Under the Window
Cover
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| Author | Kate Greenaway/Edmund Evans |
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| Illustrator | Kate Greenaway |
| Cover artist | Kate Greenaway |
| Genre | Toy book |
| Publisher | George Routledge & Son |
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Publication date
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1879 |
| Pages | 64 |
Under the Window: Pictures & Rhymes for Children (London, 1879) was Kate Greenaway's first children's picture book, composed of her own verses and illustrations. Selling over 100,000 copies, the toy book was a commercial success, helped launch Greenaway's career as a children's book illustrator and author in the late 19th century as well as starting what became known as the "Greenaway vogue".
Although Greenaway illustrated over 150 books, Under the Window is one of only two books that she wrote and illustrated; the other was Marigold Garden (1885). The book is considered to be one of the first earliest examples of a designer picture book, and its popularity caused it to be imitated, the most blatant of which was the edition Frederick Warne published within weeks of its release.
In the late 1870s, Greenaway—who had been illustrating greeting cards—persuaded her father, who was also in the engraving business, to show Edmund Evans her manuscript, Under the Window. Evans explains: "I was at once fascinated by the originality of the drawings and the ideas of the verse, so I at once purchased them." Evans considered Greenaway's illustrations to be commercially appealing and encouraged Routledge to publish the book. Of Greenaway's first collection of illustrations and verse, Evans writes:
After I had engraved the blocks and colour blocks, I printed the first edition of 20,000 copies, and was ridiculed by the publishers for risking such a large edition of a six-shilling book; but the edition sold before I could reprint another edition; in the meantime copies were sold at a premium. Reprinting kept on till 70,000 was reached.
Under the Window: Pictures and Rhymes for Children consists of rhymes and traditional nursery rhymes. Greenaway wrote her own verse for the book. In Under the Window, Greenaway presented drawings of children dressed in styles based on the fashions of the turn-of-the-century. This appealed to the sensibilities of the time, since the children's clothing appeared sweetly old-fashioned to Greenaway's contemporaries, the more sophisticated of whom were involved in the Artistic Dress movement of the era. Her books were so popular that the clothing the children in them wore came back into fashion.
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Wikipedia