Beatrix Potter, Maurice Sendak and Russell Hoban Handout
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Beatrix Potter, Maurice Sendak and Russell Hoban handout My favorite illustrator when I was a young man, just learning, was Randolph Caldecott [The House That Jack Built; Hey Diddle Diddle; The Grand Panjandrum Himself], and he must be placed in the Canon. I've learned and learned from him and although I've grown up and I've gotten old I still wonder at the freshness and honesty and delicacy of his work, and the fact that his picture books are largely ignored, and that an award is named after him [the Caldecott Medal for children's book illustration], but that most people don't know anything about him and don't read him. He's like Mozart--the way he will take a few lines and embellish those lines in personal ways and musical ways. One of the most gorgeous picture book-makers ever, perhaps the most gorgeous, is Randolph Caldecott. Another writer I'd put in my Canon is Beatrix Potter, who is to me the mini-Jane Austen. Jane Austen is is one of my very favorite writers. I re-read her all the time and I get the same pleasure. She's perfect--and I couldn't tell you why. She just makes me so happy. Beatrix Potter is a miniaturist in the same way that Austen is. Austen once described her work as "that little bit (two inches wide) of ivory,in which I work with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labor." She wasn't being coy or modest; she had measured her talent, and she knew exactly what she could do. What a perfect two inches of ivory! In the same way, Potter always works within her experience. She showed us something we have all profited from. I mean those of us who have learned the lesson, which is: There is no such thing as a children's book, no such thing as a sweet, little book for kiddies. And unfortunately, ironically, she's been forced into that image with Peter Rabbit and the Flopsy Bunnies, but her books in truth are sturdy and strange. I mean Peter Rabbit is lethal--look what almost happens to him. He gets away not because he's smart, but just by dumb luck. And the book makes it clear that it's just dumb luck that has saved him from being eaten. But your mother is still there to forgive you. It's one of the models for Max in Where the Wild Things Are. The honesty of the child--he's warned against the danger but he can't resist it. And Peter almost dies. I would include all of Potter's books in the Canon. Maurice Sendak From Beatrix Potter: writing in code By M. Daphne Kutzer The Tailor of Gloucester Both Potter’s favourite book and her most unusual. Several characteristics make it different from her other works: While a few of Poter’s books have human figures (like Mr. McGregor in Peter Rabbit), in none of them is the human a sympathetic protagonist. The T of G is also the only urban novel Potter ever wrote. Humphrey Carpenter notes that Potter is a subversive writer who is definitely on the side of the transgressor in her books, and also notes that the T of G was ‘a crucially important book for Potter, a linguistic exercise, a study in establishing what she believed to be her grandmother’s voice.’ Kutzer says, Potter’s entire oeuvre is an extended complaint of repression and argument for expression of self, and her linguistic style is only a part of that rebellion. The T of G is imp not only because it helped Potter develop a distinctive prose style separating her from her own historical moment, but because it allowed her to banish both Victorian prose and parental authority: in fact to excise her father, mother, and even her brother Bertram and t go back to a period her beloved and rebellious grandmother Jessy Crompton would have known well. T of G encoded palimpsest of complaints against hierarchy, authority and power. T of G specifically set in a pre-Victorian period – ‘in the time of swords and periwigs...lappets’. Details of clothing, crockery and language specify (for the adult if not the child reader) that the story takes place somewhere during the Regency period (probably between 1785 and 1800) Revolutionary import, strong social commentary, imagery of food and kitchen in manuscript, also use of the expression ‘unfranchize’ the mice from under the teacup. Working class tailor is in the same position as the mice in relation to the Mayor of Gloucester etc. Intertextuality: Shoemaker and the elves (only resemblance to this fairy tale is in the plot, but the mice are more naturally involved in the fate of the tailor) and Perrault’s tale Puss in Boots (cat dos not help impoverished master but makes things difficult for him). [There is also a deliberate allusion to the story of Dick Whittington and his cat (although the reference is to the bells that rung to call him back to a sudden change of fortune), but all these suggestions reinforce the idea that the cat is not anaturally loyal or devoted friend to its master. CN] 1 From the Beatrix Potter website The Tailor of Gloucester When gentlemen wore ruffles and gold-lace waistcoats Many of Beatrix Potter’s stories begin ‘Once upon a time…’. The Tailor of Gloucester is unusual in that the story takes place at a specific period – ‘the time of swords and periwigs’ – between about 1735 and 1785. Beatrix went to extraordinary lengths to create an authentic setting. Passing a tailor’s shop in Chelsea one day, she deliberately tore a button off her coat and took it in to be mended so she could observe at first hand the tailor’s posture, tools and workbench. Beatrix sought inspiration for the Mayor of Gloucester’s coat and embroidered waistcoat in the 18th-century clothes owned by her local museum, the V&A. She wrote to her publisher, Norman Warne: 'I have been delighted to find I may draw some most beautiful 18th century clothes at the South Kensington Museum. I had been looking at them for a long time in an inconvenient dark corner of the Goldsmith’s Court, but had no idea they could be taken out of the case. The clerk says I could have any article put on a table in one of the offices, which will be most convenient.’ (Letter to Norman Warne, 27th March 1903). Her sketches are so accurate that it is possible to identify the original garments, including the mayor’s waistcoat, ‘worked with poppies and corn-flowers’, in the V&A’s collections. In May 1903 Beatrix made many sketches of Gloucester whilst visiting friends in nearby Stroud. The street scenes in her story, particularly that of the tailor’s shop in College Court, depict actual places in the city. Her frontispiece is an exception. Here, Beatrix based her illustration on a London street scene by William Hogarth (1697- 1764). She used the painting to establish the period setting of her story, even picking out details of the gentleman’s attire (‘swords and periwigs and full-skirted coats’) in her opening sentence. Hogarth’s original painting, Noon of 1736, is at Grimsthorpe Castle in Lincolnshire and Beatrix is unlikely to have seen it. Instead, she may have come across the engraved print on one of her many visits to the ‘Art Reading Room’ at the V&A. A Dark Sense of Humour Graham Greene, whose own writing was influenced by his appreciation of the work of Beatrix Potter, described Potter as 'an acute and unromantic observer, who never sacrifices truth for an effective gesture'. From childhood, Potter both observed and dissected animals in order to discover their precise physiognomy and anatomy. Her early passion for scientific investigation became integral to her method as an illustrator. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Potter never resorted to caricature or the grotesque - her first concern was always to remain faithful to the true likeness of the animals. Potter's humour, both subtle and sophisticated, is based on the familiar, domestic happenings of everyday life, such as baking, shopping and spring-cleaning. Yet there is often a sinister undercurrent to her composed and elegant prose. Her treatment of violence and death is often surprisingly blunt - Potter is rarely concerned with morality. Hours spent observing the way nature operates meant she was a realist: she knew animals kill other animals, that life was full of strong instincts and potential threat. It was this attitude that allowed her to create wry and slightly detached stories about a world where cats long to eat mice, rats terrorise kittens, rabbits can end up in pies, and foxes set traps with buckets of water. From 'WONDER AND MATTER-OF-FACT MEET' − THE IMAGINATION OF BEATRIX POTTER By Marcia Rackow In her stories, illustrations, and her scientific studies, Beatrix Potter wanted "to make reality and wonder akin, the fact and strangeness like each other." For example, on the jacket of her favorite book, The Tailor of Gloucester, is a picture of a mouse, wearing black wire spectacles, sitting on a red spool of thread reading a newspaper, The Tailor and Cutter. It is charming, funny, fantastic, yet entirely sensible. There is an exactitude of observation and factuality about this drawing that makes the surprising, the strange, believable. The mouse is beautifully rendered, and though he is sitting up comfortably like a person with his feet crossed, and his hands — though we know they are his front paws — are stretched out holding a newspaper, we can see how carefully Beatrix Potter observed mice.