page_title: Kate Greenaway
section_title: Childhood
hierarchical_section_title: Kate Greenaway / Childhood
caption_attribution_description: English: John Greenaway (Father of Kate Greenaway). By Birket Foster, R.W.S
context_page_description: Catherine Greenaway was an English Victorian artist and writer, known for her
  children's book illustrations. She received her education in graphic design and art between 1858 and 1871 from South Kensington School of Art and the Royal Female School of Art, and the Slade School of Fine Art. She began her career designing for the burgeoning holiday card market, producing Christmas and Valentine's cards. In 1879 wood-block engraver and printer, Edmund Evans, printed Under the Window, an instant best-seller, which established her reputation. Her collaboration with Evans continued throughout the 1880s and 1890s.
  The depictions of children in imaginary 18th-century costumes in a Queen Anne style were extremely popular in England and internationally, sparking the Kate Greenaway style. Within a few years of the publication of Under the Window Greenaway's work was imitated in England, Germany and the United States.
context_section_description: Kate Greenaway was born in Hoxton, London, the second of four children, to a working-class family. Her mother, Elizabeth, was a dress maker and her father, John, an engraver who gave up steady employment with Ebenezer Landells' engraving firm to strike out on his own. When Greenaway was very young, he accepted a commission to provide the engraved illustrations to a new edition of Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers, sending his young family away to relatives in the countryside to give himself solitude while producing the engravings. Kate's earliest memories are of Rolleston, Nottinghamshire, which affected her deeply. It was a place she returned to frequently in her childhood. Children's literature scholar Humphrey Carpenter explains the period was to Greenway "crucial ... she felt it to be her real home, a country of the mind that she could always reimagine". After returning to grimy London streets Rolleston became a place to visit in her mind and constantly embellish.
  The publisher who commissioned John Greenaway's work went bankrupt, leaving the family without an income. When Elizabeth Greenaway returned from Rolleston with the children, the family moved to Islington, where she opened a children's dress shop, that attracted well-to-do clients. 
  The family lived in the flat above the shop, and young Kate, often left to her own devices to explore, spent many hours in the enclosed courtyard garden, later writing about in her unfinished autobiography as a place filled with "richness of colour and depth of shade."
  John Greenaway provided for his mother and two sisters as well as for his own family. He took piecemeal engraving jobs, usually for weekly publications, such as The Illustrated London News. He frequently worked on the wood carving throughout the night in front of the fire. Kate enjoyed watching him, and through his work was exposed to illustrations by John Leech, John Gilbert and Kenny Meadows. 
  As a young child Greenaway's parents taught her at home; later she was sent to various dame schools; she was an avid reader of chapbook versions of fairy tales – her favourites were "Sleeping Beauty", "Cinderella", and "Beauty and the Beast" – as well as illustrated editions of Shakespeare, writing later that children "often don’t care a bit about the books people think they will and I think they often like grown-up books – at least I did." Her father's engravings exposed her to weekly news stories, some of which were quite grisly, such as the series of his illustrations for the Illustrated London News in 1856 about murderer William Palmer.
caption: Pencil drawing of John Greenaway at work, by Birket Foster
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