Janet and Allan Ahlberg · Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson · Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd · Dr. Seuss · Eric Carle · Maurice Sendak · Judith Kerr · Raymond Briggs · Oliver Jeffers · Jonny Duddle · Anthony Browne · Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler
MOST GROWN-UP BOOKS DON’T HAVE PICTURES nowadays. Children’s books very often do. Illustration is an unignorable part of the history of children’s writing, and one that deserves a library of books to itself. What I can offer here will only, therefore, be a brief overflight. As I wrote in a previous chapter, Lewis Carroll’s Alice would not be what she was without Tenniel;* nor Barrie’s Peter Pan without Rackham; nor Milne’s Winnie-The-Pooh without E.H. Shepard. Dr. Seuss is as distinctive for his drawings as for his verse. The Gruffalo we see in our minds’ eye is the Gruffalo drawn by Axel Scheffler, whose partnership with Julia Donaldson is arguably even closer than that between Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake. Janet and Allan Ahlberg, Dave McKean and Neil Gaiman, Chris Riddell and any number of writers, Hoffman, Belloc, Richard Scarry, Judith Kerr, Emily Gravett… The list of children’s books whose words are, cliché though it is, inseparable from the drawings that accompany them is a very long one.
But it also has a history. If illustrations are nowadays the preserve of children’s books, they were not always so. Victorian novels, published as was standard in serial form, often came with drawings. The illustrations of Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne) and Cruikshank are deeply bound up with what we now think of as “Dickensian”; Sherlock Holmes would never have had his cape and deerstalker were it not for Sidney Paget’s drawings in the Strand. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, novels came without illustrations, or with illustration limited to a frontispiece. Advances in wood engraving and steel engraving around the turn of the century, though, made it easier and cheaper for publishers to combine images with printed text. Writers like Walter Scott and Jane Austen, originally published without pictures, were reissued in illustrated editions, and by the 1860s book illustration approached the status of high art.
But as the twentieth century wore on, fashions changed. By mid-century, adult fiction generally didn’t have pictures but children’s books generally did. And – thanks to a further advance in printing technology, the increasing ease and cost-effectiveness of printing full-color illustrated paperbacks – there flourished a subgenre, the large-format children’s picture book, which now represents the average child’s first reading experience. Beautifully illustrated children’s picture books throng libraries and bookshops today. They are, I think, almost a genre in themselves now – the books that parents read to children too young to read, and in whose friendly pages those children will in time take their first steps reading to themselves. Some of the most distinguished and enduring work in children’s writing and illustration has been done in that genre.
You could see Orbis Sensualium Pictus as a very early example; and as a token of the way in which at least one strand of the genre has its roots in educational material: illustrated primers, hornbooks,* and ABCs. But by the twentieth century – helped along, you could speculate, by the success of Beatrix Potter, or Kipling’s Just So Stories, which are framed and indeed written as stories to be read aloud and in which the text encourages you to examine the pictures – they were emerging from that straitjacket and taking on an identity as narrative vehicles for young children. As Janet and John or Biff, Chip, and Kipper testify, the didactic and the narrative roles often continued to go together; but the picture books that endure have tended to be the ones whose words are chosen according to literary criteria rather than synthetic phonics.
Allan Ahlberg (Each Peach Pear Plum, Peepo!, Burglar Bill, Cops and Robbers, The Runaway Dinner) once told me that he thought he was probably the best paid writer by the word in the country. It’s precisely because these books have so few words in them that the choice of words matters so much. Structure is a huge thing in these books: repetitions, refrains, the rhythm of spreads and page turns, the shape of the story. A B C – aka alphabetical order – is a structure; as is counting, which gives shape to everything from Dr. Seuss’s Ten Apples up on Top! to Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Or there’s the cavalcade structure that you can see in Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy, The Elephant and the Bad Baby, The Runaway Dinner, or any number of variations or retellings of “The Gingerbread Man.” Often, they borrow a structure from established folklore or nursery rhyme. Michael Rosen’s We’re Going on a Bear Hunt is the retelling of a traditional folktale; the magnificent poetic daisy-chain of Each Peach Pear Plum, illustrated by Allan Ahlberg’s late wife Janet, passes the reader hand over hand through a succession of traditional folktale characters: “Each peach pear plum / I spy Tom Thumb / Tom Thumb in the cupboard / I spy Mother Hubbard / Mother Hubbard down the cellar / I spy Cinderella…”
Because they are designed to be read to very young children, these also tend to be books where the double form of address – the writer’s and illustrator’s awareness of a simultaneous audience of adults and children – is especially stark. The best of them are not only scores for voice, directing the interaction between readers and read-to, they also offer, in either words or images or both, something for adults to take an interest in too.
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An early example, Munro Leaf’s The Story of Ferdinand (1936), beautifully illustrated by Robert Lawson, is a case in point. It tells the story of a Fotherington-Thomas of a big and brawny teenage bull living in the Spanish countryside who declines to join in with the violent butting and fighting of his peers. He’d rather just sit quietly in a field under his favorite cork tree and smell the flowers. Unfortunately, human talent-spotters from the bullfight circuit show up just after he has been stung on the bottom by a bee. They see him stamping and raging, decide he’s clearly the fiercest bull in the field, and cart him off at once to Madrid. There, he flatly refuses to fight, instead sitting in the middle of the bullring and enjoying the scent of the ladies’ flowers. No matter how they goad him, he refuses to fight. Defeated, the proud and ridiculously dressed picadors and matadors return him to the countryside. As the book closes, Leaf writes: “And for all I know, he is sitting there still, under his favorite cork tree, smelling the flowers just quietly. He is very happy.”
It’s enlivened by details primarily designed to please its adult readers – the cork tree, whimsically, has actual wine corks dangling from it like fruit; there’s a splendidly deadpan illustration of Ferdinand (who “grew and grew until he was very big and strong”) inspecting a dead tree marked with lines showing his height at one week, three months, a year, and two years, as a fond parent might mark a kitchen doorframe; and Lawson includes a carefully realistic representation of the Ronda gorge. It speaks to adults in more dramatic ways, too. Gandhi is on record as having loved the book, and its pacifist message was so enraging to the ridiculouslydressed-matador types that it was banned in Franco’s Spain and burned in Hitler’s Germany.
Quite something for a book whimsically scribbled, according to legend, onto a yellow legal pad in less than an hour. Munro Leaf wanted to help jolt his illustrator friend out of a thin patch by giving him something to draw, and “dogs, rabbits, mice and goats had all been done a thousand times”*: so, Ferdinand was born. He’s never been out of print.
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Heading the post-war explosion of children’s picture books came Margaret Wise Brown’s extraordinary Goodnight Moon (1947), hauntingly illustrated by Clement Hurd. Here is a miasmically strange and unheimlich picture of the liminal space between waking and sleep, in which elements of the picture vanish and reappear. There’s a lot to look at, and puzzle over, and the text interacts eccentrically with the images. Yet it also has a rigorous structure: alternating colored double-page spreads showing a whole room, with floating, grayscale images focusing on objects in the room, and time progressing in exact ten-minute intervals. There are visual rhymes and echoes, and aural rhymes and echoes. Not for nothing is the pay-off: “Goodnight noises everywhere.”
Its opening image shows a little rabbit in pyjamas, tucked up in bed but still awake, in a room too large to be cosy. An enormous window has the curtain pulled back to show a field of stars. There’s a fire in the fireplace and three logs in a basket; a clock on the mantel. A balloon floats above the bed. There are two framed pictures on the wall, one above the fire, one above the bed. A telephone and a clock sit on the chest of drawers on the near side of the bed; a circular bedside table on the other side bears a lamp, a bowl with a spoon in it, and a couple of other objects. The center of the floor (you can only, at this point, see the right half, or two-thirds, of the room) is covered with a vast empty round rug.
The text opposite reads:
In the great green room
There was a telephone
And a red balloon
And a picture of –
You turn the page. There’s a close-up of the picture above the fireplace: “The cow jumping over the moon.” On the facing page there’s a close-up of the picture above the bed: “And there were three little bears sitting on chairs.” The lurid orange-and-green palette of the previous spread has gone: the pictures are rendered in shades of gray. The words rhyme, and scan in an off-kilter way. You notice, maybe not on first reading, that in the picture of the three bears (sitting glumly on chairs in a more or less bare room) there’s a picture on the wall. The picture-within-the-picture appears to be a copy of the picture of the cow jumping over the moon.
The next spread shows you the left-hand two-thirds of the room, off-page in the previous spread.
And two little kittens
And a pair of mittens
And a little toyhouse
And a young mouse
The fireplace, still in frame, is as it was. You can see the left-hand side of the nursery: a bookcase is against one wall, and a huge doll’s house beside it. There’s a second window, also with the curtain drawn back, the very top of a full moon just peeping up in the bottom left-hand corner. There’s a rocking chair with someone’s abandoned, half-finished knitting on it. The mittens, alongside a pair of socks, are neatly pegged on a clothes-horse. But time has, apparently, passed; a pair of kittens are now sporting in the middle of the rug, where there were none before. And that young mouse has appeared, too – over by the basket of logs, so far unmolested by the cats.
Page turn. Another pair of isolated images abstracted from the larger scene face each other, again colorless. “And a comb and a brush and a bowl full of mush”: it’s the bedside table we saw in the first spread, with the mysteriously uneaten porridge, a comb and a hairbrush, in a cone of light from the lamp. “And a quiet old lady who was whispering ‘hush’”: it’s the rocking chair again and, yikes, an old rabbit-lady is now sitting in it, the knitting on her lap and her ball of wool lying on the floor at her feet. Where did she come from?
Boom, new page: just two words. “Goodnight room.” We can now see the whole room. Rabbit-lady is there. The kittens are now playing with her wool on the rug. The moon in the window has risen just a bit. The mouse hasn’t moved. The baby rabbit is still awake, and is now looking over at the old lady in the chair. A new framed picture has appeared behind her, above the bookcase. It’s black and white and appears to show a rabbit, standing in a river in waders, casting a fishing line. On the end of the line is a carrot. There’s a baby rabbit – his prey? – right where he’s casting it. On the riverbank there is a broken tree. God alone knows what’s going on there.
The next spread follows the rhythm of the previous: two single pictures in gray wash on facing pages. “Goodnight moon”; “Goodnight cow jumping over the moon.” The first image is the full moon in the window of the real-world room; the second, of course, the crescent moon in the painting, with the cow sailing unmoving over it. As the story, or incantation, progresses, there’s more subtle movement. The balloon sinks slightly; the moon in the window, page by page, rises. When we say, “goodnight mittens,” they are alone on the clothes-horse; on the following page, the socks have reappeared in time to be bid goodnight themselves. The clocks continue to creep on in increments of ten minutes every two pages.
Details of the picture continue to shift. The mouse vanishes, reappears, vanishes again. The goodnights continue. “Goodnight little house / And goodnight mouse / Goodnight comb / And goodnight brush / Goodnight nobody [this one accompanied by a blank page] / Goodnight mush.” Specifics jostle with vast abstracts. “Goodnight to the old lady whispering ‘hush’” gets a spread on its own; the knitting rabbit has a shushing paw raised to her mouth; the cats sit calmly at her feet watching her; the baby rabbit in his pyjamas seems to be settling.
“Goodnight stars / Goodnight air” – and the final full-room spread – “Goodnight noises everywhere.” The moon is full in the window. The old lady has departed with her knitting and the cats sleep curled together on her rocking chair. The rabbit is sleeping. The whole room is washed, now, with darkness. But, again a little spookily, the lights are on in the windows of the doll’s house. There’s enough detail and enough mystery in this little book to engage, and re-engage, adult readers and child readers again and again.
And that out-of-nowhere line: “Goodnight nobody.” Brr. Some of the spreads and lines in children’s picture books can, in isolation, give their adult readers a satisfying chill. In Judith Kerr’s The Tiger Who Came to Tea (which I’ll look at in more detail soon) there’s a haunting figure, which children seldom notice, walking hunched over in apparent misery, in the night-time street scene that in most ways seems to be the happiest tableau in the book. In Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham (1960), the train on which Sam-I-Am hounds and pesters his breakfast-averse quarry at one point hurtles into a tunnel. The page is a wash of blue shadow, only that radioactive ham still glowing green. The accompanying text is a whisper from somewhere else. Would you, could you, in the dark?
Dr. Seuss, the alias of Theodor Geisel (1904–1991), is another unignorable mainstay of this vast genre – a creator whose breathtaking facility with light verse (remember A.A. Milne: “it is the work of a light-verse writer taking his job seriously”) meshes wonderfully with the wildness of his line as an illustrator. Like so many creators here, Dr. Seuss deserves (and has had) a book to himself, so I can’t begin to cover the range of his work. But I’d like to note how he stands in a line of descent that includes the Lewis Carroll of “Jabberwocky”: these works are triumphs of sound over sense. Their surrealism is unexpected, but it isn’t random; it’s underscored by an iron sense of the rhythm of the verse. He isn’t fitting a world or a story into verse, but letting the verse itself dictate the story.
Look at One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish (1960) – that first line a percussive series of trochees where the dyads one/two and red/blue are different qualities (number and color) united by the rhyme of blue with two. Objects and situations seem to emerge according to rhyme or meter. That doesn’t mean his (usually anapestic) meter is regular, though: Geisel, a child of the jazz age, writes jazz poetry – and often capitalizes words to indicate where he wants the reader to hit a particularly emphatic stress.
Fox in Socks (1965) is maybe the pinnacle of his achievement in verse as pure noise. He slows the reader down (often with tonguetwisters) and speeds the reader up (with an easy bit) at will. Take the sequence (illustrated, of course, with a blithe man in a hat, alongside a funny-looking duck, licking the surface of a pond) in which we’re introduced to lake-licking, lake liking Luke Luck and his similarly inclined duck. A tricky but regular rhythm is established for the quatrain, with a tight mesh of rhymes and assonances but each line ending with “lakes.” Then he wrong-foots you with a run of "likes" and "licks". Syllables you expect to be there are elided to trip you up. Fragments of the previous quatrain are plonked into a different rhythmic context; assonances (you get “takes” instead of “lakes”) are false friends.
The adult reader limps through to the end of the quatrain and turns the page to find Mr Knox voicing his own complaint: not having a rubber tongue, he can’t pronounce these syllables. His cri-de-coeur is easy to pronounce, as is the Fox’s chiding rejoinder. You thank goodness for the respite. But that is just the pause at the crest of a rollercoaster. The Fox stares into Knox’s eyes like a hypnotist before plunging him into the thickets of the “three cheese trees” through which “three free fleas flew.”
The story’s climax relies, after a great pause for breath when the worm turns and the beleaguered Knox finally establishes some authority with a line of pure prose, on a great skittering musical run of syllables jumbling beetles, paddles, poodles and noodles followed by a final series of staccato crashes on the keyboard: “THIS is what they call… a tweetle beetle noodle poodle bottled paddled muddled duddled fuddled wuddled fox in socks, sir!”
Yet oddly, for a writer for whom meaning sometimes seems to be the proverbial bone the burglar throws to the dog, Dr. Seuss’s work proved no less politically contentious than Munro Leaf’s. Born to a German-American family in Massachusetts, Theodor “Ted” Geisel adopted his pen-name (he originally pronounced it in the German manner, as “Zoiss”) as an undergraduate so he could continue contributing to his university magazine after being barred from doing so for being caught drinking gin during Prohibition. He made his living as an adman before his books for children started to take off, and worked as a political cartoonist (he was a New Deal Democrat) and government propagandist during the Second World War.
His political engagement didn’t end when he sat down to write for children. Though he warned that “kids can see a moral coming a mile off,” the political and social import of many of his books for children is unignorable. “Yertle the Turtle” (1958) is an antiauthoritarian allegory about a hubristic turtle king who tries to build a tower of turtles so that, as lord of all he surveys, he can see further and survey more; he’s brought down when the lowest turtle in the pile burps and the whole assemblage collapses, leaving the turtles in a new state of freedom. “The Sneetches” (1953) satirizes antisemitism, while How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1957) and The Lorax (1971) attack commercialism and environmental despoliation.
In the 1970s he even repurposed his book for early readers Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now! (1971) as political satire (“Richard M. Nixon Will You Please Go Now!”).* You can see the extent to which his work, and its implications, were in the bloodstream of America’s growing generations by the fact that – reaching, a little – a tagline from Horton Hears A Who! (“A person’s a person, no matter how small”) was co-opted as a slogan by anti-abortion activists. (Geisel’s widow objected to this, and donated to Planned Parenthood.) “I’m subversive as hell,” Geisel said.† A fun fact for those of a childish disposition: Ted Geisel’s first work for children was a collection of sayings called The Pocket Book of Boners (1931).
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Undoubtedly up there with Dr. Seuss in terms of popularity and influence is The Very Hungry Caterpillar (1969), the best-known book by Eric Carle (1929–2021). This is among the very simplest of children’s picture books, but it continues to resonate in its simplicity. Carle, like Judith Kerr and illustrator Jan Pieńkowski, was a child of the Second World War. Born in New York to German émigrés, he moved back to Germany when he was six years old: just in time for his father to be drafted into the German army and captured by the Soviets. The young Carle, aged fifteen, was conscripted into digging trenches on Germany’s Western defensive Siegfried Line. He saw bombs landing and fellow workers killed just a few feet away from him. He was in his early twenties, and still traumatized by his wartime experience, when he returned to America after the war to work in commercial illustration.
The Very Hungry Caterpillar – whose protagonist, represented in Carle’s colorful collage images, eats his way through an evergreater succession of foods day by day before getting a well-deserved tummy-ache – originally wasn’t going to be a caterpillar at all; he was going to be a worm. Seldom since Gordon Lish took the blue pencil to Chandler has an editorial intervention been so important: Carle’s editor Ann Beneduce said that nobody really finds worms cute, and suggested he make his hero a caterpillar instead. Which, of course, gave Carle the book’s vital fifth-act twist, when the caterpillar (now a very fat caterpillar) turns into a beautiful butterfly like an insectoid Ugly Duckling.
The Very Hungry Caterpillar really does have everything. As well as its visual attractiveness, the book has the comic quality that the caterpillar’s food starts out being the sort of thing caterpillars might plausibly eat (it’s fruit from Monday to Friday) but come the weekend he goes nuts on ice-cream, cheese, lollipops, pickles and all sorts of foods it’s unlikely an average caterpillar could obtain, let alone digest. On rereading, children will have the memory-game/ counting-game pleasure of anticipating what comes next. It has that fairytale transformation – so it’s heading somewhere. Finally, and maybe even best of all for very young children, the book has actual holes in the pages. The caterpillar seems to have eaten through the very book itself. This was expensive and difficult to arrange back then (the book had to be printed in Japan) but it undoubtedly contributed hugely to its success.
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To talk a little more about structure, pagination in children’s picture books is absolutely everything. Formally, they behave like the poems they often are – with a page-turn working as a particularly emphatic line-break. To take a representative and outstanding example of how text, image, and page-turn can work together, look at the opening sentence of Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are (1963): “The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another his mother called him ‘WILD THING!’ and Max said ‘I’ll EAT YOU UP!’ so he was sent to bed without eating anything.” Writing that sentence down doesn’t begin to give a sense of its effects as part of the book – its relationship with Sendak’s wonderful drawings, with the white space around the words, and with the rhythm of the page-turns.
“The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind” – page turn – “and another” – page turn – “his mother called him ‘WILD THING!’/and Max said ‘I’LL EAT YOU UP!’/and he was sent to bed without eating anything.” The pagination, the line-breaks, the shouting all-caps dialogue… this is poetry, not prose, and it works in concert with the images: a series of frozen tableaux of domestic chaos, funny but a little alarming (Max is seen in the second illustration mid-air, chasing a Scotty dog with a fork).
It’s a book that combines the mythic with the domestic, and the lilt of the poem gives it a haunting stateliness. It’s a dreamnarrative, and a time-slip narrative; the monsters Max meets are perfectly poised between the comical and the (just slightly) scary. Max makes the time-hallowed journey into the strange – the safety of his bedroom gives way to a forest, and then to Max’s journey in his boat “through night and day/and in and out of weeks/and almost over a year/to where the wild things are.”
But Max – even Max at home, in his wolf suit – is half a figment of the wild itself. First he’s frightened of the monsters; and then (after he tames them with the magic trick of staring unblinking into their terrible yellow eyes) they are frightened of him, calling him “the most wild thing of all.” The centerpiece of the book is the wordless “wild rumpus” – again, frozen tableaux; there’s no movement in this book’s pictures at all – after which Max, a capricious monarch, sends the wild things to bed without their supper. Eating, in excellently Freudian fashion marrying love and consumption, is the thread that runs through the book.* Max threatens to eat his mother; the wild things, when Max proposes to leave them, threaten to eat Max: “Oh please don’t go – / We’ll eat you up – we love you so!”
And it’s the smell of food that lures Max back from his lonely eminence. It seizes him with wanting “to be where someone loved him best of all.” The journey is reversed, and Max finds himself back “into the night of his very own room/where he found his supper waiting for him” – page turn – “and it was still hot.” Max moves, in terms of the two freedoms I’ve mentioned in my introduction, from freedom to back to the safety of freedom from. That story is a resonant muddle of safety and danger, love and violence, as intriguing and haunting to an adult reader as it will be to the child read to.
The later works in Sendak’s sort-of-trilogy, In the Night Kitchen and Outside Over There, are even more peculiar and sinister than his best-known work. Children’s picture books, much more than the “chapter books” now written for older children to read to themselves, address a dual audience. These are books that will most likely be read, at least the first time, by an adult to a child. Many even contain jokes directed at adults. Will most children register that the trio of identical bakers in Sendak’s later book In the Night Kitchen (1970) all look like Oliver Hardy?
Sendak’s own childhood was shadowed by the Holocaust. Born in 1928, he grew up in Brooklyn to immigrant Jewish parents whose families were all but wiped out in the camps, and, as he later narrated it, he was “unhappily reminded endlessly of my good fortune” from the age of ten. If he was late coming up for supper his mother would rebuke him with “Leo and Benjamin and the other children who were my age who could never come up for supper and were good to their mothers but now they were dead […] You’re in mourning all the time. […] I hated them. I hated them because they blighted my life. I hated them for dying.”* He described, too, the violence that his traumatized parents visited on each-other. In that context, perhaps, we can read the comforting ending of Where the Wild Things Are as compensatory fantasy.
Similarly, we can read the chillier narrative of the third book in the trilogy, Outside Over There (1981), as a refraction of his own anxieties. It tells the story of a little girl whose baby sister is stolen by goblins (Sendak referenced the Lindbergh kidnapping case). Its set-up is one where the family home is anything but safe: the father is away at sea; the mother, catatonic with some unnamed grief, stares trancelike into the middle distance. Ida, the older sister, is in loco parentis (as was Sendak’s own older sister) and she loses the baby, learning of its disappearance only when the substitute, made out of ice, melts in her arms. Ida is playing with magic that she barely understands – she makes a terrible mistake when she climbs backward out of the window. The resolution remains as mysterious and as precarious as the progress of the plot.
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Judith Kerr (1923–2019) was, like her contemporary Sendak, a writer and illustrator whose early life was indelibly marked by the chaos of mid-twentieth-century Europe. She was born in Berlin. Her German-Jewish father Alfred, a prominent writer and broadcaster, had been outspoken in criticizing the nascent Nazi party, and in 1933 he fled Germany for Prague on the eve of Hitler coming to power after being anonymously tipped off that the Nazis planned to confiscate his passport and place him under arrest. The day before the elections that were to install Hitler as chancellor, Judith, her mother and brother too fled the country – as it turned out, not a moment too soon – first for Switzerland, where they joined Alfred; and after a stay in Paris to the UK, where Judith spent the rest of her long life.
The story of that flight as a refugee is told in Kerr’s children’s novel When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit (1971) – in which Judith herself appears in third-person perspective as “Anna.” Originally written to explain to her then eight-year-old son what her own childhood had been like, it’s a bravura child’s-eye view of the experience: true to her partial understanding of what’s going on around her (when she hears there’s a price on her father’s head, she fears that he’ll be killed by coins being dropped on his head), and of the way the things that loom large to a child are recorded.
Forced to choose only one toy to take, Anna leaves her battered but beloved Pink Rabbit in favor of a more newly acquired toy on the grounds that she’s barely had the chance to play with it yet. Only when she’s in Switzerland does she bitterly regret it: “For a moment she felt terribly sad about Pink Rabbit. It had embroidered black eyes – the original glass ones had fallen out years before – and an endearing habit of collapsing on its paws. Its fur, though no longer very pink, had been soft and familiar. How could she ever have chosen to pack that characterless woollen dog in its stead? It had been a terrible mistake, and now she would never be able to put it right.”
Here is a child grasping, as if for the first time, an irreversible change in her world: regret at a mistake that cannot ever be undone. That child/adult perspective is delicately handled again, later in the book, when Anna records her father’s recurring nightmares of trying to leave Germany and being stopped at the border by the Nazis: “It seemed terrible to lie in bed listening to Papa and then knowing that in his dreams awful things were happening to him.” She prays (“although she did not exactly believe in God”) that she could have nightmares instead of her father: magical thinking; a child, in an insecure and frightening situation, trying in some sense to parent her parent. She herself does have a terrible nightmare, just as her father’s stop: “Anna never told anyone, but she always felt that it was she who had cured Papa’s nightmares.” Two further books chronicling Kerr/Anna’s girlhood and young womanhood followed, forming what came to be known as the Out of the Hitler Time trilogy.
It’s her picture books, though, on which her enduring reputation rests. She always thought of herself as an artist first and a writer second. The Mog series, beginning with Mog the Forgetful Cat (1970), described the adventures of an absent-minded cat in a family based closely on her own (the children in the family were given her own children’s middle names; their surname, Thomas, was the given name of her husband, screenwriter Nigel Kneale). Unlike most cats, the Mog series lasted for fifty years – though when Goodbye Mog (2002) killed Mog off it caused a serious stir. “Mog was dead tired,” it begins – and it introduces death and grief to an audience of young readers into whose stories such things had seldom if ever appeared.
Her very first picture book, The Tiger Who Came to Tea (1968), may nevertheless be the one of hers that lives for ever. As the story opens, it’s an ordinary afternoon in Sophie’s house. She’s having tea with her mummy, a stay-at-home housewife with sensible shoes, a blue cardy, and her hair in a bun. There’s a ring at the door. Sophie’s mummy speculates anxiously about who it could be, ruling out the milkman (already been), boy from the grocer (comes a different day), and Daddy (has his own key).
Notice how beautifully the people who aren’t at the door – the cheery uniformed milkman with his milk-float, the errand-boy with a wicker basket on his bicycle and an advert on the crossbar, the father in overcoat and tie and hat – locate the action in the late 1960s. Sophie opens the door. It’s a bloody great tiger, the height of the doorframe. And a talking tiger, at that. It says: “Excuse me, but I’m very hungry. Do you think I could have tea with you?” Sophie’s mother invites it in. What starts as a decorous sit-down with cakes and biscuits and proper china (1968, remember) soon takes an alarming turn.
“Owp!” says the tiger in big letters, swallowing the whole plate of sandwiches at once. Down the hatch go the buns. And the biscuits, the cake, the contents of the teapot, all the milk in the milk jug, “and then he looked round the kitchen to see what else he can find.” Everything he finds, he eats, gobbling up the supper as it cooks on the stove, pillaging the fridge, ravaging the cupboards for dry goods and tins, and washing it down with milk, orange juice, all Daddy’s beer (uh-oh), and, in the line that transfixed me and transfixes, I think, every reader: he drank all the water in the tap.*
This tiger, though, is the least threatening tiger that any reader has ever seen. He’s unsettling, yes – what he represents is unsettling. He’s a creature of unruly appetite, whose adventures are framed with the elaborate courtesies of a not-quite-planned tea party. It’s not just that he eats everything in sight. It’s that, at least initially, he’s offered cakes and buns and sandwiches in a very civilized manner. English politeness, strained not quite to breaking point, is a theme of the book.
But there’s no fear at any point that he’s going to do what most tigers in stories would threaten to do, i.e. eat Sophie and Sophie’s mummy. The tiger smiles constantly, but in not one of the pictures does he show a tooth. He laps at the tap and at the supper on the stove like a cat, and pours tea merrily into his mouth directly from the pot. In the first of the book’s double-page spreads, Sophie is giving this enormous apex predator a cuddle – while it greedily eyes a string of onions hanging on the wall. Finally, abruptly, and with a polite “Thank you for my nice tea. I think I’d better go now,” the tiger vanishes, never to return.
It’s a book about a semi-exciting, semi-alarming home invasion, much like Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat (1957), where the unruly energy of the interloper leaves anxiety in its wake. The house is chaos. There’s no water for Sophie’s bath and no food for the family supper. What’s Daddy going to think? The aftermath of the tiger’s visit bathes Sophie (and the reader) in the reassurance she craves. Instead of being angry, and showing none of the skepticism you might expect at Sophie’s mummy’s explanation for how the house came to be in the state it is, Sophie’s daddy takes them all out to supper.
A gloriously atmospheric double-page spread shows how “they all went out in the dark, and all the street lamps were lit, and all the cars had their lights on, and they walked down the road to a café,” Sophie walking between her parents with a Red-RidingHood coat on over her nightie. They have sausages and chips and ice-cream, and the next day they restock the pantry – as well as (the book’s other whimsically surreal touch) – buying a giant tin of tiger food in case their visitor returns. The bonds of family are affirmed; order is restored. The devouring machine has done no permanent harm.
Many critics have wondered whether the story is some sort of allegory. What does the tiger represent? Is this story really about sexual frustration: an animalistic disruption of the domestic anomie of the 1960s housewife? Is it really about addiction? Is it really about Nazis – a suggestion made by those who remember Kerr as the author of When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit? Judith Kerr lived to be ninety-five. When I visited her that time a year or so before her death in her home in Barnes, west London, I asked her then what the book was really about, and Judith Kerr told me what she had always told interviewers: “It’s about a tiger who came to tea.”
Kerr’s career spanned something of a boom-time for children’s picture books, whose alumni are almost too numerous to mention: the husband-and-wife partnership of John Burningham (1936–2019) and Helen Oxenbury (1938–), the outstanding Shirley Hughes (1927–2022) of Dogger (1977) fame, and Helen Nicoll (1937–2012) and her Polish-born illustrator Jan Pieńkowski (1936–2022), whose books for very young children introduced a rival Mog as one of the witchy trio Meg, Mog and Owl. Of the same generation was David McKee (1935–2022), author of the Elmer the Patchwork Elephant series and, most memorably, that rebuke to the distracted modern mother, Not Now, Bernard (1980), whose protagonist is swallowed whole by a monster without his mum so much as noticing.
I notice, looking over all these birth and death dates, that writing or illustrating children’s picture books seems to guarantee you a good long innings. That many of the most successful writers of children’s picture books also had refugee childhoods or wartime trauma (Jan Pieńkowski survived the Nazi firebombing of Warsaw) suggests that there may be something restorative and grounding for their creators in the orderly and simple worlds they conjure.
Everyone will have their favorite books from this period and in this genre. This is my book, for instance, so I reserve the right to indulge myself in tipping the hat to Judith Viorst’s Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day (1972). It tells the story of the eponymous small boy, who wakes up with bubblegum in his hair and whose day goes downhill from there. He’s a steaming engine of self-pity and outrage as everything that can possibly go wrong for him does, and over and over again he vows to emigrate to Australia. For years after we read it, when things were going wrong, members of my family would remind each other of the book’s punchline: “Some days are just like that, even in Australia.” This is one of the world’s great truths. The older you get, the more you see Alexander through his parents’ eyes as well as his own.
* * *
I mentioned how often these books address themselves to a double audience, the readers and the read-to. Raymond Briggs (1934–2022) is perhaps the most sophisticated author of children’s picture books of that generation in this respect. Fungus The Bogeyman (1977) is a work of wan philosophical pessimism, filled with sophisticated literary jokes, masquerading as a child-delighting fantasy about things that go squelch in the night. The entirely wordless The Snowman (1978) (the film adaptation of which is now infallibly shown at Christmas on UK television) has a poignant ending – the snowman, spoiler alert, melts – which lands even more heavily with adults than with children. His grouchy and slightly potty-mouthed Father Christmas (1973) is funny to adults because it presents this mythic character as a recognizably ordinary man grumbling about his job, and funny to children because it presents a version of Father Christmas that adults don’t usually present. His fantasia about nuclear holocaust, written toward the end of the Cold War, When the Wind Blows (1982), is something like a comic-strip version of Threads: barely for children at all.
The pay-off of Oliver Jeffers’s Stuck (2012) is a simpler case in point: a children’s story with adult gags. In it, a boy tries to knock his kite out of a tree but finds that everything he throws up after it (shoes, ladder, bucket of paint, long-distance lorry, lighthouse, house across the street, whale) gets stuck too. (In terms of its basic narrative shape, it’s a variation on “There Was an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly.”) Eventually the kite falls down and, forgetting about everything else in the tree, he goes about his day merrily. The final panel shows the tree, at night-time, under the moon, cluttered with all these bizarre objects. Leaning out of the window of the fire engine (yup, one of those goes up too – a dry joke is that, when presented with a fire engine or a ladder, the boy chucks those in the tree instead of using them to climb the tree and retrieve the kite) is a fireman. He says: “Hang on a minute, lads. I’ve got a great idea.” Not many four-year-olds can be expected to recognize a line from The Italian Job.
These books throw their adult readers a bone because they are designed to be read and reread. Their texts implicitly score an interaction between reader and read-to: the “can you guess what happened next?” or the delicious anticipation of a page-turn. You notice more and more, in the best of them, as you reread. Jonny Duddle’s The Pirate Cruncher (2010), for example, tells the story of a pirate crew who meet a mysterious fiddler who tells them of an island on which riches beyond belief can be found. The island itself, as they discover to their cost, is the lure for a pirate-eating sea-monster who takes their boat down whole. But it’s only on rereading it and studying the drawings more closely that you notice that the fiddler is a puppet: you can see his strings; and just at the edges of the frame, in every picture, you can see the blue tentacles of the monster operating him.
That remarkable generation of 1970s and ’80s children’s picture books, be it said, is not without its inheritors. As well as Jonny Duddle and Michael Rosen, there is Jon Klassen’s extraordinary and thrillingly funny/sinister work, beginning with I Want My Hat Back (2011), in which a rabbit who steals a bear’s hat gets his comeuppance with extreme prejudice. Jill Murphy (1946–2012), probably best known for her Worst Witch series of chapter books about a school for witches, was also a deft author and illustrator of picture books for younger children. Her Large Family series, beginning with Five Minutes’ Peace (1986), follows the travails of a family of elephants. A Piece of Cake (1989), in which Mrs Large worries she’s fat and puts the family on an unsuccessful slimming drive, is particularly delightful. The mother elephant’s boosterism (“You’re off for a nice healthy jog round the park, followed by your tea – a delicious sardine with grated carrot”) is nicely counterpointed by the thunderous expression of Mr Large as he jogs out of the door in the facing illustration.
Anthony Browne (1946–)’s exquisitely drawn and frequently spooky work has a particular emotional sophistication. It includes the Greenaway-winning Gorilla (1983),* about a lonely and neglected child whose toy gorilla comes alive; and Into The Forest (2004), a uniquely unsettling and dreamlike mash-up of fairytale characters (“Have you seen our Dad and Mum?” a pitiful Hansel and Gretel ask the protagonist as he walks by them), a mysteriously absent father (Browne’s own father died suddenly when he was seventeen) and a mother seemingly catatonic with sadness.
* * *
Running in parallel, though slightly outside the remit of this study because they’re usually periodicals rather than books, are comics. They are not quite picture books – they have a slightly different visual grammar, and children typically read them by themselves rather than being read to by adults. But there’s overlap (you could certainly see Struwwelpeter as a comic) and there’s influence. Maurice Sendak acknowledged the effect of Winsor McCay’s comic Little Nemo in Slumberland on the surreal style of In the Night Kitchen.
These successors of the cheap illustrated magazines of the nineteenth century – literature for the less literate – flourished from the early years of the twentieth century. In Mary Poppins Opens the Door (1943), the “Marble Boy” – a statue in the park that the children befriend – says of the reading matter he enjoys: “Best of all are the coloured comics, especially the one called Lot o’ Fun.”†
Modern comics had their big bang in 1938; the first appearance of Superman in the US and the first issue of the Beano in the UK. Marvel and DC told straight-faced stories of superheroes in issuelength arcs. In the UK, the Beano and its many rivals and imitators over the years, such as the similarly long-running Dandy, Beezer, Topper, and Whizzer and Chips, were comic anthologies, whose most popular and enduring strips were stories of British childhood, at once mildly subversive and deeply conservative.
Alongside the playground antics of that sort of anthology comic, there emerged post-war another distinct strand of British comics, one aimed at older children and with more adult themes and, typically, adult protagonists. The Eagle, launched in 1950, had as its flagship character Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future – a Biggles figure with zigzag eyebrows who flew spacecraft instead of aeroplanes. From 1961 onward, Commando told one-shot war stories in small-format black-and-white paperbacks several dozen pages long, and in a realist idiom: a lot of stick grenades and screaming Messerschmitts and cries of “Achtung!” And in 1977, the science fiction anthology 2000 AD first appeared, and soon introduced the futuristic lawman Judge Dredd, a brutal and cynical figure whose response to a nuclear holocaust was to declare: “Next time, we get our retaliation in first.”
Generations of children have also enjoyed two European bandes dessinées. The Belgian writer Hergé (pen-name of Georges Remi, 1907–1983)’s comic strip Tintin made its first English-language appearance in the Eagle in 1951. It was not until 1958 – three decades after Captain Haddock, Professor Calculus, and the perma-quiffed boy detective first appeared in French – that Methuen embarked on translating Hergé’s large back catalog into English and publishing them in book form. Goscinny and Uderzo’s vibrant Asterix series, about the adventures of a pugnacious rebel taking on the Roman army in occupied Gaul, was the other great continental import. Having come out in French at the end of the 1960s, they also first appeared in the English language in now-defunct British comics anthologies. The book-length albums were translated with superb wit, from 1970 on, by Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge.
I don’t have space, as I say, to treat comics in detail. But I mention them as part of the storytelling ecosystem in which all these other children’s books have existed. Comics were, and remain, an important part of the imaginative worlds of childhood.
* * *
The pre-eminent genius of the children’s picture book in our own age is also its bestselling practitioner. Julia Donaldson (1948–) strikes me as having one of the best ears for prosody since W.H. Auden. She doesn’t, pun intended, put a foot wrong, from the jiggety-jig meter of Tabby McTat (2009) to the propulsive couplets and swinging internal rhymes of Superworm (2012). In terms of story construction, too, she’s virtuosic. And her roots in the genre are deep. Her books are nursery rhymes at the same time as they are folktales: tiny, perfectly structured dramas with the musical integrity of songs.
Tyrannosaurus Drip (2007), for instance, tells at an anapestic gallop the story of a herbivorous duckbill dinosaur whose egg rolls into a T rex nest and hatches there, to the confusion of all. It’s an obvious riff on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Ugly Duckling,” and its climactic scene (in which the T rexes, crossing the river on a fallen log, catch sight of their own reflections in the water and take fright) is a callback to Aesop’s fable of “The Dog and its Reflection.” Like a song, it has choruses: “And they hooted ‘Up with rivers!’, and they hooted ‘Up with reeds!’ / And they hooted ‘Up with bellyfuls of juicy water weeds!’”
Her first book – published after Methuen approached her to turn a children’s song she had written for the BBC in 1975 into a book – was A Squash and a Squeeze, which describes how an old woman learns to appreciate the limited space she has by sharing her house with ever more and more animals. (It shares its basic premise with Ruth Orbach’s 1974 picture book One Eighth of a Muffin: the root story is a Yiddish folktale – Donaldson’s “wise old man” is identifiably a rabbi, though not named as such – and other versions include A Big Quiet House, It Could Always Be Worse and No Room For A Pup!) Practically everything Donaldson has written – from the magnificently metafictional Tiddler (2007) to the plangently Odyssean Stick Man (2008) – has a special sort of fairy-dust.
Her signature work, The Gruffalo (1999), was a classic folktale, new growth from old roots; Donaldson has said she took her cue in part from a Chinese folktale called “The Fox that Borrows the Terror of a Tiger.” Our old friend Vladimir Propp, be it said, would have loved it. Like all folktales, it sends us into the forest: “A mouse took a stroll in the deep dark wood. / A fox saw the mouse, and the mouse looked good.” There, in twenty one-syllable words, she establishes some archetypal Aesopic characters, a deep dark wood, and what film producers like to call jeopardy.
As the mouse makes its progress through the deep dark wood, it encounters three predators in turn: a fox, an owl, and a snake. Their exchanges are formulaic. Each predator tries to lure the mouse into its den. Each time the clever mouse tricks the tricksters and turns the tables: “It’s terribly kind of you, [fox/owl/snake], but no: / I’m going to have [lunch/tea/a feast] with a gruffalo.”
Each time, the mouse describes the gruffalo to his interlocutor, who has never heard of one, and adds a fresh trio of frightful characteristics before adding that he’s meeting the gruffalo nearby and mentioning: “And his favourite food is [roasted fox/owl ice-cream/ scrambled snake].” The predators each scarper in terror, while the smug old mouse strolls on congratulating himself: “Silly old [fox/ owl/snake]! Doesn’t he know / There’s no such thing as a gruffalo?”
Then, bam, peripetaeia. The mouse runs smack-dab into a creature that has all nine of the frightful characteristics that he has given to the gruffalo. The joke’s on mouse: gruffalo exists. And mouse only got one thing wrong in his description of the creature, as its first words dismayingly confirm: “‘My favourite food!’ the gruffalo said. / ‘You’ll taste good on a slice of bread!’”
The story could have ended, quite satisfactorily, with the mouse vanishing into the gruffalo’s tum. Moral, perhaps: it’s possible to be too much of a smart-arse. Instead, in the grand tradition of the trickster story, the mouse turns out to be even more of a smarty-pants than we first thought. Without an instant of hesitation, he gets over his surprise and – playing, resonantly, on the word “good” – shoots back:
‘Good?’ said the mouse. ‘Don’t call me good!
I’m the scariest creature in this wood.
Just walk behind me and soon you’ll see,
Everyone is afraid of me.’
The gruffalo, laughing at the absurdity of it, humors the mouse and follows behind him. The poem, after this, unpacks like a Russian doll: there are formulaic encounters with snake, owl, and fox again in reverse order. Each predator takes one look at the gruffalo and legs it.* Each time the mouse tells the gruffalo: “You see? I told you so.” The gruffalo marvels aloud. Right up until the point that the mouse declares that “now my tummy’s beginning to rumble / My favourite food is gruffalo crumble.” And the gruffalo, too, takes to his heels.
It’s a story that touches on the power of storytelling itself. The mouse is right at the bottom of the food chain, but he tells a story that puts him, effectively, at the top of it – and everybody else believes that story. It is a little millefeuille of dramatic irony. Even the clever mouse is wrong-footed for a moment, knocked off his pedestal as the hermeneutic apex predator, when he discovers that the lie he has been telling describes something that’s real. Did he imagine the gruffalo into existence?
Part of the joy of The Gruffalo – as well, perhaps, as its value as an introduction to the world of adulthood – is that it’s a tale of deception and predation told in language of elaborate courtesy. Fox, owl, and snake seek to lure the mouse with an invitation to eat; the mouse thanks them gratefully for the invitation, or greets them like old pals on their second encounter. Nothing is quite what it seems. Nobody, not even the gruffalo, is sincere. And Axel Scheffler’s illustrations contribute hugely to taming this extraordinary, simple-yet-complex tale. His gruffalo isn’t terrifying: it’s cute. And Scheffler’s visual Easter-eggs help draw the books into a sort of Donaldsonverse – the gruffalo’s child, in the sequel of that name, carries Stick Man about under its arm; in other post-Gruffalo books you can spot gruffalo faces or visual motifs unobtrusively in the background.
Finally, look at the brilliant simplicity with which the final couplet closes the story, with its inverted echo of the opening couplet and with a caesura in the final line to be relished by every readeraloud: “All was quiet in the deep dark wood. / The mouse found a nut, and the nut was good.” The deep dark wood is now a place of calm and comfort rather than fear and threat, and the tissue of dangerous little deceptions gives way to unfalsifiable bodily reality. After all those imaginary meals, a real one. So real, in fact, you can taste it. Sweet as a nut.
Children’s books, I argued in my introduction, are gateways to adult reading. Picture books are gateways to childhood reading. You hear them, first of all. Then you start making the connection between the familiar story and the words on the page. Then you start to read aloud. And in due course you can read them to yourself, before you move on and out, beyond them.
It is in their pages that most children will first encounter poetry – see how words can bounce and chime even without a musical accompaniment. Because they have so few words in them, those words matter. They need, as children know, to be “just so.” They will remain with their readers and listeners for a lifetime.
Children’s picture books are not just read, but reread, sometimes hundreds of times; and the most beloved of them will be returned to decades later: first, when their auditors become readers to their own children; and maybe for a second time, years after that, when, with a grandchild on your knee, you reach down a frayed paperback from a shelf and say: “The night Max wore his wolf suit…”
And there you are, the years falling away: back at the beginning…
* In Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes, Pauline wears a ribbon in her hair to play Alice. Her teacher tells her she looks “ridiculously Tenniel.”
* A hornbook was a tablet, looking a bit like an optician’s paddle, on which letters of the alphabet would be written out for children to learn by heart. They’d been an educational tool since medieval times.
* Quoted in Karen MacPherson, “Hitler banned it; Gandhi loved it: “The Story of Ferdinand,” the book and, now, film,” Washington Post, 12 December 2017.
* Art Buchwald (syndicated column), July 1974.
† Jonathan Cott, Pipers at the Gates of Dawn: The Wisdom of Children’s Literature (Random House, 1983), [p].
* There’s a famous story Sendak told of getting a fan letter from a child and writing back with a drawing of a Wild Thing: “Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said: “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”
* Fresh Air, National Public Radio, 30 October 2003.
* “That was the one bit that the publishers thought perhaps should come out, because they said, ‘That’s not very realistic, is it?’” – Kerr, interview with author, 2018.
* Such is Browne’s commitment to the largest primate that he was once hospitalized by a gorilla bite during the filming of a Tv programme for kids.
† Lot o’ Fun was an English comic that published from 1906 to 1929. Comics had already become an established part of the mix of childhood reading.
* Or wings it, or bellies it, as the case may be.