A apple pie (R228016)
From Moral Tales to Imaginative Worlds
Alphabet books weren’t always playful. For much of their early history, they served as tools of discipline—meant to teach children not just letters, but obedience, virtue, and restraint. By the mid-Victorian period, however, the ABC began to loosen its grip. Publishers and illustrators started reimagining the alphabet as a space for beauty, humour, and emotional resonance. This section brings together works that respond to that shift in distinct ways.
This late Victorian primer presents the alphabet as a tidy procession of objects and ideas—some familiar, others curiously remote. S is for Ship, T for Top, U for Urn: solid, respectable items that reflect domestic order and polite learning. But the choices grow more peculiar as the alphabet progresses. V for Violin suggests cultural refinement, while X for Xerxes and Y for Yaw introduce lofty or obscure references unlikely to resonate with young readers. Z is for Zebra, a striking image, but one few children at the time would ever have seen in real life.
The page is carefully arranged, with simple woodcut illustrations and a neat display of italic letters and numbers below. It offers a vision of learning built on order, structure and restraint. There isn’t much room for imagination here. The tone feels serious, the imagery controlled, and the child is addressed not as a curious explorer but as a future model citizen. However, if this is how most alphabet books of the time taught children to learn, behave, and see the world, what were the more playful and eccentric ABCs in this exhibition trying to convey instead?
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R227973
Kate Greenaway’s A apple pie (1886) reimagines a centuries-old rhyme that traces the alphabet through a series of actions around a beloved dessert—“A was for apple pie, B bit it, C cut it…”—a format first recorded in the 17th century and long used in early literacy materials. Greenaway transforms this traditional rhyme into a visual celebration of childhood, using her signature soft watercolours, delicate linework, and idealised scenes of well-behaved children to create a book that is as much about beauty as it is about learning.
In the final illustration, she groups the last six letters—U to Z—into a single bedtime scene, where children eat slices of cake together before heading off to sleep. The decision to focus on a group image reflects the difficulty of finding distinct actions for the more awkward letters, However, the carefully composed image is also a reflection of the values of the time: Victorian children’s books often presented childhood as orderly and innocent, with children in control of their emotions. Greenaway’s serene domestic view stands in stark contrast to today’s more realistic portrayals of modern children, where mealtimes are noisy, chaotic… and most definitely full of crumbs!
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R228016
By the 1870s, children’s books were starting to change. Instead of teaching lessons about good behaviour, they began to celebrate colour, feeling, and imagination. Walter Crane’s absurd ABC reflects this shift, turning the alphabet into a series of surreal rhymes and theatrical images. It focuses on nonsense, humour, and clever wordplay rather than phonics or moral instruction. The letters are printed in red and gold to catch the child’s eye, but the real fun comes from the strange scenes and unexpected twists. The final page ends with rhymes so odd that they are hard to make sense of, chosen more for their rhythm and charm than for clarity of meaning.
Set against a striking black background—unusual for children’s books—Crane’s bright colours and detailed designs feel like looking at a painting on a wall rather than at an illustration. He wanted his alphabet to do more than amuse; it was meant to help children to develop a love of art. By filling each page with beauty and pattern, he hoped to spark an early interest in creativity and design. It is impressive how much he achieves within the simple format of an ABC.
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R228513
This illustration from Rummical rhymes (1864) reflects the shifting moral and visual sensibilities of mid-Victorian children’s publishing. While it loosely follows the alphabet format, the book isn’t a typical ABC: instead, it presents a series of limericks, each featuring a character and a place name, with certain letters printed in red to help children to notice and remember them. The focus is less on formal literacy and more on playful engagement.
In this scene, a young girl shakes her own shadow furiously, turning what might once have been a lesson in proper behaviour into a playful, surreal, and exaggerated display of emotion. James Vine Barrett’s bold linework and flat colour washes heighten the comic drama, showing how children can learn through humour and imagination too—a playful spirit that will reappear in Dr. Seuss’s anarchic fun and in Sendak’s fantastical worlds, where children explore, laugh, and imagine without limitations.
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R228631
Although Edward Lear’s Nonsense botany is not strictly an ABC either, this work belongs firmly in the story of the alphabet’s transformation from moral instruction to imaginative play. A trained natural history illustrator, Lear brings botanical precision to his invented plant species, rendering them with the same care as real specimens. With names such as Manypeeplia Upsidownia or Piggiwiggia Pyramidalis, he follows the conventions of scientific taxonomy, only to twist them into absurd Latin names and surreal forms.
Lear’s words and illustrations don’t aim to teach facts or virtues. Instead, they celebrate the sound of language, the joy of invention, and the freedom to be nonsensical. Children didn’t need to understand the parody to enjoy the strangeness. And that’s precisely the point: even the most rigid systems—like a taxonomy, or the alphabet itself—could be reimagined as spaces for creativity, laughter, and delight.
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