This slide show will walk you through ideas on how conventional visuals of traditional forms of literature close down the possibilities for interpretation, and offers ideas on how to re-open inquiry and discussion.

1. CONVENTIONAL
ILLUSTRATION AND
INTERPRETATION
Putting Humpty Dumpty Together Again

2. Presentation overview
 “Humpty Dumpty” as an example of how
nursery rhyme illustrations have become
conventional.
 The relationship between text and image in
illustrated works
 Visual conventionality ‘closes’ the text to
interpretation
 Re-opening a text closed by illustration
 Why do we care?

3. Answer the question
 What is the first answer that comes to mind
when I present the question:
 What is Humpty Dumpty?
 Did you say ‘egg’?
 Now look at the words:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
All the king’s horses, and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

4. Illustration and Words in
Relationship 1
 While the words match the well-known
illustration, the words do not exclusively
demand an egg.
 It is the conventionality of the illustration that
determines the meaning of the words.
 The finality of this image closes off some of the
text’s interpretive potential.
 This interpretive potential was re-opened in
three different ways.

5. 1 – Visualizing with words alone
 What else could Humpty Dumpty be, given the
words alone?
 Some favorite responses from my students:
 A watermelon.
 A clock. I know, because I tried it.
 A second-grader who was helping me manage
interviews about Humpty Dumpty turned to me
after hearing several responses, and said: “It
could be anything, as long as it’s breakable.”

6. 2 – Historical Inquiry
 When did the egg image become
conventional?
 How did the egg image become conventional?
 Why did the egg image become conventional?

7. Parrish was “quoting” existing illustrations, especially John Tenniel’s
illustration from Through the Looking Glass. But the breadth of his
celebrity ensured that all following illustrations held to this standard.
Maxfield Parrish (1927)

8. The visual elements remain constant: Not only is egg-man the only possible
answer to this riddle, but it is a conventional icon. Egg as head and body, with
limbs sticking out. Spiffy clothes, including collar and tie. Dozens of collected
images hold to this convention, all printed after 1927.
Post-Parrish Humpty Dumpty

9. The visual elements were NOT constant before Parrish. Even the egg was
not considered a ‘given’. Kate Greenaway in the 1880s used a child. Walter
Crane in the same period used Richard III. The Dalziel brothers (the
engravers who worked closely with John Tenniel on Alice), gave an ‘egg
head’ with a separate body. Each of these images is thematically dark by
Pre-Parrish Humpty Dumpty

10. This illustration depicts three interpretations corroborated by the Oxford
English Dictionary’s historical sampling method. The fact that the illustration
predates publication of the OED suggests that these interpretations were still
part of popular knowledge in 1843. This popular understanding seems to
have disappeared after Parrish.
Earliest Known Illustration - 1843

11. 2 – Historical Inquiry
 When did the egg image become conventional?
 By 1927
 How did the egg image become conventional?
 Popular saturation with the Tenniel  Parrish image
 Illustrators after Parrish were more or less obliged to
‘quote’ the most popular illustration
 Why did the egg image become conventional?
 Because the genre of the ‘Mother Goose’ collection
came to depend on a pantheon of recognized
characters in illustration
 The intent of the genre was to ‘domesticate’ street
rhymes for use with upper and middle class children.
The darker and more adult elements were removed.

12. 3 – Visualize with Less-Known
Rhymes
There was a man in our town
And he was wondrous wise
He jumped into a bramble bush
And poked out both his eyes
And when he saw what he had done
Then thought his little brain
I’ll jump into another one
And poke them in again

13. 3 – Visualize with Less-Known
Rhymes
Dickery dickery dare
The pig flew up in the air
The man in brown
Soon brought him down
Dickery dickery dare

14. Why do we care?
 How do texts get closed to interpretation? In
what ways does illustration contribute to this
process?
 Farm
 Stable
 Hero

15. Implications
 Each of the three approaches used with Humpty
Dumpty re-opened a closed, canonical text
 Each approach coached re-visualization as a way
of reinterpreting words
 Conventionality is a historical process, and
historical processes in visual literacy are as
important as individual psychology and
development processes
 Visualization working with and from words should
continue as a vital area of study in Visual Literacy
 Critical visualization involves not only the critique
of images, but learning to make mental images
instead of consuming them

16. REVIEW:
Revisualizing Conventional
Illustrations
 Questioning conventional illustration with the
words
 Historical inquiry to discover the origin of the
convention
 Visualization with alternate texts in the
tradition, that are not already bound by
convention

17. Connections
 John Medina’s popular book on neurology:
Almost everyone is primarily a visual learner
 Gary Wells: sociologists’ research on
eyewitness identification in police lineups
 Inverse effect noted in memory of live events:
Talking about what happened shapes the
visual memory of what actually happened –
words shape and determine the potential for
visualization
 Visuals increasingly dominate informational
text for young people (‘National Geographic’
effect)

18. When a historian friend did a close visual ‘reading’ of this picture, he
discovered that it was staged by children who were doing a school skit. But
the was being used in informational texts throughout the state as an iconic
representation of child labor.
Colorado, 1920

19. James.Erekson@unco.edu
James Erekson, Associate Professor of Reading
University of Northern Colorado