S is for Spaniard

Abstract

How are representatives of different nations portrayed in English picturebooks whose specific aim is to present a variety of foreign countries for the amusement of young readers? Taking as its main example Spaniards and how they feature in picturebooks and ABCs for children during the long 19th century, this paper observes the context of contemporary history as well as the conventions of discourse such as intertextuality, and asks how national stereotypes are deployed specifically for the target audience of young readers. The composite nature of picturebooks is taken into account in an analysis which addresses the iconography of the visual representation of national character, its verbal construction, and the interplay of the textual and the pictorial.

Keywords:

• imagology
• children's literature
• ABC books
• picturebooks
• stereotypes
• Spain
• Englishness

Notes

Most picturebooks, including this one, are unpaginated.

O'Sullivan (1989) systematically addresses the aesthetic or poetic functions of national stereotypes in literary texts.

A brief account of imagologically relevant genres can be found in O'Sullivan (2007: 16).

Weinkauff and Seifert (2006) has an extensive section (vol. I, 27–281) on the adventure novel from an imagological perspective. Wilson (2007) looks at the national constructions of identity and culture in the currently popular Scholastic Press historical journal series (such as the My Name is America, or Dear America series) which has been issued as separate, culturally specific series of fictional diaries in America, Australia, and some other English-speaking countries.

This does not only relate to the representation of the Spaniard. A direct literary origin of the dress and habits of the Laplanders, for instance, is identified by Matthew Grenby as based on Lapland Sketches, Volume 32 in the ‘Harris's Cabinet of Amusement and Instruction’ series, ‘itself probably based on an exhibition of Laplanders and their accoutrements which was held in London in the early 1820s' (Grenby, 2001).

‘Xerxes has done valiant service in many an ABC books’ (Rowe, 2001: 24).

In the travelogue Little Lucy's Wonderful Globe (Yonge, 1872), the title character ‘travels’ in her dreams around the world to meet children of all nationalities. The Spanish girl Ines dances for her ‘in the most graceful swimming way, now rising, now falling, and cracking her castanets together at intervals’. From this time on, Spanish girls in British children's picturebooks are depicted almost exclusively in dancing poses with echoes of Bizet's Carmen.

In the mid-19th century, through the use of cheap labour and by seeking out international markets, Germany supplanted Britain as the world leader in the toy industry (Buchheim, 1984). As a reaction to the mass-produced German articles which, benefiting from Free Trade, flooded their markets, the British Parliament passed a ‘Merchandise Marks Act’ in 1887 which introduced a label to identify foreign products, assumed inferior to domestic ones, to try to get consumers to ‘buy British’. Ironically the opposite of the desired effect was achieved: The label ‘Made in Germany’ ultimately came to be associated with high quality and actually increased the sales of German products.