Victorian Alphabet Books and the Education of the Eye: British Approaches to Literacy through the Nineteenth Century

Victorian Alphabet Books and the Education of the Eye shows how the familiar genre went beyond mere reading instruction to offer nineteenth-century British writers, illustrators, and publishers a site for representing and re-thinking literacy itself. This interdisciplinary study traces how individuals throughout the Victorian era deployed alphabet books to promote visual literacy or oral culture as a vital complement to textual literacy. Their strategies ranged from puns and political allusions to elaborate designs that addressed adult audiences alongside or even instead of children. As the format became more familiar in the first part of Victoria's reign, George Cruikshank, William Makepeace Thackeray, Henry Cole, and Edward Lear were quick to recognize its critical potential. This history pivots around the mid-1860s and 1870s, when the production of illustrated alphabet books exploded thanks to evolving printing technology and national education reform. Case studies of individual works and makers show how a revolution in picture books reflected and responded to laws assuring children's access to schooling. On the one hand, Socialist artist Walter Crane was able to develop alphabetical illustration from a utilitarian mid-century product into an aesthetically rich, yet accessibly priced "education of the eye." On the other hand, Kate Greenaway, Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), and their publishers tended to leverage commercialized nostalgia against pedagogy. This survey concludes by showing how market-oriented trends and the development of photographic reproduction toward the end of the century fed into interpretations of the alphabet, including works by Rudyard Kipling and Hilaire Belloc, that reflected growing ambivalence about industrialized print culture. Cover Title Page Copyright Page Acknowledgments Contents List of Illustrations Introduction: The Alphabet and Literacies The What and Why of Alphabet Books Words and/as Images Picturing Literacy Shaping Readers and Reading 1 Alphabet Books and Satire at the Dawn of Victorian England A is for Audiences Literacy High and Low The Thackeray Alphabet Cruikshank’s A Comic Alphabet ''X is only X'' 2 Mid-Century Alphabets and Waiting for the Revolution Early Designs The ABCs of Punch Henry Cole and An Alphabet of Quadrupeds The Alphabet Book as Toy Book 3 The Perils and Pleasures of Pronunciation and Perspective in Edward Lear's Nonsense Alphabets The Alphabet Again and Again The Nonsense of Spelling Cracks in the Abecedarian Faade The Playful End(s) of Lear's Alphabets 4 Walter Crane, the Alphabet, and the Value of ''So-Called Children's Books'' The Academician of the Nursery Audience(s) and Ambitions The ABCs of Revolution The Child in the Field of Cultural Production 5 Brand-Name Alphabet Books and Reading the Victorian Marketplace What's in a Name The Mass Production of Childhood The Alphabet According to Kate Greenaway Phiz and the Brand with a Life of Its Own The Alphabet and Childhood for Sale 6 Inevitable Literacy and the Alphabet at the Fin de Sie-.25excle The Forms of ''Progress'' Kipling's Technological Teleology and Its Discontents Industrialized Print Culture and Belloc's Discontent The Child as ''Heir to All the Ages'' Works Cited Index