PETER PAN AND ALICE
six weeks which is why I have not written you sooner, especially about the exhibition. It entranced me. I think I like best of all the Serpentine with the fairies, and the Peter in his night-gown sitting in the tree. Next I would [sic] the flying Peters, the fairies going to the ball (as in the “tiff” & the fairy on cobweb) – the fairies sewing the leaves with their sense of fun (the gayest thing this) and your treatment of snow. I am always your debtor, and I wish the happiest Christmas, and please, I hope you will shed glory on more of my things.
The critics were largely of Barrie’s view in the matter, as, for example, the Pall Mall Gazette: ‘Not the least part of that good fortune that follows Mr Barrie’s steps is his choice of an illustrator. Mr Rackham seems to have dropped out of some cloud in Mr Barrie’s fairyland, sent by a special providence to make pictures in tune to his whimsical genius.’ Rackham’s friends and fellow illustrators were genuinely delighted at his success. ‘It may be that your pictures are a craze, that people have lost their heads and that the dealers are keeping the thing up – it may be!’ wrote Harry Rountree. ‘All I know is that I am as intoxicated as the worst and I am certain that this drunkenness will last for ever. … Long live Rackham!’ At the same time, it is only fair to mention that there were one or two critics who were more doubtful, who sneered at these ‘children’s books’ that were designed for the drawing-room rather than the nursery (probably true, though they were appreciated in both quarters), and who obscurely resented the luxurious pages, the tissue fly-leaves, the ‘fluttering prints each half-mounted on a sheet of brown paper in approved collector-fashion’. They would have agreed with David Bland in The Illustration of Books (1951) that for all Rackham’s skill in using the three-colour (or four-colour) process and drawing for it with pen and‘Yours most sincerely,
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