Title-page for “The Careless Chicken”
Alfred Crowquill
Hand-coloured wood-engraving; engraved by J. R. Jobbins
7¾ x 6 inches
Crowquill, Alfred. The Careless Chicken, title-page.
One of Crowquill’s anthropomorphic fantasies, designed for the nursery with animals as surrogates for humans. The story embodies the usual moralizing, but the illustrations are both inventive and vividly realized – an effect greatly assisted by the application of coloured inks by an unknown hand. By turns grotesque and amusing, sadistic and dream-like, Crowquill’s illustrations have a child-like aura and, for modern observers, seem unsettling and strange.
Scanned image and text by Simon Cooke.