onfused with his namesake--is one
who has rarely illustrated works for little children, but in the famous
"British Workman" series in _Fun_, in dozens of Tom Hood's "Comic
Annuals," and elsewhere, has provoked as many hearty laughs from the
nursery as from the drawing-room. In "The Flame Flower" (Dent) we find a
side-splitting volume, illustrated with 100 drawings by the author. For
this only Mr. J. F. Sullivan has plunged readers deep in debt, and when
one recalls the amazing number of his delicious absurdities in the
periodical literature of at least twenty years past, it seems astounding
to find that the name of so entirely well-equipped a draughtsman is yet
not the household word it should be.
E. J. Sullivan, with eighty illustrations to the Cranford edition of
"Tom Brown's Schooldays," comes for once within our present limit.
J. D. Batten is responsible for the illustration of so many important
collections of fairy tales that it is vexing not to be able to reproduce
a selection of his drawings, to show the fertility of his invention and
his consistent improvement in technique. The series, "Fairy Tales of the
British Empire," collected and edited by Mr. Jacobs, already include
five volumes--English, More English, Celtic, More Celtic, and Indian,
all liberally illustrated by J. D. Batten, as are "The Book of Wonder
Voyages," by J. Jacobs (Nutt), and "Fairy Tales from the Arabian
Nights," edited by E. Dixon, and a second series, both published by
Messrs. J. M. Dent and Co. "A Masque of Dead Florentines" (Dent) can
hardly be brought into our subject.
Louis Davis has illustrated far too few children's books. His Fitzroy
pictures show how delightfully he can appeal to little people, and in
"Good Night Verses," by Dollie Radford (Nutt), we have forty pages of
his designs that are peculiarly dainty in their quality, and tender in
their poetic interpretation of child-life.
"Wymps" (Lane, 1896), with illustrations by Mrs. Percy Dearmer, has a
quaint straightforwardness, of a sort that exactly wins a critic of the
nursery.
J. C. Sowerby, a designer for stained glass, in "Afternoon Tea" (Warne,
1880), set a new fashion for "aesthetic" little quartos costing five or
six shillings each. This was followed by "At Home" (1881), and "At Home
Again" (1886, Marcus Ward), and later by "Young Maids and Old China."
These, despite their popularity, display no particular invention. For
the real fancy and "conceit" of the books yo
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