Katie Trumpner’s “Ten City Scenes: Commerce, Utopia, and the Birth of the Picture Book” is great for a few reasons, but I’m going to stick to explaining a few nuts and bolts before going into my critique of it.
As one of ten book chapters from Richard Maxwell’s The Victorian Illustrated Book, Trumpner’s piece adds a wonderful amount of historical information detailing the rise of the “picture book.” Trumpner’s main argument does not seem to be that picture books existed in the Victorian period. What she does seem to push forward is the significance of the palpable rise in importance of the “picture book” in mid-seventeenth century and Victorian England. Trumpner explicates the “small size[d]” illustrations of Romantic era looking-glass books, moral dialogues, natural histories, and juvenile guidebooks that could and did “offer intense visual and sensory training,” but were also made up of “arbitrary text-picture juxtapositions” (333). Trumpner does slight mid-seventeenth and eighteenth century picture books, but does credit Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789-94) and Jane Taylor’s City Scenes (1801, 1805) as pivotal works connected to the growth and potent ability of late Victorian picture books (334).
As far as 19th century urban picture books go, Trumpner claims that they were “transitional objects in several senses” because they “grant[ed] considerable autonomy” to both picture and words and “evoke a multisensory world” (334).
What really struck me was an equation that Trumpner uses to make a claim about the formation of a picture book.
She states, “Bookstall +Print Shop + Pickpocket = Picture Book” (335)
The parts of the equation show the importance of the print culture, the working-class citizens of England, and booksellers’ shops in the formation of the picture book during Romantic and Victorian England. Trumpner uses various nineteenth-century texts and shows that the depiction of London shops in children’s books was concurrently used as a didactic device displaying to children the “desire for consumption divorced from need” and prompting middle class parents to teach “shop-struck children to resist” the attraction of shops (336).
Trumpner moves from the nineteenth century childrens books to the early twentieth century children’s books and asserts the urban child’s budding “autonomous agency and curiosity” (366). Giving various examples such as Compton Mackenzie’s Kensington Rhymes, A.A. Milene’s When We Were Very Young, Trumpner makes a great case for the continuing influence of “earlier forms of city life [that] continue to hold a powerful, even magical allure. . .” (374).
I think that Trumpner gives great evidence for her argument of the rise of the picture book as a chronological and anachronistic relationship between children, parents, booksellers, printers, and illustrators. As for the stakes of such a book chapter, her exploration seems to be embedded in her ending sentiment that “children exist between the mundane, greedy, mercantile world, and that another, parallel utopian world that should be there instead” (379). Trumpner seems to want people to understand just how picture books come into being and what that production does for people and to them. I think that she cares for actual children and the figure of the child in the same refreshing breath, since her project deals with both the fictional and lived lives of 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th England’s children. But rather than posit a desire for a utopian world that seems to be all to fictional, maybe scholars from various fields can continue to do more interdisciplinary work and make positive changes for the existing world, the world to come, and the children in it.
