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The Wouldbegoods. by: E. Nesbit, ilustrated By Reginald B. Birch: Reginald Bathurst Birch (May 2, 1856 – June 17, 1943) was an English-American artist and illustrator.
(The Wouldbegoods (1899) recounts stories about the Bastab...)
The Wouldbegoods (1899) recounts stories about the Bastables, a fictional middle-class family that has fallen on relatively hard times. This is the second story in The Bastables Series. Reginald Bathurst Birch (May 2, 1856 – June 17, 1943) was an English-American artist and illustrator. He was best known for his depiction of the titular hero of Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1886 novel Little Lord Fauntleroy, which started a craze in juvenile fashion. While his illustrated corpus has eclipsed his other work, he was also an accomplished painter of portraits and landscapes. Edith Nesbit wrote or collaborated on more than 60 books of fiction for children. She was also a political activist and co-founded the Fabian Society. Two impoverished children, Edred and Elfrida Arden, inherit the decrepit Arden Castle and search for the lost family fortune that will allow them to rebuild it. With the assistance of the magical Mouldiwarp, they travel back in time to earlier periods of English history, searching for clues. Hardling's Luck is a sequel to The House of Arden, a great favorite of Nesbit fans; it's a story of injustice, poverty, deformity, magic, romance, suspense, sacrifice, and triumph over adversity that comes to its point with a fateful twist.
Two Little Pilgrims' Progress (Annotated & Illustrated): A Story of the City Beautiful
(*This Book is annotated (it contains a detailed biography...)
*This Book is annotated (it contains a detailed biography of the author).
*An active Table of Contents has been added by the publisher for a better customer experience.
*This book has been checked and corrected for spelling errors.
This book is sentimental and more of a modern-day fairy tale in that the main characters were of their time (1895) rather than of an indistinguishable time in some far-off past. The hero and heroine are twin brother and sister and save up to travel to the Chicago World's Fair. It's historical in its own way.
Reginald Bathurst Birch was an English-born American artist and illustrator. His works appeared in St. Nicholas, the Century, Harper's, Life, and The Youth's Companion.
Background
Reginald Birch was born on May 2, 1856, in London, England, the son of William Alexander Birch, an officer in the British army, and Isabella (Hoggins) Birch. When Reginald was five, his father went to India as manager of a river navigation company in Bombay, and the boy was sent to stay in the family of his paternal grandfather on the Isle of Jersey.
Education
Reginald attended a local school on the Isle of Jersey and then entered St. Leonard's School for Boys at Hastings. Later he studying art at the Royal Academy in Munich.
Career
In 1870 Reginald moved with his parents to San Francisco, California; he later became a naturalized citizen. In San Francisco he is said to have first exercised his drawing talent in helping his father prepare theatrical posters by incising the wooden blocks from which they were printed. Birch's abilities attracted the attention of the painter Toby E. Rosenthal, who invited him to work in his studio and encouraged him to obtain further training. Birch went abroad in 1873 and remained for eight years, and later producing drawings for publications in Vienna, Paris, and Rome. Returning to the United States in 1881, he settled in New York City. He easily obtained commissions and began producing pen-and-ink drawings for stories and poems appearing in such magazines as St. Nicholas, the Century, Harper's, Life, and the Youth's Companion.
At the age of thirty Birch achieved his first popular success, which he never later surpassed, by his illustrations for the novel Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) by Frances Hodgson Burnett. His depiction of the youthful hero, wearing long golden curls and clad in a black velvet suit with lace collar, patterned after the costumes of page boys in the court of Queen Victoria, so appealed to American mothers of the period that many sought to force their rebellious sons into similar garb. Birch was never allowed to forget his Fauntleroy and came to speak of him as "my Nemesis. "
For a time he was one of the leading magazine illustrators in New York and provided drawings for a dozen or more books, mostly for children, including Mrs. Burnett's Sara Crewe (1888). His drawings, deft and good-humored, somewhat resembled in style those of Charles Dana Gibson, and he became known as "the children's Gibson. " With changing artistic fashions, the popularity of Birch's work declined, and after 1914 he received fewer commissions. A bon vivant, fond of wine and good food, he had never accumulated money, and in the early 1930's he was living in poverty, in a fifth-floor walkup apartment.
Birch emerged from obscurity in the spring of 1933 when, at the age of seventy-six, he was asked to make the drawings for Louis Untermeyer's The Last Pirate, a collection of tales from the Gilbert and Sullivan operas. His popularity revived, and during the next eight years, until failing eyesight forced him to stop work, he illustrated some twenty books. An anthology of many of the stories and poems he had illustrated was published by Harcourt, Brace and Company in 1939 as Reginald Birch - His Book. He spent his last two years at the Home for Incurables in the Bronx, where he died at the age of eighty-seven of congestive heart failure. He was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery, New York City.