Sailing with the Phoenicians to the Tin Islands and more ......... A Picture History of Great Discoveries 1954

I am back with another of those history books written for children in the 1950s.

Many of the ones I was given at the time have survived and sit on our book shelves along with others that I have bought over the years.*

What makes A Picture History of Great Discoveries different is that while it was originally published in 1954 it has been reissued along with A Picture History of Britain.**

They were part of a series which also included the history of France and Italy and were striking in their use of colour and dramatic images.

That said I never quite took to these books in the way that I did to those of R.J. Unstead whose pictures were simpler and more realistic.

But the images in both books are of their time and reflect a style of painting which will be all too familiar to anyone who grew up in the 1950s and 60s.

And Great Discoveries is also a book of its time when it was still fashionable to write about voyages of exploration and the discovery of the “New World” with that Eurocentric notion that these were places which having been lost were now rediscovered.

I doubt that the peoples of the Americas, or Africa and the Far East ever quite saw it that way.

Still A Picture History of Great Discoveries remains a fascinating glimpse into how children’s history was written over sixty years ago and by extension how our view of the world and its history was shaped.

Picture; cover of A Picture History of Great Discoveries

*Books Children, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Books%20Children

** A Picture History of Britain, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/a-picture-history-of-britain.html

A Picture History of France 1951

I never tire of looking through A Picture History of France by Clarke Hutton.

It is another in the series which was published in the 1950s, by the OUP and while it ran to three reprints is unavailable except as a second hand copy.

I first came across it on a rainy day in Edmund Waller school sometime around 1958.

Like the others in the series it is the artwork that marks it as something special.*

Back then the text was a little too dense but the illustrations were bold and colourful.

At the time I have to admit to being unimpressed with that artwork which lacked the realism of illustrations in other history books.

But now it has a quality which appeals to me.

The style is typical of the period, and looking at the buildings and the historical figures is to be reminded of similar illustrations on posters, and adverts in books, magazines and even on those framed pictures you got in train compartments.

A Picture History of France covers the entire history of the country and in keeping with the approach to history which was becoming fashionable breaks from a series of stories of Kings and Queens and widens its story concluding with a survey of France in the 1950s.

I could have chosen any one of the illustrations from its sixty-one pages but fastened on this describing the south.

Pictures; cover of A Picture History of France, and a detail from page 60

* A Picture History of France by Clarke Hutton, 1951, OUP

**A Picture History of Australia, Britain, Canada, Great Discoveries, India, Italy, Russia, The United States of America

A Picture History of Britain

I first came across A Picture History of Britain, by Clarke Hutton on a wet winter’s day sometime in the 1950s. 

It had been published in 1945 and I guess the Oxford University Press were on to a winner right away. It tells the story of Britain through a number of bold colourful pictures with an accompanying text. Later he wrote A Picture History of Great Discoveries.

Now, I must admit that I was never completely sold on the pictures which were not realistic enough for me, but looking again at the reprint published in 2007 I have to say there is something very striking and attractive about these illustrations.

If there are criticisms of the books it is that they are very eurocentric but they are a product of the time they were written and this serves only to show how history writing for children has changed.

Picture; Cover of A Picture History of Britain