Gettin' Down-ADown-Derry With Walter de la Mare & Dorothy Lathrop

by Stephen J. Gertz

"What are the salient characteristics of childhood? Children, it will be agreed, live in a world peculiarly their own, so much so that it is doubtful if the adult can do more than very fleetingly reoccupy that far-away consciousness. There is, however, no doubt that the world of the grown-up is to children an inexhaustible astonishment and despair. They brood on us. And perhaps it is well that we are not invited to their pow-wows, until, at any rate, the hatchet for the hundredth time is re-buried. 

"Children are in a sense butterflies, though they toil with an almost inconceivable assiduity after life's scanty pollen and nectar, and though, by a curious inversion of the processes of nature, they may become the half-comatose and purblind chrysalides which too many of us poor mature creatures so ruefully resemble. They are not bound in by their groping senses. Facts to them are the liveliest of chameleons. Between their dream and their reality looms no impassable abyss. 

"There is no solitude more secluded than a child's, no absorption more complete, no insight more exquisite and, one might even add, more comprehensive. As we strive to look back and to live our past again, can we recall any joy, fear, hope or disappointment more extreme than those of our childhood, any love more impulsive and unquestioning, and, alas, any boredom so unmitigated and unutterable?" (Walter de la Mare).

The Enchanted Hill.

Walter de la Mare (1873-1956) made sure children were not bored, at least not while reading one of his books especially written for them. Down-ADown-Derry, a collection of fairy verses published in 1922, presents a charming example of his ability to arrest attention and immediately draw little (and big) readers into another world.

Down-adown-derry,
Sweet Annie Maroon,
Gathering daisies
In the meadows of Doone,
Hears a shrill piping,
Elflike and free,
Where the waters go brawling
In rills to the sea;
Singing down-adown-derry.

"Remembered chiefly as a poet, for both adults and children,  de la Mare was fluent, inventive, technically skillful, and unaffected by fashion. In his favorite themes of childhood, fantasy, and the numinous, commonplace objects and events are invested with mystery, and often with an undercurrent of melancholy" (OCEL).

Off the Ground.

In his March 1919 lecture, Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination, partially quoted above, he asserted that "[children] are contemplatives, solitaries, fakirs, who sink again and again out of the noise and fever of existence and into a waking vision." Children are visionaries, and de la Mare fostered nourishment and gave inspiration to those visions.

Dorothy Lathrop made de la Mare's visions concrete.

Dorothy Pulis Lathrop (1891–1980) was an American author and illustrator of children's books with  more  than  thirty-eight  illustrated  volumes  to  her credit,  published  primarily between  the  years
1919 -1962, with nine issued during the 1930s alone.

Sunk Lyonesse

Lathrop developed a friendship with de la Mare, and ultimately illustrated five of his children's books, including the illustrations for  Crossings (1923), Mr. Bumps (1942), and Bells and Grass (1942).

In 1938 she was awarded the very first Caldecott Medal for her illustrations to Animals in the Bible by Helen Dean Fish.

In 1922, Constable & Co. in London issued Down-ADown-Derry by de la Mare and illustrated with three magnificent full color illustrations and many dramatic and stunning black and white illustrations by Lathrop. It was issued in a limited de luxe edition of 325 copies numbered and signed by the author and bound in full Japanese vellum, pictorially stamped, with the top edge gilt. Constable offered a trade edition in the same year, bound in pictorially stamped blue cloth. The first American edition was issued by Henry Holt in the same year.

Down-adown-derry,
There's snow in the air;
Ice where the lily
Bloomed waxen and fair;
He may call o'er the water,
Cry--cry through the Mill,
But Annie Maroon, alas!
Answer ne'er will;
Singing down-adown-derry.

There, in this last stanza, is the poignant melancholy that de la Mare can capture. Whether male or female, young or old, it makes no difference; winter's onset and the sense of loss and yearning is palpable.
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DE LA MARE, Walter. Down-ADown-Derry. A Book of Fairy Poems by Walter De La Mare with illustrations by Dorothy P. Lathrop. London: Constable & Co., Ltd., [1922]. First edition, Edition De Luxe, limited to 325 large paper copies signed by the author.  Quarto (9 5/8 x 6 3/4 inches; 245 x 170mm.). Three full-page color plates, including frontispiece, with tissue guards. Numerous black and white drawings, many full-page. Top edge gilt, others untrimmed.

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Images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with out thanks.
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Warwick Goble's Fairy Book in a Binding to Behold

by Stephen J. Gertz

Custom binding by Robert Porter, c. 1990,
for The Fairy Book, 1913.

"To many the best of all fairy books is 'The Fairy Book' by the author of 'John Halifax, Gentleman.' We are glad to see the Macmillans have brought out this collection in a handsome edition...The illustrations in color, by Warwick Goble, are as pretty and dainty things of the kind that we have ever seen" (The Nation, December 11, 1913).

"A young girl of wonderful beauty lay asleep on an embroidered bed."
(The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood).

Warwick Goble (1862-1943) was educated at the Westminster School of Art and, early on, worked as a assistant to a printer who specialized in chromolithography. During the early 1890s he contributed illustrations to British magazines, and in 1896 began to illustrate books. In 1909 he become one of Macmillan's resident artists.

"When the lady came she gave the handkerchief to the magician."
(Jack the Giant Killer).

He "was one of the busiest and most versatile British illustrators of the Golden Age, at home with any subject that came his way, from a battle scene to a tea party. He gradually developed into a notable specialist of Japanese and Indian subjects, with a distinctive style recalling both Edmund Dulac and René Bull…

"And she climbed up and easily broke off a branch, with its silver
leaves and golden fruit, and handed it to the knight."
(One Little Eye).

"...Goble moved into the big time in 1909 when he became the resident gift book illustrator for the large publishing firm of Macmillan. The first of his classic de luxe volumes in the Macmillan series was The Water Babies, by Charles Kingsley (1912)…His second de luxe volume was the equally stunning Green Willow, and Other Japanese Fairy Tales (1912) by Grace James. In these 40 colour illustrations, Goble was allowed free rein with his first love, proving that he was second to none in his portrayal of Oriental subjects” (Richard Dalby, The Golden Age of Children’s Book Illustration, pp. 92-93).

"At last she remembered her dream, rushed to the grass-plot,
and there saw him lying apparently dead."
(Beauty and the Beast).

“Two influences on Goble’s work were his initial training as a printer specialising in chromolithography and his extensive travels through the Orient. He favoured soft, flowing watercolours with an oriental flavour which suited the atmosphere of the fairy tales and mystical settings in which he specialised. His understanding of design and the reporduction of colour is evident in his work, for example in his series of colour plates for Stories from the Pentamerone by Giambattista Basile (1911). His watercolours were also published in Gift Books and exhibited at the Royal Academy” (The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English).

"'Is it very far from hence?' asked the wolf."
(Little Red Riding Hood).

The collected fairy tales in The Fairy Book are, Sleeping Beauty; Beauty and the Beast; Jack the Giant Killer; Little One eye, Little Two eyes, and Little Three Eyes; Hop-o'-My-Thumb; Cinderella; Rumpelstizchen; Fortunatus; Riquet with a Tuft; Snow-White and Rose-Red; Jack and the Beanstalk; Graclosa and Percinet; The Invisible Prince; The Woodcutter's Daughter; Brother and Sister; The Fair One with Golden Locks; The Butterfly; The Frog Prince; Prince Cherry; Little Snowdrop; The Blue Bird; The Six Swans; The Hind of the Forest; and The Juniper Tree.

"By the care of the fairy tulip, she was not wounded."
(The Hind of the Forest).

"Mr Warwick Goble's pictures are thoroughly typical of the high standard reached in the best colour illustration of to-day, and we are sure this volume will find favour with the best critics of books such as these, namely, the children who receive them as presents" (The International Studio, Vol. 51, 1914):

Original cloth binding, The Fairy Book, 1913.

 
Dinah Maria Craik (1826-1887), was a respected English novelist and author of childrens books. She compiled and adapted these English, French and German fairy tales and published them in the first  and non-illustrated edition of The Fairy Book in 1863, also issued by Macmillan; her husband, George, was Alexander Macmillan's partner in the firm.

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[GOBLE, Warwick, illust.]. [CRAIK, Dinah Maria, text]. The Fairy Book. The Best Popular Fairy Stories Selected and Rendered Anew. By the author of 'John Halifax, Gentleman'.  With 32 illustrations in colour by Warwick Goble. London: Macmillan and Co., 1913.

First Goble-illustrated edition. Tall octavo (9 3/4 x 6 7/8 in; 248 xz 174 mm). xiii, [1], 378, [1], [1, blank] pp. Thirty-two full-color plates with captioned tissue guards.

Specially bound c. 1990 by Robert Porter in full, polished blue, levant morocco with gilt rules emanating from a gilt sun and three belts of tiny gilt stars and geometric forms in loose orbit, the design reiterated on rear board and spine in blind. Cockerell endpapers. Original cloth preserved at rear. Top edge gilt.

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Images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.

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