Info

• Opens Fri Nov 07 2025
• 120 minutes

Synopsis

Roger Simpson presents a series of 6 talks on
Masters of Childrens Illustration - The Children's Crusade.
A Brief History of Children's Illustration

£10.00 per talk, £51.00 for all 6 bought in advance in one transaction.

January 16th:

The Children’s Crusade. A Brief History of Children’s Illustration.

• The Invention of Childhood
• The Puritan tradition: Samuel Griswold Goodrich, “Peter Parley”
• George Cruikshank, German Popular Stories, 1826; the first modern illustrated children’s book

January 23rd:

The Roots of Alice; Sir John Tenniel: The Invisible Man.

• Author and illustrator; the great illustrator’s dilemma: the better they are, the less they are noticed.
• The satirical and historical roots of Alice
• The young Tenniel’s influence on the Alice books, 1865, 1871

January 30th:

The Grotesque.

• Ruskin’s definition
• The Fearful Grotesque: origins in magic
• The Sportive Grotesque: and satire
• The grotesque and children’s literature: from Lewis Carroll to Roald Dahl, Tenniel to Tim Burton. Fear in a controlled context.

February 6th:

Ratty, Toad, and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

• EH Shepard (1879-1976): AA Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, 1826
• Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, 1908, illustrated by Shepard 1931

February 13th

The American Revolution.

• With English children’s literature and illustration stuck in an Edwardian time-warp (and that is not a criticism), the great innovations in the field took place elsewhere — in America

February 20th

The Trouble with Disney.

• He just couldn’t leave the old traditions alone…