Victorian Colour Illustrations

People appear to have stopped buying books for Lent, so instead of packing orders I've been busy scanning book illustrations and photographs.

Today's images come from an 1890s children's book by Dr Barnado. In an age in which few people travelled abroad and most book illustrations were black and white, these colour plates must have seemed extraordinary - a window on the world.

I shall refrain from the usual commentary, but have left the original captions. The pictures speak for themselves:

A Colourful Victorian Childhood

I found a small card today that was being used as a bookmark in a rather dull memoir by a Victorian clergyman. It was between pages 26 and 27, suggesting that the reader hadn't progressed any further.

One side contained this cheerful image:

The other had this appeal for donations to the 'Incorporated Society for Providing Homes for Waifs and Strays':

Emigration seems a rather extreme measure, but the average Victorian orphan would have probably fared better in the colonies than the damp, smog-ridden streets of the East End. 

The memoir with the Waifs and Strays slip turned out to be the first of a batch of Victorian books that included a selection of 'penny dreadfuls', a couple of titles by John Ruskin and a battered copy of a children's poetry collection from 1868.

As I picked it up, the poetry book fell apart in my hands. I tried to reassemble the pages and found these appealing colour illustrations:

(I'm not sure why there's a sinister-looking stranger in the background)

As for the poems themselves, they covered cheerful subjects like death, deformity and poverty. Take this, for example:

Not something you'd want to read to your child at bedtime. But in an age in which infant mortality was a common experience, poems like these sought to bring comfort, albeit in a rather maudlin, sentimental fashion.

The poems also hark back to a pre-industrial rural idyll, evoking a world that still exists in the popular imagination: cottages with roses around the door, the hum of bees on a summer's afternoon, the church spire of a distant village, a babbling woodland stream and a carpet of bluebells.

There are no factory chimneys or back to back houses. Young readers may have been deemed able to cope with the grim realities of death and disease, but some subjects were clearly beyond the pale.

 

ABC

I must admit I'd been having sleepless nights about handing my notice in. How would my employers react? I knew that they regarded me as a permanent fixture and had planned accordingly. Would they be angry, indifferent or sympathetic?

So far, everyone has been brilliant. Indeed, they've even offered to help me find a way of setting-up in Lewes and I've been told that if my circumstances change, I can go back. I couldn't ask for more.

Now comes the hard bit. I have to find a unit in Lewes that's large enough to store a few thousand books. It doesn't matter what state of repair the building's in as long as it's dry. It also needs to be accessible for lorries and vans. Finally, I need a short lease in case I turn out to be utterly useless at running my own business.

In the meantime, I will be in my current job for at least another month, paving the way for my successor, so I'll continue to share the latest discoveries:


This book appears to be very rare. I can't find any other copies of it on sale. The flyleaf has a Guernsey bookseller's name blind-stamped in the corner, whilst the front endpaper has this bookplate:

I was surprised to find a bookplate for an English prize in French, but later realised that it was actually in Guernésiais - a Norman French dialect that remained the island's official language until 1972. Today, only 2% of the population speak it fluently, but when Victor Hugo was in exile on Guernsey, writing Les Miserables, Guernésiais was commonly spoken.

The language declined for the usual reasons, but was accelerated when many of the island's children were evacuated to the British mainland at the beginning of World War two.

As for the book, it has some beautiful colour illustrations accompanying a military-themed ABC:


Can you guess what each letter stands for? I've already thought of some (which are unrepeatable).

In addition to the ABC illustrations, there are also some full colour plates:


The final scene clearly shows that rioting isn't a modern phenomenon, but in the Victorian age they disguised themselves with clown suits instead of hoodies. The police response doesn't appear to have changed very much.

That's the nearest I get to writing about the riots. I have very strong opinions about why they happened and what could be done to prevent future unrest, but like most of the UK population I didn't witness any of these disturbances. I've lived in thoroughly middle-class Lewes for ten years and London feels a world away.

Maybe it's time for me to go to Tottenham and get down with the kids.

The Colourful 1890s

I was going to call this post 'Dr Barnardo's Bubbles', but then I remembered all of those annoying, possessive book titles that seemed to be a craze in the publishing world after 'Captain Corelli's Mandolin', so I decided against it.

Yesterday I found a children's annual from the 1890s, edited by Dr Barnardo. Like many annuals of this period, it contains a selection of mawkish, sentimental short stories and rather dull, worthy articles. This copy was given as a present to a boy called Herbert:

It's a brief message, but in true Victorian fashion, Mrs Thwaite Metcalfe manages to squeeze in a quick reference to her son's eventual demise.

I wonder what Herbert thought when he unwrapped his present from Mama on Christmas Day? Perhaps his heart sank when he saw that the package was book-shaped, rather than toy steam engine-shapped. However, he might have changed his mind once he opened the pages, as this is no ordinary annual.

Unlike most books of this period, 'Bubbles' is packed with attractive, full page colour illustrations covering a variety of themes: fairy tales, Bible stories, scenes from the Empire and portraits of the deprivation and poverty that Barnardo fought to alleviate. In the 1890s, it must have seemed miraculous.

It has been observed that if you want to really want to get the flavour of a particular period, you should eschew great art in favour of the second rate, the ephemeral and the commercial. I'm not completely convinced by this argument, but the following illustrations probably tell us a lot more about late-Victorian society than any Van Gogh painting:

























And finally, here is the back cover:

I'm sure that young Herbert loved these bright, colourful illustrations. But I bet he never read the short stories.