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• 1 media/Belcastro_Nature_130120.jpg 2024-04-16T13:37:46-07:00 Poor Cock Robin (1869) 16 plain 2024-05-24T11:48:34-07:00 Poor Cock Robin, published in New York, NY by the McLoughlin Bros. in 1869, presents the English nursery rhyme as a picture book printed on linen. While the colorful illustrations and the anthropomorphic animals are typical for children’s picture books, this copy of Poor Cock Robin is strikingly different from the modern children’s book.
  
  The front cover is unlike that of a typical brightly colored children’s book. While anthropomorphic animals are not uncommon in children’s books today, the art style of Poor Cock Robin is dark, heavy, and almost realistic. A modern children’s book about animals would likely have more abstract, cartoon renderings of the animals, but the birds on this cover are styled much more realistically. The realism of the art style brings a much more frank approach to the nursery rhyme, particularly to a modern audience more used to abstract art in children’s books. While the perpetuation of a more light-hearted, carefree, whimsical childhood is prioritized in modern children’s culture, Poor Cock Robin is an artifact from a time when childhood was culturally much different. Then, of course, is the subject matter.
  
  The inside cover, which serves as the first page, confirms the surprisingly dour mood of the front cover, announcing “The Death of Poor Cock Robin.” The book continues with the nursery rhyme, describing the arrangement of Cock Robin’s funeral, with every few verses accompanied by full-page color illustrations, like the one opposite the inside cover.
  
  While the text is not necessarily graphic, it is very somber and frank, with roles like the grave digger, the chief mourner, and the pallbearers, among others, being assigned to various animals. In nursery rhyme fashion, each of the verses have some kind of rhyme, but none of animals or the colorful illustrations make the book seem any more familiar to the modern era of children’s literature. Poor Cock Robin gives a look into a time when death was far less taboo, to the point of being acceptable as a children’s picture book. The book also reveals, through the illustrations in particular, the shift that has taken place today to using more abstract art in children’s literature. That shift in art style reflects the overall shifts in western art in the 19th and 20th centuries, with Poor Cock Robin as an example of more academic art and modern children’s literature illustrations reflecting later abstract and contemporary art movements.