LITMIR.BIZ

      Figure 4.16 Final illustration to “Baby Bunting.” Source: Caldecott [1882], n.p. Baldwin Library of Children’s Historical Literature, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL.

      Baby is staring with the most perplexed look at those rabbits, as though with the dawning of knowledge that that lovely, cuddly, warm costume he’s wrapped up in has come from those creatures. It’s all in that baby’s eye – just two lines, two mere dashes of the pen, but it’s done so expertly that they absolutely express … well, anything you want to read into them. I read: astonishment, dismay at life – is this where rabbit skins come from? Does something have to die to dress me?(p. xi)

      Sendak draws attention to the ethical ambiguity of Caldecott’s final illustration, which uncovers the brutal realities beneath the baby’s fine goods. Also significant to my mind, though, is the upending of a familial hierarchy: the baby and her mother can find rabbits, the father cannot. (Remember, too, that the fur dealer is a woman.) Baby comes out on top.

      The meanings discussed in the preceding paragraphs emerge from the gap between words and pictures. Clémentine Beauvais (2015) has noted that the gap is the central concept of contemporary picturebook theory: a normative as well as a descriptive property, in that “‘good’ picturebooks are understood to be ones with gaps and more gaps make better picturebooks” (p. 2). I have treated the gap in this way in the very first sentence of the chapter, where I offered a definition of the picturebook from Sendak which positions the dynamic interplay between word and picture as the form’s definitive feature. The privileging of the gap in picturebook theory also dictates the elevation of Caldecott that I noted in the previous section: his works are the “gappiest” of the Victorian period. By contrast, Muir (1954) asserts Greenaway’s primacy over her competitors at a time when other picturebook attributes – wistful charm, for example – held sway.

However, it is important to note in concluding this chapter that many nineteenth-century picturebooks do not carefully curate the gap between words and pictures over a building sequence. Instead, they represent the larger “disharmony” of Victorian illustrated books, in which words and pictures vie against one another (Thomas 2004, p. 8). Sometimes such disharmony is a technical feature, as at different times the need to print pictures separately precluded a smooth integration of words and pictures. The nineteenth-century picturebook’s debt to the chapbook, in which pictures were reused and recycled, also offers a period-specific manifestation of the gap in that pictures might not be designed for a single text but rather as multipurpose decorations (see Masaki 2006). For every breathtaking Caldecott design, there were many Favourite Riddles and Rhymes (1896), where an anonymous illustration – seemingly stock – shows Baby Bunting held by a small boy in an incongruous top hat (Figure 4.17). Such an image adds little to the rhyme. Although I have focused in this section on how Caldecott’s Baby Bunting makes sophisticated use of the picturebook form, reckoning with the Victorian picturebook means thinking about such works, too.