THE IMPACT OF 1914
Rackham’s determination to maintain and to raise the standard of his work was incessant. As he had written a few years earlier (10th December 1906) to M. H. Spielmann, who had drawn his attention to a favourable criticism: ‘I’ve just seen the Graphic & I blush. Well, I can only do my best to live up to it. But the farther I go (& I do hope I am gaining ground) the harder it becomes & the more impossible the “arrival”.’
The Rackham books published in 1912 and 1913 made a complete contrast to Wagner. In Aesop’s Fables (1912) and Mother Goose (1913) Rackham’s primary intention was to amuse, but his illustrations for the fables of ‘The Moon and her Mother’ and ‘The Gnat and the Lion’ suggest the imaginative refinement that he brought to the task. Rackham was often his own model; there are several self-caricatures to be detected in Aesop’s Fables. He is the man who catches the flea, the pompous gentleman who scolds the drowning boy, the credulous slave-owner who scrubs the black boy (see page 101).
The Mother Goose drawings, illustrating a collection of the old nursery rhymes, appeared in the American St Nicholas Magazine, 1912–13. Here Rackham laid himself out to please the children, and was completely successful. The initial letters at the beginning of each chapter of this biography are taken from Mother Goose, Rackham himself figuring in the initial I at the opening of the first chapter. The House that Jack Built, shown on the next page of text, was a drawing of his own home in Chalcot Gardens.
Aesop’s Fables and Mother Goose are small books that have had a94
