This children’s book was given to Anne Allegra Longfellow, the youngest of Henry W. Longfellow's children, by her uncle Nathan Appleton, Jr. in 1860 when she was just five years old. It features a red cloth cover with a pebbled texture, and the title, Child’s Play, in gilt lettering, with the initials “EVB” below.EVB was Eleanor Vere Boyle, an artist best known for her illustrations of children’s books. Born in 1825 in Scotland to an aristocratic family the norms of the day made it difficult for her to entertain any sort of commercial endeavor as a career. Boyle used the initials “EVB” to maintain a semblance of anonymity, allowing her to skirt the rules of what was socially acceptable for a woman of her station.
Child's Play was her first book, with the earliest edition published in 1851 or 1852. It consisted of 17 drawings depicting children in various environments, each accompanied by a brief snippet of a popular nursery rhyme. The volume is an early example of a book produced by anastatic printing, a method invented in 1840 that made use of acid-etched zinc plates which enabled the creation of highly accurate reproductions. Child's Play went through at least three editions, with the third being released in 1865.
Boyle’s artwork was heavily influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites of the mid-19th century. Two of her most commonly used central themes were love and death, and her highly detailed images often featured natural settings. Her paintings are commonly characterized as having a slightly forbidding or dark tone to them, possibly an appropriate element as many were used to illustrate fairy tales which in their original versions often featured violence and menacing figures. She worked well into her old age, having new work published as late as 1908, making her notable not only for being among the earliest 19th century woman illustrators, but also for the length and productivity of her career.
Every illustration in this book, bar the one shown here, was crudely cut out as if a child went at it with a pair of scissors. Did Annie Longfellow do this herself for a craft project, perhaps to make a collage or simple stick-puppets out of the illustrated characters? Maybe it was the action of a vengeful sibling? We may never know!