LITMIR.BIZ

      Figure 4.11 Facing pages from “Baby Bunting.” Source: Caldecott [1882], pp. 14–15. Baldwin Library of Children’s Historical Literature, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL.

A clock on the wall in this first illustration shows five past six. In the colored illustration on the facing page, contrasting with the spotless children’s spaces often depicted by Crane and Greenaway, the nursery appears at the moment the children are getting ready for bed: nightgowns warm in front of the fire. Baby Bunting is undressed on her mother’s knee; her elder brother wears only striped breeches and a riding helmet. The shoes discarded at bottom left are a telling detail, a portal into lived-in space. The toys filling the nursery include a doll, a dollhouse, a hobby horse and miniature riding gear, images of exotic animals on the walls, a windmill, and what looks to be a Noah’s ark sitting atop a chest of drawers. Caldecott’s depiction is up to date: Noah’s arks were popular Victorian toys, and the nursery as a separate space in middle-class homes was also a trend of the period. Elsewhere, though, the book can seem backward-looking, as, like Greenaway and other children’s illustrators, many of the costumes recall eighteenth-century garb (see Whalley and Chester 1988).

      These first two illustrations point to aspects of the book’s sequentiality derived not just from the content of the pictures but also from the color printing: spare monochrome line drawings intersperse with intensely filled-in and sumptuous full-color pages. (Some Caldecott picturebooks had colored doublespreads, too.) The rhythm of Caldecott’s picturebooks thus relates to a play of monochrome and color, which contributes to the “quickening” pace of his works (Cech 1983–1984, p. 116). The key wood-engraving block was printed in sepia, filled in with five shades – yellow, blue, flesh pink, red, and grey – for the colored pictures (see Masaki 2006). If the line drawings represent Caldecott’s “art of leaving out,” the colored illustrations present an alternative art of putting in; color is associated with the nursery’s abundant material goods – not to mention the sensuous appeals of the picturebook itself.

The next page opening contains two monochrome illustrations, one for each of the words “Father’s” and “gone” (Figure 4.12; Caldecott [1882], pp. 16–17). These pages offer what Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott (2001) call a symmetrical relationship between words and pictures: “The words tell us exactly the same story as we can ‘read’ from the pictures” (p. 14). Here, this is the father’s appearance and actions. While the illustration of the slightly rumpled father in his formal hunting attire reprises the single focus of the exhibit book, the illustration that accompanies “gone” is more sophisticated. Caldecott reduces the scene to what Perry Nodelman (1988) considers the picturebook’s most characteristic depiction of movement: the foot lifting from the ground. The reader must connect the father’s foot as it disappears around the corner to his personage in the preceding page. The spaniel that follows him draws the eye into the picture, round the corner into the next page opening and the hunt itself.