Rackham’s projects included illustrations for adult readers as well. Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung and Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream ranked among his greatest critical and commercial successes. In 1927, he sailed to New York, where his works were on exhibit and where he personally met with an enthusiastic reception. In his last years, he completed the illustrations for Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows, a work to which he maintained a powerful sentimental attachment.
In total, Rackham illustrated nearly 90 volumes. Influenced by Albrecht Dürer, George Cruikshank, John Tenniel, and Aubrey Beardsley, he is best known for his sure sense of line, his muted hues, and the creation of a mysterious world filled with gnomes, nymphs, giants, elves, sea serpents, and fairies amid intricate landscapes of gnarled branches, foaming waves, sinuous vines, and anthropomorphized trees. A firm believer in the partnership between author and illustrator, he endorsed the notion that illustrations take an interpretive turn, giving an “independent view of the author’s subject.” Rackham exercised a strong influence on future generations of illustrators, most notably Disney Studios, whose feature film of Snow White contains scenes clearly inspired by his style. Rackham died of cancer in 1939, just a few weeks after he had put the final touches on The Wind in the Willows. His last drawing shows Mole and Rat loading the rowboat for a picnic.
Further Reading:
Gettings, Fred. Arthur Rackham. New York: Macmillan, 1975.
Hamilton, James. Arthur Rackham: A Life with Illustration. London: Pavilion, 1990.
Hudson, Derek. Arthur Rackham: His Life and Work. London: Heinemann, 1960.
Larkin, David, ed. Arthur Rackham. 2nd ed. Toronto: Peacock Press, 1975.
Riall, Richard. A New Bibliography of Arthur Rackham. Bath, England: Ross, 1994.
W. HEATH ROBINSON (1872–1944)
Storyteller, artist, and cartoonist, William Heath Robinson was the youngest of three brothers, all of whom became renowned illustrators. He is best known today for Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales (1913) and for his drawings of humorous contraptions that are the precursors of Rube Goldberg machines. Heath Robinson worked on three illustrated editions of Andersen in total, one of which was a collaboration with his brothers. A reviewer of the first Andersen volume noted that “the demand for Hans Andersen’s fairy stories seems to be endless. . . . A new one—and a very good one—is illustrated by the clever brothers, Thomas, Charles, and William Robinson.”
Born in London into a family of artists and craftsmen, Heath Robinson left school at age fifteen to study at the Royal Academy Schools. “Frankly, there was no limit to my ambition,” he later recalled. “ . . . To me, as yet, anything seemed possible” (Lewis, 18). Robinson hoped to become a painter of landscapes, but quickly shifted to line drawing and watercolor when he realized the commercial potential of illustration. His drawings for Edgar Allan Poe’s poems, which (as he himself acknowledged) reveal the influence of Aubrey Beardsley, Walter Crane, and of his own brother Charles Robinson, established him as the equal of his older brothers in the art of book illustration.
In 1897, Robinson produced images for four volumes: The Giant Crab and Other Tales from Old India, Danish Fairy Tales and Legends of Hans Andersen, Don Quixote, and Pilgrim’s Progress. Throughout his career, he focused his efforts on high culture and popular culture, producing illustrations for works by Homer, Rabelais, and Shakespeare but also for fairy tales and children’s stories. In 1914, he published his vibrantly accomplished illustrations for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A year later, he drew a delightful set of images for Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies. He published two children’s books: The Adventures of Uncle Lubin (1902), a whimsical tale of an eccentric uncle in search of his nephew, and Bill the Minder (1912), a series of tales about the King of Troy and a boot-cleaner named Bill. In 1938, he completed his autobiography, My Line of Life.
Of the three Robinson brothers, W. Heath was known as the one with a sense of humor. He produced hundreds of “absurdities” (the title of a collection designed to bring together his humorous drawings) that included a chair for removing warts from the top of the head, an “ice-hole clamspearer for use in the Frozen North,” a “magnetic apparatus for putting square pegs into round holes,” and a “multimovement Tabby Silencer,” which threw water on wailing cats. His machines were generally run by bald, bespectacled gentlemen and were powered by kettles or candles. The name “Heath Robinson” is still in use today as a term for overly complex machines made of knotted string, old ironwork, and recycled parts kept in service through constant tinkering. A machine built to assist in decrypting German messages was named “Heath Robinson.”
After the outbreak of World War I, paper shortages led to the gradual disappearance of the gift books that had flourished in the early part of the century. Robinson expanded the advertising side of his work and continued to produce comic art through the 1920s and 1930s. The last fifteen years of his life were marked by a heart condition that led to deteriorating health. Scheduled to undergo surgery in 1944, he removed the tubes, drips, and catheters (painfully reminiscent of his “absurdities”) when left alone and died shortly thereafter.
Further Reading:
Beare, Geoffrey. The Art of William Heath Robinson. London: Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2003.
Day, G. Langston. The Life and Art of W. Heath Robinson. London: Herbert Joseph, 1947.
Hamilton, James. William Heath Robinson. London: Pavilion, 1992.
Jordan, R., ed. The Penguin Heath Robinson. Middlesex: Penguin, 1966. Lewis, John. Heath Robinson: Artist and Comic Genius. London: Constable, 1973.
Robinson, W. Heath. My Line of Life. London: Blackie & Sons, 1938.
MARGARET TARRANT (1888–1959)
Born in London, Margaret Winifred Tarrant trained as an art teacher but shifted to book illustration because she lacked confidence in her teaching abilities. Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies was her first subject, and she published her illustrated version of it in 1908. Her collaboration with the Medici Society publishers provided her with the opportunity to produce books, posters, postcards, greeting cards, and calendars that met with great popular success in the 1920s and 1930s. Famed for her light and airy portraits of children, fairies, and animals, she collaborated with Marion St. John Webb on a highly successful series of Flower Fairy books. She is also known for her illustrations of Andersen’s fairy tales (1910), Perrault’s fairy tales, and Alice in Wonderland (1916). In 1936, shortly after the death of her parents, the Medici Society funded her travels to Palestine, and her work thereafter took a religious turn. She died in Cornwall.
How did Andersen affect his readers? That is a challenging question, for readers move like travelers through the landscapes of his stories, leaving few traces behind and only occasionally providing glimpses of their experiences through memoirs. I have assembled here some of those souvenirs of reading, including reminiscences of writers, artists, historians, and others whose insights into Andersen’s tales often capture their power in remarkable ways. They remind us that the stories throb with beauty and charm, but also pulse with horror and dread.
AUGUST STRINDBERG
In Sweden, we don’t say H. C., we just say Andersen, for we only know of one Andersen, and that is Andersen. He belongs to us and our parents, our childhood and adulthood and old age.
When, as a child, I was given a Christmas calendar, I always skipped over the poetry, because it seemed so artificial and prosaic to me. So, when I got my hands on Andersen’s Fairy Tales, I asked an older expert if this wasn’t poetry. “No, it is prose!” the wise man answered.
“Is this prose?”
I can remember the little book with the Gothic type, I remember the woodcuts, the willow tree that belonged in “The Tinder Box,” “The Ball and the Top,” “The Tin Soldier,” “Ole Shut-Eye”, “The Snow Queen,” and all the others. And when I read and had finished reading, life seemed so difficult to me. This terrible everyday life with its peevishness and unfairness, this dreary, monotonous life in a nursery be
came unbearable to me. Like little plants, we were right up next to each other and felt crowded, quarreling over food and favors. Through Andersen’s fairy tale world, I became certain that there was another world, a golden age, where righteousness and mercy existed, in which parents truly caressed their children and did not just pull their hair, in which something completely unknown to me cast a rosy glow even over poverty and humiliation, the glow that is called by a word that cannot be used anymore today: love.
He also reminded me of Orpheus, the bard who sang in prose, so that not just the animals, plants, and stones listened to him and were touched, but toys also came to life, elves and trolls became real; schoolbooks, those terrors, became poetic; he covered all of Danish geography in four pages! He was truly a wizard!
And so we parted! But one day, at the age of twenty-five, I had to translate “Andersen’s last fairy tales” for a publisher. I could tell that Time had passed for both him and me; it was the time of utilitarianism and the national economy, and there was nothing evil in that, but Pegasus pulled a plow. These fairy tales were a little prosaic, but one of them was amusing; it was called “The Great Sea-Serpent” and dealt with the telegraph cable in the Atlantic Ocean and the fishes’ confusion about this new fish “that had no end.” It was a brilliant idea and I still remember it.
When I was thirty, my friend Carl Larsson was to illustrate Andersen and so I renewed my acquaintance with him, but this time I had the joy of sharing the book with my children. Since they were children of their time, they asked me “if all of that was true.” I don’t remember what I answered! It was about 1880, when all of the old truths had come under discussion.
I turned forty and discovered Andersen’s novels, in German. I was amazed at the clumsiness with which Andersen’s novels had been treated. Only a Fiddler is, after all, a great fairy tale and one of the best, and it can no longer be considered a mistake for a novel to be poetic!
I turned fifty and spent time on the Danish coast. Cavling remembers that I stayed in a little cottage with grapevines running along the walls, I wandered through the beech forest and swam in the sound, and borrowed Andersen’s fairy tales from the lending library. Now we shall see if they have kept their value!
They had! The Tinder Box still made sparks, the Willow Tree bloomed with growth, the Tin Soldier shouldered his rifle, although he had had contact with the gutter, and the year 1900, after utilitarianism and the national economy passed over with their steamrollers. He was a hardy youth!
On Saturday, my youngest daughter will be four years old, and she shall receive Andersen’s fairy tales in Danish, so she can at least look at the pictures. Perhaps she can also read the stories, even if I don’t know of it; for she is a child prodigy, and her grandmother was Danish, from Odense. Andersen keeps, and Andersen follows me!
Politiken has asked what I owe to Andersen. My answer is: Read my “Simple Things” from 1903 and see for yourself where I have gone to school!
I have had many teachers: Schiller and Goethe, Victor Hugo and Dickens, Zola and Peladan, but, all the same, I will sign this interview as
August Strindberg
Student of H. C. Andersen
From: August Strindberg, “H. C. Andersen. Till Andersen-jubileet 2 april 1905,” in Efterslåtter: Berättelser. Dikter. Artiklar, ed. John Landquist, Samlade skrifter av August Strindberg 54, Supplementdel 1 (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag, 1920), 443–45
CHARLES DICKENS
It has been given to Hans Andersen to fashion beings, it may almost be said, of a new kind, to breathe life into the toys of childhood and the forms of antique superstition. The tin soldier, the ugly duckling, the mermaid, the little match girl, are no less real and living in their way than Othello, or Mr. Pickwick, or Helen of Troy. It seems a very humble field in which to work, this of nursery legend and childish fancy. Yet the Danish poet alone, of all who have laboured in it, has succeeded in recovering, and reproducing, the kind of imagination which constructed the old fairy tales.
From: London Daily News, April 5, 1875
HERMANN HESSE
When we were little children, who had only just learnt to read, we owned, like all children, a beautiful, favorite book. It was called Andersen’s Fairy Tales, and every time, once we had read it, we would pick it up again. It was our faithful companion until the end of our boyhood years, our dear childhood, with its treasures and fairies, kings and rich merchants, poor beggar children and bold fortune seekers. . . . In my memory there were no sentences and words, only the things themselves, the whole, multicolored, magnificent world of old Andersen, and it was so well preserved in my remembrance and was so beautiful that I took great care in later years not to open this book again (which seemed in any case lost). For I had unfortunately already, at an early age, made that painful discovery: the books which in earliest childhood and youth were the source of all our bliss, should never be read again; otherwise their old shine and sparkle will be no more and they will appear changed, sad and foolish.
But the story which I read was good. It was not at all as fabulous and effusive and artificial as I had secretly been almost dreading. On the contrary, it looked with fully alert eyes at the real world and sent forth its fairy enchantment not out of vanity and foolish high spirits, but from experience and compassionate resignation. The enchantment was genuine, and as I read again and attended once more to many of the old stories, there reappeared the same beautiful magic sparkle as before. From the furrowed disappointment arose a joy and exuberance, and wherever it lacked something and failed to resound with its old completeness, the fault lay with me and not with old Andersen.
From: “Andersen’s Fairy Tales,” in A Literary History in Reviews and Essays (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1970)
W. H. AUDEN
Much . . . can be said against middle-class family life in the nineteenth century, but in the midst of its heavy moral discipline, its horsehair sofas and stodgy meals, the average child was permitted and even encouraged to lead an exciting life in its imagination. There are more Gradgrinds now that there were then, and the twentieth century has yet to produce books for children equal to Hans Andersen’s Tales, Edward Lear’s Book of Nonsense, the two Alices, Struwwelpeter, or even Jules Verne.
Houses are smaller, servants are fewer, mothers have less time, or think they have, to read to their children, and neither the comic strip nor the radio has succeeded so far in providing a real substitute for the personally told tale which permits of interruptions and repeats. . . .
It is to be hoped that the publication of the tales of Grimm and Andersen in one inexpensive volume will be a step in the campaign to restore to parents the right and the duty to educate their children, which, partly through their own fault, and partly through extraneous circumstances, they are in danger of losing for good.
From: “Grimm and Andersen,” in Forewords and Afterwords, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Modern Library, 1952), 198–99
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
“Now we shall try a new way. You and I will read these pleasant little Märchen together, and dig nor more in that dry book, that goes in the corner for making us trouble.”
He spoke so kindly, and opened Hans Andersen’s fairy tales so invitingly before me, that I was more ashamed than ever, and went at my lesson in a neck-or-nothing style that seemed to amuse him immensely. I forgot my bashfulness, and pegged away (no other word will express it) with all my might, tumbling over long words, pronouncing according to the inspiration of the minute, and doing my very best. When I finished reading my first page, and stopped for breath, he clapped his hands and cried out, in his hearty way, “Das ist gut! Now we go well! My turn. I do him in German; gif me your ear.” And away he went, rumbling out the words with his strong voice, and a relish which was good to see as well as hear. Fortunately the story was “The Constant Tin Soldier,” which is droll, you know, so I could laugh, and I did—though I didn’t understand half he read, for I couldn’t help it, he was so earnest, I so excited,
and the whole thing so comical.
From: Little Women (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 526–27
HENRY JAMES
The small people with whom he played enjoyed, under his spell, the luxury of believing that he kept and treasured—in every case as a rule—the old tin soldiers and broken toys received by him, in acknowledgement of favors, from impulsive infant hands. Beautiful the queer image of the great benefactor moving about Europe with his accumulations of these relics. Wonderful too our echo of a certain occasion—that of a children’s party, later on, when, after he had read out to his young friends “The Ugly Duckling,” Browning struck up with the “Pied Piper”; which led to the formation of a grand march through the spacious Barberini apartment with Story doing his best on a flute in default of bagpipes.
From: William Wetmore Story and His Friends: From Letters, Diaries, and Recollections (Edinburgh: Blackwood and Sons, 1903), 285–86
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
Andersen (the Dane) came to see me yesterday, kissed my hand, and seemed in a general verve for embracing. He is very earnest, very simple, very childlike. I like him. Pen [Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s twelve-year-old son] says of him, “He is not really pretty. He is rather like his own ugly duck, but his mind has developed into a swan”—That wasn’t bad of Pen, was it?
From: The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. F. G. Kenyon (London: Smith, Elder, 1897), II, 448
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
A bewildering sequence of English nurses and governesses, some of them wringing their hands, others smiling at me enigmatically, come out to meet me as I re-enter my past. . . . There was lovely, black-haired, aquamarineeyed Miss Norcott, who lost a white kid glove at Nice or Beaulieu, where I vainly looked for it on the shingly beach among the colored pebbles and the glaucous lumps of sea-changed bottle glass. Lovely Miss Norcott was asked to leave at once, one night at Abbazia. She embraced me in the morning twilight of the nursery, pale-mackintoshed and weeping like a Babylonian willow, and that day I remained inconsolable, despite the hot chocolate that the Petersons’ old Nanny had made especially for me and the special bread and butter, on the smooth surface of which my aunt Nata, adroitly capturing my attention, drew a daisy, then a cat, and then the little mermaid whom I had just been reading about with Miss Norcott and crying over, too, so I started to cry again.
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