Classics in Short No.48: Lavender’s Blue

A book to keep for babies? Haven’t got a clue? Off you go and get ’em… <!–break–>

T’other little tune, t’other little tune,

Prithee, Love, play me t’other little tune.

Thus spake the recalcitrant maiden whose brief history may be found above on page 16 should anyone wish to know.

There too you will find

a review, late by a couple of hundred years, of a nursery-rhyme book which stands in loco parentis to all the nursery-rhyme books that followed, both in England and in North America, establishing once and for all the name of Mother Goose as purveyor of popular verses as well as popular tales.

What also matters

is that from the start these apparently trivial and nonsensical recitings attracted an unexpected amount of editorial care from those unacknowledged souls who compiled and published them. This is especially true of the first-ever collection (almost the first-ever, and surely the greatest-ever children’s book) Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book of 1744, a tiny volume containing 38 nursery rhymes and engraved in such a way that its page-openings alternate red and black printings. Both the look of these books and the way the rhymes are arranged suggest thoughtfulness, and that tradition of editorial care has continued alike in Victorian times with Charles Bennett’s delicious Old Nurse’s Book of 1858 or today with that panoramic masterpiece, Michael Foreman’s Mother Goose (Walker Books).

T’other little tune

is what all these books play, incorporating things heard in Mother Goose’s Melody but with their own key signatures giving a distinctiveness not to be found in other popular collections where words and pictures are slung together any old how. And high on the list of Mrs Goose’s devoted epigones is Kathleen Lines’s Lavender’s Blue with its rhymes set in the matrices of Harold Jones’s illustrations, now reissued by O.U.P. in celebration of its fiftieth birthday (*).

[Pause for identification:

So speedily is earth shovelled over eminent figures from the past that I should record here that Kay Lines was a leading authority on children’s books both past and present during the decades around the Second World War. Harold Jones sprang to fame as an illustrator with a wonderful set of autolithographs which became This Year, Next Year (1938) with verses attached by Walter de la Mare. The Lines/Jones partnership began when he provided pen drawings for her influential catalogue of a ‘library of books for children’ Four to Fourteen (1950) and they later worked harmoniously on several more picture and story books which do not deserve to be forgotten.]

The editing of Lavender’s Blue

probably presented Kay Lines with an entertaining jigsaw puzzle. She chose 167 rhymes (I know not whence) and set about organising them to bring out whatever comparative relationships she might find without being too plonkingly categoric. She gave the book nine sections, titled with the first rhyme in each, and while some have obvious themes: alphabets, riddles etc, others are more general featuring, say, rhymes about human or animal characters. Four pages at the end give instructions on how to manage the finger-plays or nursery-rhyme games that crop up in some of the sections: ‘Dance, Thumbkin, dance’… ‘Oranges and lemons’… ‘Pease porridge hot’…

This is ingeniously done

and is matched by the circumambient pictures. Following on a larger scale the ancient precedent of little Tommy Thumb Harold Jones alternates plain monochrome page-openings with those in full colour (‘full’ not meaning garish acrylics but subtly modulated watercolours) and he triumphantly achieves a graphic unity for the book without imposing any repetitive formulae. While many of the illustrations may simply represent a given scene or those appearing in it – roughly what Thomas Bewick had done for Mother Goose’s Melody – these are interspersed with variant treatments: synchronic pictures showing a progression of incidents within a single drawing; scenes framed by arches or even portrait frames; rhymes printed within the outline of an object such as Polly’s kettle. The draughtsmanship is unfailingly confident – the free monochrome drawing a lesson to all who would learn – and the colour-work, reproduced from that in the first printing, while somewhat ‘hotter’, is vastly better than what the book suffered in previous reprints.

The compatibility between compiler and artist

has resulted in a nursery-rhyme book which is indeed fitted for whatever today may pass as a nursery. Here is the comfort, the security of the child journeying with a loved adult through a fanciful pastoral world peopled by almost doll-like figures wearing mob caps and steeple hats and where monstrous crows may cause consternation, but not fear, to three men in a tub across the gutter of the page. And somewhere behind Harold Jones’s bosky landscapes you may be sure that a lark is ascending.

What the creators and recipients

of Lavender’s Blue are collaborating in though is not the tame recycling of a never-existent rural idyll. It may be that, if you compare the book’s content with that of Mother Goose’s Melody, you will find that the 27 corresponding rhymes are the less aggressive ones – no smelly pie-sellers or drunken soldiers here. But rhymes of that timbre lie closer to the oral tradition of street song and playground chant, best left to the voices of the children themselves. What Kathleen Lines and Harold Jones have preserved for us with such happy consistency is the mysterious dream-poetry of the nursery: wild, impossible events and jokes that were never invented but arrived out of the aether. They not only defy, they discountenance rational explanation but once they are absorbed they become an education in delight.

(*) Is it prudent, Madam Editrice, for me to reveal that just about the first publisher’s party I ever attended was at O.U.P.’s London office at Amen House for the book’s first publication?

Lavender’s Blue; a book of nursery rhymes, compiled by Kathleen Lines, pictured by Harold Jones, Oxford University Press 2004, 0 19 278227 4, £14.99. An issue is also available in a slip-case (but without a jacket), garnished with a book label on the front free endpaper recording that it is one of 1250 copies so bedizened (0 19 278226 6). Yours for only £30.

Brian Alderson is founder of the Children’s Books History Society and chldren’s book consultant for The Times.