Cobwebs to Catch Flies (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Cobwebs to Catch Flies Patricia Dooley Joyce Irene Whalley . Cobwebs to Catch Flies. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1975. Cobwebs to Catch Flies reveals its range in a sub-title: Illustrated Books for the Nursery and Schoolroom 1700-1900. The title itself, however, borrowed from a 1783 reading book, is revelatory in its own way: in the view of writers during most of the two hundred years covered here, children had to be trapped into learning, and the "flies" were not to be caught with honey. Since Joyce Irene Whalley has concentrated on picture books, the "cobwebs" are not so dry and dusty as they might be, however, and for an adult reader the collection has both fascination and charm. Whalley's "Introduction" provides a brief—in fact, cursory—history of children's books, focusing mainly on educational works; then a chapter surveys children's book illustration in the 18th and 19th centuries, mentioning the appearance of the recognized "book artist," beginning with Bewick, as a watershed, and discussing some of the technical advances that affected chiefly the appearance, but also the price and quantity of children's books produced in the latter half of the period. Each of the dozen chapters following treats one kind of educational book: alphabets, readers, counting books, religious instruction, "moral improvement," history, geography and travel, street cries and trades, natural history and science, grammar, music, and languages. At least half of the interest of the book lies in its illustrations: there are few pages without at least one, and each chapter has a page of color plates. The book is printed on heavy stock, so that the reproduction of even the finer 19th century engravings is excellent; the system of marginal reference, by number, to each numbered illustration as it is discussed in the text is laudable; and the bibliographical captions for each illustration are informative and complete. The general bibliography at the end is more useful for English readers, as it is based on the holdings of the Victoria and Albert Museum; nevertheless, it provides an instructive view of that collection. There is also a short list of "Selected Collections of Children's Books" in Great Britain, Europe, North America, an index of publishers of the works referred to in the text or captions, and a well-made general index. These appendages alone make the volume a valuable research tool. Whalley's orientation is not only bibliographic; she emphasizes the interest of these books as social history, a source of information on buildings, manners, customs and costumes; as intellectual history, tracing the development or discrediting of significant ideas; and as aesthetic history, although few children's books of the period can claim to be considered as works of art. One can raise some minor quibbles with the text, and particularly with the captions some of which seem to have been written at one remove from the work illustrated. Whalley accuses one plate from The Childhood of Christ of having a "pseudo-Egyptian" setting: but the illustration in question clearly appears to be portraying an Assyrian or Babylonian "Wise Man's" discovery of the Star of Bethlehem. Whalley's ideas of what constitutes "arbitrary" and what "appropriate" illustration also seem at times rather narrow. A copy editor ought to have caught some of the repetitions and irrelevancies (such as the schematic account of the Reformation and Revolution at the beginning of Chapter 5), and at least one intra-textual reference is inaccurate (the further discussion of Commenius, referred to on page 100, occurs on page 130, not 114 as cited). The major weakness of the work is, of course, its summary character. As Whalley herself points out, each of her subjects might be treated at full-length, and the few pages it gets here is bound to seem an inadequate allotment. Perhaps one ought only to say, in fairness, that it does as good a job as any survey could do. It is interesting to compare Whalley's book with one covering a narrower portion of the same field: Seen and Not Heard, a compilation of extracts from illustrated juveniles 1837-1880, by Nigel Temple (The Dial Press: New York, 1970...