Book contents
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1870s
- Nineteenth-Century Literature In Transition
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1870s
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 The 1870s and the Invention of Victorian Literature
- Chapter 2 Media Technologies, the Organisation of Knowledge, and 1870s Literary Culture
- Chapter 3 Assembling the 1870s
- Chapter 4 Feminism, Reform, and the Professional Woman Writer in the 1870s
- Chapter 5 The ‘High Victorian’
- Chapter 6 Middlemarch, High Realism, and the Victorian Everyday
- Chapter 7 The Post-sensational Seventies
- Chapter 8 The Shock of Aestheticism
- Chapter 9 ‘Verses, Good and Bad’
- Chapter 10 The Comings and Goings of High Victorian Nonsense
- Chapter 11 Transforming Pages
- Chapter 12 Literature, Science, and the Voice of the 1870s
- Chapter 13 A ‘sweet especial rural scene’? Nature, Culture, and Agriculture in the 1870s
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 11 - Transforming Pages
Illustration, Materiality, and the Child Reader in the 1870s
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2025
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1870s
- Nineteenth-Century Literature In Transition
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1870s
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 The 1870s and the Invention of Victorian Literature
- Chapter 2 Media Technologies, the Organisation of Knowledge, and 1870s Literary Culture
- Chapter 3 Assembling the 1870s
- Chapter 4 Feminism, Reform, and the Professional Woman Writer in the 1870s
- Chapter 5 The ‘High Victorian’
- Chapter 6 Middlemarch, High Realism, and the Victorian Everyday
- Chapter 7 The Post-sensational Seventies
- Chapter 8 The Shock of Aestheticism
- Chapter 9 ‘Verses, Good and Bad’
- Chapter 10 The Comings and Goings of High Victorian Nonsense
- Chapter 11 Transforming Pages
- Chapter 12 Literature, Science, and the Voice of the 1870s
- Chapter 13 A ‘sweet especial rural scene’? Nature, Culture, and Agriculture in the 1870s
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Abstract: This chapter examines 1870s children’s literature materially. It does this by emphasising, first, the children’s book as a material object and, second, the process of producing children’s literature within the material conditions of Victorian publishing. A discussion of the distinctive material attractions of the movable picturebook for children, such as three-dimensional pop-up pictures and manipulable mechanical figures, sets up the chapter’s focus on the value added by considering the material configuration of word and image in other books from the period. This facilitates a reassessment of well-known texts including Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (1871), Kate Greenaway’s Under the Window (1879), and Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song (1874). Features such as the distribution of illustrations across pages, the variation of editions’ content, and illustrations changing from manuscript to print restore children’s classics as materially specific objects rather than timeless texts conveyed immaterially from the 1870s to the present
Keywords
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1870s , pp. 229 - 253Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025