business men lacking interest in the arts, with certain notable exceptions including Edward and Marjorie Pease, the well-known founder-Fabians and socialists, and his old friends the Keen family. Mrs Rackham became increasingly an invalid, and hardly went out at all, except for her motor drives. Few visitors came to the house. More than ever, Rackham found that he needed his London studio as a pied-à-terre to bring him into touch with his friends at the Arts Club, at the R.W.S. or the Art-Workers’ Guild.
It would be misleading to show him in his last decade as an unhappy man, or his wife as totally subdued by ill-health. But it is undeniable that Mrs Rackham’s health, her progress and treatment, and the various ‘cures’, orthodox and otherwise, that she tried enthusiastically one after another, absorbed the thoughts of the Stilegate household. Other interests tended to revolve around this problem.
Rackham worked on as determinedly and enthusiastically as ever. Harraps were now his principal publishers, and for them he illustrated Goldsmith and Izaak Walton, Ruskin (The King of the Golden River), Hans Andersen, Christina Rossetti (Goblin Market), Browning (The Pied Piper of Hamelin), Edgar Allan Poe, and Ibsen (Peer Gynt). For Harraps, again, he prepared The Arthur Rackham Fairy Book.
His nephew Walter Starkie spent many months in the years 1932–6 wandering through Castile, Andalusia and La Mancha, journeys bearing excellent fruit in his three gypsy books, Raggle-Taggle, Spanish Raggle-Taggle, and Don Gypsy, for which Rackham drew the frontispieces. The gypsies fascinated Rackham; but when Starkie proposed to his uncle that he should illustrate Don Quixote, Rackham was not attracted, saying that the Don appeared so often that variety was impossible. Starkie suggests that ‘Rackham’s genius was so essentially Gothic that it needed the fantastic trees of the forest and felt ill at ease in the bare steppes of La Mancha’.
The undertaking that meant most to him in the early ’thirties was
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