This chapter discusses the potential for meaning-making through the use of both hand-lettered text and formal print in a number of texts for young children. Young children often encounter such texts at home or at school during their pre-literate or early learning life stages. They are often placed in the role of observers, or unsophisticated co-readers, before they gain the reading skills to decipher writing systems on their own; but this is a gradual and accumulative process – as children learn to read they are constantly exposed to print media which they absorb and assimilate, to varying degrees, as their abilities mature (Kress 1997; Sassoon 1993). To elucidate and interrogate some of the ways in which the physical
appearance of text can function on multiple semiotic levels I examine and analyse the function of the presentation of written text in both hand-lettered and print format.
Hand-lettered text can have complex connotations for the reader, depending on the style of writing, the ability of the reader and the intended audience (Walker 2001, 2007). In light of this, a case study of two examples of hand-written texts by parents that were not originally designed for mass consumption are examined – A Very Pretty Story to Tell Children When They Are About Five or Six Years of Age (1744) by Jane Johnson, and The Father Christmas Letters (1976) by J.R.R. Tolkien, published posthumously and edited by his daughter-in-law Baillie Tolkien. Both sets of material, produced with the utmost care, give an insight into the ways in which adults use design, symbols and graphic devices in the communicative process. The most basic principles of communication through the use of graphic symbols and narrative voice are deftly illustrated through these texts and their creators’ use of design and hand- lettering to construct character, atmosphere and meaning. Leading on from this I will interrogate the role of both traditional print and hand-lettered text in picturebooks for children, focusing on the work of two contemporary picturebook artists, Oliver Jeffers and Sara Fanelli, both of whom create visual narratives that play with mixed-media and hand- written text in order to create a unique narrative voice. Finally I will present a detailed analysis of the acclaimed picturebook The Stinky Cheeseman and Other Fairly Stupid Tales (1992)by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith, as an example of sophisticated use of printed type in conjunction with narrative voice to create character, and play with concepts of trust and irony, in books for younger readers.
Adults Writing for Children
Producers of children’s literature have in the past made use of a whole host of inventive and eye-catching techniques in order to draw and hold the attention of both child
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readers and the adults who more often than not purchase these texts on children’s behalf – from Newbery’s pincushion and ball in A Pretty Little Pocket Book (1744) to the ground- breaking illustrations of Randolph J. Caldecott (1846-1886); from the iconic pairing of text and image by Carroll and Tenniel (1865), to the paper-engineering mastery of Jan Pieńkowski (1936–), innovation in the design of the children’s book as object have often triggered the next advancement in children’s literature. 30 One such area, however, which is often
overlooked in analysis of texts for children is the use of typography to shape meaning, and more particularly, how this interacts with the narrative voice in the text to produce meaning. Sophisticated technology and digital design processes available in the twenty-first century mean innovative design and typography in children’s literature is an everyday occurrence. Yet those who have created books for children have, to various degrees, always been conscious of the importance of good design, and the blossoming of a new golden age of children’s
literature today does not preclude the subtle and often central use of typography to add meaning to texts in the past. Particularly noteworthy, and indicative of the inherent consciousness of human beings to the nuances and subtleties of written and printed
communication, are those persons in the past who wrote for a particular child or children, and who may have had to use the basic tools at their disposal to fashion engrossing narratives that engage the attention of their young audience – to both instruct and delight them with stories of their own invention.
The first two case studies which I present in this chapter are unusual. The objects discussed are, in their own ways, published books, yet their origins lie in the realm of family history and biography, and they were certainly not originally created by their authors for publication. The reasons for their publication, long after the authors’ deaths, have much to do with the unusual circumstances of preservation and subject in the case of one, and with the fame of the author in the other. The first object is the work of Jane Johnson (née Russell) (1706-1759) of Olney, Buckinghamshire. The archive of materials by Johnson, shared between
30 Newbery’s seminal text has oft been cited as the point of origin for children’s literature as we know it, although
this absolutist position has been successfully argued against in much of the research of the last thirty years (for an analysis of Newbery’s contemporaries in early children’s book publishing, see Chapter 4, ‘The First Innovators and Their Creations’, in Engines of Instruction, Mischief, and Magic: Children’s Literature in England from Its beginnings to 1839 (1989) by Mary V. Jackson). Still, its position as an exemplar of the earliest popular children’s literature remains. Caldecott’s name has lent itself to the Caldecott Medal, an annual award for illustration made by the American Library Association, which marks the significant impact of his innovative illustrations on the development of the picturebook as we know it today. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) is not only famous for its development of fantasy in children’s literature, but is significant for its use of typographical play for The Mouse’s Tale, which is analysed in more depth in Chapter 3. Although perhaps a less widely known name than Newberry, Caldecott, Carroll and Tenniel, Pieńkowski is a twice winner of the CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal; for The Kingdom Under the Sea and Other Stories in 1971 with Joan Aiken, and for his exceptional pop-up book Haunted House in 1979, which, according to Lisa Boggiss Boyce, is an “iconic book” which “heralded the leap into what has been commonly referred to as the second ‘‘Golden Age’’ of moveable books” (2011, 245). These seminal texts all played a part in shifting or impacting the way children’s books are produced.
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Lilly Library at Indiana University, USA and the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, UK, include a collection of homemade literacy ephemera including word chips, alphabet, story and lesson cards, and, of particular interest to this study, the hand-written original story called
A Very Pretty Storyto Tell Children When They Are About Five or Six Years of Age, written down in 1744.31The second work is the collected letters sent from J.R.R. Tolkien to his children from
1920 to 1943, originally edited and published posthumously by his daughter-in-law Baillie Tolkien in picturebook format in 1976, and subsequently published in various different formats since then.32
Case Study 1: A Very Pretty Story (1744) by Jane Johnson
A Very Pretty Story was written down to assist the multiple retellings Jane Johnson enacted for her children; that much is clear from the description at the very end of the story:
This Story was made in the year 1744, on purpose tell Miss Barbara Johns & her Brother Mister George-William Johnson who took Vast Delight in hearing it told over & over again a vast many times by Jane Johnson. (41-42, Johnson’s manuscript; 2001, 77)
The story forms part of a short collection of writings by Johnson, the earliest dating from 1733, the latest 1752. There are a number of intriguing elements to the story, in the context of its production and survival, that are fascinating but it is its form and content, the way it was written down and the style of narration, which are relevant to this study.33
31 Published in facsimile and transcription in 2001, with an introduction by Gillian Avery, and referred to as A
Very Pretty Story from here on.
32 The most complete collection published thus far is the extended Letters from Father Christmas published by
Harper Collins in 2012.
33 For the full history of how the text, and Johnson’s entire handmade library, was found, see Reading Lessons from
the Eighteenth Century: Mothers, Children and Texts (2006) edited by Evelyn Arizpe, Morag Styles, with Shirley Brice Heath and Opening the Nursery Door: Reading, Writing and Childhood 1600-1900 (1997) edited by Mary Hilton, Morag Styles and Victor Watson.
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Figure 12. Sample page of A Very Pretty Story (1744) by Jane Johnson. From the collection held at The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, UK. Shelfmark MS. Don. d. 198.
The story is neatly and cleanly laid out, in Johnson’s careful hand-writing (see fig. 12), the style lying somewhere between her best attempt at copperplate or round-hand, which we can see in an early letter to her son George while he was at school (see fig. 13), and her more fluid style of letter-writing to friends and relatives (see fig. 14).34 Gillian Avery (2001) mentions
this letter to George, with the writing carefully restricted and laid out using scored lines to ensure uniformity, as an example of Jane struggling “to write a clear enough hand for a child to read” (8) but the evidence is, I think, more open to interpretation. The letter is addressed to her son while he was in his early days at school, and epistolary literacy was part of his
education she could still participate in from a distance, as Styles and Arizpe (2006) point out:
34 For the purposes of this comparison, I looked at the full collection of Jane Johnson’s letters, as well as the
original manuscript of A Very Pretty Story, held in The Bodleian Library. In a postscript to this particular letter to a friend, she apologises for the condition of her handwriting: “I once again beg pardon for all faults &
imperfections in this Epistle, & particularly here for the bad writing, but really this is too long a letter to write over twice, which I hope will plead my excuse. Olney October 17, 1749.”
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“[...] some of her letters to her children are written in a neat copperplate, presumably meant for them to emulate” (72).
Figure 13. Letter to George Johnson from Jane Johnson circa 1750-55.
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Many parents of children at school during this period would have sent their children letters to use as exemplars,35 and Johnson may have merely been ensuring her son learnt from hers how
best to lay out a letter by making clear the method employed. In any case, Johnson’s everyday hand-writing, while not accomplished, was certainly legible, and the neater hand-writing she uses to transcribe her story is more legible again. It is not an entirely clean copy, with a small number of errors, and changed or crossed out words, but the impression on the whole is one of neatness and uniformity, as if written down from a draft or well-recalled from memory.
The quality of the hand-writing is important because not only would the story need to be legible to Johnson, for future retellings, but perhaps also for the children to read for themselves or to each other. Clearly this book occupied a space both in the private and the public domains; it was both deeply personal to Johnson, containing her own unpublished works which often revolved around her faith and her children, but was also collected together from various periods in her life and transcribed into the notebook so that her writings would survive, and potentially be seen by future generations and those outside her family circle. Indeed, Victor Watson (1997), in commenting on the auspicious date that the story was transcribed, the same year as John Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744), has noted that the name Johnson chose for her story may be a clue to her cognisance of its reception by others outside her family circle:
She called it ‘A very pretty Story to tell Children when they are about five or six years of age.’ ‘Pretty’ might indicate that A Little Pretty Pocket-Book had arrived at the Olney rectory hot from Newbery’s press and given Jane Johnson the idea – but it is more likely that the word was already highly charged with connotations of childhood. The title has a pragmatic quality, too, as if Jane Johnson had it in mind to make the story available for other parents to use. (32)
The very act of carefully writing out her story for Barbara and George signifies Johnson’s hopes that her work would survive and be read – even as a widow sorting through her husband’s papers she was keenly aware of the need to preserve (or destroy) certain family records and letters for the future, as can be seen in the archive of family papers which contain Johnson’s notes to retain or discard certain documents (Whyman 2009, 171).
35 See chapter one, ‘Creating the Letter – How to Acquire Epistolary Literacy’, in Susan E. Whyman’s The Pen and
the People: English letter writers 1660-1800 (2009) for examples of parents writing sample letters to their children, and chapter five, ‘Letter Writing and the Rise of the Novel – The Epistolary Literacy of Jane Johnson and Samuel Richardson’, for a discussion of Jane Johnson’s letters to her children in particular. Chapter two, ‘Round Hand Character’, in Aileen Douglas’s Work in Hand: Script, Print, and Writing, 1690-1840 (2017) is also very useful for situating the development of English round hand, which Jane Johnson appears to use in her letters to George, within the history of writing and print culture.
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The tone and narrative voice used in A Very Pretty Story is also striking. Placing her own children in the text, Johnson tells the story of George and Bab Alworthy and their two fictional friends, Lucy and Tommy Manly. Through misfortune, and the disreputable
behaviour of an untrustworthy uncle, the Manly children are orphaned and eventually given a home by the Alworthys. The story follows the four children as they go to a local fair, where Tommy behaves greedily and selfishly. His misbehaviour continues later on, as he steals and lies to the Alworthys, and causes the unfair dismissal of a maid for theft. There follows a unique passage of fantastical escapism in which all the children are taken by angels to “The Castle of Pleasure and Delight” (31, Johnson’s manuscript; 2001, 73); all, that is, except Tommy, who is punished for his behaviour by being brought to a hogsty and made to stay in the mud instead. The three children eventually return having enjoyed their stay in the beautiful castle, and Tommy is allowed go home also, but wracked with guilt and misery at his own behaviour he soon sickens and dies. The other children grow up to be wise, devout and thoughtful adults, each marrying one of the other well-behaved children they originally met at the castle:
[…] so they all Lived very happy, & Loved one another Dearly till they were very old men & women & then they all Died & went to Heaven to live with God Almighty & all the Good Angels for ever and ever. Amen. (41, Johnson’s original manuscript; 2001, 77)
The story is thus a strange mix of heavy-handed morality and glorious fantasy, with lessons about honesty, charity, greed, and even temperance, going hand-in-hand with a vivid
description of a fantastical, other-worldly adventure – along with a neatly tied-up ‘and they all lived happily ever after’ ending.
As Watson has noted, the tone and narrative voice used in the story are constructed to appeal directly to the narratee of the story, including references to the intimate life of the nursery: “There is a careful child-centred rhetoric here, along with hints of the elusive gestures of storytelling: almost certainly, for example, that reference to ‘holding up their heads’ and ‘turning out their toes’ was a shared nursery joke” (1997, 33). There is an excited, energetic style to the narration, with minimal use of full stops and sentences strung together with
multiple ampersands which lend an almost child-like tone to the story. The narrative style used in the descriptions of the Castle of Pleasure and Delights is “bright, almost radiant (36)”, with Johnson appearing to revel in the description of the finery the children encounter in this magical place. As Watson describes it:
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When the three children in the story decide it is time to go home, they are taken to a stable to choose horses for themselves. In the description that follows, bright and colourful details are precisely and energetically celebrated in language which suggests the breathless yet controlled excitement of the storyteller. (37)
Watson, Avery and others have argued for the influence on Johnson’s writing of the Comtesse d’Aulnoy’s Contes des Fées, originally translated from French to English in 1707, 1716, and again in 1721:
Many of the features in Jane Johnson’s story clearly derive from the Comtesse d’Aulnoy’s Contes des Fées – the generally fantastical countryside full of magical possibilities; the landscape of gardens, woods, palaces, trees and flower; her baroque interest in ornamental details; the emphasis on colour and the vivid imagery of bright flowers, fruit and birds; and her focused attentiveness to the colour and brightness of clothes and jewellery. Finally there is an abundance of magical flying chariots and carriages, usually pulled by fantastical animals. (V. Watson 1997, 38)
Johnson was clearly influenced by this style, but undertook a wholly original endeavour when she used its motifs to embellish her own tale. The fairy story within the narrative is a fantastic interlude practically unknown in dedicated children’s books produced at this time (Avery 2001, 14). Yet A Very Pretty Story is quite clearly also a didactic tale, full of the kind of moral and religious instruction that peppers the handmade educational material she made for the