Classics | Cotsen Children’s Library

Margery Williams’ The Velveteen Rabbit, or How Toys Become Real (1922) may have been booted off recent lists of 10 and 100 best children’s books by Mo Willem’s Knuffle Bunny (2004), but the book keeps rolling on. The original version with designs by William Nicholson is now in the public domain and continues to inspire covers in the form of reillustrations, retellings, and repurposings, even though it is not the equivalent of a catchy, accessible pop standard. William’s strange story about the three kinds of “realness” is much closer to an iconotext like Lewis Carroll’s Alice books where the author’s characters are inseparable from the illustrator’s figures to such an extent that future artists struggle to break away from it in their reinterpretations.

New sets of illustrations were commissioned for the picture book’s 100^th anniversary and Erin Stead’s are easily the most elegant. She asserts her independence even as she pays homage to Nicholson in her redrawing of the famous first picture of the stuffed rabbit’s head peeking out of the Christmas stocking. Reproduced in three colors from woodblocks and delicately heightened with pencil, her pictures are full of light, perfectly suited to the brief summer idyll. More scenes in Williams’ story take place closed cupboards, sick rooms, and trash bags than the woods or gardens, so Stead put herself at a disadvantage in the scenes where the high notes are sadness and confusion. Her threadbare toy rabbit’s transformation into a living creature falls a little flat because all the pictures are so pretty.Publisher Nosy Crow gave former art director Sarah Massini the wherewithal to create a picture book with a large trim size, full color illustrations, endpapers reproduced from a hand-drawn design, and a lot of silver stamping on the binding and dustjacket. While William’s text is intact, but Massini’s illustrations shift the dynamics between the nameless boy and his stuffed rabbit to something more like parity, pushing the story’s visualization in the direction of a more conventional story about the friendship between child and beloved object. Showing their “splendid games together” bathed in light is a logical way for Massini to put her stamp on the text. Visualizing the pair’s happiness in such detail does make the rabbit’s grief in the trash heap poignant, but Massini’s decision to limit the expressions on the faces of people, the stuffed rabbit, and actual rabbits to the same pleasant half smile robs the story of drama.The popular Japanese illustrator Komako Sakai published her picture book version in 2007, well before the original’s centennial. The abridged text stays surprisingly close to the outline of Williams’ and it strikes me as the truest to its strangeness. The nameless boy appears frequently drawn in profile, from behind, or with closed eyes, a detail in characterization that makes him somehow makes him a little less important his wide-eyed rabbit. Light alternates with dark when the story calls for it, as did Nicholson. Sakai also references Nicholson’s drawing of the Christmas stocking at the story’s nadir, not at the beginning, which demonstrates how little protection becoming real has afforded him.. Sakai was careful to distinguish the real rabbits’ bodies from the soft immobile one of the stuffed one, a strategy that makes the page turn from the fairy to her hands holding a tiny rabbit a simple but brilliant realization of the toy’s transformation.The new Velveteen Rabbits includes one adapted and self-published for “today’s kids” by Rose and John Jimerson, a daughter/father team. Get Real is unusual because it is rare for modernizations of a classic to be simultaneously playful and respectful and let children of color see themselves in what was a very English story. Here’s the Jimersons’ summary from the rear wrapper: “Alberto, the toy rabbit, loves dirt. He also sometimes sleeps on firecrackers. But more than anything else, he wants to become real. The only problem is… He is not sure what “real” is.” He thinks real rabbits are “stuffed with sawdust, and…made in the Philippines” just like him. A remote control is not essential to the process of being real, according to the old horse on wheels. Legs he does not learn about until a couple of curious rabbits challenge him to a game of bunny tag. When they find out he has front legs, a soft bottom, and no hind legs, they yell. “HORRIBLE!” Then they get in his face and take a good sniff, “He smells funny! He’s not real!” Alberto is dumped in a plastic trash bag with all the other germy things after the boy’s serious illness and he cries, calling the soulful fairy of toy magic to his rescue. He is not so sure about a fairy that sings the blues instead of talking normally, but she scoops him up anyway for the flight across the night sky. She sets him down among the “fun bunnies” and introduces him as a new friend who needs to be shown the ropes. Positive they will remember he is legless, he nervously scratches his ear…Get Real stands apart from most of the new Velveteen Rabbits trying to create introductory versions of a cherished story now perceived as a little beyond its target audience. Carol Ottolenghi’s retelling has been around since 2009.Her brief version, which retains almost none of Williams’ vocabulary or syntax, shows how “the Velveteen Rabbit learns the value of friendship and the power of love as he encounters toys that tease him and live rabbits in the garden!” The fairy is not responsible for his transformation despite making a cameo appearance. A bilingual version is currently available in the Bilingual Fairy Tales English/Spanish series published by Rourke Educational Media, which features more folk and fairy tales, nursery rhymes, and The Wizard of Oz. 100 public libraries reported copies to WorldCat, and another hundred college and university libraries have the electronic edition.

Will any of these new versions rise above the rest and become The Velveteen Rabbit for a new generation or two? Even in this small selection of Velveteen Rabbits, the artistic styles vary so much it takes some effort to establish the ways in which they adhere and depart from Williams’ text and how they specifically differ from one another. Presented with two or more of them in a bookstore or online, a book buyer who may not know or have seen the book recently may select one of the new ones on basis of a snap response to the cover design. The wealth of choice may divide readers into little pockets of fans who experience The Velveteen Rabbit through the reinterpretation they purchased without reference to the dark and troubling but stunning Nicholson illustrations.

Tenniel's 's original illustrations from "Alice in Wonderland"

One of John Tenniel’s original illustrations for “Alice in Wonderland” (Cotsen 657)

The best stories have always lent themselves to retelling, reillustration, or transformation into new formats and there’s a new display of some wonderful reimaginings–some of them surprises, some old friends–on display in Cotsen now through March. It’s the first exhibition in the gallery since the pandemic, so please come see magic lantern slides of Barrie’s Peter Pan, a very early set of Walt Disney’s figurines of Snow White and the seven dwarves based on the famous animated film, Beatrix Potter’s unpublished version of Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood” illustrated by Helen Oxenbury, a new take on Humpty Dumpty by Dan Santat, a growth chart inspired by the Brothers’ Grimm’s “Bremen Town Musicians,” a “Stone Soup” card game, a “Jack and the Bean Stalk” Lego set, and Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland adapted for kamishibai, a form of Japanese street theater and “translated” into the author’s cipher code and reillustrated by school children. The last item was on exhibition in the 2016 show “Alice after Alice,” which was curated by Jeff Barton, Cotsen’s rare book cataloger. Here’s his post about about how children redrew famous characters in Alice.

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Alice in Wonderland has been delighting children and grown-ups for over 150 years now. In addition to Lewis Carroll’s text, the illustrations by John Tenniel and other, later illustrators have been a major source of readers’ delight.

Try to imagine Alice without any illustrations of the famous characters and scenes, either by Tenniel or other illustrators. Virtually impossible isn’t it? Carroll himself provided very, very little descriptive detail, if you actually look at his text. So our sense of how Alice and all the inhabitants of Wonderland look is strongly conditioned by illustration, when you stop to think about it. Textual and visual elements of Alice seem inseparably intertwined, with the illustrations shaping meaning, extending it, and sometimes commenting ironically on the text. Tenniel’s Queen of Hearts and Mad Hatter look comically absurd, rather than menacing or hostile, illustration leavening the tone of the words, which can be quite edgy, or even scary, all by themselves.

Professional illustrators have been reimagining Alice in new versions since the nineteenth century, including names like Arthur Rackham, Willy Pogány, Ralph Steadman, or Salvador Dali. (Yes, Dali did have a go at illustrating Alice, in his own distinctive style! More on that “curiosity” in a later posting.). The flood of the new illustrations shows no sign of abating in the twenty-first century either, based on recent editions.

“Cipher Alice” Cheshire Cat (detail) by Lesley Young (Cotsen 20836).

Another “Cipher Alice” Cheshire Cat (detail) by Lee MacArthur & David Dansey (Cotsen 20836).

But it’s worth remembering that adults haven’t been the only illustrators of Alice. Generations of children have reimagined Alice in their own pictures, mostly unpublished, but some have found their way into various publications. For instance, the Cipher Alice — a coded version of the story based on the Telegraph Cipher devised by Carroll — credits some twenty-six ten- and eleven-year old children as illustrators (in addition to twenty-nine named “code checkers” for the coder cipher text), all of whom were students at the Edward Peake Middle School in Biggleswade, Bedfordshire, England in 1990, when the book was printed by L & T Press, Ltd.

Alice & the “Drink Me” bottle, by Louise Lawson.

The students’ graphic renderings vary in style and sophistication, but all display the obvious pleasure that children have taken in Alice since 1865. Louise Lawson, for instance, pictures Alice as a smiling little girl with huge bow on her hair, wearing a variation of Alice’s traditional pinafore emblazoned with a super-hero’s “W” (“Wonderland”) and the name “Alice” added on her apron, just for good measure. She chooses to depict Alice theatrically holding up the “Drink Me” bottle at the beginning of her Wonderland adventures.

The book’s Preface, by supervising grown-up, Edward Wakeling, notes that the Cipher Alice was produced for the Alice 125 Project of the Carroll Foundation, Australia, which attempted “to set a world record for the number of different languages version of the same book.” Interest in Alice was indeed world-wide in 1990, and if anything, it has become even more so in 2016 (Alice 150), with the book having been translated into more than 170 languages in countless editions!

But as in so many editions of Alice, I think the illustrations in the Cipher Alice are “the thing” (with apologies to Hamlet), so I’d like to share some others with you. It’s one my very favorite editions, since it shows how child-readers responded to Alice. I also like the way that different children sometimes imagined quite different depictions of the same scene — there’s no one, “right” way to depict Alice, as the many different versions over the last 150 years have shown us! The illustrations are simply terrific fun to see too! (Click on any thumbnail image to see a larger version.)

Down into Wonderland via a tunnel-like maelstrom… past curious things on the way.	Descending into Wonderland via a bucket in a well… Past dinosaur fossils on the way!	Alice and the White Rabbit “after the fall” — Alice looks distinctly unhappy (and wears a name-tag).
Alice (wearing a “Cool” tee-shirt) as she shrinks, becoming too small to reach the key on the table.	Tiny Alice after shrinking too small to reach the door key on the (now giant-sized) table.	The Mad Hatter (price tag in his hatband) with a hot-dog, a coke, and an earring!
Alice and a mustachioed caterpillar, who also wears a monocle and smokes a gentleman’s pipe.	Alice (with a name-tag), an unusual-looking White Rabbit, and the Court of the Queen of Hearts.	“You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” –Alice. (And how about the Hatter’s outfit shown here?)