EARLY YEARS: BIRTH—AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CHILDHOOD—FIRST VISIT TO ROLLESTON—LOVE OF FLOWERS—FAMILY TROUBLE—EVENING PARTIES AND ENTERTAINMENTS.

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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.’

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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.

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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.

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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—i18

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.

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.

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