Author Archives: Andrea Immel

Imagining Sameness and Difference in Children’s Literature just published

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The Little Traveller, or A Sketch of the Various Nations of the World (London: Dean and Munday, ca. 1830).

In October 2013, Cotsen hosted the conference, “Putting the Figure on the Map: Imagining Sameness and Difference for Children.”  The monograph based on the proceedings, Imagining Sameness and Difference in Children’s Literature from the Enlightenment to the Present Day co-edited by Emer O’Sullivan (Leuphana University) and Andrea Immel (Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University), has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan in the series “Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature.”   It features thirty-seven black-and white illustrations; for color, the e-book must be purchased.  

The front cover features a charming illustration of stylishly dressed little Parisians holding hands with Alsatian children in traditional costume from the famous picture book Mon village (1917).  While the illustration appears to celebrate friendship, the author/illustrator Oncle Hansi (aka Jean-Jacques Waltz) was only interested in  friendship among French-speaking Alsatians and the French.  At the time Alsace-Lorraine belonged to Germany and Oncle Hansi cruelly caricatured the German-speaking Alsatians as he worked tirelessly to overthrow German rule so that the region could rejoin France.  The propaganda is made palatable by the style of the illustrations and readers now find it difficult to see what the conventions of representation were supposed to communicate.

As O’Sullivan and Immel argue in the introduction, “The identification and evaluation of these conventions concerns practioners–parents, teachers, school librarians, editors, and publishers vetting materials–the process is equally important to literary critics and historians who examine children’s books for evidence of a society’s attitudes and the way those ideas circulate in order to contextualize them.  A nuanced understanding of the what and how and why of portraying sameness and difference is critical to an appreciation of the role of children’s books in promoting social change.”

The twelve essays by leading scholars from the United States and European Union: the roster includes Amanda M. Brian, Nina Christensen, Gabrielle von Glasenapp, Margaret Higonnet, Cynthia J. Koepp, Gillian Lathey, Silke Meyer, Lara Saguisag, Martina Seifert, and Verena Rutschmann.  Texts from Denmark, Germany, France, Russian, and the United States from the last two hundred years are analyzed–not just literary works, but picture books, non-fiction, comics, instructional volumes, novelties with moveable illustrations.   This volume does not attempt to offer a comprehensive survey or history of representations of difference in children’s literature: rather the contributors “offer a sample of the issues and materials that are a part of this history and the kinds of questions that can and must be asked of them if such a survey or history should be written.  By engaging with the past…the authors provide a wider context and a more discerning way to look at diversity and national identify tropes in children’s literature today.”

Dolls and Sights of the Crystal Palace from the series “Aunt Mavor’s Picturebooks for Little Readers.” (London; Routledge, 1852).

Lapland Sketches, or Delineations of the Costume, Habits and Peculiarites of Jens Holm and his Wife Karina Christian. Jens and Karina were exhibited at the Egyptian Hall in London. (London: J. Harris and Son, 1822). Cotsen 40103.

 

Marks in Books 7: Owners Repair Their Books Published by the Newberys

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The Toy-Shop. London: E. Newbery, [ca. 1791]. (Cotsen 5610, copy 2)

This copy of The Toy-Shop is a good example of a book that has almost been read to death.  Who was responsible?  It’s natural to pin the blame for the book’s poor condition on the owners who wrote their names in it.  But H. and John Beague were probably just two in a succession of owners.  It’s possible that the damage was done by one of the owners who didn’t identify him or herself or whoever scribbled in pencil throughout the book–possibly as late as the nineteenth century.  Maybe it was more than one bad actor.The binding of the The Toy Shop should be a wreck, but the Dutch gilt paper over boards is in better shape than the text. Really well read copies of eighteenth-century juveniles bound this way often have naked spines, exposing the stitched signatures below.  Where the paper covering the spine is torn away, you can see how thin it is..

Front board and oversewn spine. Mother Bunch’s Fairy Tales. London: E. Newbery, 1790. (Cotsen 5505)

Some young readers actually cared enough about their books to reinforce the bindings, but there’s no way of knowing whether it was the owner or a kind sister or mother who stopped what they were doing and repaired the book.  This binding is so worn that it’s impossible to tell what the original color of the paper covering the boards was.  The spine is completely gone, although some of the original stitching holding the two boards together is still intact.  Someone did a rough-and-ready job of securing them so they wouldn’t fall off.  The repair is not neat or precise, but the collection of then popular fairy tales by Mme. D’Aulnoy and others can still be opened and read.

The book is a 1790 reprint of a title issued nearly twenty years before.  The engraver’s signature is long gone and the images are so worn that they have been touched up in places. On the inside there have been additional repairs to keep the pages from falling out.

(Cotsen 5505)

(Cotsen 5505)

The first owners of Cotsen 5505 that can be traced lived in the middle of the nineteenth century.  In 1854 this copy of Mother Bunch’s Tales was signed by  G. M. Richmond  (George Martin Richmond, a businessman in Providence, Rhode Island) and he gave it to his adult daughter Ellen in 1857.  Nearly twenty years later Ellen presented it to her married daughter Alice.   Did one of them sew the boards back on or had that been done long before it came into the family?  There must be a story about this book, but it is impossible to tell from the information Jill Shefrin discovered in the course of researching the people who owned Cotsen’s collection of Newbery juveniles.The third example below must have been read until the boards had fallen off, but someone cared enough about it to oversew the binding with stout thread with an interlocking stitch.   Other eighteenth-century children’s books in the collection have been repaired the same way, although I don’t have a list of them.

Front board and spine. Histories, or, Tales of Past Times Told by Mother Goose. 5th ed. Salisbury: B. Collins, 1769. (Cotsen 25150)

.You can get a glimpse of the stitching on the inside as well.

(Cotsen 25150)

This Mother Goose’s Tales belonged at one time to a Mary Barrett and we know from the number of books surviving with her signature that she must have had a pretty large nursery library.  You can see that the pages are in danger of coming detached from the text block and that someone has neatly pinned them together near the gutter. Other groups of pages have been treated the same way.  Pinning pages is another homemade repair I’ve seen more than once, but I have no idea how to date or localize the pins.  I assume they are too short to have been the kind of pins women used to attach pieces of their clothing together.  If only I could find a passage in some eighteenth-century children’s book that describes an eager little reader using her needle to fix up an old favorite…