ILLUSTRATION FROM "AT THE BACK OF THE NORTH WIND." BY ARTHUR HUGHES (STRAHAN. 1869. NOW PUBLISHED BY BLACKIE AND SON)
Even the dreary text need not have made the illustrators quite so dull, as we know that Randolph Caldecott would have made an illustrated "Bradshaw" amusing; but most of his earlier predecessors show no less power in making anything they touched "un-funny." Nor as art do their pictures interest you any more than as anecdotes.
Of course the cost of coloured engravings prohibited their lavish use. All were tinted by hand, sometimes with the help of stencil plates, but more often by brush. The print colourers, we are told, lived chiefly in the Pentonville district, or in some of the poorer streets near Leicester Square. A few survivors are still to be found; but the introduction first of lithography, and later of photographic processes, has killed the industry, and even the most fanatical apostle of the old crafts cannot wish the "hand-painter" back again. The outlines were either cut on wood, as in the early days of printing until the present, or else engraved on metal. In each case all colour was painted afterwards, and in scarce a single instance (not even in the Rowlandson caricatures or patriotic pieces) is there any attempt to obtain an harmonious scheme such as is often found in the tinted mezzo-tints of the same period.
ILLUSTRATION FROM "AT THE BACK OF THE NORTH WIND." BY ARTHUR HUGHES (STRAHAN. 1869. NOW PUBLISHED BY BLACKIE AND SON)
Of works primarily intended for little people, an "Hieroglyphical Bible" for the amusement and instruction of the younger generation (1814) may be noted. This was a mixture of picture-puns and broken words, after the fashion of the dreary puzzles still published in snippet weeklies. It is a melancholy attempt to turn Bible texts to picture puzzles, a book permitted by the unco' guid to children on wet Sunday afternoons, as some younger members of large families, whose elder brothers' books yet lingered forty or even fifty years after publication, are able to endorse with vivid and depressed remembrance. Foxe's "Book of Martyrs" and Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" are of the same type, and calculated to fill a nervous child with grim terrors, not lightened by Watts's "Divine and Moral Songs," that gloated on the dreadful hell to which sinful children were doomed, "with devils in darkness, fire and chains." But this painful side of the subject is not to be discussed here. Luckily the artists—except in the "grown-up" books referred to—disdained to enforce the terrors of Dr. Watts, and pictured less horrible themes.
With Cruikshank we encounter almost the first glimpse of the modern ideal. His "Grimm's Fairy Tales" are delightful in themselves, and marvellous in comparison with all before, and no little after.
ILLUSTRATION FROM "THE LITTLE WONDER HORN." BY J. MAHONEY (H. S. KING AND CO. 1872. GRIFFITH AND FARRAN. 1887)