1. The Butterfly’s Ball

On adult authority

Where do my memories begin?

It shocks me, the number of people who say they recall nothing before school. I feel more like Beatrix Potter, who was laughed at for saying she could ‘remember quite plainly from one and two years old’. To me, one of the best passages of prose ever written is the opening chapter of Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie (1959). It exactly captures the state of being a toddler with ‘antennae of eyes and nose and grubbing fingers’. He describes those towering grasses ‘tattooed with tiger-skins of sunlight’; family faces ‘of rose, familiar, living’; water that breaks and shines on the tiled floor. I too recall an abundance of those slow strange days, their muddled clarity: dusty chickens on a path; briar-rose petals stirred to brown to make perfume; the smell of home-made playdough; powdering my sister’s bum; the hosepipe’s pattering rainbows; a foxglove the colour of fever I could never touch.

But do I really remember? My father was such a teller of stories. What is really mine, and what is instead a vivid imagining of a much-repeated tale? Stories are powerful things. Plato said that ‘those who tell stories rule society’. When we are small, the stories adults tell us shape our world, our selves, our memories.

The stories they choose to tell about our childhood, in a way, become our childhood.

Our bungalow, on a new estate called Moorfield, was, I realize now, contrived by my dad to look like a pub, probably in order to piss off his strict father who was part of the Temperance movement. It had wooden panelled walls, horse brasses, leather furniture, a soda siphon, ashtrays, a dart board, a low hush of smoke in the air. The football pools were always waiting near the door for collection. We had a Turkish-patterned carpet in faded peacock colours. He would paint the ceiling by standing on the glass coffee table and stippling the plaster until it looked like royal icing, and once his foot crashed through. My dad was useless at DIY – my mother hung the wallpaper – although legend has it he did once knock out our old bathroom with Uncle John while I sat in the cot, a preternaturally calm baby, turning over the pages of my Ladybird books for hours.

It is also difficult to say for certain when picture books begin. The term ‘picture book’ is now usually used when pictures and text are of equal importance, with an illustration on every page or pair of facing pages, and the book is aimed at children who cannot read or are just beginning. They are distinct from, say, graphic novels (like Hergé’s Tintin series) or illustrated novels (such as Roald Dahl’s, with those glorious, scrappy Quentin Blake illustrations).

There have been claims that the first picture book is the Orbis sensualium pictus, published in Nuremberg in 1658. It was created by a tragic teacher and priest from Bohemia called Jan Komenský, who had lost all his belongings in a fire and all his family to the plague. For much of the Thirty Years War, a wanderer exiled from his homeland, he was witness to the suffering of child refugees, who he decided he wanted to help. The Orbis sensualium pictus disseminated his unusual educational technique of teaching the alphabet via animal noises (you make the sound r as the dog ‘grinneth’, w as the hare ‘squealeth’, l as the wolf ‘howleth’) with a woodcut illustration beside each letter. Such was its lasting impact that it was treasured a hundred years later by a young Goethe.

Afterwards, there were many other illustrated tomes aimed at children, but like Komenský’s they tended to be educational tools: ABCs or moral lessons. John Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744) offered improving fables and a list of ‘One Hundred and Sixty three Rules for the Behaviour of Children’ which must have been a real bedtime favourite. (Sample rules: ‘Approach near thy Parents at no Time without a Bow’, ‘Dip not thy Meat in the Sauce’, ‘Spit not in the Room, but in the Corner, and rub it with thy Foot, or rather go out and do it abroad.’)

For those adults who despair of the tiaras and weapons now stuck to the cover of every magazine, it’s worth noting that even in 1744 the (gender-specific) free gift was being pioneered as an inducement to reading – A Little Pretty Pocket-Book was originally sold with a ball for a boy and a pincushion for a girl, both half-red and half-black. A pin was stuck in the red side to mark a good deed, and the black to mark a bad one, in order to ‘infallibly make Tommy a good boy, and Polly a good girl’.

These books are clearly on the side of the grown-ups. They are teaching tools with designs on shaping and disciplining. The picture book as we might recognize it – as a fully illustrated tale – had yet to appear.

Perhaps our story really begins with this memorable invitation:

Come take up your Hats, and away let us haste

To the Butterfly’s Ball, and the Grasshopper’s Feast.

The Trumpeter, Gad-fly, has summon’d the Crew,

And the Revels are now only waiting for you.

Whoever is speaking, their voice has the ring of authority. With everyone waiting, it is difficult not to fold to the social pressure and reach for our hat.

These are the first lines of The Butterfly’s Ball, and the Grasshopper’s Feast, which was composed by an adult of considerable real-world authority, the MP William Roscoe, in 1802. It was initially illustrated by William Mulready. I first read the poem in Hilda Boswell’s Treasury of Poetry with her own dreamy illustrations – the androgynous moth with its parted lips; the spread of rosehips and tiny lily-pads; fairies nibbling crumbs under the table – and remember loving the sound of Roscoe’s fancy words, although I didn’t know their meaning: viands, repast, minuet.

Written by Roscoe for his ten children as a celebratory jeu d’esprit to memorialize the birth of his youngest son, Robert, the poem was first published in The Gentleman’s Magazine. Its popularity led to it being republished as a stand-alone book, which was one of the first to have colour illustrations. Some editions had hand-coloured images, probably completed by young children working on an assembly line in sweatshop conditions (the gap between the sentiment attached to the idea of a child and care for actual children is, I should warn you, often stark in this history).

The book, notably, aims to entertain rather than elucidate. Some of Roscoe’s contemporaries struggled with this, searching frantically for a moral – the Irish author Mary Leadbeater wrote in a letter in 1811, ‘I apprehend Roscoe’s Butterfly’s Ball must have been written to remove the dread and disgust of insects so prone to fasten upon a youthful mind, and if it could prevent this evil early in life it must be allowed to be a meritorious performance.’ The text, however, clearly doesn’t do anything of the sort. It is a glorious party, with sweet treats, acrobats and laughter – a party enjoyed not by human adults, but by ‘the children of earth and the tenants of air’, the homeless, the dirty, the young, the tiny, the squashed and stamped upon, and ‘you’ – dear reader – on whom they all wait.

It would be neat to see The Butterfly’s Ball, and the Grasshopper’s Feast as a poem that defeats the forces of authority, the primers and sermons, and ushers in the anarchic new age of the picture book. Certainly Edward Lear, who we will soon see unleashing nonsense upon the world of children’s literature, seems to have enjoyed it in his youth. But the truth, of course, is more complex – it is always the adult who writes children’s books, illustrates them, publishes them, buys them. Adult desires (to educate the child, to keep it quiet, to make it sleep, etc.) did not just disappear.

Jacqueline Rose famously claimed that ‘children’s fiction is impossible’ because the ‘child’ that children’s fiction is aimed at is always an adult construct (The Butterfly’s Ball, and the Grasshopper’s Feast was not, for example, aimed at the actual child labourers colouring its pictures). Even the name ‘children’s fiction’ is a sleight of hand that erases adult involvement. With picture books there is a whole extra layer of adult interference, as the preliterate toddler cannot experience the story without a parent or carer mediating it for them (and often, as I do, changing vocabulary, skipping, unpacking, emphasizing, doing the voices, pointing things out). Children’s fiction, such as it is, Rose suggests, usually relies on creating a ‘child’ within the text, and then inducing the young audience to identify with it, as Roscoe did when he inserted his little son Robert into his verses.

The trick is to persuade both the grown-up reader and the child who listens that you are on their side.

The Butterfly’s Ball, and the Grasshopper’s Feast did this so successfully it became a phenomenon, spawning hundreds of imitations with names like The Peacock ‘At Home’, The Lion’s Masquerade and The Fishes’ Grand Gala. (Roscoe himself also produced The Butterfly’s Funeral, but surprisingly that wasn’t such a hit.)

The poem creates a sense of carnival, of the world turned upside down, but we should remember that carnivals are usually state sanctioned. They release pressure in a manner that protects the status quo. The Butterfly’s Ball, and the Grasshopper’s Feast was much loved by the royal family. Rebellion is kept within the party, within the pages, and anyway sticks close to civilized behaviour. In this case insects mimic the hierarchies of humanity, attending formal ‘balls’, laying aside their stings, setting the table neatly, reminding us – as the occasion ends – that at such a late hour we should ‘hasten home’.

My early pleasure in poetry was bound up with nonsense. ‘Be alert,’ my dad would counsel. ‘The world needs more lerts.’ When I woke up in the middle of the night as a baby, my dad always lulled me back to sleep by rocking me to ‘I Am the Walrus’ by the Beatles. Our family had many invented words. ‘To squink’ (verb), for example. If we were all sharing a can of pop on a day trip and you sipped it, you had to be aware of the binding rule that you then had to carry it: ‘The one who drinks it squinks it.’ My mum and I played rhyming games for hours, generating gibberish. When I was two I took to calling the local marmalade cat a ‘jam ham’.

Another of my favourite pages in the Treasury of Poetry is Edward Lear’s description of the delightfully random cargo the green-headed Jumblies pick up, having ignored everyone’s advice and gone to sea in a sieve:

And they bought an Owl, and a useful Cart,

And a pound of Rice, and a Cranberry Tart,

And a hive of silvery Bees.

And they bought a Pig, and some green Jack-daws,

And a lovely Monkey with lollipop paws,

And forty bottles of Ring-Bo-Ree,

And no end of Stilton Cheese.

‘Ring-Bo-Ree’ made me thirst as ‘forty bottles of apple juice’ never could have done. It was a thirst for the world of pure imagination; for the impossible. Even then, I was a good ‘Polly’. Perhaps I also thirsted for the Jumblies’ defiance.

Edward Lear’s A Book of Nonsense (1846) is, in the history of English picture books, the next great leap, and one further still away from the didactic tradition. If books were meant to drill sense into children, this explicitly did its opposite. Edward Lear was a fascinating character – the twentieth of twenty-one children, neglected by his mother and afflicted by terrible epilepsy which always made him feel an unmarriageable outsider (in his diary he recorded his fits with an X). He was, despite this, very successful. As well as being one of the great ornithological illustrators, producing birds for both of John Gould’s famous books of birds and The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, he was also a drawing master for Queen Victoria, and a friend and sometime member of the Pre-Raphaelites.

The constant tension between insider- and outsider-dom, authority and anarchy, finds its way into his Book of Nonsense, which he began both writing and illustrating at Knowsley Hall. Engaged there by Edward Stanley, the 13th Earl of Derby, to sketch the estate and draw plates of the ‘Knowsley Menagerie’, Lear began concocting rhymes to entertain the earl’s grandchildren. He was sometimes welcomed into the earl’s family, at other times sharply aware he wasn’t one of them. It was the period of the Corn Laws, soldiers firing on Chartists, a general unease. Knowsley was a home for the establishment, but the company could also be surreal: reptiles, zebras, a platypus and a bandicoot. (It was later turned into Knowsley Safari Park – a monkey stealing your windscreen wipers becoming a memorable event in many Northern childhoods.)

A Book of Nonsense is mainly comprised of limericks – five-line rhyming poems with an AABBA structure and roughly anapaestic metre. As a folk-form, limericks are often linked to transgression and the violation of taboos, which perhaps appealed to Lear’s subversive side. In these limericks there is often a struggle against an oppressive ‘they’. ‘They’ tell the Old Person of Hurst he’ll get fat; smash the Old Man with a gong for making too much noise; smash the Old Man of Whitehaven for dancing a quadrille with a crow, etc. (there is a lot of smashing). ‘They’ seem to be those in power; the crowd; the system. Lear’s sympathies with the individual pitted against societal prejudice make the limericks feel very contemporary.

However, Lear’s verses are also just extremely random: sometimes tenderly daft, sometimes wincingly dark (a woman bakes her husband in an oven; a man shuts his wife in a box and says ‘Without doubt / You will pass all your life in that box’). The giddy pictures that accompany each of them are what make the book such a work of genius – they don’t just illustrate but interact with the limericks: elaborating, shifting the tone. It is this which has led some to claim A Book of Nonsense as the first true picture book. We read, for example, that:

There was an Old Man with a nose,

Who said, ‘If you choose to suppose,

That my nose is too long,

You are certainly wrong!’

That remarkable Man with a nose.

Take the limerick on its own, and it is easy to sympathize with this Old Man who refuses to conform to society’s physical ideals. In the accompanying image, though, we can see his nose, more like an elephant’s trunk, is actually forcing screaming people to leap out of its way.

On a first read, the final lines of Lear’s limericks can feel disappointing. The rhythm – with those two shorter, more urgent lines – and the anticipation created by the rhyme scheme lead us to expect a punchline. But Lear never delivers one, only repeating the first line with subtle tweaks. Nothing changes. The Old Man still has a long nose. The antithesis of teacherly, these poems explicitly refuse to go on a journey or teach a moral lesson.

In the last lines Lear sneaks in some of his own, invented adjectives (‘ombliferous’, ‘umbrageous’) as if to leave us even more at a loss.

At the same time as Lear was putting together his Book of Nonsense, just before Christmas in 1844, Dr Heinrich Hoffmann went into Frankfurt to look for a book for his three-year-old son Carl. It was a time of festive markets, brimming with candies, nuts and toys. Candles shivered in the cold. Hoffmann, a medical man who worked at a mental asylum, found nothing but moralizing tales that began with assertions such as ‘children must keep clean’, so instead he bought a blank exercise book, and told his wife, ‘We are going to make a book of it.’ After Christmas he circulated it amongst friends. Zacharias Löwenthal came across a copy and urged Hoffmann to let him publish it. On a ‘bright wine-influenced whim’ Hoffmann consented, although he used the pseudonym Reimerich Kinderlieb (meaning ‘the rhymester who loves children’).

Der Struwwelpeter himself, with his eyrie of hair and meat-hook nails, was a character Hoffmann often drew for his younger patients to distract them from anxiety and pain. His intention was not to terrify children, but to laugh with them at the underlying savagery of existing didactic texts that revelled in the nasty consequences of misbehaviour. But as Marina Warner has written, it is in fact ‘a good example of an author’s intentions failing to control the impact of his work, for it still is, for all its happy ironies, a nasty book.’ Ever since, while some of his three- to six-year-old readers have been amused by these ‘funny stories and droll pictures’ (as the original title had it), a great many more have found them bed-wettingly terrifying.

Hoffmann brought together two common juvenile plot lines, both popularized by his Danish contemporary Hans Christian Andersen. The first presents us with a pure, innocent child who is called early to their Lord’s side in heaven. Early children’s books are full of such death scenes, with the best example still read today perhaps being Andersen’s ‘The Little Match-Girl’, snowflakes caught in pretty curls, dreaming of her grandmother in the flare of her last moments. The second portrays the bad child who is punished – as in Andersen’s ferocious tale ‘The Red Shoes’ where Karen is brutally punished by angels for her vanity, her feet unable to stop dancing even after she has them amputated.

Both these narrative arcs are parodied by Der Struwwelpeter, in which misbehaviour leads swiftly to a brutal, meaningless end. A boy declares he will no longer eat soup and dies five days later, lighter than a sugarplum; lighter than a thread. A boy goes out in a storm and is blown away, never to be seen again. Little Suck-a-Thumb, most famously, sucks his thumb and – alack – the scissor-man flies into his house with enormous scissors and ‘Snip! Snap! Snip!’ removes his thumbs, the stumps of which bleed copiously on to the floor and into nightmares.

Having come to Der Struwwelpeter as a grown-up, it’s the story of Harriet, who plays with matches and is burnt to death, that I find most disturbing. Her Mamma and Nurse have left her alone. She finds the flames ‘pretty’ and is ecstatic with joy when one burns ‘so clear’. Only her pets witness her death:

The Pussy-cats saw this

And said: ‘Oh, naughty, naughty Miss!’

And stretched their claws,

And raised their paws:

‘’Tis very, very wrong, you know,

Me-ow, me-o, me-ow, me-o,

You will be burnt, if you do so.’

Like a Greek chorus, their warning cannot stop the inevitable tragedy. Harriet’s apron strings catch fire and we witness her fully aflame as if in self-immolation. ‘Her apron burns, her arms, her hair—/ She burns all over everywhere.’ The cats’ tears make a pond. Only her scarlet shoes are left amongst the ashes, like proof of her wickedness (it is hard to believe this story doesn’t allude to Andersen’s match-girl and red shoes, although they are contemporaneous, both published in 1845).

To a modern reader, used to the concept of ‘responsible adults’, placing the guilt for a little girl’s excruciating death solely on her own actions is hard to take. The cats’ hiss of ‘naughty Miss’ and ‘we told her so’ exposes an ugly adult world that smears the innocent with its own carelessness.

This was also Hoffmann’s point, surely, but it’s not an easy point for a three-year-old to absorb. Der Struwwelpeter went on to inspire adult political humour (such as the 1941 Struwwelhitler), Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children (‘Henry King: Who chewed bits of String, and was early cut off in Dreadful Agonies’), Edward Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies with its alphabet of infant deaths (‘X is for Xerxes devoured by mice’). In picture book terms, though, it is hard to think of anyone who has since aimed such disturbing material at such a young readership. The mixture of authority and anarchy in Hoffmann’s adult voice (and the parent’s voice, as they read aloud to their child) is disturbing because it is so hard to interpret, especially across the centuries. It is like the voice of a sociopath who keeps everyone on their nerves, not knowing when to laugh or tremble. By the end a child is left barely able to distinguish bad from good; prank from horror. They do not know whether Hoffmann is on the grown-up’s side or their own.

Still, perhaps that wasn’t the case for Heinrich Hoffmann’s little son Carl, who recognized his father’s dark jokes, and who lived in a nineteenth-century Germany where every second child died. Every second child! To be a father or a son in that period was to live every moment with mortality in mind. Death in your mouth or in the weather.

Marina Warner has talked of these stories teaching laughter as a kind of ‘strategic refuge’ from the world’s arbitrary suffering. Their function, she says, is to ‘line the stomach’.

Carl Hoffmann died at age twenty-seven in Peru of yellow fever.

Being pregnant in the twenty-first century can sometimes feel like existing within a cautionary tale. The responsibility for children’s suffering now lies, it is widely agreed, entirely with the mother.

‘Sinead King: Who changed her cat’s Litter Tray, and had a Miscarriage in Dreadful agonies’

‘Ramona: Who absent-mindedly nibbled some Brie, and was rushed to an Emergency C-section’

‘Kelly Horne: Who drank Prosecco at a wedding before she knew she was Pregnant, and had a Baby with Smaller than average Head Dimensions’

Being pregnant is also a reminder of how strange it is to be growing. To wake up every morning with your body somehow different: bigger, stranger, fuller. Little children live with this strangeness every day: you can fit through a door, then you can’t. Your chair is too small. Suddenly, you can reach the secret cupboard.

Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871) are novels, not picture books, but they have had such an influence on the artists in our story that they are relevant – thousands of picture books are foreshadowed in the human-sized white rabbit hurrying past in his waistcoat, from Beatrix Potter’s clothed bunnies to the rangy Mr Rabbit in Charlotte Zolotow and Maurice Sendak’s Mr Rabbit and the Lovely Present. How to begin assessing the influence of the Drink Me potion’s flavour of ‘cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffy, and hot buttered toast’, or the innovative interplay of text and words that has the Mouse’s tale a wriggling tail on the page, the gnat speaking in a tiny little voice?

There are also, importantly, the radical shifts in size and perspective: Alice falling down a rabbit hole, the tiny golden key, her body opening up ‘like a telescope’, swimming in a pool of tears, talking with a caterpillar. Shrinking and growing. Illustrator John Tenniel’s picture of a giant Alice jammed in a room – head pressing against the ceiling, arm out of the window – is uncannily like a repeated bad dream I had as a teenager, where I found myself stuck and stooped in a house like a Wendy house.

It’s always about power, of course, big and small: wanting and not wanting power; disappearing or becoming unignorable. Picture books are obsessed with scale – look at the miniaturism of The Butterfly’s Ball, and the Grasshopper’s Feast – and Alice’s lurches between large and small lead to Little Miss Tiny in her mouse hole, The Giant Jam Sandwich, Dr Seuss’s Who-ville (on a speck of dust on a clover flower), Jez Alborough’s Where’s My Teddy?, Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s The Smartest Giant in Town.

Lewis Carroll is another nonsense writer with a fascinating life, caught between a hallucinatory, subversive dream-world and his reality as a buttoned-up Victorian. Carroll was born Charles Dodgson in 1832. Originally expected to join the church, he ended up a mathematician at Christ Church, Oxford, at the heart of the establishment. He had a stammer and referred to himself as the dodo (Do-Do-Dodgson), hence the dodo in Alice. He never married.

The contrast between his fantastical imagination and his repressed outer life has led to speculation – particularly as Carroll enjoyed the company of young girls and had an interest in photography, taking photos of them in costume or, occasionally, naked. There is a photograph of his muse, Alice Liddell, aged seven and uncomfortably self-aware, dressed as ‘The Beggar Maid’ with her tattered dress exposing a shoulder, chest, thigh; another of him kissing her, fingers grasping her waist. There is one of her elder sister, Lorina Liddell, nude and full-frontal. Although we may appreciate that Victorian culture is utterly alien to our own, with the age of consent being thirteen when the Alice books were written, it is hard not to be discomforted by a letter that says: ‘one hardly sees why the lovely forms of girls should ever be covered up.’

Carroll clearly saw allies in children – others who had to behave, to abide by the rules, to be seen and not heard, but who were clear-sighted about the absurdity of adults. If, as Jacqueline Rose suggests, all children’s fiction is a kind of ‘soliciting, a chase, even a seduction’ of the child reader, this is something Carroll excelled at. In his books, at least, they embraced Carroll’s anarchy as he ridiculed hierarchies and rituals (royalty, the tea party, the croquet game, the court room, school), and mocked characters like the Duchess, so fond of finding morals in things.

The essayist G. K. Chesterton’s brilliant ‘A Defence of Nonsense’ (1902) asserts that true nonsense resists analysis, claiming proudly that no age but his own could have realized Lear’s Quangle Wangle ‘meant absolutely nothing’. Making sense is, in a sense, a trap, even as we’re seduced into it. When Alice asks Humpty Dumpty to explain ‘Jabberwocky’ (in which Carroll famously invented the words galumphing and chortle), he declares airily that toves are ‘something like badgers, something like lizards and something like corkscrews’ and that a rath is ‘a sort of green pig’. He is clearly making it up, trying to sound knowledgeable. Pontificating pompously; as are we, if we start asserting that we have decoded the poem. (I wonder, is this whole book me performing as Humpty Dumpty – pontificating self-aggrandizingly about silliness?) But nonsense also reveals the structures of language – particularly, in Lear and Carroll, of the language of reason and authority – and so can be satirical even as it flaunts its meaninglessness.

Not that such satire bothers the powerful, when it’s so easy to dismiss as gobbledegook. The best way to neutralize criticism is to purchase it, so they (literally) patronized these writers and let them amuse the children. During his lifetime a rumour even developed that ‘Edward Lear’ was a pseudonym, and the true author was Lear’s patron, the Earl of Derby – both men were named Edward, after all, and ‘Lear’ is an anagram of Earl.

The rich and influential eat the honey; wrap their money in money. They dance on by the light of the moon.

I remember my father, too, as an insider and outsider. He taught begrudgingly for the educational authorities, but was actually more interested in being liked by the village children. Once the head of his school made him dress as the Mad Hatter for a fair. The costume suited him well; anarchy and authority in tension.

Usually my father wore cheap suits, which hung well on his slim frame. A tie, a handkerchief folded in his pocket. He had a thick, untameable mess of dark hair, and amused blue eyes. Every morning after his shave, tiny scraps of bloodied toilet paper clung to the nicks on his chin. My dad always seemed to be heading out to lead assemblies, football, the PTA; dashing and relaxed in his role, chewing a stick of Wrigley’s gum in his handsome mouth.

Although he was the deputy head, his whole self rebelled against society’s idea of how a teacher should behave. He was a local ‘character’, always up for a party, a pint, a provocation, a bet on the horses, a competitive game of almost anything (chess, darts, tennis, holidays). So ludic, his favourite book was actually Games People Play. His anecdotes were tales of youthful mischief – punching a bully, breaking into a train shed; illicit fireworks and purple hearts.

The children of the village would often talk of the mythical uplands of Junior Two, in which Mr Pollard let you play rounders every day, practise mind-reading and do quizzes instead of maths. He taught flight by climbing on a table, then leaping from one desk to another. At playtime, he ‘taxed’ children’s crisps, and one end-of-term he came back with a bin bag full of different-flavoured packets – chicken to Worcester sauce – that students had Sellotaped over every inch of the classroom as a thank you. They knew he loved the end of term as much as they did.

When Gruff was born and I became a mother, I too felt suddenly torn between responsibility and rebellion. It was my job to wipe and change and burp this tiny creature; to produce milk at appropriate intervals; to report to the various social workers and clinics in a timely fashion; to never leave the baby unattended for a moment. It was impossible, such ceaseless attentiveness, like being at sea in a sieve. Where once I had been utterly independent, society now expected me to politely ask for help at staircases; politely smile when random strangers told me I had dressed him inappropriately for the weather; politely listen while employers told me a new mother would add too much risk to a freelance job; politely sing along with the ‘Wheels on the Bus’ at library rhyme time. When they got to the mothers on the bus go chatter-chatter-chatter, it made me want to break something.

I wanted to be free but I kept biting my tongue. It occurred to me that this is what adulthood is. When my son had a screaming tantrum, I partially admired him.

By the mid-nineteenth century imaginative advances in children’s books were being matched by technical advances. The McLoughlin Brothers were becoming the biggest children’s publisher in America by adapting the old idea of hornbooks – text pasted or carved on to wood, bone or leather to stop it tearing, or even, in some parts of Europe, baked into gingerbread and then gilded. McLoughlin Bros., Inc. started mass-producing ABCs and counting books mounted on linen, so that children could play with them roughly. Around the same time London publishers Dean & Son began printing what were commonly known as ‘toy books’, often with mechanical features – the name itself suggesting education was not their priority. Dean & Son eventually moved into ‘rag books’ too, advertising them as ‘quite indestructible’ (their logo showed a Jack Russell in a tug of war with a bulldog). These were the precursors to the cloth books I was given when Gruff was born, often with clips to attach them to the pram – books to gum and paw at.

Colour was also transformed in this period – instead of the pictures having to be hand-coloured, chromolithography was used (a chemical process based on water rejecting grease). When Routledge and Warne contracted printer Edmund Evans, famous for his yellow-backs or ‘Penny Dreadfuls’, to produce toy books in 1865 the market galloped on at dizzying speed – first print runs soon exceeded 10,000. Evans himself became involved in choosing and commissioning artists including Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, who were soon his best-known illustrators – often referred to as the ‘Triumvirate’. Their experiments in relating text and image developed the picture book further, although many of their publications were still poetry anthologies, Birthday Books or songbooks rather than single tales. Reading them now, one also suspects they were often devised to titillate adult palates rather than amuse children – Caldecott’s Babes in the Wood, for example, would be morbid for a toddler, but panders to the maudlin sentimentality of Victorians who liked Little Nell and thought dressing small girls up as beggars picturesque.

Of the three, it is Kate Greenaway who is perhaps best remembered – another artist of this era caught between a genuine childlike quality (she said, ‘I hated to be grown-up, and cried when I had my first long dress’) and the demands of an adult audience. She is also the only one I recall from my own childhood. We had a copy of The Language of Flowers on the bookshelves, with its secret world of signs: a yellow chrysanthemum for slighted love; lady’s slipper for ‘win me and wear me’.

Born in London to a working-class family in 1846, Greenaway’s mother was a busy dressmaker. While she was in the shop, Kate’s childhood was spent wandering around Islington in the care of her big sister, watching Punch and Judy and street magicians. They used to play a game called ‘Pretence’ in which they would mimic the fancy shoppers. Her doll collection was her great pride – Dutch, wax and wooden. She had a favourite called ‘One-Eye’ and another called Gauraca that was four foot tall, and which she dressed in her brother’s cast-offs.

Greenaway’s early career was spent illustrating greeting cards, until Evans saw her manuscript Under the Window. On its publication in 1879 it became a bestseller. Soon Greenaway was famous for her doll-like children in quaint short jackets, smocks, pinafores, mob caps, and straw bonnets. Her mother’s daughter, Greenaway would stitch these clothes herself before posing young models in them, creating an incredibly influential look (‘Greenawayisme’) that very much appealed to liberal Arts and Crafts mothers; they called themselves ‘The Souls’ and clamoured to dress up their children in nostalgic pantaloons. Her illustrations spoke to the contemporary cult of childhood innocence. With Liberty & Co. mentioning her in its adverts for muslin frocks, her game of ‘Pretence’ came to strange life.

Greenaway met the famous art critic John Ruskin when she was thirty-six and he was sixty-three, and their subsequent relationship dominated much of her adulthood. Ruskin had previously been in love with a nine-year-old girl, Rose La Touche, and it seems likely that Greenaway’s pictures of sweet children clutching roses in Under the Window encouraged him to start their correspondence. Greenaway considered herself plain – her father nicknamed her ‘Knocker’ because when she cried she looked like their door-knocker, and she filled her student notebooks with reassuring phrases like: ‘Beauty is but skin deep.’ Flattered by Ruskin’s attention, she was soon exchanging hundreds of letters with him. Ruskin championed her work for showing ‘the infantine nature in all its naïveté, its gaucherie, its touching grace, its shy alarm, its discoveries, its ravishments, embarrassments, and victories’. But he also led her on and could be caustic, as in his criticism of her illustrations for The Language of Flowers: ‘they look as if you had nothing to paint them with but starch and camomile tea.’

John Ruskin had problems with adult female bodies – his biographer, Mary Lutyens, has suggested that his marriage to his first wife, Effie Gray, was unconsummated because he was disgusted by her pubic hair – and his flirtation with Greenaway also carried disturbing undertones. As the years passed, it seems she drew more to please him than any audience of children. Many of her letters to him are illustrated with the languorous ‘girlies’ he so enjoyed gazing at. In a letter from July 1883, he even tried to persuade her to undress one of her illustrations further:

WILL you – (it’s all for your own good!) make her stand up, and then draw her for me without her hat – and, without her shoes, – (because of the heels) and without her mittens, and without her – frock and its frill? And let me see exactly how tall she is – and how – round.

It will be so good of – and for – you – And to, and for – me.

His cousin and companion, Joan Severn, got to the letter before Greenaway and pencilled underneath: ‘Do nothing of the kind! – J.R.S.’

My favourite Kate Greenaway illustrations are those for the poet Robert Browning’s The Pied Piper of Hamelin – their talents combine, somehow, to make the most perfectly Victorian picture book imaginable. Browning’s realistic details make the pestilence vivid:

Rats!

They fought the dogs and killed the cats,

And bit the babies in the cradles,

And ate the cheeses out of the vats,

And licked the soup from the cooks’ own ladles,

Split open the kegs of salted sprats,

Made nests inside men’s Sunday hats.

It is another book that stages a confrontation between anarchy and authority. Blame for the plague lies with the ‘dolts’ of the corporation, and the mayor is memorably brought to gross life:

Nor brighter was his eye, nor moister

Than a too-long-opened oyster,

Save when at noon his paunch grew mutinous

For a plate of turtle green and glutinous …

The Pied Piper himself – ‘tall and thin, / With sharp blue eyes, each like a pin’ – is promised a thousand guilders, but then refused his payment when the greedy adults of Hamelin remember they could instead spend it on council dinners with ‘Claret, Moselle, Vin-de-Grave, Hock’. They are punished for this by the removal of their children, who are seduced by the musician:

And, like fowls in a farm-yard when barley is scattering,

Out came the children running.

All the little boys and girls,

With rosy cheeks and flaxen curls,

And sparkling eyes and teeth like pearls,

Tripping and skipping …

No one but Greenaway could illustrate such an eerie and beautiful scene. She decelerates her tempo to a picture per line, then a picture for a single word (‘tripping’) – the children dance forth in slow motion, their arms raised like puppets’ or zombies’ arms.

In many versions the Pied Piper leads the children, like rats, into the waters of the Weser river to drown. It is a tragedy of adulthood; of the failure of parental responsibility. But in this version the Piper leads the children into a mountain’s mouth, and Greenaway adds something remarkable and additional to the text – a picture of the Paradise that lies inside. It is a sentimental idyll of peacock-bright sparrows and pretty, blushing youths wearing Kate Greenaway smocks, dancing hand-in-hand around the blossom trees. A revolution of innocents. A butterfly’s ball.

It would be possible to argue this book is on the side of children rather than adults, with the Pied Piper a liberator, freeing them from their corrupt parents. By that reading, this is a dangerous image that suggests the overthrow of old hierarchies.

Except. Greenaway illustrated The Pied Piper of Hamelin entirely under Ruskin’s guidance, as an attempt to please him. This last scene, which shows the celestial garden, and which he said perfected the story ‘while it changes it into a new one’, obsessed him, and he supervised her on every figure and pose. The Piper is a cipher for Ruskin himself: artist and choreographer, ‘girlies’ clinging round his lap. He even wrote: ‘I think we might go to the length of expecting the frocks to come off sometimes – when it was very warm? You know.’

How could Greenaway ever hope to draw Ruskin his heaven? He was never satisfied. ‘I know the Paradise is bad’ she apologized in a letter to him, even as it was sent to the publishers. In later years, she stayed devoted as he slid into senility. Just a year after Ruskin passed away, in 1901, Kate Greenaway died of breast cancer, after silently suffering in abominable pain until it spread into her lungs. It was the beginning of the twentieth century; the thickest fog in years.

Greenaway could not have known, but, just a month later, Beatrix Potter would privately print 250 copies of The Tale of Peter Rabbit. For all the nineteenth century’s obsession with childhood, it would take a mischievous bunny to make the leap (the hop?) into the modern picture book.