melody, or, Sonnets for the Cradle (1780), which was also reprinted in Worcester by Thomas in 1786 as the first authorized American edition. The name “Mother Goose” had appeared in French literature as early as 1620, and in 1697 Charles Perrault (1628-1703) had published Tales of My Mother Goose. Instead of nursery rhymes, Perrault’s collection was fairy tales such as “Little Red Riding Hood,” which was translated into English in 1729 by Robert Samber in London, then reprinted in America in 1786 (Fifteen Centuries of Children’s Literature).  

The Only True Mother Goose Melodies (anonymous; British?) was printed in 1833 by Boston booksellers/printers Edmund Munroe and David Francis. And Tom Thumb’s Picture Alphabet was taken from the New England Primer as a one-cent chapbook in the 1850s, first in the series of forty-eight titles in "Redfield's Toy Books" published in New York and advertised as “Beautifully Illustrated from Designs” by American artist John Gadsby Chapman (1808-1889). 

This background may lead the reader to a better understanding of why a children’s illustrated fantasy novel of over a hundred pages published in 1865 was such an overnight sensation in England and subsequently in the United States. 

    

    Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, written by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson “Lewis Carroll” (1832-1898) and illustrated by Sir John Tenniel (1820-1914), has been credited as the beginning of “The First Golden Age of children’s literature in Britain, Europe and America, a founding book in the development of fantasy literature. The next fifty years of popularity, abundance and most importantly unprecedented upsurge in the quality of illustrated books marked an astounding change in the way that publishers, artists and the general public came to view this hitherto insufficiently esteemed art form” (Pook Press, “The Golden Age of Illustration 1875-1920”).   

    London engravers, the Brothers Dalziel, cut the wood blocks and made copies of Alice in a process called electrotyping for the first print run on November 26, 1865, which was published by Macmillan of London. However, Tenniel and/or Carroll apparently objected to the print quality and insisted that the first 2,000 copies “be destroyed or sold in the United States,” rather than in England. 

    A new British edition was improved and immediately released in December 1865 (with publication date of 1866). The wood blocks were sold by Dodgson to the New York publisher D. Appleton & Company, who also published the book in 1865 but with the 1866 date (The Alice Companion). 

    

    Tenniel’s 42 wood-engraved illustrations for Alice “established a superior structural and stylistic framework which became a standard for the future” (The Annotated Alice, 2000). Not until 1946 did American illustrator Fritz Kredel (1900-1973) add color to Tenniel’s iconic engravings “in the manner of the period” for the Random House editions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass (1897). 

    In addition to Appleton publishing house in New York City in 1865 was the recognized leader in the publishing world, Harper & Brothers, which occupied ten city lots downtown. The company’s technological advancements provided outstanding illustrated material for its magazines, such as Harper’s Weekly: A Journal of Civilization, the most successful periodical in the United States, by introducing extensive woodcut illustrations as well as line drawings based on photographs of the Civil War by Mathew Brady. 

    Harper’s had been the first American publisher to establish its own art department in 1863, to expand on its in-house illustrations for the Weekly’s extensive coverage of the War. Chosen as head of the new art department (for a salary of over sixty dollars a week) was an accomplished artist, Charles Parsons.

  Parson’s interesting story was uncovered after primary research by archivist extraordinaire, Barbara Elleman, founder of the Barbara Elleman Research Library (BERL) at The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. Elleman pointed the way through a tangle of artists named Charles Parsons, two with the same painting style and one an inventor, all during the same time period (a helpful scholar admonished in print, “Treat all sources with caution”). Our Charles Parsons signed his art “C. Parsons” and had no middle initial.  

    Parsons had come to America at age nine in 1831 with his family from Hampshire, England. As a young boy in England, he could have been familiar with work of the “modern Hogarth” George Cruikshank (1792-1878), whose illustrations for two volumes of German Popular Stories (1823-1826) collected by the Brothers Grimm have been called “the earliest manifestation of a Golden Age of Illustration in England.”    

    In New York, C. Parsons had been apprenticed as a boy in 1836 to lithographer George Endicott and then worked for Currier & Ives, creating lithographs like “Union Barrage at Malvern Hill, July 1, 1862”, for the most prolific and successful American printing firm of hand-colored lithography (Fifteen Centuries of Children’s Literature).

    

    By the time he took the job at Harper’s, Parsons was a well-known watercolorist, illustrator, lithographer and printmaker (as in “Central-Park, The Skating Pond, 1862”). Not only was he a versatile and talented artist who practiced his craft alongside his new team members, but he also diligently mentored them as his proteges. 

    No record is found of Parsons’ first team, but among staff illustrators who already worked at Harper’s and who might have participated in the new department were Theodore Russel Davis (1840–1894), Henry Mosler (1841-1920), Winslow Homer (1836 –1910), Thomas Nast (1840 – 1902), Granville Perkins (1830–1895), Alfred Rudolph Waud (1828–1891) and brother William Waud (1832–1878). All served as artist-correspondents during the Civil War and had illustrious careers long after the War. 

    Artists like Nast, Homer and Perkins were already well-established, but Parson’s influence in his department over future team members may have been the catalyst for a subsequent period of superior illustrative art in America. 

    Indulge for a moment a hypothesis about how this change might have happened—

“What if?” 

“Then surely…”

    

    Imagine “what if” one day in late 1865 or early 1866 Parsons received a package in his office that contained the just-published Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland? The copy might have been one of the 2,000 rejects that Tenniel/Carroll are said to have banished to the United States. Or the book could have been sent across town as a courtesy copy from Alice’s American publisher Appleton & Company.

    If this package arrived, “then surely” Parsons and his colleagues would have been as excited over the book as the rest of the publishing world. As professional artists they would have been struck by Tenniel’s exemplary illustrations accompanying Carroll’s masterful prose. 

    The department’s enthusiasm over Tenniel’s art would only have been eclipsed by the celebration at the time over what was—at long last—the end of the Civil War. 

    Harper’s artists would no longer be Illustrating wartime’s bloody battles (see Parsons’ “First Naval Conflict Between Iron Clad Vessels, March 9, 1862” above) and years of suffering at home. At least for the men in the art department—survivors of the War’s madness—reconstruction of their lives and healing of their hearts had begun. 

    Might not they and Parsons himself have turned to their own artistic endeavors with new vigor, with fresh approaches, even with a sense of enchantment that creative souls often feel when confronted with beauty? 

    After all, such is the power of the arts.

    That premise is this article’s conjecture about the importance of a possible delivery of Carroll’s masterpiece into the hands of Charles Parsons, artist and mentor. This hypothesis is only meant to present a possible impetus for America’s Golden Age; the rest is history. 

    Harper's was the country’s preeminent publisher, established itself as early as 1850 as a leader with its illustrated Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, which by 1865 had branched out from the objective news in the Weekly magazine toward more opinionated pieces. The Monthly became a literary as well as political force nationwide, publishing the writings of Winston Churchill and Woodrow Wilson and even excerpts from Moby Dick. Illustrations provided by the art department for Harper’s magazines placed both publications at the forefront of what has been called “a great age of American magazine illustration.” Parsons directed the department for twenty-six years, coinciding exactly with this “great age.” 

    During the 1870s and 1880s, Parsons personally mentored artists who would later become famous magazine and book illustrators, as well as political cartoonists, painters and sculptors. No record exists of when they were Parson’s team members, so listed alphabetically are some of them: Edwin Austin Abbey (1852 –1911), Robert Frederick Blum (1857–1903), Arthur Burdett Frost (1851-1928), Edward Winsor Kemble (1861–1933), Howard Pyle (1853-1911), Charles Stanley Reinhart (1844 –1896), Frederic Remington (1861 –1909) and William Allen Rogers (1854–1931).  

    The pre-eminent illustrator among Parson’s proteges was Howard Pyle (1853-1911), who became known as the “Father of American illustration”—a title previously held by Felix Octavius Carr Darley (1822-1888), another early illustrator for Harper’s Weekly as well as for adult fiction by the great early American novelists. 

    However, Pyle is the artist who stands tall in America’s Golden Age because of his classic publications for young people, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (1883), and subsequent work with iconic portrayals of pirates, collected later as Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates (1921). As groundbreaking as his books would be, equally as important was that, after leaving Harper’s, he maintained Parson’s tradition of mentoring others, beginning in 1894 by teaching art and illustration at the Drexel Institute of Art, Science, and Industry.  

    Maxfield Parrish (1870-1966) audited Pyle’s classes at Drexel but was never enrolled, since the forty-year-old teacher looked at the twenty-three-year-old prospective student’s portfolio and said he had “already mastered technique…and there was nothing else he could teach him” (Ludwig, Maxfield Parrish). In 1897 Parrish’s first book illustrations were for Mother Goose in Prose by L. Frank Baum, such as the charming portrayal of a dapper Humpty Dumpty.   

    This was followed by his most well-known illustrations for Eugene Field’s Poems of Childhood (1904), Arabian Nights (1909) and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales (1910). He painted murals of scenes from nursery rhymes, including one from “Sing a Song of Sixpence” for Chicago’s Hotel Sherman in 1910. In 1924 he illustrated a book of the play “The Knave of Hearts” by Louise Saunders. His painting “Daybreak” (1922) would become the most popular art print of the 20th century, and he was so famous after a 50-year career of using vibrant colors that cobalt blue is often called “Parrish blue.”

    At Drexel, half of Pyle’s students were females, and he championed the right of his gifted “lady artists” to illustrate for major publishing firms and to fight against the social stereotype that labeled them as inferior to the “gentlemen artists.”

    One of these gifted artists was Jessie Willcox Smith (1863-1935), who began a lifelong friendship with fellow students Elizabeth Shippen Green (1871-1954) and Violet Oakley (1894-1961). Pyle helped secure their first illustration commission in 1897 for Evangeline by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He nicknamed them the "Red Rose Girls" while they lived together in the Red Rose Inn in Villanova, Pennsylvania from 1899 to 1901. The three of them later joined Henrietta Couzens (1862 - 1940) in Philadelphia (elisa-rolle.livejournal.com).

After 1900, Pyle founded his own school attached to his art studio, the Howard Pyle School of Illustration Art, called Brandywine after a river and valley in Pennsylvania and Delaware. During the ten years that Pyle ran his school, he was mentor and teacher for a whole generation of illustrators, many of whom who went on to have careers in the “astounding change and unprecedented upsurge in the quality of illustrated books.” He had already contributed his own quality work to the Golden Age by writing as well as illustrating twenty books, and his particular style of art and teaching became known as the “Brandywine School.”

    Smith continued her studies with Pyle at Brandywine and gained her reputation with illustrations in 1905 for A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson, in 1914 for her own Jessie Willcox Smith Mother Goose and in 1916 for The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley. Smith made illustrations for more than 250 periodicals, 200 magazine covers and 60 books from 1888 to 1932, was one of the highest paid illustrators of her time and became known as one of the greatest female illustrators. For the rest of the 19th century and into the 20th, several of Smith’s feminist colleagues at Brandywine also became successful illustrators of picture books.    

    Of Pyle’s hand-picked male proteges, among the most successful were Frank E. Schoonover (1877-1972), Harvey Dunn (1884-1952), Clifford Ashley (1881-1947) and the incomparable N. C. Wyeth (1882-1945). Wyeth became the famous illustrator of twenty-five titles for Scribner Classics, the first of which was his masterpiece, Treasure Island (1911), followed by The Boy's King Arthur (1920). Pyle himself had illustrated his own classic, The Story of King Arthur and His Knights (1903), and of all his Brandywine students, Wyeth was the most like him in his artistic style for adventure novels—high drama, explosive action and brilliant colors.    

    In 1905 studios were built at Brandywine for Wyeth (who eventually worked at home in nearby Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania), Dunn (who opened his own school in 1915 in Leonia, New Jersey), Ashley (who went east to write sea stories) and Schoonover (who opened his own school in the studio and remained for 63 years). After Pyle died in 1911, another student Stanley M. Arthurs (1877-1950) bought Pyle’s studio and continued the school from 1912-1950.

    Tenniel’s fantastic art in Alice is seen as the catalyst for a Golden Age in children’s book illustration on both sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps both British and American artistic communities craved a focus other than traditional rhymes, songs and fairy tales. As it turned out, the focus in England would be early fantasy literature—the Walrus and the Carpenter, Peter and Wendy, Eeyore and Piglet, Toad of Toad Hall. 

    Early British illustrators after Tenniel, like picture book artists Walter Crane (1845-1915), Kate Greenaway (1846-1901), Randolph Caldecott (1846-1886), Leslie Brooke (1862-1940), Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) and Arthur Rackham (1867-1939) pose a similar illustrious lineage to that of Parsons, Pyle, Parrish, Wyeth and Smith. In fact, Caldecott, Crane and Greenaway had a mentor much like Charles Parsons—Edmund Evans (1826-1905), the esteemed London wood-engraver and printer who painstakingly reproduced their illustrations in full-color to achieve his goal of creating beautiful books for children (see Article 10).

    America’s first contribution to fantasy literature like Alice was the masterpiece, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). Baum and W. W. Denslow (1856-1915) were like Carroll and Tenniel, creators of an incomparable story for the ages. Other American fantasies followed about Doctor Doolittle, Stuart Little, Charlotte and Wilbur, Ralph H. Mouse and his motorcycle.

    Many early authors in the United States did not follow in the tradition of old-world European-style fantasies of talking animals and portals leading into magical worlds. Instead, they created realistic novels about children close to home, such as Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in Missouri and Caddie Woodlawn in Wisconsin. Even Dorothy’s story began in Kansas before flying off in a Midwestern tornado to Oz. Perhaps these authors wanted to convey an idea that the settlement of a continent was America’s unique fantasy. 

    Much of the focus on the fantastic in America turned instead to the technological and futuristic, as a flood of creative authors, illustrators, comic book creators and filmmakers began to lead the world in science fiction and exploits of superheroes. But that is another article.

    The Golden Age of Illustration in America and Britain faded during and after World War I. Perhaps Pyle’s contemporary, illustrator Alice Barber Stephens (1858-1932) summed up the feeling of many artists during war-time when she refused “to make pictures in the midst of destruction.” When prosperity returned in the early 1920s, publishing houses began to create special departments with editors devoted to juvenile literature, and the world of writing and illustrating for children took another giant leap forward.  

    An outpouring of extraordinary talent in the 1930s might be called a Golden Decade of American Picture Books. Despite the fact that the decade was a difficult time — families were broken after the War, split on Prohibition and devastated by the Great Depression—every major publishing house in America released at least one picture book that is considered a classic. The magic of children’s books continued, on and on.

                                                        Read on for a continuation!

                         Companion Article 10

                                19th Century Golden Age of Nursery Illustrations:

                                    Seven Rhymes and Songs into the 21st Century

Article 10 reviews seven nursery rhymes and songs illustrated by Caldecott, Crane and Greenaway in the Golden Age in Britain, and concludes with 21st century American illustrators who have pictured the same rhymes in innovative ways.

                            Suggested reading:

Bingham; Scholt (1980). Fifteen Centuries of Children's Literature. Greenwood Press. pp. 99, 107.ISBN 0-313-22164-2

Bradley, Johanna (2007). From Chapbooks to Plumb Cake: The History of Children's Literature. ProQuest. ISBN 978-0-549-34070-6

Carter, Alice A. (2000). The Red Rose Girls: An Uncommon Story of Art and Love. New York: Harry N. Abrams. p. 35. ISBN 978-0-8109-4437-4

Carpenter, Humphrey (1985). Secret Gardens: The Golden Age of Children's Literature. Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 978-0-395-35293-9

Florey, Kenneth (5 June 2013). Women's Suffrage Memorabilia: An Illustrated Historical Study. McFarland. pp. 115, 119, 148. ISBN 978-1-4766-0150-2

Gardner, Martin (2000). The Annotated Alice: the definitive edition. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-04847-6

Gladstone, J. Francis, and Elwyn-Jones, Jo (1998). The Alice Companion. Palgrave Macmillan, pages 253–255

“The Golden Age of Illustration 1875-1920”. Pook Press.com 

"Harper & Brothers." American History Through Literature 1870-1920, Thomson Gale, 2006, Encyclopedia.com. (September 23, 2018). http://www.encyclopedia.com/ history/culture-magazines/harper-brothers

Heinemann, Sue (1996). Timelines of American Women's History. Berkley Publishing Group. p. 377–378. ISBN 978-0-399-51986-4

“A Latter-Day Industry and Its Rewards: How a Group of Illustrators is Making Fortunes by Drawing Pictures of the 'Modern Woman'" (PDF). The New York Times. February 6, 1910. Retrieved April 14, 2015.

Lerer, Seth (2008). Children's Literature: A Reader's History, from Aesop to Harry Potter. University of Chicago Press.

Lundin, Anne H. (1994). "Victorian Horizons: The Reception of Children's Books in England and America, 1880–1900". The Library Quarterly. The University of Chicago Press, p. 64

 Marcus, Leonard S (2002). Ways of Telling: Conversations on the Art of the Picture Book. New York, N.Y: Dutton Children's, p. 164

May, Jill P.; Robert E. May; Howard Pyle. Howard Pyle: Imagining an American School of Art. University of Illinois Press; 2011. ISBN 978-0-252-03626-2. p. 89

McDonald, Edward D.; Edward M. Hinton (1942). Drexel Institute of Technology 1891–1941. Haddon Craftsmen, Inc. p. 126-130. ISBN 1-4067-6374-8

McHenry, Robert (1980). Famous American Women: A Biographical Dictionary from Colonial Times to the Present. Courier Dover Publications. p. 335–336. ISBN 978-0-486-24523-2

Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York. National Museum of American Art. 1995. p. 203–204. ISBN 978-0-393-03901-6

Moore, Rebecca Deming, ed. (1920). "The Children's Pages". The Publishers Weekly. F. Leypoldt. p. 1199.

Nodelman, Perry (2008). The Hidden Adult: Defining Children's Literature. JHU. p. 4. ISBN 978-0-8018-8980-6

Ovenden, Graham (1972). The Illustrators of Alice. New York: St. Martin's Press. p. 102. ISBN 978-0-902620-25-4

Philips, Deborah (January 19, 2012). Fairground Attractions: A Genealogy of the Pleasure Ground. Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 93. ISBN 978-1-84966-666-4

Prieto, Laura R. (2001). At Home in the Studio: The Professionalization of Women Artists in America. Harvard University Press. p. 267. ISBN 978-0-674-00486-3

Ray, Gordon Norton (1991). The Illustrator and the book in England from 1790 to 1914. New York: Dover. ISBN 978-0-486-26955-9

Reed, Walt (2001). The Illustrator in America 1860–2000. New York: Society of Illustrators, p. 186. ISBN 0-942604-80-6

Swinth, Kirsten (2001). Painting Professionals: Women Artists & the Development of Modern American Art, 1870-1930. UNC Press Books. pp. 175, 256. ISBN 978-0-8078-4971-2

Thomson, Ellen Mazur (1997). The Origins of Graphic Design in America, 1870-1920. Yale University Press. p. 154. ISBN 978-0-300-06835-1

Williams, Jay G.; Barrett Art Gallery (2014). “Women Illustrators in the Golden Age of Illustration, 1880-1920: Original Publication Prints and Covers”, Jay Williams American Print Collection: January 27-February 21, 2014, Barrett Art Gallery, Utica College, New York

"Women Artists Featured in Fall Brandywine Exhibition." Morning Herald. Hagerstown, Maryland. September 5, 1975. p. 10.

Zipes, Jack (ed.) (2000). The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales : The Western Fairy Tale Tradition from Medieval to Modern. Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-9653635-7-0

 19th Century Golden Age of Nursery Illustrations:

Seven Rhymes and Songs into the 21st Century

Article 10 

by Lyn Lacy

8500 words

                    

Three Victorian artists who revolutionized children’s picture books were Walter Crane (1845-1915), Kate Greenaway (1846-1901) and Randolph Caldecott (1846-1886), whose illustrations were wood engraved and printed by Edmund Evans (1826-1905) as classic examples of the Golden Age of Illustration in the English-speaking world. Among the popular subjects for all three artists were little stories for the nursery, some of them known as Mother Goose rhymes or songs, passed down in 18th- and 19th-century Britain and America. 

The extraordinary collaborator and friend, Evans, was born February 23, 1826, in the borough of Southwark. Almost 20 years later, Crane was born in Liverpool on August 15, 1845, the second son of a portrait painter and miniaturist. Catherine “Kate” Greenaway was born in London seven months later on March 17, 1846, the only daughter of the wood engraver, John Greenaway. Randolph Caldecott was born in Chester five days after that on March 22, 1846, the third of thirteen children of an accountant.

                                

Evans would play a crucial role in the careers of the three young illustrators. For his unusually intricate, subtle color printing, Evans used a hand-press himself and as many as a dozen woodblocks for a single image to get the right colors. At age 14, he had been apprenticed for seven years to wood engraver Ebenezer Landells, who introduced him to an assistant John Greenaway—Kate’s father—and also to one of his pupils, with whom Evans traveled widely on sketching and painting trips—Myles Birket Foster (1825-1899), later considered “certainly the most popular water-color artist of our time.” Greenaway and his daughter Kate would be Evans’ life-long friends, and Evans not only worked with Foster on many books but also married Foster’s niece and built a home next to his (“Edmund Evans”). Foster did the above pencil drawing of John Greenaway. 

By 1865 Evans had his own high-class printing business and was well-known as an artist and skilled craftsman who had a strong influence on artists with whom he worked. He had a vision that picture books for children should be in color, beautifully crafted and inexpensive. That year, the 39-year-old Evans enlisted the 19-year-old Walter Crane as his first collaborator in this effort to improve children’s books.

                            

         Crane had come to London in 1859 as an apprentice to a wood engraver and was inspired by William Morris (1834-1896) of the Arts and Crafts movement, as well as by the work of Japanese artists such as Hiroshige (1797-1858). Crane produced an array of illustrations and paintings as well as striking designs for ceramics and other decorative arts throughout his illustrious career. 

When he began illustrating picture books, his work was originally produced by Camden Press, owned since 1839 by the Brothers Dalziel, other prolific wood engravers and printers. Crane drew his initials for a signature on illustrations— using a “C”, two “Vs” to make “W”” and the figure of a crane—but in widely different configurations.   

Evans invited Crane to illustrate Sixpenny Toy Books, beginning in 1865 with The House That Jack Built (sadly, this first of Crane’s books is unavailable). Crane produced two to three Toy Books each year until 1876, a series that contained fairy tales, alphabets and nursery rhymes of his own choosing. One was the comical Mother Hubbbard: Her Picture Book (n.d.). Crane is today widely regarded as the patriarch of the Golden Age of Illustration in Britain (Pook Press).  

Crane acknowledged that his early illustrative style was inspired by Sir John Tenniel’s pen-and-ink illustrations in 1865 for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Lord of the Nursery). In Article 9, a hypothesis is presented that a similar situation in New York prompted a concurrent Golden Age of Illustration in America. At Harper’s publishing house in Manhattan, Charles Parsons was head of the art department, and a conjecture is that he might have shared his enthusiasm over Tenniel’s new ground-breaking illustrations in Alice, especially influencing his young protégé, Howard Pyle. Pyle became known as “the Father of American Illustration” (Howard Pyle), just as Crane became known as the father of British illustration. However the artistic beginning of the Golden Ages might have come about on both sides of the Atlantic, Tenniel’s illustrations in Alice in 1865 appear to be the impetus for the flourishing of exemplary illustrations that followed into the 20th century.

In 1877 Crane illustrated The Baby's Opera: A Book Of Old Rhymes With New Dresses (n.d.) containing music for nursery songs like “Ye Song of Sixpence” and “Ye Frog’s Wooing,” with an illustration for “Hey-Diddle-Diddle” on the front cover. The Baby’s Opera was followed by The Baby’s Bouquet (1878) and The Baby’s Own Aesop (1886). 

In 1870 Evans also collaborated with a prominent artist, Richard "Dickie" Doyle (1824–1883), to engrave and print In Fairyland, a Series of Pictures from the Elf-World, with 36 illustrations that have been considered “a masterpiece of Victorian illustration” (Victorian Fairies).

Caldecott was another illustrator who impressed Evans, especially with his illustrations for Washington Irving’s Old Christmas (1876). Caldecott traveled widely in the countryside and drew his pictures, often humorous, of the landed gentry, landscapes and common scenes he saw along the way for magazines in London. He admittedly borrowed from the style of Tenniel as Crane had done. 

Evans invited Caldecott to collaborate on two books in 1878, The House that Jack Built and The Diverting History of John Gilpin. Despite being in poor health, Caldecott produced two  children’s books each Christmas for the next seven years. He chose the nursery rhymes and literary pieces by 18th century writers and created exquisite illustrations that conveyed a sense of “music and dance” that made him rightfully dubbed “Lord of the Nursery.” 

His picture books Hey-Diddle-Diddle (1882) and Sing a Song for Sixpence (1880) are especially praised for their exemplary art and ingenious endings concocted by Caldecott himself.

Queen of Hearts illustrated by Caldecott is considered one of the most beautiful picture books ever published, with its Hollywood-handsome King and drop-dead-gorgeous Queen. The page-by-page design and Caldecott’s inventive elaborations add to the fame of this near-perfect Victorian picture book.         

                        

By the late 1870s, Evans had also begun a collaboration with the young Greenaway that continued for the next two decades. She wrote as well as illustrated her first book, Under the Window: Pictures & Rhymes for Children (1879), which some historians feel was influenced by Crane’s The Baby’s Opera two years before. She also wrote the verses and illustrated Marigold Garden (1885).

                             

     She illustrated over 150 books, among them Mother Goose or the Old Nursery Rhymes (1881) and A Apple Pie (1886), perpetuating "Kate Greenaway children” who were always dressed in her version of Regency fashions. Her designs for bonnets and high-waisted dresses were copied, sold in shops and became known as the “Greenaway vogue” in the 1880s and 1890s.

    The three picture book illustrators were also popular for a variety of other work in addition to nursery rhymes. Crane illustrated Aesop’s fables, fairy tales, his own poetry and children’s primers. Greenaway illustrated fairy tales and poetry, bookplates and greeting cards. Caldecott illustrated travel books and folk ballads. In 1862 the Royal Academy exhibited Crane’s painting The Lady of Shalott. In 1876 Caldecott’s painting There were Three Ravens Sat on a Tree was also exhibited by the Academy. In 1882 Caldecott and Crane were elected to the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colors and by 1889, Greenaway had been chosen as well. In 1868 Greenaway sold a set of six watercolors to the publisher of People's Magazine; Caldecott had also become a magazine illustrator when he moved to London in 1872. Crane and Greenaway had met in London when Greenaway studied at Heatherley School of Fine Art, and in 1876 the two contributed illustrations to a collection of Valentines, The Quiver of Love.

    The three crossed paths periodically and apparently were friendly rivals, sometimes critical of each other’s style, other times praising a specific work. Crane helped Caldecott with publishers when he first arrived in London (Lord of the Nursery). When Caldecott was commissioned to design four columns at the home of Frederic Leighton in Kensington, Crane designed a frieze for the same room. Evans once remarked about Greenaway, “It was refreshing to see her keen enjoyment of Caldecott’s spontaneity” (“Edmund Evans”).  

    In 1885 Caldecott’s deteriorating health motivated him to seek the warm climate of St. Augustine, Florida, which was advertised above as “becoming the foremost winter resort in America” (Old St. Augustine). Ironically, he contracted acute gastritis during Florida’s worst cold spell in fifty years and died on  February 13, 1886, at age 40, his prolific career lasting only ten years. He is buried in St. Augustine’s Evergreen Cemetery. Marian returned to England. The Caldecott Medal in the United States was established in his honor in 1938 and is awarded annually to the artist of the most distinguished American picture book for children published in the United States during the preceding year. 

    Greenaway died November 6, 1901, of breast cancer, at age 55, and is buried in the Hampstead Cemetery in London.  The Kate Greenaway Medal was established in her honor In Britain in 1955 and is presented annually to an outstanding illustrator of children’s books in the United Kingdom.

                                                        

    Evans died August 21, 1905, at age 79, after ill health forced him to transfer his business to sons Wilfred and Herbert and move to Ventnor on the Isle of Wight. In the decade before his death, he had written The Reminiscences of Edmund Evans, a short autobiography he described as "the rambling jottings of an old man" (McLean). “Evans, who had printed Doyle’s In Fairyland, was also undoubtedly the key figure to whom Crane, Greenaway and Caldecott owed recognition, encouragement and brilliant color reproduction” (Watson). 

    Crane died March 14, 1915, at age 69, in West Sussex. His ashes are interred at the Golders Green Crematorium. He was survived by three children, Beatrice, Lionel and Lancelot. Reproductions of his contributions to the Arts and Crafts movement can still be found on the market today. He was awarded the Albert Medal by the Royal Society of Arts in 1904 (Wikipedia).

    The triumvirate of Caldecott, Crane and Greenaway epitomized the legendary Golden Age of Victorian Illustration. The consummate skills of these three—along with their engraver/printer Evans—are credited as being the first to create books for children that were not only considered entertainment but also works of art. In 1892 the American critic William A. Coffin praised the new medium for popularizing art: “More has been done through the medium of illustrated literature… to make the masses of people realize that there is such a thing as art and that it is worth caring about” (Pook Press).

    Into the 20th century in America, picture books by Crane, Caldecott, Greenaway were preferred by parents who sought quality works from Britain rather than America. Illustration on this side of the Atlantic began to improve in technology as well as artistry due to immigrant artists who came to the United States and others who entered from the field of the fine arts. Many of these illustrators got their start with Little Golden Books, such as Gertrude Espenscheid (1911-1993) who illustrated Mother Goose by Phyllis Fraser in 1942.

    Notable American illustrators who created handsome editions of nursery rhymes in the late 19th century into the 20th century were W. W. Denslow (1856-1915), Blanche Fisher Wright (1887-1938), Philip Reed (1908-1989) in a 1964 Caldecott Honor Book, Jessie Willcox Smith (1863 -1935), Feodor Rojankovsky (1891-1970), Tasha Tudor (1915-2008) in a 1945 Caldecott Honor Book, Marjorie Torrey (1891-1964) in a 1946 Caldecott Honor Book, Marguerite De Angeli (1889-1987) in a 1955 Caldecott Honor Book, Tomie de Paola (1934-), Lois Lenski (1893-1974), Peter Spier (1927-2017), Arnold Lobel (1933-1987), Michael Hague (1948-) and Rosemary Wells (1943-). 

    One renowned American picture book illustrator from the 1970s to the present day is Susan Jeffers, who has award-winning art for fairy tales, songs, Mother Goose rhymes and her own prose, particularly about horses. In 1973 and 1979, Jeffers made fun departures in both verse and illustration for rhymes Caldecott himself had published with Evans as Toy Books in 1880 and in 1884. This connection with Caldecott makes reviews of Jeffers’ two 20th century picture books the perfect segue to a discussion below of subsequent 21st century nursery rhymes. 

    The first of Jeffers’ books is the folk song, Three Jovial Huntsmen, A Mother Goose Rhyme (1973), and the second is Mother Goose: If Wishes Were Horses and Other Rhymes (1979). The latter collection includes two jogging or trotting rhymes, “Ride a Cock-Horse to Banbury Cross” and “A Farmer Went Trotting Upon His Grey Mare.” 

                            “The Jovial Huntsmen””

    Not really a nursery rhyme, this old nonsense verse and traditional folk song was popular for its silliness, described through many versions. The comical plot dates back to The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer and appears in the tragicomedy “The Two Noble Kinsmen” attributed in 1634 to John Fletcher and William Shakespeare. 

    Caldecott’s version of The Three Jovial Huntsmen (1880) began with three friends galloping precariously down the lane in blazing red coats, black flat caps, breeks and wellies after a hearty breakfast and perhaps too much ale. Maurice Sendak, who  said Caldecott “invented the picture book,” pointed to the Huntsmen’s ride as inspiration for his “wild rumpus” scenes in Where the Wild Things Are (1963).

    The happy three had no guns or hunting dogs but blasted away on brass horns, then resorted to hollering as they raced hither and yon, telling jokes about whatever they encountered in fields, farmyards and lanes. “Look ye there!” they cried, over and over. They “powler’t” (bounced) up and down a bit on their horses and at the end, even though they had “seized” nothing, they pronounced that they had indeed had a “rattling” good day. 

    Jeffers’ 1974 Caldecott Honor Book of a rhyming version of Three Jovial Huntsmen, A Mother Goose Rhyme (1973), concerns three Welshmen who go hunting on March 1, feast day of St. David, the patron saint of Wales. The nattily dressed friends do carry guns but they do not have horses, horns or other hunting accouterments. One of them has brought along his dog, but it acts more like the family pet as it rolls around on the ground, easily distracted by a butterfly or leaf. 

    Animals are hiding all around, but the oblivious Huntsmen simply wander about all day and into the night, talking among themselves and making up stories about what they see. The only events of the Day are illustrated rather than told in the text, such as the dog dumping everyone off a log into the stream and later startling a family of skunks that sprays the entire hillside. The Huntsmen leave with handkerchiefs over their noses as the woodland creatures peek out from the trees, and looking back at the audience is a sly fox with a knowing grin. 

                                            “Ride a Cock-Horse to Banbury Cross”

                                    and “A Farmer Went Trotting Upon His Grey Mare”  

                                    
    Both of these mid-16th century jogging rhymes are for a child bounced on an adult’s lap or sitting on someone’s foot crossed over the other knee, as shown by Greenaway in Mother Goose or the Old Nursery Rhymes (1881). Greenaway also pictured a little girl riding on a toy stick-horse to “see little Johnny/Get on a white horse.” A statue commemorating “The Fine Lady on a White Horse” was unveiled by Princess Anne in Banbury, Oxfordshire, in 2005. 

    In Caldecott’s 1884 picture book, Ride A-Cock Horse to Banbury Cross, a gentrified girl and boy were set upon sturdy ponies (but the over-proud boy shows off his finery a bit too much for the village children, who enjoy watching the pony run away with him). 

    Crane also included in his 1909 Song of Sixpence Picture Book the rhyme “Ride a Cock-Horse to Banbury Cross,” found in the “Alphabet of Old Friends.” His choice of verse referred to “an old woman,” and he pictured a boy on a wooden stick horse.

    Caldecott included the trotting rhyme, “A Farmer went Trotting Upon his Grey Mare,” in the same picture book as the other rhyme. With a “Bumpety, bumpety, bump!” and “Lumpety, lumpety, lump!” the bouncing rhyme relates how a Farmer took his Daughter for a ride, only to have a Raven’s startling “Croak!” make everyone fall down, including the horse. Studying the faces of wary townsfolk as the Farmer trotted by earlier in the day, the assumption can be that he was perhaps going a bit too fast on his afternoon ride, so maybe his reckless gait startled the Raven, rather than the other way around. Regardless, we hear from the raucous Raven that it plans the same mischief again the next time they ride. 

                         

    Jeffers illustrates both rhymes in Mother Goose: If Wishes Were Horses and Other Rhymes (1979), a collection of rhymes about horses. Her pictures are as warm and witty as Caldecott’s, and in “A farmer went trotting upon his good mare,” she additionally gives a reason for the Raven’s rude behavior – it had planned all along to steal the daughter’s goodies from her basket. For “Ride a cockhorse to Banbury Cross,” Jeffers chooses a different story in which a father takes his daughter, little Annie, to buy her “a galloping horse.” Annie breaks into a wild ride, until the worn-out, disgruntled beast glares out at the audience with a look that conveys he would perhaps rather “ride no more.”

    No one since has given these rhymes the full picture book treatment like Jeffers and Caldecott. Jeffers’ variants for the rhymes are welcomed additions, giving extra dimensions for the characters’ actions and making the stories even funnier. The art and wit in her versions are remarkably similar in intent to the gentle fun Caldecott himself conveyed in his pictures. Versions by two artists a century apart poke fun in light-hearted ways at children and adults alike, and Illustrations in both are infectious, each with its own style, one slapstick, the other wry. Watching jokes unfold in pictures is just as enjoyable in the 20th century as it was almost a hundred years ago.  

    Regrettably, no contemporary illustrator has come forward with a new version of one of the best runaway horse stories ever, The Diverting History of John Gilpin: Shewing how he went Farther than he intended, and came safe Home again, a comic ballad written in 1782 by William Cowper that was so popular that copies sold out, along with Gilpen toys. Like The Jovial Huntsmen, Caldecott’s picture book of John Gilpin is a classic example of the illustrator’s gentle nudges at townsfolk who aspired to social status. On the Caldecott Medal is a design of Caldecott’s illustration of Gilpen “the linendraper” (cloth merchant) on the runaway horse borrowed from his good friend “the calender” (textile worker).

    Seven rhymes illustrated in the 19th century by Crane, Greenaway and/or Caldecott have also captured the imaginations of 21st-century illustrators. Modern-day illustrators featured below have published them as a single nursery rhyme or in a collection of rhymes. A brief history of the rhyme follows each of the titles below, including discussions of illustrations by Crane, Greenaway and/or Caldecott, before turning to reviews of the 21st century versions. The rhymes are found in the “List of nursery rhymes” (also called Mother Goose or Tommy Thumb songs) by Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, along with place of origin and date first recorded:

 “A Frog He would A-Wooing Go” (England, 1611)

“A Was an Apple Pie” (England, 1671)

“Sing a Song of Sixpence” (England, c1744)

“This is the House that Jack Built” (England, 1755)

“Hey-Diddle-Diddle” (England, c1765)

 “The Queen of Hearts” (Britain, 1782)

“Humpty Dumpty” (England, 1803)

    Characters in these rhymes are immediately recognizable when they appear in illustrations for unrelated books, such as the Cat and the Fiddle in David Wiesner’s 2002 Medalist, The Three Pigs, and Humpty Dumpty as well as Mother Goose herself ln Uri Shulevitz’s 1999 Honor Book, Snow.

                                            “A Frog He Would A-Wooing Go”

    A 19th century refrain is the lighthearted, high-stepping “With a rowley-powley, gammon and spinach/Heigho, says Anthony Rowley!” that historians surmise might satirically refer to four families in Suffolk named Rowley, Poley, Bacon and Green. However, no one seemed to know why they were spoofed in this way or what part was played by Anthony Rowley in the refrain. The poem as a song goes back to the 16th century and has had as many versions as there were singers.  

    In Crane’s musical rendition of “Ye Frog’s Wooing” published in The Baby’s Opera: A Book of Old Rhymes with New Dresses (1877), the singer/narrator admitted in the verse that the villains  -- “Tib, our cat” and “Dick, our drake” – belonged to his own family. 

                                            

    Caldecott used a version published in A Book of Nursery Songs and Rhymes (1895), compiled by the scholar Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924). The version was called “A Frog He Would A-Wooing Go”, beginning with Mr. Frog, Mr. Rat and Miss Mousey enjoying a cheerful afternoon of ginger beer and music before Mr. Rat and Miss Mousey were killed by Cat and her Kittens and then Mr. Frog, when he ran away, was caught and killed by a lily-white Duck. 

                                            

    Caldecott’s 1883 picture book not only told the whole Miss Mousey story but also showed concerned reactions of a human family who—like Caldecott himself—had heard the song about Mr. Frog so many times that they had a sense of foreboding about what they knew was to come.

    In the 20th century, a 1938 Caldecott Honor Book, Four and Twenty Blackbirds: Old Nursery Rhymes included a Southern Appalachian version by Helen Dean Fish, illustrated by Robert Lawson. In 1956, Feodor Rojankovsky received the Caldecott Medal for his rollicking illustrations in John Langstaff’s retelling of Frog Went A-Courtin’, with single-page portraits of each attendee at the wedding breakfast. 

2000 Marjorie Priceman (n.d.), Author and Illustrator. Froggie Went A-Courting, Little Brown, 8.75” x 11.25

In Priceman’s expressionist version of the story, Froggie takes a taxi to New York’s Upper West Side, and soon Broadway’s bright lights announce, “Frog and Mouse to Marry.” In brilliant colors, a frenetic tour of the Big Apple continues, the wedding has too many fun-loving guests to count and a happy honeymoon in Paris awaits for “One rodent, one amphibian!”   

2006  Iza Trapani (1954-), Author and Illustrator. Froggie Went A-Courtin’, Charlesbridge, 32 pp, 8.5”x 9.6”

    Trapani’s Froggie Went A-Courtin’ in 2006 begins with the lovesick hero riding a 19th century high-bicycle instead of a “high horse.” Trapini created a new series of events in which Froggie’s proposal is first rejected by Mousie in her parlor, then by Turtle in a rowboat, followed by Birdie on a picnic and finally by Chipmunk in a restaurant. A lovely double-page illustration shows Froggie in bed, reading his book The Lonely Frog. Then, lo and behold, as he sits on a park bench one day, a lovely lady frog sashays up to him, and she’s the one to propose to him. 

    Interesting to note in these two 21st-century poems is that both Trapini and Priceman introduce new characters that are prejudiced against Froggie. They reject the idea of his marriage to Mousey, declaring that he is “slimy,” “smells like swamp” and “isn’t our kind.” Indeed, in Trapini’s illustrations, woodland creatures on almost every page are paired off with partners of their own species, a not-so-subtle hint to Froggie that this is what a marriage should be. In Priceman’s story, Auntie Rat shouts, “You cannot marry an amphibian!” Mousey still wants Froggie, however, and Cat shuts up the nagging old Auntie for good. Both books show Froggie himself as a sweet, gallant, lovable guy who is not at all deserving of such disparagement, and both stories have a happily-ever-after ending.

                                                                “A Apple Pie”

Reference to the rhyme “A Apple Pie” was made as early as 1671, in which the letter “J” was the curved form of the letter “I” and the two were not differentiated. So Greenaway had no rhyme for “I” in her A Apple Pie: An Old-Fashioned Alphabet Book (1886). She used stanzas from a popular 1742 version called The Child’s New Plaything which became known as the Apple Pie ABC.

                           
In Greenaway’s version for “F Fought for It,” she sanitized the idea of fisticuffs by picturing little boys doing nothing more than posturing for the other children. They are living a bucolic life that is, as Maurice Sendak described it, “a never-ending ring-around-the rosie,” referring to Greenaway’s “Ring-a-ring-a-roses/A pocket full of posies” in Mother Goose or the Old Nursery Rhymes (1881). 

                        

      

    Included in Crane’s toy book Mother Hubbard/Her Picture Book (n.d.) is “The Absurd ABC” (Crane was fond of publishing alphabets), in which each letter referred to a nursery rhyme—such as “A” for apple pie, “C” for cat and the fiddle, “F” for Froggie, “H” for Humpty and “P” for the Sixpence blackbird pie. 

2003 Nina Crews, Illustrator. The Neighborhood Mother Goose, Greenwillow, 26 pp, 11”x 8”

    Crews digitally color-corrected and manipulated collages of photographs using Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator to re-enact a collection of rhymes set in real street scenes with characters modeled by multiracial adults and children in a Brooklyn neighborhood. “A Was an Apple Pie”  by Crews is a double-page spread of a charming composite photo of children posed on an outdoor stairway pantomiming actions from the poem. Here again, all is serene. However, just enough mischief is evident in some of the preschoolers to show what little girls and boys are truly made of. The book also includes photographs of the same children acting out other rhymes, such as “Hey Diddle Diddle” and “Humpty Dumpty.“ “Ride a Cockhorse to Banbury Cross.” is especially delightful with a fine lady photographed sitting on a merry-go-round’s painted horse.

                                                “Sing a Song of Sixpence”

Enough hypotheses exist about a background for this story that the head spins. Online searches reveal that historians suppose the song was a veiled allusion to Henry VIII, Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn (aka the maid). Or they suppose it was a code Blackbeard’s pirates sang walking up and down the wharfs to lure new recruits. Or maybe it was a reference to a current King as the sun, Queen as the moon and blackbirds as 24 hours in a day. Or it could have been taken from a scene in Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” in which Sir Toby Welch tells a clown,  "Come on; there is sixpence for you: let's have a song." 

    Another fascinating aspect about this rhyme -- a fact, not an hypothesis -- is that elaborate dishes called “entremets” in medieval times included small animals or birds hidden inside fancy pies, intended by wealthy landowners to impress their guests. Baked or unbaked pie is not specified.                                            
    Caldecott imagined his own 28-page picture book of Sing a Song for Sixpence in 1880. An elderly woman tells the story (or perhaps “sings a song”) to a group of children (fashioned by Caldecott in the Regency style of Greenaway) about how, once upon a time as a child herself, she gave sixpence to a man who bought a pocketful of rye, which his wife ground into flour to make a big pie with birds tucked inside for a fantastic entremet to set before the King and Queen. The royals in the story were children, perhaps intended to appeal to the old storyteller’s young audience. Afterward, as childish characters in a story might, the little King sat down to count his shiny coins while the little Queen had a tea party of bread and honey.

    And what happened to the blackbirds? One of them flew out of the castle and “snapped off” the laundry Maid’s nose in the garden. However, Caldecott had created some vignettes scattered among full-color illustrations so that here his elderly storyteller might invent a kinder ending for young children. The Maid’s nose was “popped” on again by a little Jenny Wren, thanks perhaps to an attentive castle guard who appears to be taking some credit for the miraculous event. 

                                      

    Crane offered eight lovely traditional scenes in 1909 for each of the couplets in “Sing a Song of Sixpence,” complete with white-bearded King and exquisitely coiffured Queen. In his Preface to The Song of Sixpence Picture Book, the illustrator said, “What that famous blackbird pie really cost – except in blackbirds – is not disclosed, though the King seemed to show some anxiety about the state of his treasury, as he was discovered ‘in his counting house’ immediately after the feast. The Queen, regardless of expense, regales herself on ‘bread and honey in the parlour,’ and her Maid-of-honour, or perhaps of-all-work, is engaged at the clothes-line.”           

    Greenaway illustrated “Sing a Song of Sixpence” in April Baby’s Book of Tunes (1900) by Elizabeth von Arnim. In this book published a year before her death, Greenaway’s attention to detail in interior illustrations appears quite different from her earlier outdoor scenes of children at play.   

2007  Leo Dillon (1933-2012) and Diane Dillon (1933-), Illustrators. Mother Goose Numbers on the Loose, Harcourt, 56 pp, 11”x10”

    In the left illustration for “Sing a Song of Sixpence” in the Dillons’ 2007 collection, Mother Goose Numbers on the Loose, the baker carries the pie, followed by a maid with a bundle of Rye, a silly chickadee “singing the song” while playing a fiddle and 24 blackbirds marching along on spindly legs. The Pie itself is the star of the scene, for the baker has fashioned a crust that forms an ingenious high dome beneath which all the birds are seen to be creeping. Thus, an answer is provided for that pesky question about how on earth those birds of old could sing after being baked in an oven. On the facing right page, when the crust is lifted whole from the dainty dish, the audience sees that the blackbirds have not even worked up a sweat.  

      

    The last of the Dillons’ illustrations contains a continuous narrative showing the Maid in two poses—hanging out clothes and then having her nose snapped off. However, throughout the book, some nursery rhyme characters are disguised in costumes with head masks or cone-shaped noses tied behind their heads, as if everyone performs at a carnival. The importance of this advance planning becomes clear in this illustration because the pretty Maid wears one of the nose masks, which is snapped off instead of her real nose. Thus, a second disaster in the rhyme is averted – first, no incinerated blackbirds and now, a maid with nose intact. The mischievous Dillons also invented a perplexing visual mystery that was not mentioned in the poem. Silently watching both scenes unfold is a cat—not far-fetched for a nursery story—but a second unexplained observer happens to be a crocodile in a blue suit. The incongruous interloper is the kind of puzzling twist that has delighted the Dillons’ audiences during their long careers illustrating picture books. RIP, Leo Dillon.   

2016 Scott Gustafson (n.d.), Illustrator. Favorite Nursery Rhymes from Mother Goose. Artisan, 100pp, 10.9”x12.3”

This large 100-page collection of rhymes includes an illustration for “Sing a Song of Sixpence” as one of Gustafson’s few double-page spreads, in which the pie is served in the counting house to the grumpy, wizened old King and then in the parlor to his vacuous, simpy trophy Queen. The perky little red-headed Maid, however, steals the show with her sidelong glance at a suspicious-looking blackbird perched on the clothesline next to a large pair of frilly royal-purple bloomers.

                                            “This is the House that Jack Built”

This cumulative tale could be found in many British collections of Mother Goose during the 18th and 19th century. Online searches seem to agree that a Shropshire house called Cherrington Manor is likely the actual house that is shown. However, Jack and the house itself are actually not the focus. Instead, the rhyme builds links to other things and other people.

    Caldecott’s first picture book in 1878 had only six color illustrations interspersed among eighteen other pages of text and pencil drawings that fleshed out the plot. The illustrations are all in good fun, especially the man all tattered and torn who ended up getting the girl. Both Jack and his house were tantalizingly shown on the front cover, but illustrations focused on the tale of Jack’s sack of malt (grain used to make sugar, most likely for Jack’s whiskey) that was eaten by a rat, that was caught by a cat, that was worried by a dog and so forth, all the way to a Farmer innocently sowing corn. The realization hits the reader that this story was originally either someone’s idea of a joke on Jack or a tongue-in-cheek philosophical statement about how one simple act causes subsequent events in the lives of others. 

    Crane had also illustrated a version in 1865 for publishers Ward, Lock and Tyler’s New Schilling series, but a copy is impossible to find (Lord of the Nursery). Antonio Frasconi (1919-2013) won a 1959 Caldecott Honor Book Award for his woodcuts in The House that Jack Built: A picture book in two languages (1958).  

2002  Simms Taback (1932-2011), Author and Illustrator. This is the House that Jack Built, Putnam, 32 pp, 8.9”x11.3”

    Taback certainly gets the joke in his own version, and he places the humor firmly in the context of the house itself, which is never out of sight in his illustrations. First, the classified ads on the inside covers imply that Jack’s house is competing as one of three dozen for sale. Next, a variety of smelly cheeses, depicted in an upstairs room, might indeed just be the reason why Jack is having trouble selling the house. A truly dreadful rat is after the cheese, then an equally dreadful cat appears, followed by dreadful dog and so on, until the dreadful maiden, all forlorn takes the prize for causing an hysterical racket (so very different from Caldecott’s maiden). At the end, the house is sold, and the offending cheeses are thrown out the window.   

2014  Mark Teague (1963-), Illustrator. The Tree House That Jack Built by Bonnie Verburg, Orchard, 9.5” x 12.5”

Magical details are shown for a tree house in a banyan tree beside the sea. The boy Jack’s friendly creatures – fly, lizard, parrot, cat, dog, snake and monkey – are playful rather than predatory and after a bedtime story, everyone finds a place to sleep in the magnificent tree by the sea.

                                                                    “Hey-Diddle-Diddle”

This rhyme has endured for over two and a half centuries for reasons no one really knows. Perhaps the nonsense of it all tickles the funny bone, or the incongruity of its five characters described together intrigues even adults. Part of the rhyme may date back to medieval times when a common image for some unknown reason was a cat playing a fiddle. Another source from the 16th century talks about a “new dance called hey-diddle-diddle.” Whatever the origin, illustrators to this day choose to portray “Hey-Diddle-Diddle” in clever ways more than any other rhyme, with the exception perhaps of “Humpty Dumpty.”

    Crane’s adult humor pictured an innuendo on the cover of The Baby's Opera in 1877, in which the scene is set on a proscenium stage, showing Dish as a mustachioed figure wearing kimono and traditional Japanese baggy trousers serenading the demure Spoon standing at his side. Behind them a floral screen pictured the Cow jumping over the Moon. In front of the stage, Cat in a tuxedo played a cello and Dog, dressed in a formal topcoat with tie and trousers, clapped and chortled at the suggested seduction onstage.   

    Caldecott had three single-page, full-color illustrations in his 1882 picture book, with eleven more pages of vignettes for the rhyme. First, Caldecott created a party during which the Cat fiddled while children danced a jig. Then Cat fiddled outdoors while Dog laughed at the light-footed Cow, as well as dancing chickens and pigs with double rows of suit buttons. The third showed Cat fiddling back inside the house where the dishes were the ones cutting a rug. The pictures in color remain today as some of the most endearing in the history of picture books.

  Part of the book’s charm is action shown in line drawings. While the fiddler distracted everyone, the duplicitous Dish snuck away to court the unsuspecting little Spoon on a nearby bench. They were confronted there by her parents, an indignant knife and fork that busted up the blackguard Dish into pieces and marched Miss Spoon back home to the cutlery drawer. Caldecott’s genius was in his faithfulness to the rhyme while including his own wry humor in the details.  

2001 Janet Stevens (n.d.), Illustrator. And the Dish Ran Away with the Spoon by Janet Stevens and Susan Stevens Crummel, Houghton, 11.29” x 11.83” 

The Stevens’ storybook features Dish as a gal who finally gets the upper hand. When she and her suitor the Spoon had not returned after a reading of the poem, the Cat, Cow and Dog set out through Mother Goose land to search for them. Especially funny is the female Dog in her polka-dot tutu and perky red party hat held on by a rubber band that reaches under her chin.  New stanzas for the original rhyme tell the sequence of events, right up to Dish dragging Spoon back home.  

2008  Mary Engelbreit (1952- ), Illustrator. Mary Engelbreit’s Mother Goose Favorites, HarperCollins, 40 pp., 9.5”x 9.5”

    Engelbreit’s “Hey Diddle Diddle” turns things around in one of the funniest pictures from the many picture books she has published. The Dish is the lovely female, all gussied up, who is led down the garden path by a debonair male Spoon who has bedroom eyes, a pencil mustache, little red coat, big top hat, outrageously-striped socks and holds up a couple of tickets to get outta town. Cow, Moon and Dog are oblivious to the imminent scandal, but Cat looks out at the audience with eyes wide in alarm, as if to ask ”Is it my fiddle music that always makes our story end this way?”  

2016  Scott Gustafson (n.d.), Illustrator. Favorite Nursery Rhymes from Mother Goose, Artisan, 100pp, 10.9”x12.3”

Gustafson in his single-page illustration has the laughing Dog dressed as a clown complete with red pom-poms and holding a drum. Cat is a masked female fiddling away in gaudy feathered hat and flowing harlequin gown. Spoon is the male culprit who leads Dish down the garden path in the moonlight.

Also fun in 2011 Eve Bunting re-imagined the rhyme to include the moon playing a trombone, a whale banging a drum, a seal on sax, a camel on trumpet and an elephant on bass, all of which are shown by Mary Ann Fraser as mechanical figures in a little boy’s music box. Matthew Reinhart is the paper engineer of 2014 A Pop-Up Book of Nursery Rhymes, in which the male Spoon was the mischief-maker with sweet little Dish, and the audience is left to imagine what Dog is really laughing at. 

                                                            “The Queen of Hearts”

Many hypothetical histories have been written by scholars for this rhyme, but every one has been debunked. Despite all the research, some say that the fact that “hearts” and “tarts” rhyme might be the only explanation left standing. The anonymous author appears to have simply based the rhyme on the characters found on a deck of playing cards, in which the “Jack” was called the “Knave.”            

    Caldecott offered in 1881 another 26-page picture book of The Queen of Hearts. His version had resplendent royalty and staff from all four suits in a deck of cards and in addition, each royal couple had an angelic little child. Another change in the story was that a cat tattled on the sneaky, haughty Knave (“Jack” or “servant”). Caldecott’s beautiful families, genius for composition and humorous detail place this picture book as his most lavish contribution to children’s literature. 

    Crane in Alphabet of Old Friends (1874) had one small charming illustration representing the couplet, “The Queen was in the parlour, eating bread and honey.”

2011 Eleanor Davis (n.d.), Cartoonist. “The Queen of Hearts,” Nursery Rhyme Comics, 50 Timeless Rhymes from 50 Celebrated Cartoonists, Chris Duffy, Editor, First Second, 115pp, 8”x11”

“The Queen of Hearts” by Davis has the most innovative backstory and twist of all in this collection of comics— rather than the Knave as villain, he is a young Robin Hood who steals the tarts to take them clean away to villagers who live and work outside the king and queen’s castle. When the Knave is beat full sore by the king’s guards (“Teach him a lesson, boys!”), the villagers free him from the dungeon by concocting for the king a batch of (ahem) “Revenge Tarts,” the nasty recipe for which has gross and socially incorrect ingredients of the sort (yuck) that make first-graders howl with glee. From picture book spreads to comic book panels is not such a great leap (over the moon) to make anyone (or any little dog) laugh, as Nick Abadzis shows in his  cartoon of “Hey, Diddle Diddle”. Lilli Carre´ also has fun with a silly king and queen in her cartoon of “Sing a Song of Sixpence,” and Gilbert Hernandez confounds the comic book audience with a (male) “Humpty Dumpty” producing, oddly enough, a bunch of babies.      

2016  Scott Gustafson (n.d.), Illustrator. Favorite Nursery Rhymes from Mother Goose, Artisan, 100pp, 10.9”x12.3”

    Gustafson illustrates “The Queen of Hearts” in another of his double-page spreads. At the top of one page is the Queen, shown from the back making the tarts in full royal regalia, and on the opposite page the King squalls like a baby when no tarts have been delivered. In the middle are two poses of the Knave, first as a smarmy thief and then as a chastened wretch, both silly enough to cause a giggle.

                                                                “Humpty Dumpty”

Humpty has not always been an egg. The nursery rhyme was probably a riddle in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the answers to the riddle varied widely. Perhaps Humpty was “brandy mixed with ale,” or King Richard III after his armies were defeated in 1485, or a piece of field artillery set atop a wall as defense for a castle or maybe just a simple, clumsy fellow.  Artists through the ages have not always been kind to Humpty.

    Crane in his 1877 Mother Goose’s Nursery Rhymes included a vignette in “The Absurd ABC” in which Humpty indeed had a hump on a distorted frame and a vicious expression on his face. His illustration might imply Humpty Dumpty was King Richard lll, whom scientists have since proved had scoliosis, but Shakespeare in “Richard III” had embellished for all time his spinal curvature as well as his evil deeds.

    However, Greenaway pictured a little boy -- delicate and pensive -- in her 1881 collection Kate Greenaway’s Mother Goose. She attached only the first couplet, “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall/ Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.” This precious boy, however, safely sits for all time, and Greenaway threatening him with danger of any kind is unimaginable. He is such a joy to look at that one wishes for an even-simpler caption—“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.” Period.

    In the 20th century, Denslow’s Mother Goose: being the old familiar rhymes and jingles of Mother Goose (1901) deserves mention as a well-known example of the artist’s famous sense of humor in portrayals of characters.  Denslow showed a personified egg for “Humpty Dumpty” and printed it as a riddle, with his answer “An egg” at the end. On the facing page, the toppled Humpty was splattered egg white forming arms and legs and the yolk’s face crying piteously but comically nonetheless. In 1903 Denslow additionally published a set of twelve “Picture Books for Children,” in which he attempted to eliminate coarseness and cruelty from fairy tales and nursery rhymes.

    And Feodor Rojankovsky (1891-1970) was outright contemptuous in the 1940s in The Tall Book of Mother Goose (1942) by illustrating “Humpty Dumpty” with hair and mustache like Hitler. Humpty was then pictured on the ground as a splattered egg being devoured by the King’s horses and scooped up in the hats of the King’s men. Rojankovsky was born in Russia and was a prisoner of war in a German camp in Poland. Two years into World War II, he emigrated to America and just a year after his arrival, he published The Tall Book of Mother Goose with his anti-Fascist sentiment.  

2016  Scott Gustafs on (n.d.), Illustrator. Favorite Nursery Rhymes from Mother Goose, Artisan, 100 pp, 10.9”x12.3”

    Gustafson is at the top of his most creative illustrative form in “Humpty Dumpty.” A sententious, bewigged Humpty on the wall is distracted from reading his book by a boy passing by on a stick-horse. The handsome little “king” wears a paper crown and pulls a wagon full of his “horses” and “men.” Humpty fails to notice that a dog is also in the wagon, and the spaniel is eyeing a cat sitting beside Humpty on the wall. The cat is about to leap at a bird in the tree on the other side of Humpty. The audience realizes that Humpty’s inattention and precarious position on the wall place him directly in the path of the melee soon to come. 

    Gustafson likes Humpty so much that he places him in two other illustrations in the book. On the title page, the beloved, bewigged egg rides high in a rope swing with such a joyous, exuberant grin that the audience can’t help but cheer that the artist’s sweet fellow has been put back together again. On the cover, he waves out a window as Mother Goose herself flies off with children.  

2017  Dan Santat (n.d.), Author and Illustrator. After the Fall (How Humpty Dumpty Got Back Up Again), Roaring Brook Press, 40 pp, 8.8”x11.2” 

    Santat takes the rhyme about an egg on a wall a few giant steps farther than anyone else imagined. He not only reveals (but not until the end) why Humpty was up there in the first place, he also conveys that the poor guy wasn’t hurt all that bad when he fell (except that now he’s afraid of heights) and then he relates what became of him afterward (the whole point of the book). The illustrations are as satisfying as the story. As Humpty longs to return to the wall and be the birdwatcher he once was, he must find the courage to overcome his fear of climbing back up there. The artist’s perspectives of looking up and then back down, visualizing for the audience how high the wall truly is, lend credence to the enormity of Humpty’s task. He succeeds, but the story has one more lap to run. Spoiler alert: once he is on the wall, his shell cracks open, and a bird is released to the heavens.

2018 Gina Baek (.n.d.) Illustrator. The Classic Collection of Mother Goose Rhymes, Applesauce Press, 128 pp, 11”x10.5”

Known for her watercolor paintings of children’s classics, Baek pleases with full-page illustrations for a hundred poems and nursery rhymes. Humpty Dumpty is indeed a royal personage, smugly enjoying a sunny day atop his wall, with his mounted escort of soldiers huddled close by in case of trouble. Perhaps the sinister smirk on the egg’s face implies he might indeed be the arrogant King Richard III. The artist’s portrait of a modern-day Mother Goose on the cover is an appealing grandmotherly figure.

    Other 21st century titles about Humpty Dumpty are worth mentioning. In Humpty Dumpty (2000) illustrated by Daniel Kirk, King Moe puts his talent for doing puzzles to good use when he puts Humpty together again. Kevin O’Malley wreaks havoc in Mother Goose Land when Humpty Dumpty Egg-Splodes (2002). Dan Yaccarino creates witty, stylish, urban scenarios in his Little Golden Book, Mother Goose (2003). In Humpty Dumpty Climbs Again (2008) by Dave Horowitz, other nursery rhyme characters are involved in a tale about Humpty getting his nerve to climb again. In What Really Happened to Humpty? (2010) by Jeanie Franz Ransom, illustrated by Stephen Axelsen, the fractured nursery rhyme starts when Humpty’s brother, Detective Joe Dumpty, thinks he was pushed by someone in Mother Gooseland. 

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