Victorian Horizons: The Reception of the Picture Books of Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway

Citation

Glasgow, E. (2002), "Victorian Horizons: The Reception of the Picture Books of Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway", Library Review, Vol. 51 No. 6, pp. 319-320. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.2002.51.6.319.13

This is an exceedingly useful and thorough appraisal of Victorian illustrated children’s books, compiled most conscientiously by Anne Lundin, associate professor of Library at Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin‐Madison, USA. She is essentially a distinguished American academic teacher, with a specialisation in the important and formative subject of children’s literature. She has already won an appreciative readership within the USA and here is a more trans‐Atlantic work, indicating amply enough her meticulous capacity for detailed and exhaustive studies, well documented and well researched.

Moreover, the subject – despite its large extent of specialisation – has a general importance in the wider field of Victorian culture and society, as a whole. The theme of the Victorian childhood – however much it may be disparaged or criticised – still possesses outstanding qualities of significance and nostalgia, going to the very roots of our continuing English heritage of humanism and tradition. “The child is father of the man”. Psychologically, we remain – despite all superficial changes and evolutions – largely as we grew up in childhood; and there are immense virtues as well as immaturities within the various cocoons of remembered or retrieved childhood.

This most welcome and highly illuminating book recaptures the essence of the Victorian childhood – perhaps, inevitably, putting aside the themes of poverty and squalor – in terms of imagination, freedom and the cult of both the heroic and the innocent: before the pressures of adult life overwhelmed mostly the carefree themes of the “small years”. Even the moral fervour of the Victorians – dominant in the early years – was eventually sobered by an increasing willingness to entertain and to amuse. This was increasingly literature for girls as well as boys; and it must also denote the very remarkable Victorian tendency to use visual as well as literary materials: showing, as always, that the gulf between then and now was in fact, at bottom, less great than we may often believe.

At any rate, the best of the Victorians well appreciated when young beautifully and carefully illustrated books: producing indeed the varied and gifted products by Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, all of whom are granted their separate chapters in this original and thought‐provoking book. The book is outstanding for its excellent documentation, and at the end of it there is a useful and discerning bibliography, making the work, as a whole, pre‐eminently suitable for its permanent inclusion in any ostensible library of children’s literature. The latter, of course, has long since emerged as a very specialised and demanding aspect of library and literary work. So it must always remain, on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean; because, after all, children in both England and America share the same propensities for wonder, imagination, discovery and discernment. Not infrequently, perhaps, the insights of children contain and retain a lot that is absent from the experienced maturities of adult, and it is a profound mistake to try to overwhelm them or to set them aside.

This book, at any rate, discloses the close and intimate relationship, between the two apparently rival worlds of children and adults, by no means always in favour of the latter. We learn much about Victorian character, and Victorian society, even in the multiplicity of its adult aspects, from this excellent and admirable book; so that it must be welcomed by social as well as literary historians, and by the fully‐fledged as well as the very young. After all, the sober realism of grown‐up life and society should never be allowed altogether to remove, or to discard, the relevance of the romanticism of childhood; and this, indeed, still serves to embellish, and to enlarge, the urgent practicalities of adult life, even for librarians and academic teachers. It would have been fatally easy to produce a naive or superficial book on this crucial Victorian theme. Thankfully, however, Anne Lundin has here demonstrated an excellent capacity to avoid any such pitfalls, and we have a book of permanent importance and exhaustive scholarly ability.