English Language Children’s Books | Cotsen Children’s Library

In 1837, there were reports in south London of an alarming figure assailing unsuspecting Londoners walking out late at night. This was the beginning of the urban legend of Spring-Heeled Jack, the masked boogeyman who made sudden appearances (often by leaping great distances) and fills criminals with terror, often credited by experts in popular fiction like the great collector Joseph Rainone, as a forerunner of Batman. By 1900 Jack was quite the dandy…

Cotsen has just acquired a complete run of 1867 penny-dreadful, Spring-Heeled Jack, The Terror of London by the Author of TURN-PIKE DICK, the Star of the Road. The first attempt to create a narrative about this cryptid ran to 48 numbers in 576 pages set in two columns on brittle paper. Each 12-page number was illustrated with a captioned picture 175 x 130 mm. The covers may have been removed when the set was bound into one volume. If the printer and publisher left any traces, it would have been on the wrappers, if there were any. Unless they were too embarrassed by the high consumption of brandy, Sir Roland Ashton, the aristocratic villain’s “hard and cruel heart,” the virtuous young lady with blond tresses and pearly teeth warding off loathsome advances, crime fighters named Catchpole and Grabham, etc. in issue after issue being ground out for the greedy consumption of impressionable young men.

One hundred and twenty-odd years later Philip Pullman wrote a tongue-in-cheek homage illustrated by David Mostyn to high Victorian scary silliness illustrated for the chapter book crowd. Author and illustrator assume that their readers will be able to follow a penny dreadful spoof, having picked up the conventions which still shape all kinds of popular fiction.

But how does this modern Spring-Heel Jack resemble the 1867 original?

He appears in odd places at odd times.His legs have extraordinary strength.

He is a protector of women, although it’s easy to see why he would frighten them.He always gets his man, some times by unorthodox means like a storytelling contest. The grossest one wins.But they don’t really look the same…. Some contemporary accounts say he wore what sounds like a white body suit, but penny-dreadful Jack appears to be wearing no clothes on most of his escapades. Occasionally he has a cape with a shaped hem. He wears a mask with horns, but no hat could contain all those coarse, long locks. His eyes glow and he breathes fire. The critical difference is the footware. Mostyn’s masked crusader is shod in knee-high boots à la Superman; penny-dreadful Jack is barefoot throughout.It pays to go back to the source!

Traddles displaying a slate with a skeleton drawing. From an advertising card for a cigarette manufacturer.

The most celebrated child artist of the skeleton must be Tommy Traddles, David Copperfield’s fellow pupil at Salem House. Or would be if any of his slate drawings had survived…

Poor Traddles!…He was always being caned—I think he was caned every day that half year….After laying his head on the desk for a little while, he would cheer up somehow, begin to laugh again, and draw skeletons all over his slate before his eyes were dry. I used at first to wonder what comfort Traddles found in drawing skeletons, and for some time looked upon him as a sort of hermit, who reminded himself by those symbols of mortality that caning couldn’t last forever. But I believe he only did it because they were easy and didn’t require any features (Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, chapter 7).

We may have none of Traddles’ art, but there are a respectable number of boys’ and girls’ drawings of skeletons in the manuscript versions of the religious turn-up book, The Beginning, Progress and End of Man. (There’s more information about this fascinating illustrated text at the Learning as Play site). The subject of the final metamorphic picture is a rich and worldly young man, who, when the flaps are lifted, transforms into Death, always represented as a skeleton, usually holding an hourglass and scythe, sometimes with a coffin in the background. The manuscript turn-ups are actually more common than the printed ones, whose heyday was between 1660 and the early 1800s. However, the anonymous manuscripts are harder to localize, even when signed by their makers. English or American? 18 or 19^th century?

Here is a gallery of skeletons from Cotsen’s rather large collection of the manuscript turn-up books. No two are the same and none are even remotely anatomically correct. Maybe the differences reveal something about the extent of the individual artist’s knowledge of the human body, in addition to the level of skill with pen and watercolor wash.

Perhaps Eleanor Schank was quite young in 1776 when she scratched out the drawings for this turn-up. The figure’s costume is unmistakably feminine. It’s the only one in the collection where a young woman is substituted for the man. The skeleton seems to have given her more trouble (Cotsen in process).The anonymous artist of this nicely colored one emphasized the joints at the expense of the rib cage. The floral frames around the verse are a dainty touch (Cotsen 5145).This creator of this unsigned manuscript produced a substantial man in blue breeches holding money bags and the pleasingly abstract skeleton with bow legs. The Adam and Eve were given belly buttons (Cotsen 23624).John Sutton drew this well dressed young man in a tricorne and a better than average skeleton–one of the few with a pelvic girdle (Cotsen 3135). The drawings in this, the last example, has dash and energy, along with major problems with the perspective. The skeleton’s face looks a little too friendly.Children continue to be fascinated by making skeletons. One father/blogger has immortalized his three-year-old son’s obsession in at least three posts. He sounds as if he could give Tommy Traddles a run for his money filling up all available blank space with animated constructions of bones…