Visual Literacy in the Randolph Caldecott Tradition

Abstract

Visual Literacy in the Randolph Caldecott Tradition Hamida Bosmajian (bio) Alderson, Brian . Sing a Song for Sixpence: The English Picture Book Tradition and Randolph Caldecott. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press in Association with the British Library, 1986. Lacy, Lyn Ellen . Art and Design in Children's Picture Books: An Analysis of Caldecott Award-Winning Illustrations. Chicago: American Library Association, 1986. Both Alderson and Lacy use Randolph Caldecott as the historical and symbolic touchstone of excellence in children's picture books. Alderson focuses on the development of the British tradition in book illustration that culminates in Caldecott; Lacy analyzes key Caldecott Medal Winners whose aesthetic conventions and cultural diversity continue and expand the tradition and demand that we become visually literate. Sing a Song for Sixpence was prepared in conjunction with an exhibition at the British Library commemorating the centenary of the artist's death. Alderson does not intend to cover the range of Caldecott's achievements; rather, by placing his work within the historical tradition, he wants to show "how he figures as primus inter pares in an essentially English style in the creation of children's picture books," a style that establishes conventions for all such illustrations. He never really tells us why and how this is so. As he himself admits, his book and the exhibition "are not so much chronological descriptions as ruminations [my italics] on one of our happiest and most fruitful contributions to a small but significant art form." Without waxing profound, Alderson attributes "the human urge to illustrate" to our distaste towards "the offending blankness," be it a cave's wall, a sheet of plotting paper or the margin of a Celtic manuscript. His second chapter, perhaps the most useful one, focuses on representational illustration and illustration technique. He shows how the media of illustration—woodcuts, engraving on metal, relief metal engraving, wood engravings and lithography—affected in the course of their emergence and development the production, distribution and message of the picture book until the method of photomechanical reproduction in the 1880s eliminated the profession of the engraver and made the illustrator's art almost text-independent. The body of Sing a Song for Sixpence consists of eight chapters dealing with specific illustrators. The tradition of dramatic illustration, images that tell their own story, begins with William Hogarth whose influence on the children's picture book is evident for Alderson in the artist's "Industry and Idleness" series which tells a story and points a moral for and about the young. Alderson next discusses Blake's Songs of Innocence, Rowlandson and the arrival of the commercial picture, the Cruikshanks, 'Alfred Crowquill' and the Punch men, Charles Bennett, Edmund Evans and his protegés. The brief chapter on Caldecott is followed by a cursory survey of continuity and change in the tradition. Finally, with his discussion of color printing, Alderson returns to the importance of the medium in communicating the message of the picture book. The richness of the book is in its many illustrations and often in the explanatory notes accompanying them. Alderson's "ruminations'' prove insufficient in his discussion of masters such as Hogarth, Blake and Caldecott. He defines Songs of Innocence as the first masterpiece of English children's literature as well as the first great original picture book that attempts to integrate words and images into a single linear whole, but a three page chapter, half of which is given to illustrations and blank space, hardly helps the reader see why this might be so. Similarly, after having read about Caldecott's precursors, the reader is given minimal analysis in the brief Caldecott chapter, [End Page 150] certainly not the kind of synthesis the preceding chapters led one to expect. In the fourteenth chapter, "Encore: Sing a Song for Sixpence," Alderson offers a number of illustrations of the nursery rhyme, beginning with 1858 and ending with a contemporary drawing by a child; the text has now disappeared. Alderson claims that the illustrations throughout the book "have been chosen to clarify or expand upon matters raised in the text," but the reader is likely to rely on the text as a museum guide while engaging in his or her own analysis and...