In Arthur Rackham's Twilight Dreams – his endpapers for J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens – intricate line-work dances over watercolour wash. As wings are defined with precise anatomy, the city dissolves into sky. At the time, Victorian London (wracked with soot, globed by lights) was held, too, between states of industrial rationality and folklore: Rackham's elfin parade is caught somewhere between faerie and bug.
Rackham's art was a touchstone of what has come to be known as 'the golden age of book illustration' – an era when drawing and illustration became the method for documenting boundaries between worlds. These works are symbols of technological advancement and popular aesthetics, but they are also genuine case studies for unlocking the Victorian imagination, where spiritualism was a science and dreams were a bridge.
Whilst the industrial revolution paired the steam-powered printing press with rising literacy, drawing – previously reserved for expensive folios – became wedded to text en masse. More books were being read, being read by children, and those books were frequently illustrated.
For children, Victorian England was a country of superstition and threat, with high mortality, disease, youth work and elaborate mourning rituals. Adults, not children, are the stunned subjects of Edmund Dulac's illustration for Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen. Armed, they face into the undergrowth, mystified by an unknown light.
Drawing for illustration to 'The Snow Queen'
1911
Edmund Dulac (1882–1953) 
Inheritors of Gustave Doré and William Blake's dark Romanticism, the golden age illustrators endeavoured to draw a thinning veil, artefacts of a primal psychology, rather than nursery rhymes and whimsy.
The clearly defined contours of ink contrasted with lighter, watery colouring create a visual representation of this liminal world, where drawing is a rational architecture (this creature exists, I have measured its proportions...), and the wash preserves the unknown (but I cannot tell you what it means).
The drawn line carried epistemological weight. The Victorian mind was deeply empirical, obsessed with classification, and pencil and ink could capture what photography could not: the taxonomic precision needed for natural history art, botanical and anatomical drawings, and encyclopaedias.
Unlike the soft cloud-cover of watercolour, drawing pronounced exact horizons: the edge of a wing, the texture of fur, the anatomy of a goblin's hand, and positioned them within a tactile and accurate geography.
Evolutionary theory invigorated fascinations of hybridity, and pen-and-ink was the perfect medium for metamorphosis, as exacting in Kate Greenaway's sketching of plant stem and pistil as it was in marking the moment where human became beast.
Ornamental design with flowers and leaves
1864
Kate Greenaway (1846–1901) 
Colour-plate lithography and engraving could reproduce the finest pencil marks. Beauty lay, as Keats put it, within truth, but there was also a sense that the more precisely we drew the world, the more we infused it with myth. The scientific renaissance paradoxically saturated the magical sphere – the works from the golden age of illustration are evidence of a time before this mass cultural forgetting of the allure of the unknown.
The professor can't stand that sort of thing
1932
Arthur Rackham (1867–1939) 
As the Victorian imagination was stretched to accommodate a vast universe of invisible, microscopic worlds, it was also left in want of supernatural elements still unexplained by psychosomatic symptoms. Industrial deforestation uprooted England's oral folklore. France had myth, the Germans had the Grimms – so invoking fairy tales in earnest was a national, as well as a spiritual concern.
Sketching, made with the hand, charcoal and pencil, implied observation. Seeing their illustrations, a child might imagine our illustrators muddying their boots in fairy glens, scratching themselves on enchanted thorns and returning with their field studies of distinctly real, hidden worlds.
Charles Altamont Doyle (1832–1893) 
When Dulac's entomologist awakes, we can't be sure that he is not still dreaming, maddened by unleashed knowledge that can only be fully grasped in liminal states. Freud would come to view dreams as wish-fulfilment, latent with analysis. But for a pre-Freudian society, dreams were forks in the road between science and the fantastic, thought to 'perceive' creatures of distant pasts and near futures.
It is difficult for the contemporary mind to properly comprehend this 'second sight' in a world magnetised by twin poles of knowledge and uncertainty. John Tenniel, known for his topsy-turvy carnival in Alice in Wonderland draws an alchemist with angel wings, turning a ladle inscribed '[18]97' into a quicksilver concoction of '1898'.
An Alchemist with Angel's Wings and a Skull Cap, Pouring Fluid from a Ladle into a Crucible
1898
John Tenniel (1820–1914) 
The alchemist is simultaneously a scientist, a divine thing, and an old man in slippers and a nightcap. The boundaries between human, creature and ghost were startlingly thin.
Aubrey Beardsley made good on the bawdy, violent subtext of illustration in his stark black-and-white drawings for The Yellow Book. Beardsley contributed to decadence, an aesthetic promise fulfilled by its alternative, hedonistic lifestyle alongside writers like Oscar Wilde.
Cheekily echoing the yellow covers of licentious Italian novels, Beardsley's art direction on the Yellow Book serial made an adult fairy tale out of an urban sprawl, draped in coagulated blacks achieved through dense penwork and solid ink.
His unforgiving line hermetically trapped the lost woods of childhood in the felled timber that panelled dancehalls and séance parlours. Beardsley's drawing style, with its 'Japonisme' flat blacks, art-nouveau curves and refusal of depth, was a direct rebuke to polite society. Where Rackham's pen collaborated with watercolour to suggest mystery, Beardsley insisted on it.
The decadent movement's orgiastic transgressions of category also seemed a Dionysian insurrection. Not only an architecture of future liberties, but an exhumation of a chaotic, magical past. From Beardsley's commissioned drawings for a new edition of Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur at 20 years old, he seemed to infer this force: fantasy illustrations that doubled as illuminated manuscripts, dictating forgotten ways of being, dangerous and revolutionary enough to invoke Pan.
Caleb Carter, writer, poet and researcher
This content was funded by The Bridget Riley Art Foundation
Further reading
Jad Adams, Decadent Woman: Yellow Book Lives, Reaktion, 2023
Richard Dably, The Golden Age of Children's Book Illustration, Michael O'Mara, 2001
Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber, Gollancz, 1979
Robert Macnish, The Philosophy of Sleep, W. R. McPhun, 1830
Carole Silver, Strange and Secret Peoples: Faeries and Victorian Consciousness, OUP, 1999
