EARLY YEARS: BIRTH—AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CHILDHOOD—FIRST VISIT TO
ROLLESTON—LOVE OF FLOWERS—FAMILY TROUBLE—EVENING PARTIES AND
ENTERTAINMENTS.
[Illustration: On a Letter to Ruskin.]
Kate Greenaway was born at 1, Cavendish Street, Hoxton, on the 17th
day of March 1846. She was the daughter of John Greenaway and of his
wife, Elizabeth Jones. John Greenaway was a prominent wood-engraver
and draughtsman, whose work is to be found in the early volumes of the
_Illustrated London News_ and _Punch_, and in the leading magazines and
books of the day. His paternal grandfather was also the forebear of the
artist, Mr. Frank Dadd, R.I., whose brother married Kate’s sister.
The family consisted of (1) Elizabeth Mary (‘Lizzie’), afterwards Mrs.
Frank Coxall, born in 1841; (2) Catherine (‘Kate’), born in 1846; (3)
Frances Rebecca (‘Fanny’), afterwards Mrs. Edward Martin Dadd, born
in 1850; and (4) Alfred John, born in 1852. It was the intention of
the parents that the second child should bear the name of Kate, but by
a blunder Catherine was substituted. Kate she called herself all her
life, and so entirely was Catherine dropped that she always had to be
reminded of her real name before she put her signature to any document
in which strict accuracy was required.
Kate’s early life was, in the general acceptance of the term,
uneventful. Unimportant, childhood never is; but what is important in
it is generally hard to come at. The reason is that we are rarely able
to recall the trivial yet very material events which make up the sum
of child-experience; and the biographer is commonly left to ferret out
the more salient points of the little one’s surroundings, and dress
out his own conjectures of the effect they may have exercised upon the
subject of his memoir. In the case of Kate Greenaway we are in a better
position, for there are in existence certain records from the pen of
the artist herself, candid and direct, and as particular in detail as
if they had been studied, as it were, with her eye at the microscope of
memory. These records, however, are not the best that could be desired,
either in kind or in form, so that their proper presentation is not
without some difficulty.
A few years before her death Miss Greenaway conceived the idea of
writing the autobiography of her childhood. This she did not live to
accomplish, nor did she succeed in producing what can properly be
called a complete rough draft of her nursery days. What she left behind
is the long detailed record of undigested recollections and sensations
as she recalled them, marked by discursiveness and lacking in literary
form. In the desire to render acceptable such of them as are here
reproduced, we have deemed it wise to substitute, in the main, the
third for the first person singular.
No apology need be offered for dwelling upon the trifling personal
details with which character is built up, more particularly when they
are revealed by a searching observation reinforced by an unusually
retentive memory. These things come to be of peculiar interest and,
combining to form a study of child-life, may be said to possess real
value and importance. A certain lack of sequence and cohesion may be
apparent in the record of these early days; but the events happened
and the impressions were created, and from them there arose the Kate
Greenaway who was destined to be beloved of two continents. The reader
is therefore prepared, so far as the early years are concerned, for a
cumulative effect rather than for a rigidly consecutive narrative.
Kate’s own ideas on the relative merits of biography and autobiography
may be gathered from the following quotations from letters written to
her friend, Miss Violet Dickinson, in 1897:—
What an interesting thing nearly every one’s life would be if they
could put it all down; but it is only the horrid ones who will, like
Marie Bashkirtseff or Rousseau—but if nice people could tell all their
mind it would be charming. Did you ever read Goethe’s _Life_—the
autobiography? All the early part is so charming,—only there you feel
he also was very heartless. And he was, but it is so charmingly told.
Sometimes frankness is curious. I once met a young man who told me
he was a coward and a liar—and it turned out _he was_, to my great
surprise. It isn’t often people know themselves so truthfully, or, if
they know, they don’t say.
And again:
I am longing to read the Tennyson _Life_—shall send for it next week. I
don’t know, I’m sure, who is best to write a Life—outsiders don’t know
half what any one is like, and relations often get a wrong idea of you
because they are cross at little points in your character that annoy
them. I feel an autobiography or diary is best. A person must reveal
himself most in that.
Kate was a precocious child. We have it on her authority that when she
was eight months old she could walk alone, and while still an infant
criticised the pronunciation of her sister Lizzie, who was five years
her senior. She was not a year old when she was taken by her mother to
visit her great-aunt, Mrs. Wise, the wife of a farmer at Rolleston, a
village some five miles from Newark and fourteen from Nottingham. And
Aunt Aldridge, her mother’s sister, lived in the neighbourhood, at a
lonely farm, weirdly called the ‘Odd House.’
[Illustration: IN THE CHAPPELLS’ COTTAGE AT ROLLESTON—THE KITCHEN.
_An early drawing by Kate Greenaway._
(See No. 1 on Sketch Plan.)]
At Aunt Wise’s house Mrs. Greenaway was taken seriously ill, and it
was found necessary to put little Kate out to nurse. Living on a small
cottage farm in Rolleston[1] was an old servant of Mrs. Wise’s, Mary
Barnsdale, at this time married to Thomas Chappell. With the Chappells
lived Mary’s sister, Ann. It was of this household that Kate became
an important member, and forthwith to the child Mary became ‘Mamam,’
her husband ‘Dadad,’ and her sister Ann ‘Nanan.’ This was as soon as
she found her tongue. Among her earliest recollections came a hayfield
named the ‘Greet Close,’ where Ann carried Kate on one arm, and on
the other a basket of bread and butter and cups, and, somehow, on a
third, a can of steaming tea for the thirsty haymakers—which tells us
the season of the year. Kate was sure that she had now arrived at the
age of two, and for the rest of her life she vividly remembered the
beauty of the afternoon, the look of the sun, the smell of the tea, the
perfume of the hay, and the great feeling of Happiness—the joy and the
love of it—from her royal perch on Ann’s strong arm.
[Illustration: SKETCH OF THE KITCHEN AT ROLLESTON.
Showing the disposition of the apartment pictured in the three
coloured illustrations.]
Another remembrance is of picking up tiny pebbles and putting them
into a little round purple-and-white basket with another little girl
named Dollie, who was engaged in the same serious business with another
purple-and-white basket. Kate was dressed in a pink cotton frock and a
white sun-bonnet—she would have sworn, she tells us, to the colours
half a century later, under cross-examination if necessary. Indeed, she
seems never to have forgotten the colour of anything her whole life
long.
But great as was the joy of tiny pebbles and of playmate Dollie, far
greater was the happiness inspired by the flowers, with which she
struck up friendships that were to last to her life’s end. There was
the snapdragon, which opened and shut its mouth as she chose to pinch
it. This she ‘loved’; but the pink moss rose, which grew by the dairy
window, she ‘revered.’ It grew with the gooseberry bushes, the plum
tree, and the laburnum in the little three-cornered garden near the
road. Then there was a purple phlox on one side of the gate and a
Michaelmas daisy on the other side; and outside the gate (she put this
into a picture years afterwards, and to her indignation was laughed
at for it) grew a wallflower. But though she loved and revered the
garden flowers, they were never to her what those were which grew of
their own free will in the fields and hedgerows. There were the large
blue crane’s-bill, the purple vetch, and the toad-flax, and, above all
others, the willow-herb, which to her sisters and brother was ‘Kitty’s
flower.’ These were the prime favourites, and, in the absence of the
most elementary botanical knowledge, had to be christened ‘my little
blue flower,’ ‘yellow dragon’s-mouth,’ or what not, for private use.
Farther away were the more rarely visited fairylands of the Cornfield
and the Flower-bank, only to be reached under Ann’s grown-up escort
when she was free of a Sunday. In the first, where the corn-stalks grew
far above Kate’s head, the enchanted vistas reached, so it seemed,
away for ever and ever, and the yellow avenues were brilliant with
pimpernels, pansies, blue and white veronica, tiny purple geraniums,
the great crimson poppies, and the persistent bindweed, which twined up
the stems of the wheat. But the Flower-bank was better still—a high
raised pathway which sloped down to a field on the one side and what
was to her a dark, deep stream on the other, with here and there stiles
to be climbed and delightfully terrifying foot-planks to be crossed;
then through a deep, shady plantation until a mill was reached, and
right on, if one went far enough, to the river Trent itself. Then, in
the plantation grew the large blue crane’s-bill, the purple vetch, and
the large white convolvulus, which with the vetch trailed over the sloe
and blackberry bushes. And up in the trees cooed wood-pigeons; and,
in the autumn, all sorts of birds were gathered in view of flights
to warmer lands. Round the mill wound the little river Greet, with
forget-me-nots on the banks and overhanging apple trees, from which
apples, falling off in the autumn, would float away and carry with
them Kate’s baby thoughts on and on to the sea, and so to the new and
wonderful world of the imagination which was to be her heritage, and
which she was to share with children yet unborn.
[Illustration: THE KITCHEN PUMP AND OLD CHEESE PRESS, ROLLESTON.
_Early drawings by Kate Greenaway._
(See Nos. 2 and 3 on Sketch Plan.)]
One thing only marred her pleasure, one note of melancholy discord
on these Sunday morning walks—the church bells, which from earliest
childhood spoke to her of an undefined mournfulness lying somewhere
in the background of the world of life and beauty. She had heard them
tolled for the passing of some poor soul, and ever after that they took
the joy out of her day for all their assumption of a gayer mood.
As Kate grew a year or two older, another prime entertainment was to
rise at five o’clock in the morning and go off with Ann to the ‘Plot’
to fetch the cows. The ‘Plot’ was a great meadow to which all the
Rolleston cottagers had the right to send their cows, the number of
beasts being proportioned to the size of the cottage. The Chappells
sent three, Sally, Strawberry, and Sarah Midgeley, and the sight was
to see Ann running after them—Ann, tall and angular, running with
great strides and flourishing a large stick which she brought down
with sounding thwacks on to tough hides and protruding blade-bones.
The cows were evil-minded and they resented uncalled-for interference
with their morning meal. They were as determined to stay in the plot as
Ann was to get them out of it; sometimes, indeed, so determined were
they on defiance that they would wander into the ‘High Plot,’ and then
their disgrace and punishment were terrible to behold. ‘Get along in,
ye bad ‘uns,’ she would cry in her shrill voice, and down the stick
would come; until at last, hustling each other from where the blows
fell thickest, and running their horns into each other’s skin, while
little Kate grew sick with terror, they were at last marshalled to the
milking-place, and peace would reign once more.
After a year or two at Rolleston, Kate was taken back to London, to
Napier Street, Hoxton, whither the Greenaways had now moved.
Up to this time the family had been in easy circumstances, but trouble
was now to come. Mr. Greenaway had been engaged to engrave the
illustrations for a large and costly book. The publishers failed and
he never received a penny of his money. There was nothing for it but
to make the best of a bad job, and Mrs. Greenaway was not one to be
daunted. The family was removed to Upper Street, Islington, opposite
the church, and while her husband sought further work, Mrs. Greenaway
courageously set up shop and sold lace, children’s dresses, and all
kinds of fancy goods. The venture was successful, and the children
found nothing to complain of in their new surroundings.
Fashioned out of the middle portion of an old Elizabethan country
house, the wings being likewise converted into two other small shops
and the rooms apportioned accordingly, the new home was a very castle
of romance. To the Greenaways fell the grand staircase and the first
floor, with rambling passages, several unused rooms, too dilapidated
for habitation, and weird, mysterious passages which led dreadfully to
nowhere. At the back was a large garden, the use of which was held in
common by the three families.
It was in Islington that Kate had her first taste of systematic
education, from Mrs. Allaman, who kept an infants’ school—an old
lady with a large frilly cap, a frilly muslin dress, a scarf over her
shoulders, and a long apron. Here she learned her letters and how to
use needle and cotton. On the whole, she liked the old lady, but all
her life long she could feel the sounding tap of her admonitory thimble
on her infant head in acknowledgment of a needle negligently and
painfully presented point first to the mistress’s finger.
Of all her relations Kate loved best her mother’s mother, ‘Grandma
Jones,’ who lived in Britannia Street, Hoxton, in a house of her own.
She was a bright, clever old lady, with a sharp tongue, fond of shrewd
sayings and full of interesting information. Not her least charm was
that she always had Coburg loaves for tea, beautiful toast, raspberry
jam, and honey. Of Grandfather Jones, Kate writes:
My mother’s father was a Welshman. She used to tell us he belonged to
people who were called Bulldicks because they were big men and great
fighters, and that they used as children to slide down the mountains
on three-legged milking-stools. He was very bad-tempered and made
them often very unhappy, but he was evidently intellectual and fond
of reading. My mother has often told me how he read _Sir Charles
Grandison_, and she used to stand behind his chair unknown to him and
read it also over his shoulder.
On her twentieth birthday he insisted upon giving a party, because he
said he should die before she was twenty-one, and he did.
Other relations of whom the little Greenaways saw a great deal were
their aunts Rebecca, a bookbinder, and Mary, a wood-engraver. Aunt Mary
was a great favourite because she always had bread and treacle or bread
and butter and sugar for tea. But on Sundays there were oranges and
apples, cakes and sweets, with _The Pilgrim’s Progress_, _John Gilpin_,
or _Why the Sea became Salt_ to follow. Especially from Aunt Mary,
later on, did Kate derive her deep love of poetry.
It was in Aunt Mary’s company that a certain disastrous walk was taken
up the City Road one enchanted night, dimly lighted by the stars
overhead and by the red and blue chemist’s-bottles in the windows
below. Sister Fanny was of the company, and both the little girls,
overcome by the splendours of the scene, tumbled off the curb into the
road, and arrived home muddy and disgraced. And the whole was the more
terrible because Fanny was resplendent—(for there seems no limit to
Kate’s sartorial recollection)—Fanny was resplendent in ‘a dark-red
pelerine, with three rows of narrow velvet round the cape, and a drab
plush bonnet, trimmed with chenille and red strings; and Kate in a
dark-red frock, a bonnet like her sister’s, and a little grey cloth
jacket scalloped at the edge, also bound and trimmed with red velvet.
And each had a grey squirrel muff.’ From which particularity we see how
the artist _in posse_ was already storing her mind with matters which
were to be of use to her in garment-designing in time to come. As we
proceed, we shall more and more realise how important a factor in her
artistic development was this early capacity for accurate observation,
ravenously seizing upon and making her own the infinitely little
details of her childish experiences. It was the vividness of these
playtime impressions that made their recall possible at such period as
her life-work had need of them.
There was another aunt, Mrs. Thorne, Mrs. Greenaway’s youngest sister,
who lived at Water Lane, near the River Lee, of whom Kate by no means
approved, for hers was an extremely ill-ordered household. But though
visits there left a very disagreeable impression, they were big with
something of delightful import which had its development many years
later. It illustrates well how impressions absorbed in early years
coloured the artist’s performances in far-off days to come.
Aunt Thorne’s garden was overrun with a glory of innumerable
nasturtiums. They were, in Kate’s own words, the ‘gaudiest of the
gaudy,’ and she ‘loved and admired them beyond words.’ She was
possessed by their splendour, and finally got them visualised in
a quite wonderful way in a dream with a background of bright blue
palings. For many a long year she bore the entrancing vision about
with her, and then gave it permanent expression for the delight of
thousands in her picture of Cinderella fetching her pumpkin. The
visits, therefore, which were so distasteful at the time were neither
without result nor unimportant. Moreover, the nasturtium dream brought
to Kate, who as a child was a great dreamer, a new experience. Two or
three years before she had dreamed that she had come to a cottage in a
wood and knocked at the door. It was opened by an old woman whose face
suddenly assumed an expression so awful that she awoke frightened and
trembling. In the nasturtium dream there was just such another cottage
with just such another door, at which, after she had passed through
the garden and had absorbed its beauties, she also knocked. Then in a
moment she knew that the door would be opened by the old woman with the
horrible face of three years before. A deadly faintness seized upon her
and she again woke in horror. This was her first experience of a dream
within a dream.
Many of her dreams were recurrent and are common enough to childhood.
One constantly repeated vision, she tells us, brought to her her
dearly loved father. She would dream that, gazing into his face, the
countenance would change and be, not his face, but another’s. With
this change would come an agony of misery, and she would desperately
tear off the false face, only to be confronted by another and yet
another, but never his own, until in mercy she awoke and knew that
the terrible mutations were as unreal as they were terrifying. Again,
an often-repeated dream was of falling through water, down, down past
the green weeds, slowly, slowly, sink, sink, with a sort of rhythmic
pause and start until the bottom was reached, and she gently awoke. Or
something would be in pursuit, and just as capture was imminent, she
would feel that she could fly. Up, up she would soar, then float down
over a steep staircase, out at one window and in at another, until she
found herself lying in an ecstasy awake and wanting the delightful
experience all over again.
Kate’s childhood seems, on the whole, to have been happy enough, not so
much in consequence of her surroundings as of her temperament. Writing
to Miss Violet Dickinson forty years later, she says:
Did you ever know Mr. Augustus Hare? I find his book so very
interesting. I once was at the Locker-Lampsons’ when he was there. I did
not feel very sympathetic then, but now I read his Life, I feel so very
sorry for the poor unhappy little child he was. And the horrid stern
people he lived with—it makes me feel I don’t know what, as I read....
I can’t think _how_ people can be hard and cruel to children. They
appeal to you so deeply. I had such a very happy time when I was a
child, and, curiously, was so very much happier then than my brother
and sister, with exactly the same surroundings. I suppose my imaginary
life made me one long continuous joy—filled everything with a strange
wonder and beauty. Living in that childish wonder is a most beautiful
feeling—I can so well remember it. There was always something
more—behind and beyond everything—to me; the golden spectacles were
very very big.
Late on in life, too, she used to compare the ‘don’t-much-care’
attitude of the modern child with the wildness of her own enjoyments
and the bitterness of her own disappointments. It was a complaint with
her that the little girl in Jane Taylor’s poems who cried because
it rained and she couldn’t go for a drive was a child of the past,
whereas her modern representative, surfeited with treats, takes her
disappointments stoically, or at least apathetically, and never sheds
a tear. There may have been some grounds for the comparison, but
probably what she missed in the modern child was the latent artistic
emotion with which she had been endowed at birth. For this power of
joyful realisation had its necessary converse: the very intensity of
anticipation which made it necessary for treats to be concealed from
her until the morning of their occurrence, and her wild abandonment to
pleasure when it came, found its counterpart in fits of depression and
gloom, such as do not come to the humdrum and unimaginative child. At
such times she would make up her mind not only to be not happy, but to
be aggressively gloomy. One day, indeed, she went so far as to announce
at breakfast that she did not intend to smile the whole day long, nor
indeed to utter a single word. The announcement was received with
derisive laughter, for the others knew it was only Kate’s way, and that
at the afternoon party which was imminent she would be the gayest of
the gay. And the worst of it was that Kate knew in her heart of heart
that they were right, and that when the time came she would laugh and
be happy with the rest.
One of these well-remembered gatherings was the B.’s party, an annual
affair, held in a long rambling furniture shop, full of dark corners,
weird shadows, and general mystery. Here it was, year in, year out,
that they met the little Miss C.’s, who, full of their own importance,
seeing that they were much better dressed than the other children,
annually sat silent, sulky, and superior. Here too disported himself
the debonnaire Johnny B., a very wild boy, who generally managed to
break some furniture, and had such dexterity in the lancers that he
could shed his shoes as he went round and get into them again without
stopping. Fate claimed him for the Navy, and he passed out of their
lives in a midshipman’s uniform.
Another was Mr. D.’s annual Twelfth Night party, notable for its
very big Twelfth cake, its drawing for king and queen, and its
magic-lantern. Kate never became queen, but at Miss W.’s party, quite
the most important of the year, she once had her triumph. According to
her own account—
It was some way off; even now I remember the shivery feeling of the
drive in the cab, and the fear that always beset me that we might have
gone on the wrong day. There was Miss W., Miss W.’s brother, Miss W.’s
aunt, and Miss W.’s mother. Miss W. taught my eldest sister Lizzie
music, and all her pupils were invited once a year to this party, their
sisters also, but no brothers—at least, two brothers only I ever
remember seeing there.
[Illustration: On a Letter to Ruskin.]
There was one big tomboy sort of girl, with beautiful blue eyes and
tangled fair hair, who used to have a grown-up brother come to fetch
her; this girl I loved and admired intensely, and never spoke to her in
my life. She had merry ways and laughing looks, and I adored her. The
other brother was the cause of my one triumph. One party night there
was just this little boy—among all the girls—and tea over and dancing
about to begin, the boy was led to the middle of the room by Miss W.,
and told out of all the girls to choose his partner for the first dance.
He took his time—looked slowly round the room, weighing this and
that, and, to my utter discomfiture and dire consternation, he chose
me—moment of unwished triumph—short-lived also, for he didn’t remain
faithful, but fell a victim later on to the wiles of some of the young
ladies nearly twice his age. I remember I was much relieved, became
fast and devoted friends with a nice little girl, passed an agreeable
evening, and remember at supper-time surreptitiously dropping an
apple-tart I loathed behind a fender. I daresay it was good really, but
it was tart with the tartness of lemonade and raspberryade, two things I
disliked at that time.
But delightful as were these private parties, they were as nothing
compared with the rarer visits to the theatres or other places of
entertainment. On these never-to-be-forgotten occasions Mr. Greenaway,
whose work was chiefly done away from home, would turn up quite
unexpectedly at tea-time, would pretend that he had come home for
nothing in particular, and would playfully keep the eager children
on the tenterhooks of expectation. But it was only part of a playful
fraud, for they knew well that nothing would tempt him early from
his work but some thrilling treat in store for them. What delight
there was, when finally the secret of their destination leaked out,
to scramble over tea, hurry on best clothes, thread dark streets, and
finally blink their way into the magic circle of the blazing theatre
itself, with its fascinating smell of oranges and gas, the scraping of
violins, and all the mysterious titillations of the expectant senses.
Kate’s first taste of the theatre was _Henry the Fifth_ at Sadler’s
Wells. Then came the _Midsummer Night’s Dream_, _Henry the Fourth_,
_The Lady of Lyons_, and (at Astley’s) _Richard the Third_. It was at
Astley’s, too, when she must have been several years older, that she
saw a piece called _The Relief of Lucknow_, in which General Havelock
rode on to the stage on a beautiful white horse. This made so great an
impression upon her that she burst into tears, whereupon her sister
said she was ‘a silly’ and her father said she wasn’t; for the awful
tragedy of the Indian Mutiny was at that time filling everybody’s
thoughts, and with the details of it she had grown terribly familiar by
poring over the pictures in the _Illustrated London News_. Moreover,
her imagination had stimulated her pencil at this time to make many
dramatic drawings of ladies, nurses, and children being pursued by
bloodthirsty sepoys; but the pencil was of slate, and consequently
these earliest known drawings were wiped out almost as soon as executed.
Hardly less enchanting than these theatrical experiences were the days
which brought them tickets for the Polytechnic or took them to the
Crystal Palace. The former was not yet the haunt of Pepper’s Ghost, or
of Liotard (in wax) on his trapeze, but it was quite enchanting enough
with its Diving Bell and the goggle-eyed Diver, who tapped the pennies,
retrieved from the green depths of his tank, on the sounding brass of
his helmet. The Palace, with its Alhambra Courts, its great fountains,
its tall water towers, and other innumerable delights, was an Abode of
Bliss. Those were days in which, to her memory, the sun seemed always
to be shining, the sky always to be blue, and the hours never long
enough for all their joyous possibilities. And, though the time had to
come when the sun sometimes forgot to shine, and, when it did, threw
longer shadows before her, Kate Greenaway never wholly forgot, but kept
these joys alive in her heart for the enchantment of others.
[Illustration:
Book-plate designed for Miss Hannah Jane Locker-Lampson, 1898.]
[Illustration: WINTER, 1892.
_From a water-colour drawing in the possession of Stuart M. Samuel,
Esq., M.P._]