Ireland is another important source of the fairy tale. T. Crofton Croker published in two volumes his influential Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland in 1825 and 1828. Tales of the folk of Ireland, such as this one, although not especially addressed to children, made a lasting impression upon both young audiences and subsequent publishing. Released at around the time that the Grimm stories arrived in Britain, Croker's and others' literary works manifested the interest in and demand for the traditional fairy lore of the islands. The indigenous tales of the Emerald Isle colorfully recount the activities of fairy beings of considerable variety-those little people who danced in the moonlight, such as the Leprechaun, who can disappear in the twinkling of the eye. Later in the century, in 1854, exploring local superstitions about pixie lore in Devonshire and Cornwall, Anna Eliza (Kempe) Stothard (known as Mrs. Bray)-a widely published author who had written in the 1830s on the subject-published the collection A Peep at the Pixies. These six stories are accompanied with colored illustrations by Hablot K. Browne, or Phiz, Charles Dickens's celebrated principal illustrator. In 1867, Anna Maria (Fielding) Hall (Mrs. S.C. Hall) published The Prince of the Fair Family, A Fairy Tale. The numerous illustrations of J. Noel Patton, Walter L. Allen, W. S. Coleman, Jules Cheret, Kenny Meadows, and others feature winged maidens, cherubs riding lily pads and fish, ghostly figures dancing at night, and elves sheltered under toad stools.

The selection of books and their illustration on display in this exhibition suggests the diverse range of fantasy made available in children's books-from the fairy tale to the nursery rhyme to poetry to nonsense-during the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Illustrated by Richard (Dicky) Doyle (1824-1883), The King of the Golden River, by John Ruskin, first appeared in 1851; this legend of the Rhine-style tale had been written some ten years earlier for twelve-year-old Effie Chalmers Gray, whom Ruskin later married. William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) is remembered by children for his The Rose and the Ring, or the History of Prince Giglio and Prince Bulbo (1855), a "fireside pantomime"-a fast-paced, nonsensical opera for children that he both authored and illustrated. Paul de Musset, in his nursery tale Mr. Wind and Madame Rain (1864), illustrated by Charles H. Bennett, went to collect in Brittany "all that was there related to me about Mr. Wind and Madame Rain," for the amusement of children. Fuz-Buzz the Fly and Mother Grabem the Spider (1867), by the well-known Philadelphia physician S. Weir Mitchell, collects together a number of short, magical fairy tales, including "Lady Golden Hair and Her Two Lovers"; "Prince Clever and Prince Sturdy"; "Krusstikuss and Growlegrum"; and "Mustapha, or the Musical Gourd." Thomas Hood the Younger (1835-74), a writer and illustrator who had edited two comic papers for children in the 1860s, published Petsetilla's Posy: A Fairy Tale (1870), illustrated by F. Barnard. Typical of the period, the whimsy and fancy of the prose and illustrations demonstrate the overwhelming influence of Alice in Wonderland and its illustrations by Tenniel. A novelist who also wrote children's stories of real quality, Dinah Maria (Mulock) Craik (Mrs. Craik) in 1872 published The Adventures of a Brownie, the story of a mischievous sprite who becomes the companion of a family of children. Christina Rossetti is best known for her fairy poem Goblin Market (1862), perhaps the most magical and vivid of all poems put before children. Rossetti is also acknowledged for her achievement in Sing-Song, A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872)-a book superbly illustrated by the prominent Pre-Raphaelite artist Arthur Hughes-in which she exploits the cadence and inventiveness of the nursery rhyme form as spoken and sung to children. William Brighty Rands's verse preface to Lilliput Legends (1872), illustrated by G. J. Pinwell and Sir John Everett Millais, explains his adventures in a country full of storybook folk: fairies, columbines, Punch and Judy and others welcome him, and there he discovers a wistful happiness. A high point of late-Victorian nonsense is surely Lewis Carroll's Hunting of the Snark (1876), illustrated by the painter and designer Henry Holiday (1839-1927). Like his predecessor and contemporary, Edward Lear, Carroll mines the rhyming limerick tirelessly in this ballad for children.

Perhaps no illustrator of the Victorian period better personified the spirit of an imaginary, miniaturized elf world than Richard Doyle, the founder and later editor of the magazine Punch. Doyle was a child prodigy who in his early life had collected and illustrated the folk legends of Wales, Denmark and Norway, as well as tales of giants, pixies and strange apparitions seen across Scottish lochs. Doyle's early achievements, beginning in the 1840s, rivaled those of Cruikshank in their delicate inventiveness and fluid yet minute detail. Especially noteworthy were his The Fairy Ring (1846), Fairy Tales from all Nations (1849), The Enchanted Doll (1849), The Story of Jack and the Giants (1851), and An Old Fairy Tale Told Anew (1865). The folio-size In Fairyland-A Series of Pictures of the Elf World, published by Longman, Green and Company in 1870 and reissued in 1875, is a masterpiece of Victorian book illustration, color printing, design and production, one of the most commercially and critically successful children's books ever published. In Fairyland is accompanied by the verse of the Pre-Raphaelite poet William Allingham, of which the following has become now famous: "Up the airy mountains; Down the rushing glen; We daren't go a-hunting; For fear of little men." Doyle's illustrations for In Fairyland were reformatted for a story by Andrew Lang, The Princess Nobody, A Tale of Fairy Land, which was published in 1884, a year after Doyle's death. Tangible evidences of the fairy world appeared widely during this period, both in the work of Doyle's contemporaries and in those of his successors. Eleanor Vere Boyle (1825-1916), the only female member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, offered plates richly suggestive of the fairy world ("The gossip with the fire flies") among her illustrations for The Story Without an End (1868). In the United States, the charmingly naïve chromolithographic illustrations of the author and illustrator L. (Louise) Clarkson (born in 1865) depict winged cherubs flying among flowers in The Gathering of the Lilies (1877), Little Stay-at-Home (1879) and Flyaway Fairies and Baby Blossoms (1882).

Of particular note is the unsurpassed richness and subtlety of the color printing of Edmund Evans, Doyle's collaborator for In Fairyland. Evans, who during much of the last quarter of the century developed a unique process employing as many as ten separate color blocks for each printed illustration, is credited with vastly increasing the quality and nuance of color book illustration. More than simply adding color to black-and-white illustration, Evans sought in his work to integrate text and illustration more fully and, ultimately, to put pictures on an equal footing with text. He not only increased the size of the children's book but worked with artists to design and size artwork for the full page. These innovations of Evans, and others, are the primary hallmarks of the modern children's picture book. Early in his career in the 1860s, Evans sought out Walter Crane (1845-1915)-a young, talented illustrator and book designer-for a highly productive and visible partnership in children's book production that was to last many years. It is Evans's work primarily with Crane and two other prominent illustrators-Kate Greenaway (1846-1901) and Randolph Caldecott (1846-1886)-that fully transformed the design and concept of the children's book. These artists' inventive, graphic melding of memorable illustration with popular fairy tales and nursery rhymes (such as Caldecott's Hey Diddle Diddle and Walter Crane's Arabian Nights) linked the past and future, giving new form to classics. In the process, Evans, Crane, Greenaway and Caldecott, and many other artists who both preceded and followed them, have made our association with childhood favorites as much a visual as a verbal experience.

Dan Younger
Director
Olin Art Gallery

Thanks for editorial assistance are extended to Jean Caslin, Melissa Dabakis and Judy Sacks.