A Child's Garden of Christian Verses

PREFACE

A century ago one superb children's book after another was being born: Water Babies, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Hans Brinker, Little Women, Black Beauty, The Five Little Peppers and How they Grew, Tom Sawyer, Uncle Remus, the Princess and Curdie, Little Lord Fauntleroy, and Treasure Island. At that very time the first great children's illustrators were producing books almost every year. Walter Crane (1845-1915), Kate Greenaway (1846-1901), and Ralph Caldecott (1846-1886) produced sixty-two picture books altogether, and they were immensely popular.

Kate Greenaway's success surpassed that of Crane and Caldecott, and in 1878 the 20,000 copies of her book Under the Window sold out so fast that before the publisher could issue a second printing the first copies were reselling at inflated prices. Her popularity spread from England to the United States, France, and Belgium. Soon the Greenaway rage resulted in clothes, dolls, dishes, vases, and even wallpaper based on her sweet old-fashioned but original designs.

Robert Louis Stevenson looked at Kate Greenaway's Birthday Book for Children (1880) and remarked, "These are rather nice rhymes, and I don't think they would be very difficult to do." So from 1881 to 1884 he tried his hand at little rhymes for children, and they were printed in 1885 as A Child's Garden of Verses. Stevenson had hoped to have this book illustrated by Caldecott, Crane, or Greenaway; but they were not available. His verses were published with no illustrations at all, and people loved them anyway.

At last, in this edition, Stevenson's verses for children appear with art by his chosen illustrators Walter Crane and Kate Greenaway. This is art that they produced for other books of Stevenson's day.

As Kate Greenaway aged, she remarked, "I go on liking things more and more, seeing them more and more beautiful." Her famous friend John Ruskin told her she was "a mixed child and woman," because of her childlike wonder. Walter Crane wrote on that very subject:

"It appears to me that there is a certain receptive impressionable quality of mind, whether in young or old, which we call childlike. A fresh direct vision, a quickly stimulated imagination, a love of symbolic and typical form, with a touch of poetic suggestion, a delight in frank gay colour, and a sensitiveness to the variations of line, and contrasts of form—these are some of the characteristics of the child, whether grown up or not. Happy are they who remain children in these respects through life."

I have made clear again for today's children, grown up or not, words and phrases that became obscure in the passing of a hundred years. Moreover, I added a Christian perspective to every poem. Some verses are much as Stevenson wrote them, and others are drastically changed. I urge everyone to read Stevenson's originals, available in any library, in order to know their nostalgia, delicate humor, and wry sweetness "unbaptized."

My hope is that if Robert Louis Stevenson read these adaptations of his verses he could still say of them, as he did a century ago,

"They seem to me to smile, to have a kind of childish treble note that sounds in my ears freshly — not song, if you will, but a child's voice."