"The Books We All Read": The Golden Age of Children's Book Illustration and American Soldiers in the Great War

Abstract

"The Books We All Read":The Golden Age of Children's Book Illustration and American Soldiers in the Great War Vanessa Meikle Schulman (bio) After Kenneth Gow's (1889–1918) death on the battlefield, his former Sunday school teacher wrote to the fallen soldier's captain, who was compiling a book of letters and reminiscences on the young man's life. In thinking back on Gow's life, his teacher, W. Henry Grant, recalled of the teenaged Gow that, in addition to field trips to cultural and historical sites, he was "greatly stimulated by the books we all read: Men of Iron, Treasure Island, Robin Hood, Knights of King Arthur." This "playful and yet serious" student, who was drawn to "those things which interest boys," was killed in action at the Battle of the Selle in October 1918 (Letters of a Soldier 439). But in his earlier life as a schoolboy in Summit, New Jersey, he was reading the classic works of the American "Golden Age," an outpouring of high-quality illustration that peaked between about 1880 and 1910. The books cited by Grant as comprising the reading material of average teenage boys at the turn of the twentieth century had a powerful impact on those boys' socialization into manhood, their understanding of male bonding, and their interpretation of a shared Anglo-Saxon past inspired by myths and tales from British history. Images, stories, and themes from these books reinforced an ethos of masculine chivalry and a spirit of boyish adventure that enabled young American soldiers to find common cause with their allies during the war. Though readers may presume that the theme of this special issue includes only those works produced during or about the war, studying the books and illustrations that soldiers accessed in their formative years, prior to the outbreak of war, is equally important for understanding the relationship between literature and the Great War. The works Grant cited in his memories of the boys in Sunday school were part of the emergence of a more specific market for juvenile literature [End Page 204] in the late nineteenth century. The leader in the field of high-quality illustration for this literature was Howard Pyle, an artist and author who trained a second generation of American illustrators, a group that included N. C. Wyeth, Charlotte Harding, Frank Schoonover, and Stanley Massey Arthurs. Focusing on stories of pirates, knights, and adventurers, the members of this group created vivid illustrations for the emergent children's literature of the day. The books Grant referred to as forming the core reading material of New Jersey schoolboys in the first decade of the twentieth century were Men of Iron (1891), a tale of medieval knighthood written and illustrated by Pyle; the classic pirate story Treasure Island (1883), written by Robert Louis Stevenson and issued in a 1911 American edition illustrated by Wyeth; several versions of the Robin Hood story, notably Pyle's The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (1883) and Eva March Tappan's Robin Hood, His Book (1903), illustrated by Harding; and many retellings of the Arthurian legends, including Sidney Lanier's The Boy's King Arthur (1880) with illustrations by Alfred Kappes, William Henry Frost's The Knights of the Round Table (1897), illustrated by Sydney Richmond Burleigh, and several volumes written and illustrated by Pyle beginning with The Story of King Arthur and His Knights (1903). In addition to these titles, Wyeth produced illustrated editions of Stevenson's Kidnapped (1913) and The Black Arrow (1916) and his own versions of Robin Hood (1917) and Lanier's The Boy's King Arthur (1917). As a group, these texts and their vivid illustrations appealed to readers over the period of roughly three decades that coincided with the formative years of most of the young men of the World War I generation. These works forged a visual and literary embodiment of chivalrous manhood that would be emulated by America's World War I soldiers, most of whom were born between 1880 and 1900. We may approach these books through the concept of readership, defined by Sarah Wadsworth as "large groups of readers joined through shared literacy practices" (9; see also Anderson 9–46...