‘What is the use of a book without pictures?’ wonders the heroine of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. John Tenniel’s memorable illustrations of the White Rabbit, the Caterpillar, the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, the Red Queen and the March Hare ensured that no child would ask this question of Lewis Carroll’s surreal tale.
The Victorian reading public clearly shared Alice’s view – even books aimed at adults regularly included illustrations, such as the etchings made by Hablot Knight Browne under the pen name Phiz for the novels of Charles Dickens.
Most books at this time were illustrated with black-and-white steel engravings. To bring colour to collections of folk tales and fairy stories, the Arts and Crafts illustrator Walter Crane used the painstaking process of woodblock printing, as did Kate Greenaway in her Under the Window: Pictures & Rhymes for Children (1879). It was the development of chromolithography in the second half of the 19th century, however, that greatly facilitated the illustration of books in colour. Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit was first published privately in 1902 with the author’s own black-and-white drawings, but when it was taken up by Frederick Warne & Company later that year, it was illustrated with 30 colour plates.
Colour printing ushered in a golden age of children’s book illustration, which included Arthur Rackham’s artwork for The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1931), Ernest Shepard’s drawings for AA Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) and Fred Bestall’s Rupert Bear stories. The illustrations for these tales evoked a nostalgic, pastoral and gently humorous world that felt secure and comforting, and their influence has been wide-reaching, most notably on Australian artist Robert Ingpen (b.1936), whose romantic and meticulously detailed illustrations have adorned modern editions of classics such as Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, Kipling’s The Jungle Book and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
By contrast, the American author and illustrator Maurice Sendak (1928–2012) brought a more challenging modern sensibility to the children’s book. Born in Brooklyn to Polish immigrant parents, he lost many relatives to the Holocaust, making him aware of mortality at an early age. When his dark, Freudian fable Where the Wild Things Are was first published in 1963, parents and teachers considered his drawings of monsters too scary for children – but children themselves adored them, and the book has become an enduring classic beloved by several generations.
Where the Wild Things Are marked a turning point in literature for children and young adults – a recognition that they could deal with much stronger themes than they had previously been given credit for – and while Sendak’s British contemporary Quentin Blake (b.1932) brings a lighter touch both in terms of humour and palette, his anarchic style has also enabled villainous characters such as Roald Dahl’s witches and Miss Trunchbull to be represented in a child-friendly manner.
It is testament to the creativity of Blake, and those who came before him, that the importance of offering children a rich and diverse range of stories was formally recognized in 1999 with the establishment of the Children’s Laureate, awarded to not just writers but also to illustrators including Chris Riddell, Lauren Child and Cressida Cowell.
