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.”
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).
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.”
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.
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:
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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
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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
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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
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Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York. National Museum of American Art. 1995. p. 203–204. ISBN 978-0-393-03901-6
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Philips, Deborah (January 19, 2012). Fairground Attractions: A Genealogy of the Pleasure Ground. Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 93. ISBN 978-1-84966-666-4
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Ray, Gordon Norton (1991). The Illustrator and the book in England from 1790 to 1914. New York: Dover. ISBN 978-0-486-26955-9
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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
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