Illustrating Mary Poppins: Visual Culture and the Middlebrow

Abstract

In 1934, the English publisher Gerald Howe brought out an illustrated children’s novel by a relatively unknown Australian author, P. L. Travers, then living in London. The book, Mary Poppins, was an immediate success with readers, and not only with the children who were its ostensible market.¹ A protégé of AE (George Russell), Travers had always wanted to be a great poet; in her endless self-regard, she imagined herself a peer of the modernists, at least one of whom, T. S. Eliot, as editor of Faber and Faber, had expressed interest in the book. The illustrator she picked was a young woman named Mary Shepard, whose pedigree as a children’s book illustrator was assured by the success of her father, Ernest H. Shepard, the illustrator of the ‘Winnie-the-Pooh’ books and cartoonist for Punch.