Category Archives: British children’s books

An Enslaved Woman Learns to Read in Eliza Fenwick’s A Visit to the Juvenile Library (1805)

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Frontispiece to Eliza Fenwick’s Visits to the Juvenile Library. London: Printed by Barnard and Sultzer for Tabart and Co, 1805. (Cotsen 14522)

Visits to the Juvenile Library; or, Knowledge Proved to be the Source of Happiness (1805) is a scarce, desirable book by a stylish and important publisher of the Napoleonic era.  Benjamin Tabart was a rival of John Harris, who enjoyed the advantage of being successor to the great Newbery firm. While Tabart had the backing of the unscrupulous Sir Richard Phillips, he still had an uphill battle establishing his bookstore as a destination for families.

Visits  was less a novel than an extended exercise in product placement for his new business on New Bond Street.  It was written by Eliza Fenwick (1766-1840), the friend who nursed radical feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) when she lay dying.  An on-again-off-again marriage to a charming deadbeat with a bottle problem, had forced Fenwick to put on hold her ambitions as a novelist, being obliged to take what paid work the book trade there might be to support her little family.  During 1804 and 1805, she produced Visits and several other children’s books which cross-promoted Tabart’s backlist and premises.  The street-level view of the shop in the frontispiece  advertises that  he stocked books for lessons and leisure reading in English and French appropriately priced for private individuals or wholesalers.  As an additional inducement to stop by, a little boy is shown dragging his mother by the hand towards Tabart’s door, while a somewhat older boy peers in the window crowded with books. Wiling away part of the day in Mr.Tabart’s comfortably furnished shop, filled with books arranged by subject, looks like a pleasant expedition.  Through the double door, a cheery blaze in the fireplace in the back room can be seen.  There is a little animal lying underneath the chair on the left, but it is hard to tell if it is the shop cat or the customers’ dog.  Fenwick presents this shop as a temple of learning which will become the site of several conversions to literacy.

The five orphaned Mortimer children are sent away from their home in the West Indies after their parents’ death to live with the kind, intelligent guardian, Mrs. Clifford.  These circumstances  in children’s novels of this period always initiate a narrative arc of personal improvement. Child characters like Thomas Day’s Tommy Merton, who spent any amount of time on Caribbean plantations, are presumed to have received little or no education and can be expected to act out, as they have never had to control themselves.   The Mortimers are no exception.  Idle and quarrelsome among themselves, the children are sullen, haughty, or rude to Mrs. Clifford, who is concerned by their listlessness and lack of curiosity.

Of course the Mortimers have no idea of how to pass their time beyond  tracing the roses in the drawing room carpet.  “I always grow low spirited when I am obliged to read,” declares Richard.  Says the youngest ,Caroline, “I had rather have another wax doll, for I am quite tired of mine already.”  Louisa asks, “Now, Mrs. Clifford, are you going to be cross Mrs. Clifford?  Nora said you would make us read, and write, and work until we should all be quite wretched.”

Nora is the woman of color who has been the Mortimers’ slave.  She has come with them to England with some trepidation.  Her affection for the children is genuine, but  she has encouraged them to believe that “there was no occasion for rich people to be learned.”   Being illiterate herself, she supposes that “Reading and writing were only to be acquired by excessive suffering.”   During the sea voyage, she kept repeating to the children that England would be a “dull disagreeable” place to live, where there will be no slaves to wait upon them,” only tutors to flog them.  Nora’s worst fears are confirmed when she goes into the library by mistake and sees Mrs. Clifford seated at a table covered with books, writing a letter.

Thanks to Mr. Tabart, Mrs. Clifford is not obliged to remove the Mortimers from Nora’s influence and send them away to school.  Her friend Mr. Benson tells the children all about the Juvenile Library and suggests that some of the many books there might interest them.  While  too proud to admit to the adults  that they would like to go to New Bond Street, some of the children the Mortimers meet convince them that it could be quite pleasant to stick their noses in books  full of interesting stories and pictures. Their new acquaintances Edward Soames and Frank Howard describe their favorite Tabart titles and are even generous enough to loan them out.  The  Mortimers  spend the first evening of their lives busy and happy.  Nora notices the change in her charges and wonders if her dislike of Mrs. Clifford is misplaced.

It is not until chapter five that the children finally go to Tabart’s.  Once inside the shop,  they can hardly decide what to chose–books, jigsaw puzzles, prints, or globes   Mrs. Clifford expertly helps each Mortimer to  select a small group of titles that will hold his or her attention and lay the foundation for further study.  They take home works of natural history, biography, French grammars, spellers, easy readers,and poetry anthologies.  Mr. Tabart himself waits on the party until  called away on other business. Soon after this expedition, Arthur happily describes how he has changed since discovering  the pleasures of reading: “I find myself quite a different boy to what I was when I used to life half the day upon the sopha, or was always quarreling with my brothers and sisters, for want of something better to do.”  This change is not  lost upon Nora.One evening Arthur and his brother Henry go up to their room and surprise Nora sounding out words in William Mavor’s English Spelling Book.  Obviously embarrassed, Nora explains that “Well me tell all–you, Massa Henry, was cross boy, sometimes cruel boy to poor Nora–you, Massa Arthur, use to call Nora here, send Nora there; never satisfied if Nora sat down a moment, and you sit still and scold all day.  Since you come to England, you get books, you read books, you talk together, play together, read again, play again, be happy, be merry, fetch your own play-things, put the away no call poor old Nora down stairs, up stairs, now pick up a ball, now to tie your shoes, no scold and quarrel with Nora when you go to bed; all kind and good to Nora now.  Nora think you have learn it all out of books, so Nora learn books too.”  Her outburst shames the boys into apologizing for having been “sad tyrants” to her.  Not only do they promise to continue to give her “any such cause to complain of them,” but Henry volunteers to teach her to read and Arthur to write, so that she can write letters to her sister in the West Indies.

What are we in the twenty-first century to make of this early nineteenth-century story about how the West Indian-born Mortimers and their slave Nora embrace education as the high road to happiness? The use of dialect is cringe-worthy.  Lissa Paul, author of a new biography about its author Eliza Fenwick, observes how  how unusual it was for an enslaved person to be presented in such a positive light in children’s stories then.  And Nora is represented in the plate as an attractively dressed woman–indeed her pose while seated at the table is perhaps inappropriately sexualized  Nor is Nora’s conversion is  unambiguously positive, if scrutinized a little more carefully.

She seems not to have accompanied the children to Tabart’s, which probably would have been the case, given her low rank within the hierarchy of servants as the nursery maid.  Certainly Nora displayed the curiosity, initiative, and determination to go through all the books from Tabart’s lying around the children’s rooms in order to find the one she needed to teach herself to read.  But she hasn’t gotten any farther than sounding out words of one syllable when the boys interrupt her.  And her “simplicity” is what is emphasized.  Does “simplicity” in this context refer to her direct manner of speaking, or to her intelligence (think of Edgeworth’s “Simple Susan”)?  Does it imply that Nora would not have been able to make much progress towards full literacy if Henry and Arthur hadn’t offered to be her tutors?  Surely it would have been quite difficult for her to have learned how to write without a teacher.  Nora decided to improve herself because of the improvement she noticed in her charges, but readers don’t get the chance to see how far she progressed.  Fenwick moves on to the education of the two Mortimer girls and readers hear nothing more about Nora.  It would have been a triumph if she had been shown giving Mrs. Clifford a letter to her sister to be franked, but that is probably an unrealistic expectation on our part…

 

Printing Kate Greenaway: the Color Wood Blocks of Edmund Evans

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[Color wood engraving blocks…]. [London]: T. I. Lawrence, [1885]. (Cotsen 32262)

Above is the half-title illustration from Kate Greenaway’s collection of children’s poetry Marigold Garden (London; New York: G. Routledge and sons, [1885]). “Printed in Colours” by Edmund Evans, the book is full of excellent examples of color wood engraved illustrations. Sometimes referred to as chromoxylography (from the ancient Greek roots for “color-wood-writing”), color wood engraving was one of the most popular forms of color printing during the 19th Century. A variety of wood engraving, using an engraver’s burin to cut relief images against the grain of a hard wood block, color wood engraving employed multiple blocks to make color images: often employing one block per color.

Marigold Garden. London; New York: G. Routledge and Sons, [1885]. (Rare Books PZ8.3.G75 Mar3), title-page.

Yet examples of the actual blocks used for this once ubiquitous process are few and far between. Perhaps this is because contemporary printers didn’t value the blocks after their job was done (namely printing illustrations). Wood engraving blocks were often used or reused so much (for different editions of some work or even shared across different publications) that they wore down or broke over time; becoming utterly useless for printing. Others were simply discarded or re-purposed (probably burned) after a print job was completed so that they wouldn’t take up valuable space in a print shop.

But as historical artifacts, wood blocks (and other printing surfaces like lithographic stone or intaglio plates) can be extremely informative about the history of the book, revealing more about the process involved than the finished product (i.e. books) can show us. Cotsen is lucky enough to have the original color wood blocks for the half-title illustration of Marigold Garden. Besides being beautiful objects in their own right, the blocks elucidate aspects of the production of Marigold Garden that have up till now, been otherwise unknown or unrevealed.

(Cotsen 32262). Each block measures only about 3 x 2 x 1 inches.

As primary sources the blocks illustrate the color wood engraving process. They give us a first hand glimpse into Evans’s methods and style showing, through comparison, how he designed and layered blocks in order build a multi colored image. With close scrutinization of both the blocks and the resulting illustration we can discern the block printing order with more certainty (from lightest to darkest): pink, yellow, orange, green, blue, and black (the “key block” for printing the line work). Notice too how the ink in the “pink” block has not only turned orange over time, but reveals the grain of the wood on the flat raised printing surface (see below).

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(Cotsen 32262). Here are the blocks and illustration paired for comparison. Notice how the image in the blocks is the reverse image for the finished product (converted during the printing process as the blocks are pressed onto the paper).

Close analysis of the wood blocks themselves, including areas other than the printing surface, reveals even more about the production of Marigold Garden. By looking at the backs of the blocks, we find the name “T. I. Lawrence” carved (with a burin) into the blocks themselves.

(Cotsen 32262). Back of the “Blue” block. “T. I. Lawrence” is just visible across the bottom right of the block. It looks thick paper was once affixed to the back of the block. This may have been done by the printer to help the blocks reach “type height” in order to be flush with type used on the page. Or it may have been pasted on later in order to mount the blocks for presentation.

Using cutting edge research tools (a little bit of googling) I was able to discern the identity of T. I. Lawrence. From the website of Lawrence art supplies, I was able to discover a well informed (complete with sources) meticulous family history of Lawrences who have been art suppliers for seven generations. It turns out that Thomas John Lawrence Junior (1840-1887) was an engravers’ block manufacturer and most likely the wood block supplier for this work. With close analysis of the wood blocks themselves, I was able to add this missing link to the book production process.

Looking closely at the blocks also reveals more about their use. Printing blocks were subjected to a tremendous amount of pressure during the printing process. As a result, many would crack after continuous pressings. Notice above how the “green” block has a significant horizontal crack across the upper left side. Such cracks are sometimes visible in illustrations using well worn blocks. But, with a little attention, cracks could be repaired for continual use without blemishing the image. Savvy printers like Evans could extend the life of a wood block by inserting new wood joints and rejoining cracks and splits:

(Cotsen 32262). The top left edge of the “green” block.

Cotsen’s six blocks for the half-title illustration reveal how much work and preparation is involved in creating just one small 3 x 2 inch image. Larger images would have required multiple wood blocks joined together (using end grain wood from young box wood trees meant that the size of engraving wood blocks was limited to a few inches), often employing several wood engravers working together to complete a single image. Can you imagine then how much more labor and time was required to make a larger image (or, indeed, the whole book)?

(Rare Books PZ8.3.G75 Mar3), page 20. I count seven colors requiring seven blocks, how many do you see? This illustration also reveals one of the primary advantages of printing from wood blocks. Images and text could be printed together since wood blocks and printer’s type could fit together in the printer’s forme (unlike the popular rival to color wood engraving: the chromolithograph).

Wood blocks and other printing surfaces help tell the story of the labor and people involved in making books. They can also be used to help teach and illustrate the history of printing and illustration. With close consideration of these once disregarded pieces of manufacturing equipment we can learn so much more about the history of books and the process of their creation.

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Heads up for a blog extravaganza! Next week, in celebration of banned books week, Cotsen will highlight a banned children’s book every day!