The last of the Victorians' John S. Goodall and the Politics of Picture Books - Image ...

‘The last of the Victorians’
John S. Goodall and the Politics of Picture
Books

Margaret D. Stetz

Abstract: The wordless picture books written and illustrated by the British artist John Strickland Goodall
(1908-1996) were an important part of the British “heritage industry” of the 1970s and 1980s. They proved
popular not only with children, but with many adults. Along with their beautiful visual images of idyllic
village life in the Victorian and Edwardian periods, they offered fantasies of aristocrats in large country
manors being waited upon by docile servants. Goodall’s work encouraged his audience’s class-based
nostalgia for fixed social hierarchies, as well as for Britain’s imperial past. It also displayed the artist’s
disgust with the present, and especially with what he saw as the destruction of Old England by urban
development, multi-culturalism, and American influences. This essay explores the tension, however,
between Goodall’s reactionary politics and the innovative, pioneering qualities of his art and his book
designs.

Keywords: Goodall; illustration; picture books; British “heritage industry”; imperial nostalgia

Résumé : Les livres illustrés, sans texte, de l’artiste John Strickland Goodall (1908-1996) sont pour
beaucoup dans “l’industrie patrimoniale” britannique des années 1970 et 1980. Ils ont eu du succès chez les
enfants, mais aussi chez de nombreux adultes. Outre de belles images d’une vie de village idyllique à
l’époque victorienne et édouardienne, ils donnaient aussi à voir des rêves d’aristocrates se faisant servir par
un personnel docile dans de larges propriétés. Le travail de Goodall a encouragé la nostalgie de son public
pour une société strictement hiérarchisée, comme pour l’ancien Empire britannique. Il témoigne aussi du
mépris de l’artiste pour le temps présent et en particulier pour ce qu’il perçoit comme la destruction de la
Vieille Angleterre par le développement urbain, le multiculturalisme et les influences américaines. Cet
article explore la tension entre les tendances politiques réactionnaires de Goodall et ses néanmoins grandes
qualités artistiques : le caractère pionnier et innovant de son dessin et de sa conception du livre.

Mots-clés : Goodall; illustration; livres d’images; “industrie patrimoniale”; britannique, nostalgie pour
l’empire

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This essay is dedicated to Donald D. Stone (1942-2021), who inspired generations of students at the City University of
New York and at Peking University with his deep knowledge of Victorian literature, art, and visual culture, and who
taught us all to love these subjects, just as he did.

                               There is no such thing as value-free art, whether it is purely literary art or the
                               combination of visual and verbal art that constitutes the picturebook. One of the
                               aspects of the art of the picturebook that we must address, therefore, is how the modes
                               of representation in picturebooks are necessarily freighted with sociocultural and
                               political significance. (Sipe 244)

In their 2020 examination of the covers and dust jackets of printed books, The Look of the Book, Peter
Mendelsund and David J. Alworth pay careful attention to the “book cover … [as] a site where literature
intersects with visual culture, business, politics, law, and even history” and draw their objects of study from
transatlantic publishing in the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries (Mendelsund and Alworth 55). It
is, therefore, remarkable that not a single one of their examples has been selected from the sphere of picture
books for young audiences. Though such neglect of this publishing medium may be surprising, it is by no
means uncommon. While a few theorists, such as Lawrence Sipe in “The Art of the Picturebook” (2011),
have focused their critical gaze on the picture book as a genre with the potential to contain and convey
political ideologies, the picture book is a medium that has, more often, flown beneath the radar of such
analysis. Assumed somehow to be innocent of any intention beyond that of entertainment, picture books
have, at various moments, in fact proven themselves to be highly effective vehicles for social propaganda,
including the dissemination of culturally reactionary perspectives.

This was never truer than in the case of a particular volume that arrived on the British scene in the mid-
1970s at a moment of change, as the forces of conservatism that would dominate the UK for the next two
decades in the form of Thatcherism were just beginning to coalesce. Because this picture book was a work
that was aesthetically beautiful and, moreover, innovative in its material presentation, it was prized at the
time of its appearance largely for its artistic qualities. Nonetheless, it ushered in a series of related titles by
the same author that would sell to young consumers and their parents alike a politically potent mix of
nostalgia for English pastoralism, for class hierarchies, and for Britain’s lost dominion in the world, while
actively rejecting multi-culturalism and urban modernity alike. In doing so, it would leave a lasting
impression that continues to shape the visual designs of self-consciously “retro-looking” pop culture
commodities in new formats, such as the attractive online animations involving idyllic English gardens,
peaceful villages, and richly furnished manor houses that today are sold by e-businesses such as the
Jacquielawson.com company.

    1. An Edwardian Summer

When John S. Goodall’s An Edwardian Summer appeared in British shops in 1976, it looked to casual
browsers like just another children’s book—small in format and with a brightly colored dust jacket. But
several features distinguished it immediately. First, there was the unusual design of its dust-jacket
illustration, which wrapped around from the back cover to the front, inviting the buyer to remove it from the
book and to spread it flat, in order to read the image properly from left to right. Then, there was the nature of

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that image, which followed a recognizably cinematic pattern, imitating the ‘pan’ of a camera. It began (on
the back) on the left-hand side with a close-up of an interior, elaborately furnished with objects of the past—
notably, a potted palm and dark red patterned wallpaper—and displaying what might be described as a
lady’s taste: matching ceramic ewers, a lace table-runner, a folded fan, and a large china bust of a
conventionally pretty female head, with elaborately sculpted blonde coiffeur. The most distinctive element
of this still-life composition of historical props, however, was the presence of several photographs in antique
frames, or rather of several watercolor representations of photographs, creating a trompe-l’oeil effect. These
painted images were, moreover, of photographic portraits, capturing what would seem to be family
members, both adults and children, to suggest that this was a corner of a home (an impression reinforced by
the small toy—possibly an animal-shaped bank made of china—on the table).

As the viewers’ eyes moved rightward, they were led toward the object behind the palm fronds and across
the book’s spine—a drawn-back curtain—and beyond that to a window, framing multiple perspectives. In
the foreground was a vase filled with pink roses in full bloom, their stems drooping under the heavy weight
of the blossoms. Farther away and below, on a perfectly green lawn, two elegant ladies and two men in turn-
of-the-century costume played croquet. In the background strolled another lady (not a mere woman, but a
lady, bearing a parasol as a marker of her status), followed by a little dog. And beyond the terrace lay what
can only be described as a ‘pleasant prospect’ of the sort enshrined in early-nineteenth-century paintings by
John Constable (1776–1837) or especially by Paul Sandby (1731–1809)—trees and shrubs, the faint outline
of a village in the central clearing, and then, farther in the distance, water and gentle hills, with a cloudless
sky above. If the parting of the curtains made them equivalent to theatre curtains, then the tableau onto
which they opened was a spectacle of golden light, verdant natural growth, wealthy people at play, and a
peaceful location preserved in time.

Over this threshold between the domestic space and the pastoral landscape floated two iconic butterflies,
signaling the ephemeral beauty of the season and of the scene itself, poised in flight beneath the author’s
name, the book’s title, and one more thing: words that read “Foreword by Harold Macmillan.” Certainly, it
was unusual for a children’s book to have a Foreword written by the former Chairman of the publishing firm
that issued it. But it was all the more so, when that Chairman of Macmillan happened not only to be the
Chancellor of Oxford University, but a former Conservative M.P. who, from 1957 to 1963, had been Prime
Minister of Britain. If the dust-jacket image hinted at a political significance to Goodall’s idyllic
representation of an English country-house-centered past, then the presence of the name of Harold
Macmillan (1894–1986) sealed the deal. An Edwardian Summer became the first of Goodall’s bestselling
small-format books of the 1970s and 1980s—mostly priced from £1.95 to £3.50 in Britain, and from $4.95
to $8.95 for the U. S. market, where they were equally successful—devoted to romanticizing a class-
stratified life Above and Below Stairs (to quote a 1983 title also by Goodall) of masters and servants. These
picture books were set in glorified versions either of the Victorian or Edwardian eras, while making an
implicit visual protest against the architectural styles, social practices, and cultural tastes of the present.

It is tempting, therefore, to view John S. Goodall’s books, which bridged the divides across children’s
books, artists’ books, and political polemics, as having helped to inspire the so-called “heritage industry” of
the 1980s. This was a cultural development that critics such as Andrew Higson in English Heritage, English
Cinema (2003) and Simon Joyce in The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror (2007) have attributed to
Margaret Thatcher’s ascension to power in 1979 and to the rise of what film theorists label “heritage
cinema,” following the 1981 Granada TV adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Brideshead Revisited. These
“English costume dramas of the period,” as Higson has described them, “seemed to articulate a nostalgic and

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conservative celebration of the values and lifestyles of the privileged classes, and… in doing so an England
that no longer existed seemed to have been reinvented as something fondly remembered and desirable”
(Higson 12). But Goodall’s books came first, preceding the works and events that Higson and Joyce have
identified as instigators of this phenomenon. The aesthetic attractions of his picture books, which circulated
among purchasers of a wide range of ages, were informed throughout by conservative political sentiments.
Unlike, moreover, those British films later afforded the “heritage” designation, which were usually watched
only once, these printed productions could be consumed again and again, kept on bookshelves, and passed
from one family member to another.

   2. From “Pocket Cathedrals” to Pocket Propaganda

In a now-famous comparison, the Victorian artist Edward Burne-Jones once likened the 1896 edition of
Chaucer produced by William Morris’s Kelmscott Press to a “pocket cathedral,” alluding to John Ruskin’s
description of a medieval illuminated missal as “a fairy cathedral… bound together to carry in one’s pocket”
(Schoenherr 92). Goodall’s late-twentieth-century series of little rectangular volumes devoted to glorifying
the English past, particularly the stratified social norms and the artistic tastes of the preceding century, could
more rightly be called “pocket country houses.” They put into the hands of children and parents alike—as
well as adult fans without children—page after page of illustrations as dazzling and reverential as anything
to be found in a stained-glass window, though they offered views not of saints, but of aristocratic couples
gracefully waltzing across enormous ballrooms; ladies and gentleman at ease in drawing-rooms resplendent
with family portraits, antique clocks, and polar-bear rugs; and groups of dashing pink-coat-wearing hunters
on horseback, preparing to ride to hounds across green fields. In the process, these uncritically nostalgic
evocations of a world not merely of privilege, but of extreme privilege—which was always rendered as
unproblematic and fully deserved—turned their creator into what Christopher Wood, the London gallery
owner, called in 1996 “one of England’s best-loved artists” (Wood “Obituary”).

As a committed Socialist, William Morris (1834–96) envisioned the beauty of his Kelmscott Press books—
of those “pocket cathedrals”—as a positive agent for social change, encouraging the undoing of class
distinctions. Goodall’s books appear to have been designed to perform a comparable function, though in a
wholly antithetical direction and among a far younger audience. They reaffirmed class hierarchies in a time
of change and aestheticized them. Whether widespread and lasting effects could have emerged from the
Macmillan firm’s release, in the 1970s and 1980s, of Goodall’s extremely popular pocket country houses (so
to speak), with their idealized portrayals of a homogeneous English identity defined by a white, landed
gentry-class, is a question worth raising. Examining how images in children’s literature shape the cultural
“assumptions... learnt by even a young readership” and embed “problematic stereotypes”—as Melissa M.
Terras puts the matter in her 2018 study of picture books—has been one of the chief aims of those who take
seriously the political potential of this genre (Terras 194). As Martin Salisbury and Morag Styles assert in
Children’s Picturebooks: The Art of Visual Storytelling (2012), “No book is ever socially or politically
neutral... [and the] difficulty is that children of traditional picturebook age tend not to have the language
skills to express in words what they are receiving from an image” (Salisbury and Styles 113). In the case of
Goodall’s books, moreover, these were works with crossover appeal that were also purchased and collected
by adults, and thus were subtly influential across several markets.

This open acknowledgment by critics such as Terras or Salisbury and Styles of the propagandistic power of
the images in picture books is, however, a relatively recent phenomenon. In the 1970s and 1980s, Goodall’s

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productions did not seem to trigger any alarm bells—any awareness that they signaled a right-facing
movement in terms of ideology and did so by infiltrating the children’s market. On the contrary, these
volumes inspired more often among reviewers the sort of swooning and unreflective tributes to their painted
fantasies of a perfectly ordered English past in which the American journalist Mary Cantwell (1930–2000)
engaged in 1989. In an article for the New York Times, Cantwell looked longingly at “Mr. Goodall’s never-
never land” and confessed unashamedly, “If I had seen ‘An Edwardian Christmas’ at a more impressionable
age, I might have spent my life yearning for a butler and a covey of maids in ribbon-streamered white caps”
(Cantwell C2), seemingly indifferent to the political implications either of expressing such desires for a
position at the top of an oppressive social system or for praising the volume that fed them. Even so
important a scholar of children’s picture books as Perry Nodelman, in his classic study, Words about
Pictures: The Narrative Art of Children’s Picture Books (1988), had nothing to say either about the cultural
context from which Goodall’s images emerged or about the retrogressive social vision with which they were
infused. Nodelman’s sole concern was instead with the disconnect between the aesthetic complexity of
Goodall’s productions and parental assumptions as to what children are able to appreciate, commenting only
on how “the series of wordless books by John Goodall, that look painterly and are filled with subtle details,
often strike adults as overly sophisticated for young readers.” (Nodelman 45).

   3. John S. Goodall’s Cultural Politics

At the time of the publication of An Edwardian Summer in 1976, John Strickland Goodall (1908–1996) was
no newcomer to the world of illustration, to the world of children’s books, or to the world of imaginative
literature set in the past. Trained at the Royal Academy Schools, he had exhibited paintings, worked in
advertising, and illustrated magazines and books, including a popular series of novels by Dora Jessie Saint
(1913–2012), who wrote pseudonymously as “Miss Read” about romanticized English village life. He had
also been author of his own historical animal fantasies for young readers, including the 1973 picture book
Jacko. In that volume set in eighteenth-century England, Goodall told a story through a series of watercolors
arranged chronologically, à la William Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress (1735), to form a connected narrative
that used images alone, without words. Unlike Hogarth’s morality tale, however, Goodall’s Jacko was a
picaresque adventure with allegorical overtones involving race and the slave trade of the past, as well as
questions of migration and citizenship in the present. In it, the author depicted the brave and clever deeds of
a little monkey and a green parrot who, having been taken from their homeland to serve, respectively, as an
organ grinder’s assistant on a leash and a fat British naval officer’s caged pet, find a way to escape England
and return to their native island, where they are greeted rapturously by their families.

Jacko was the only one of Goodall’s many children’s books to focus primarily on non-indigenous species,
and it implied thematically throughout that those who were not born on English soil needed to go back to
their ‘exotic’ places of origin. John Goodall was certainly no Enoch Powell, inveighing against the dangers
posed by Commonwealth immigrants through racist rants. Nonetheless, Goodall, like his important
forerunner in the authorship and illustration of animal fables, Beatrix Potter, preferred to anthropomorphize
and to dress in period costume both domestic and wild animals that were recognizably English—pigs,
badgers, frogs, mice, kittens, and rabbits among them. Goodall’s connection to these turn-of-the-twentieth-
century predecessor texts by Potter was more than accidental. As Leslie Linder revealed in 1966, through his
deciphering of the secret code in which Potter wrote her journals from 1881 to 1897, Beatrix Potter was
politically aware and deeply conservative. She filled her private diaries with sympathetic accounts, drawn
from the Times and other daily papers, of Tory political speeches in Parliament, alongside her own

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expressions of fear and disgust over the actions of Socialists and other radicals, whom she linked to
“dynamiters” (Linder 123). Her later abandonment of London and retreat to the Lake District, where she
raised Herdwick sheep (a native English breed) was, as Linda Lear notes in Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature,
part of her larger ideological commitment to preserving the countryside and to maintaining it as a site for
traditional English agriculture and culture alike (Lear 318–19).

John S. Goodall’s perspective on such matters, albeit nearly a century later, was remarkably similar to
Potter’s. His animal fables, most of which took the form of wordless books with alternating full and half-
pages or occasionally of pop-up books, reinforced conservative values. When they touched upon issues of
labor, they used them as material for comic treatment. The frock-coated and boutonnière-wearing Paddy
Pork—an early twentieth-century pig who, in Goodall’s 1973 Paddy’s Evening Out, appears to have the
status of a gentleman—goes looking for employment in Paddy Finds a Job (1981). He becomes a waiter in a
restaurant run by chefs who are also pigs. But his unsuitability for this working-class occupation becomes
clear when his feet get entangled in the fur boa belonging to the female half of a foreign-looking and over-
dressed couple (a bejeweled French poodle escorted by a cigar-smoking rat), and he drags the unfortunate
‘lady’ out of her chair, across the dining-room and into the kitchen. Whether he will be able to earn a living
after this not only remains unclear, but this is beside the point: a question lost amid the hearty physical
humor leveled at the expense of the parvenu intruders, who have had their comeuppance.

Throughout Goodall’s series of small-format books published by Macmillan from 1976 through the 1980s
that depicted human beings, rather than animals, in turn-of-the-century English settings, laborers were rarely
highlighted, except as adjuncts to the activities of the upper-middle-class or aristocratic characters. The
working classes were background figures—shopkeepers or shop assistants cheerfully selling goods; or
simple cottagers gladly welcoming more sophisticated visitors to their homes (which invariably had portraits
of the late Queen Victoria hanging on the wall); or farmers and their wives smilingly offering cups of fresh
milk to travelers on bicycle tours. Most often, however, the images of workers were of domestic servants,
particularly those attached to large country houses, who ranged from benevolent nursemaids wheeling
prams, to rosy-cheeked cooks turning out elaborate feasts, to butlers efficiently overseeing multitudes of
parlor maids and footmen scurrying up and down staircases. Whether in An Edwardian Summer (1976), An
Edwardian Christmas (1977), An Edwardian Holiday (1978), An Edwardian Season (1979), or Edwardian
Entertainments (1981), in every case, these representations of servants emphasized their utility, the
submersion of their identities into their domestic functions, and the sturdiness of their physiques, none of
which looked underfed or seemed subject to illness.

Goodall replicated this pattern of (quite literally) painting over social problems in Victorians Abroad (1980).
It was his paean to Britain’s lost Empire and imperial glory, as well as his homage to a classic children’s
picture book, titled Abroad (1882), by Thomas Crane and Ellen Houghton, about a pleasure a trip to the
Continent. In Goodall’s hands, “abroad” turns out first to mean France, to which he had already sent his
nameless cast of beautifully attired, upper-class English figures in An Edwardian Holiday, as well as Italy.
But as the wordless sequence of images continues, it also includes the colonial outposts of Egypt, where a
white English lady poses atop a camel near the Sphinx; an unidentified part of Africa, where big-game
hunting takes place; and India at the height of the Raj, the site of a lavish garden party and a boat ride down
a river. At each location, servants appear in various styles of indigenous dress or undress, but they show no
evidence of poor diet, poor treatment, or even poor attitude toward their white masters. Contrary to what
decades of anti-colonial activism and of post-colonial politics might have suggested, in this revisionist
history children are taught that nineteenth-century British imperialism turned out to be quite a good thing for

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all concerned. No wonder, in his 1996 obituary of John S. Goodall for a British newspaper, the Independent,
Christopher Wood referred to the artist as “the last of the Victorians” (Wood “Obituary”).

   4. John S. Goodall’s Artistic Innovations

To assign Goodall this label as a Victorian, however, is to locate him solely in the past and to risk losing
sight of what was also innovative and very modern about his books qua books. If he was not the inventor of
the graphic memoir as a form, he was nevertheless among its earliest practitioners and probably the creator
of the first bestseller in this genre, with a crossover text, moreover, aimed at both the children’s and the adult
markets. As Carrie Hintz and Eric L. Tribunella have asserted in Reading Children’s Literature: A Critical
Introduction (2013), this mixing of levels, in terms both of content and audience, would go on to become
one of the distinguishing features of texts in graphic forms, while “the sophistication of graphic novels...
suggests the often-overlooked sophistication of children’s picturebooks” as well (Hintz and Tribunella 180).

Goodall’s 1981 Before the War: 1908–1939 was, as the subtitle on the front of its dust wrapper announced,
An Autobiography in Pictures. Organized chronologically, it used watercolors as narrative, with its text
confined almost wholly to identification of place, and/or date, and/or event (as in “1914,” printed above a
night scene of a family in silhouette, lit from above by the beams of a zeppelin hovering in the sky; or
“Hampstead 25 March 1933,” accompanying an image of the church where Goodall married Margaret Nicol
on that day). The single exception—the volume’s sole declarative sentence—came at the end, on a final two-
page spread that reported (in all-capital letters), “MY PARENTS DIED IN 1934 AND 1937 AND RIVERS
COURT BECAME OUR HOME,” to explain how Goodall (depicted in a British officer’s uniform), his
wife, daughter, cat, and dog became the residents of a stately home in Norfolk, on the verge of the Second
World War. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of this graphic memoir project was its creation of the
appearance of a 3-D collage on a flat surface, through trompe-l’oeil watercolor versions of photographs,
meant to look like period images removed from a family album and scattered across the pages of the book.
Sometimes the corner of one “photo” lay atop another, to produce an appearance of multi-dimensional
layering.

The effect of these faux photographs was to authenticate Goodall’s wordless account of what the past had
been like—to provide seemingly objective documentation of impressionistic visual memories and to lend
them a reality and authority that went beyond the merely personal. Thus, Before the War: 1908–1939 made
its unspoken claim to be the memoir not only of the artist, and not only of the professional classes into
which he and his wife were born, but to be, in a sense, a memoir of England itself—of a vanished, idyllic
England in which housemaids uncomplainingly scrubbed the front steps; prosperous young white gentlemen
owned racist Black Golliwog dolls bearing the name tag of “HITCHYKOO” and went off to Harrow School;
ladies wore picture hats and men wore top hats when attending the cricket matches at Lords; and well-born
heterosexual couples made their engagements official with notices in the Society periodical, the Queen.

It was this same sense of both celebrating and mourning a communal political and social identity that Harold
Macmillan’s Foreword to An Edwardian Summer also had captured. Framed in the first-person plural, its
opening sentence asked, “Why do we look back with such indulgent nostalgia upon the brief era of Edward
the Seventh (1901-1910), the period depicted in this book, for it is not, perhaps, one of the more exciting
periods in our island’s history?” [italics added] (Macmillan 1). Of course, rendering the decade unexciting

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and tranquil, as Goodall’s book deliberately did, was only possible through its complete erasure of the visual
record of everything from the Boer War to women’s suffrage demonstrations.

Both before and after telling his own story through pictures in Before the War, Goodall produced an equally
ambitious series of imaginary visual biographies of English places (almost always semi-rural) and of English
domestic architecture, including The Story of an English Village (1978), The Story of a Castle (1986), The
Story of a High Street (1987), The Story of a Farm (1989), The Story of the Seaside (1990), and Great Days
of a Country House (1991). Often beginning in a suspiciously clean and tidy-looking medieval or
Elizabethan past, these books invariably moved forward in time, through the equivalent of snapshots taken
in succeeding centuries, toward images of present-day decline and degradation. The once neat and orderly
village becomes a traffic-congested nightmare and victim of urban sprawl; the castle becomes a ruin, its
exterior defaced with signs pointing mobs of visitors to “RESTAURANT/ CAR PARK/TOILETS” (with the
usage of this last word—“toilets” instead of “lavatories”—signaling the presence of what were known as
non-U, or non-upper-class, speakers of English). The country house, too, becomes a tourist site, in which a
guide lectures to an ill-dressed crowd of gawkers—long-haired men wearing shorts and carrying knapsacks,
and women sporting too-tight orange trouser suits.

But in all of Goodall’s oeuvre, there is no more depressing and distressing image than the illustration that
concludes Above and Below Stairs (1983). The orderly class segregation of the preceding pages,
representing aristocrats and servants from the eleventh century through 1910 living in dignity and material
beauty, ends with the jumble and confusion labeled “TODAY.” In a bedsit at the top of a house, where the
maids would have slept, a blue-jeans-clad woman of indeterminate class, cigarette dangling from her lips,
now prepares her own meal on a wooden dresser top, as garish posters of American pop culture icons
(Marilyn Monroe and Elvis) stare down from the wall opposite.

Several of Goodall’s books employed the phrase “The Story of …” in their titles, suggesting that they would
produce a linear, if unspoken, narrative. All were organized according to some kind temporal arrangement,
whether the organizing principle was the natural cycle from morning to night, or from the start of a summer
to its end; the human life cycle with its passages from birth, to childhood, to maturity; the cycles of social
life among the well-to-do, composed of arrivals at rituals, gatherings, and entertainments, and then of
departures; or the cycles of life for architectural structures and communal spaces, from their flourishing to
their decay and, very occasionally, their restoration. A number of these were movable books—either in pop-
up form, or with half-pages to turn and use in transforming the images of the whole pages. But they were
also transformational books in a different sense, as works that celebrated an aesthetically pleasing English
past and implicitly mourned the transformation of a nation through its cultural, political, and visual decline.
Whatever individual “stories” they might contain, all presented the same master-argument and did so,
moreover, not only through each sequence of images, but through each image on its own. The gorgeousness
of the representations, on every single page or half-page, of English life in earlier centuries and decades—
the beauty, delicacy, and order of the compositions—spoke silently, through purely visual means, and stood
as a rebuke to the present.

And yet, despite the reactionary social philosophy that underpinned them, these were radical texts when it
came to their status as books—breaking generic boundaries and posing problems, both at the time of their
publication and today, for those interested in classifying them. Perhaps because they have defied easy
categorization by librarians, collectors, and historians, they remain undervalued in every sense, at least in the
realms of academic scholarship and curatorship. Unlike, for instance, the “picture letters” of Beatrix Potter

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and the books that grew out of them, which were the subject in winter 2012 through 2013 of an exhibition at
the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City (and which have been the subject of numerous displays,
throughout the years, at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum), neither the watercolors of which John S.
Goodall’s books were composed nor the books themselves have enjoyed any such exalted position in
institutions of high art, and no scholarly labels by curators have attested to their importance. Goodall’s few
solo shows occurred mainly at the Christopher Wood Gallery in London during the late 1980s and early
1990s—shows such as Home and Abroad, 1990: An Exhibition of Recent Watercolours by John Strickland
Goodall, RI, RBA, which ran only from 12 to 20 December 1990 and did not distinguish between works that
were created for the picture books and those that were not. The emphasis was on Goodall as a watercolorist
in general, rather than as a pioneer in pictorial books.

But he certainly was a pioneer, as well as someone who reached back self-consciously to align himself with
nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century traditions of illustrated books, children’s books, and picture books.
His debt to British past masters is perhaps more obvious in some of the work that he published prior to the
Edwardian-themed titles that began in 1976—all of them books centered upon animals behaving like
humans. Goodall paid homage to Beatrix Potter, in particular, throughout his “Paddy Pork” series, which
started in 1968, always featuring a well-dressed but rather hapless pig as protagonist—a figure who owed
much to both Potter’s Pigling Bland and her Little Pig Robinson. Similarly, the mice who starred in
Goodall’s “Naughty Nancy” (1975-85) and “Shrewbettina” series (1970-81)—beautifully turned out in their
Victorian and Edwardian costumes, but prone to getting into scrapes—shared the mischievous personalities
found in Potter’s The Tale of Two Bad Mice (1904).

Equally indebted to antecedent texts, Goodall’s 1972 The Midnight Adventures of Kelly, Dot, and Esmeralda
had its origins in the conventional genre of children’s fiction that Lois Rostow Kuznets surveyed in her 1994
study, When Toys Come Alive—a form in which such great predecessors as A. A. Milne and Margery
Williams had excelled. Goodall’s “Kelly” the wooly koala, “Dot” the pinafore-wearing doll, and
“Esmeralda” the toy mouse in an Edwardian party frock, however, work an imaginative variation on the
genre by leaving their toy shelf at the stroke of twelve and entering the watercolor that hangs on the wall
behind them. Thus, the fictional characters and the book itself quite literally work in tandem to break the
frame and to move into another dimension. Once ‘inside’ that work of art, the toys discover not merely the
landscape depicted in it, but a larger pastoral world beyond that landscape, as they row upstream and into a
previously unseen village inhabited by animals who walk upright, wear turn-of-the-twentieth-century
costumes, and live in cottages and caravans. They even come upon a traveling circus with an entrepreneurial
cat ringmaster and a troupe of acrobatic frogs, before re-emerging from the unchanged scene in the original
watercolor and climbing over the picture-frame to return to their shelf. This is both a wordless narrative and
a truly extraordinary visual text that encourages the spectator to think not only of works of art, but of
representations of works of art in books, as both windows and doorways, rather than as flat surfaces—to see
Goodall’s book itself as opening deeper and deeper into and onto another plane of existence with every turn
of the full and half-pages. Is its visual “story,” then, about the night-time roving of animate toys, or about
the possibilities of the picture book itself as a medium of exploration that can propel the viewer into a world
at once fantastic and grounded in an idealized vision of English history?

   5. Legacies in New Media

The wide circulation of John S. Goodall’s books, which were issued primarily by Macmillan in the U.K.
(and later by André Deutsch), as well as under the imprint of Margaret K. McElderry in the U. S., and which

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attracted not only children but also a growing adult fan base, certainly gave fuel to the conservative impulses
that brought Margaret Thatcher to prominence and ensured her hold on the office of Prime Minister from
1979 to 1990. These artifacts accomplished their ideological work wordlessly, or almost wordlessly. They
served as pictorial polemics, thus demonstrating the ability of picture books to make a political impact and,
moreover, to do so through visual means and materials alone.

As Paul Grainge has suggested, “Products of popular culture cannot be divorced from the political climate in
which they emerge” (Grainge 29-30); neither, of course, can they be separated from the political climates
that they help to create and support. With their pictorial fantasies about the splendor of English heritage
properties, as well as about the rightness of privilege and of traditional social hierarchies, John S. Goodall’s
little volumes of gorgeous watercolors made a strong impression. In the U. S., Goodall was greatly admired;
individual volumes of his were twice named to “New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Books of the
Year,” a select annual list of ten titles (New York Times A46). But it was of course in the U.K. that his work
mattered most. Memorializing him in the Independent after his death, Christopher Wood described how,
through “his children’s books,” he “became one of England’s best-loved artists” (Wood “Obituary”). A self-
portrait is held today in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery in London, affirming Goodall’s
permanent place in the history of British cultural life (“John Strickland Goodall”). The children who grew
up with his watercolors of tranquil English villages filled only with white inhabitants and with his images of
late-nineteenth-century British travelers being fawned upon by their imperial subjects around the globe are
of precisely the same generation as the current Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. It is indeed tempting to draw
a line between Goodall’s visions, which were imparted to British children from the 1970s onwards, of an
Old English splendor and superiority uncorrupted by foreign intrusion, and the popularity of recent pro-
Brexit ideologies, although such connections must remain purely speculative.

What is easier to demonstrate is that the visual aesthetics that Goodall’s works pioneered, along with the
potently nostalgic social yearnings that they captured so perfectly, live on in new forms and media. They
have migrated from the wordless picture books marketed to young readers to the realm of wordless
animations online that now are advertised both to adults and to entire families, especially during the holiday
of Christmas, when they offer “cozy” fantasies of quaint English villages and prosperous manor houses
frozen in time around 1900. Perhaps the chief and most financially successful purveyor of such e-
merchandise is Jacquielawson.com, which emerged in Britain in the year 2000—the start of the new
millennium—as if in reaction against this numerical marker of change and of entry into an unknown future.

As early as December 2004, the American Wall Street Journal, a journalistic bastion of political
conservatism and promoter of unfettered capitalism, published an article (“How an Artist Fell into a
Profitable Online Card Business”) touting this lucrative business, which was started by the British artist
Jacquie Lawson, who began with a single “intricate animated card” illustrating a cottage setting based on the
“village of Lurgashall in West Sussex, England” (Bounds B1). A mere four years after its founding,
Jacquielawson.com could boast of 300,000 paid subscribers, with sales of about “$1.7 million” that were
expected to increase by “as much as $5 million” over the period of Christmas, as “about 1.5 million” cards
were being ordered every day between mid- and late-December.

Today, the Jacquielawson.com empire, which now supports over 400 different ecards, has expanded to
produce since 2010 an annual online Advent Calendar—such as its 2019 “Cotswold” version offering access
to “your own peaceful Cotswold cottage” set in a “beautifully painted village scene” (“New Jacquie Lawson
Cotswold”) with animated illustrations that borrow openly from the imagery of John S. Goodall’s children’s

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books. In these cards and calendars, pastoralism and a reassuring, strife-free evocation of the past dominate
such subjects as the “idyllic English country garden” and the “Curio Collection,” with the latter promising
“a cosy [sic] sitting room in the house of an intrepid world traveller, full of exotic curiosities collected from
far-flung continents” (“Gift Shop”). In these scenes, as in Goodall’s images, anthropomorphic animals,
many of them in fancy dress, are common. When human figures appear, they are almost always white. The
colors and the lines are consistently muted and softened, mimicking the effects of watercolor and hand-
drawing familiar from Goodall’s books, although now computer-generated.

Like the groundbreaking series of volumes that began in 1976 with An Edwardian Summer,
Jacquielawson.com’s animations are often stunningly sophisticated and pioneering in their visual
techniques, yet also the very antithesis of the new in their spirit. The escape into a “never-never land” ideal
of an untroubled English past that Mary Cantwell found in Goodall’s An Edwardian Christmas (1977) can
be purchased in remarkably similar form today—not in a bookshop, but on a screen (Cantwell C2). No
longer is John S. Goodall what Christopher Wood labeled him: “the last of the Victorians” (Wood
“Obituary”). That distinction now belongs to the millions of modern-day subscribers who go online to
indulge in fantasies of flower-filled English gardens and roaring fires in the book-lined libraries of well-
tended manor houses, all kept running by invisible labor for the spectator’s pleasure. Goodall’s Victorians
and Edwardians live on.

Bibliography
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Margaret D. Stetz is the Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s Studies and Professor of
Humanities at the University of Delaware, USA. She is the author of several books and more than 120
essays on topics such as Victorian feminism, the politics of animated films, women’s comic writing, Oscar
Wilde, and fashion in literature, and she has curated more than a dozen exhibitions related to late-Victorian
print culture and art at museums and libraries in the US and UK.
Email: chavvy@aol.com

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