Randolph Caldecott - On Book Design

Randolph Caldecott was the man who painted the backdrop to nicely turned-out Victorian childhood. From 1870 no well-furnished home was complete without a set of his visual renditions of popular nursery rhymes including "The House that Jack Built" and "Sing a Song for Sixpence", as well as some that no longer trip off the tongue, such as "The Three Jovial Huntsmen". What's more, with colour lithographic printing becoming cheap and easy as the decade progressed, Caldecott's picture books pushed steadily into the mass market so that, by the time of his early death in 1886, his work was a fixture in homes that couldn't boast a set of proper bookshelves, let alone a nursery.

A Caldecott picture is immediately recognisable, although you might not to be able to name it as such. The setting is historical, usually late 18th century, although sometimes as early as Queen Anne (the elegant yet childishly symmetrical houses in the background are a clue). Middle-aged men wear dusty wigs, younger ones strut in breeches and stockings. Milkmaids have mob caps while prosperous matrons wear their silken fortunes on plump backs. The colour palette tends to the autumnal, although it is not as muted as that of Caldecott's contemporary Kate Greenaway. While his three jovial huntsmen may charge across a landscape already washed out by the dying sun, the interior scenes in "The Queen of Hearts" have enough rich jewel tones to satisfy even the most exacting young monarchist. His bold use of white space only makes the colours sing louder.

Where Caldecott particularly excels is in scenes of mayhem. Everyone is on the go, from the cow with the crumpled horn which tosses the dog in "The House that Jack Built" to the Queen of Hearts who, celebrating the return of her tarts, dances with a swerving, light-toed King of Clubs. Just as alive are the background figures, the spectators to all this palaver. Children hang down precariously from branches or stick their heads through railings in order to get a better look. A maidservant drops a jug in surprise at the sudden appearance of the four-and-twenty musical blackbirds bursting out of the pie, while a host of rabbits look on in nervous astonishment as Baby Bunting is paraded past them in his skinned-rabbit costume, ears and all.

Beatrix Potter's father presented her early on with books by Caldecott, and you can spot the influence immediately. The pointing cat in his Queen of Hearts is surely the model for that brilliant moment of terror when a petrified Tom Kitten confronts Samuel Whiskers, while the dancing pigs in "Hey Diddle Diddle" look as if they have been reworked in The Tale of Pigling Bland. But one area in which Caldecott and Potter stayed far apart was in their capacity for casual cruelty. In Potter's dark world, rabbit dads get put in pies and eaten, and foxes move into other peoples' homes without asking. In Caldecott's work, the moments of death are few and mostly take place off the page (for instance, when the cat kills the mouse in "The House that Jack Built"). When asked to illustrate "Sing a Song for Sixpence", the tender-hearted Caldecott worried that children might be traumatised by believing that the maid had permanently lost her nose to the blackbird. So he added a final line about the arrival of a Jenny Wren "who popped it on again".

None of which means that there is anything sentimental or soft-focused about Caldecott's landscapes. Having spent his early working life in rural Shropshire, he knew exactly what a ploughed field looks like and how a cow bucks when forced to carry a human passenger. His dust looks as if it would coat your throat, and you can almost smell his pigs. If his characters are decked out in clothes of nearly a century earlier, those waistcoats and breeches and lace shawls have been informed by a sharp antiquarian eye. The faces may be a little generic - the children, in particular, are all the dimpled same - but the costumes carry the tang of the particular.

One of Caldecott's great gifts to the genre of children's books was to insist upon unifying the design, making sure that the title page and even the endpapers were as pretty and witty as the colour plates. This reproduction of nine of his picture books from the Huntingdon Library has been put together with equal care and attention. Beautifully produced, and without a dull or redundant page anywhere, this edition will make a handsome Christmas present for anyone who, once upon a time, longed to live in a world where a dish really might run away with a spoon. Kathryn Hughes's biography of Mrs Beeton is published by Harper Perennial.

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Caldecott is a great inspiration to book design, I feel a lot of work really opens my eyes to how important design within Children's books work. It's not just about creating something with visual beauty, but there is a lot of effort that goes into semiotics of design.

His inspiration is great, seeing as he grew up experiencing landscapes, a lot of his design inspiration so far has been improved by taking my work environment into the world outside. Being from Manchester (Aswell as me) I know that there are some great landscapes in the North that help inspire me.