Katie Trumpener

Picture-book worlds and ways of seeing

The world in images When adults look back on their lives, Virginia Woolf argues in The Waves (1931), they turn over these scenes as children turn over the pages of a picturebook. Memories of childhood may become indelibly linked to early memories - visual, tactile, spatial - of reading picture books, whose picture worlds may permanently shape readers worldview. Since the Enlightenment, illustrated books have aimed to teach children how to read, apprehend and make sense of the world. This chapter describes how an emerging picture-book tradition developed particular visual conventions, working both to initiate children into this tradition and to push them into autonomous seeing. Precisely because of its ambitions to represent the world itself, the picture book frequently understands itself as a Gesamtkunstwerk (a work integrating multiple art forms and appealing to multiple senses), and hence reflecting more general trends in visual, literary and intellectual culture. Unlike other forms of childrens literature, the picture book makes meaning largely through its visual format, the way its images relate to one another, to the verbal text, and to the space on (and physical layout of) the page. This chapter, accordingly, traces the history of several influential and enduring picture-book formats.

Orientalism and empire

In a 1762 review of John Langhornes Solyman and Almena , the Monthly s critic stated that there was so little of “invention or originality” in the work that “a reader, who is but moderately acquainted with this modish kind of literature, may anticipate most of the incidents”; “in truth,” he went on to add, “few of the Oriental Novels differ very essentially from each other.” Even as reviewers sometimes complained that moral tales such as Langhornes bore few signs of the properly Eastern style of the Arabian Nights (first translated as Les Mille et une nuits by Antoine Galland in 1704), works of this kind represented perhaps the dominant if by no means the only form of “oriental” narrative published in English, for most of the eighteenth century. Well-known works such as Samuel Johnsons Rasselas (1759) and John Hawkesworths Almoran and Hamet (1761) conceived of the East at the level of neoclassical generality, without much interest in accuracy or specificity of detail, and - although they reflected on topical issues - employed a broadly applicable language of abstract morality, so that one critic noted that the insight into the human condition in Rasselas might be acquired “without going to Ethiopia.” The contemporary sense of what the oriental amounted to in this context was capacious enough for “Igluka and Sibbersik,” subtitled “A Greenland Tale,” to be included in The Orientalist: A Volume of Tales after the Eastern Taste (1764). Charles Johnstone presented The History of Arsaces (1774) as a fiction concerned with “the universal manners of Nature,” and stated that “greater particularity would only have been pedantry,” insisting that the reader would excuse him “not having paid more minute attention to the manners of the times and countries, in which the various scenes of the work are laid.”

Thinking locally: novelistic worlds in provincial fiction

Of all situations for a constant residence, that which appears to me most delightful is a little village far in the country; a small neighbourhood, not of fine mansions finely peopled, but of cottages and cottage-like houses. . . . Even in books I like a confined locality. . . . Nothing is so tiresome as to be whirled half over Europe at the chariot wheels of a hero, to go to sleep at Vienna, and awaken at Madrid; it produces a real fatigue, a weariness of spirit. On the other hand, nothing is so delightful as to sit down in a country village in one of Miss Austens delicious novels, quite sure before we leave it to become intimate with every spot and every person it contains; or to ramble with Mr White over his own parish of Selborne, and form a friendship with the fields and coppices, as well as with the birds, mice, and squirrels, who inhabit them. (Mary Russell Mitford, Our Village ) In the first chapter of Our Village , her collection of rural sketches (published as a collection 1824-34), Mary Russell Mitford stages her taste for a confined rural locality through three points of divergence from eighteenth-century aesthetic tastes. First, she shifts attention from the finer classes and their country estates to the village and its inhabitants. Second, she esteems residence over travel. And third, she prefers a detailed, specific, and intimate knowledge of a single place to a broad cosmopolitan knowledge of many places, achieved by propertied aristocratic gentlemen through extensive travel, education, and leisure. Mitford gently mocks this cosmopolitan knowledge gained from a whirl “half over Europe” and subscribes instead to a competing model of knowledge espoused by Gilbert White in The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789): “Men that undertake only one district are much more likely to advance natural knowledge than those that grasp at more than they can possibly be acquainted with: every kingdom, every province, should have its own monographer.”