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

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A. Robin Hoffman (Senior Editor, Publishing, The Art Institute of Chicago)

Victorian Alphabet Books and the Education of the Eye

British Approaches to Literacy through the Nineteenth Century

A. Robin Hoffman (Senior Editor, Publishing, The Art Institute of Chicago)

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Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

Oxford University Press
21 November 2024

Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 ; Children's literature studies: general

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.

By: A. Robin Hoffman (Senior Editor Publishing The Art Institute of Chicago)
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 135mm,
ISBN: 9780198938132
ISBN 10: 0198938136
Pages: 256
Publication Date: 21 November 2024
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

For more than twenty years, A. Robin Hoffman's research has focused on children's literature and Victorian illustration. This includes master's degrees in English (University of Connecticut, 2005) and art history (University College London, 2007) and a PhD in English, completed spring 2012 at the University of Pittsburgh. That fall, she began a postdoctoral fellowship in museum publishing at the Yale Center for British Art, where she became a curatorial staff member in 2015. Upon moving to Chicago in 2017, Robin joined the publishing department at the Art Institute of Chicago and is now Senior Editor.