William Heath Robinson, The Adventures of Uncle Lubin (1902)

Some of my blog posts begin in one place and end somewhere completely different. This is a case in point. I started writing with the intention of talking about Mervyn Peake’s picture book Letters from a Lost Uncle from Polar Regions (1948), then started thinking about Peake’s debt to Heath Robinson’s much older book, and found myself with so much to say that the Peake post risked sinking under the weight of its excess Heath Robinson cargo. In any case I need to get a copy of the latest edition of the Letters to make my point about it properly, and I’ve used up my book allowance for the month, so here’s something on Heath Robinson instead.

Heath Robinson is best known now for designing elaborate machines to perform simple or surprising tasks; the term ‘a Heath Robinson contraption’ has entered the English language, and is still being used even by those who have never seen his drawings. His art, in other words, spills out of its confines within the pages of printed books to invade the world, introducing a new concept into everyday use, providing copy for magazines and advertising campaigns, appearing on crockery for children in the 1920s, lending its name to a code-breaking machine at Bletchley Park, and reshaping the history of film. Caractacus Potts uses Heath Robinson contraptions to make breakfast, manufacture sweeties and cut hair in the movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), and the car of the title is a Heath Robinson contraption which takes on a life of its own, beginning as a straightforward Potts project to refurbish a vintage automobile and going on to become a flying, ocean-going, sentient vehicle that can put down tyrannies. The inventor Wallace in the Wallace and Gromit movies designs Heath Robinson contraptions to meet his needs, and many of those contraptions escape the limits of what they were made for, as in The Wrong Trousers (1993), where the titular piece of clothing goes rogue on the orders of a criminal penguin. Heath Robinson’s own inventions extend the interior space of buildings into the open air, allow weddings to take place in aeroplanes with the celebrant perched on a steeple, and enable the great monoliths of Stonehenge to tiptoe across Salisbury Plain while being used as camouflage by British troops on a training exercise. His inventions invoke the hectic inventiveness of the first half of the twentieth century, when domestic and urban time and space burst out of their previously stable boundaries, transforming the old into the sometimes ridiculously new, and catching ordinary men, women and children in an ever-expanding web of innovative technologies.

Heath Robinson’s penchant for eccentric technology is often traced to the first of his books for which he both wrote the words and drew the pictures, The Adventures of Uncle Lubin (1902).[1] There are improvised inventions in this book – a balloon driven to the moon by a crude propellor, a submarine which seems slightly too small to accommodate its pilot – but the most striking thing about Heath Robinson’s story is the tendency of familiar objects in it to take on a life and character of their own, from footwear and hats to umbrellas, swords, blunderbusses, birds, fish and babies (the last three being honorary objects thanks to their inarticulacy). Most strikingly of all, the illustrated book as object acquires a life of its own in Heath Robinson’s hands, its decorations taking control of the story instead of merely embellishing it. Look closely at Heath Robinson’s visual embellishments to Uncle Lubin and you’ll find that they have as many adventures as the old man of the title, enmeshing him in a dynamic, ever-changing universe where anything – or rather, any thing – can steer his narrative in unexpected directions on a whim. Things, in fact, have whims in Uncle Lubin, thus identifying the century at the beginning of which the book was published as one in which human beings would find themselves possessed and their fortunes steered by the unexpected agency of the objects they owned.

Heath Robinson’s picture book tells the story of an elderly uncle whose baby nephew, little Peter, is stolen by a wicked bag-bird while in his care. The bag-bird’s act of thievery succeeds on account of Uncle Lubin’s negligence – the old man was dozing when it happened – so Lubin must pursue the child across every region of the world, and beyond it, to atone for his lapse. His adventures involve difficult journeys, on foot and in gimcrack vessels, as far as the moon, the ‘Land of Chilblains’ (which looks much like one of the Poles), the depths of the ocean and an orientalised Eastern kingdom, before being reunited with little Peter in the final chapter. The book is organised into twelve short chapters or ‘Adventures’, and the twelve-part structure aligns it with the great English-language epics modelled on Virgil’s Aeneid, such as Spenser’s unfinished Faerie Queene or Milton’s Paradise Lost. There’s an imaginative ambition to it, in other words, which belies its short length and youthful readership, and suggests it is somehow larger than the sum of its parts. It strains at its seams, I’d suggest, and Heath Robinson makes the notion of bursting out of narrow confines the presiding principle of his composition.

This is largely the result of Heath Robinson’s games with the form and conventions of the Victorian illustrated novel. His book has a full-colour frontispiece (in the first edition), followed by title page, dedication, list of pictures and list of chapters (or ‘Adventures’), each richly decorated with drawings in black and white. Each Adventure has its own title page, and each pair of facing pages in each chapter includes a full-page framed illustration on the right, and a decorative initial capital on the left, followed by a carefully typeset text with a pen-and-ink drawing in the margin. There are also three wordless ‘display cases’, so to speak: two-page framed illustrations depicting some of the more significant moments in the Uncle’s travels. So far so conventional. But Robinson’s initial capitals and pen-and-ink drawings exist in complex dialogue with the framed illustrations that face them. The initial capital sometimes alters or expands upon some element of the framed illustration, while the drawing sometimes alludes to a quite different moment in Lubin’s adventures, not always implied by either the framed illustration or the accompanying text. The effect is that Robinson’s narrative spills out of the confines of the formal publishing conventions it follows. The carefully ruled borders of the largest illustrations cannot restrain the inventiveness of the artist’s pen, which finds new and surprising angles on the narrative in the marginal drawings, the initial capitals, and even the ornaments that decorate the other pages. The book’s visual images augment the verbal text rather than illustrating it; they tell a larger and more complex story, which implies that the narrative contained in the text is by no means a sufficient account of the dynamic world through which Lubin moves, and to which he responds with such improvisatory enthusiasm.

There are continuities, too, in the pictures which are not mentioned in the verbal text, but will quickly be picked up by the sharp-eyed observer. The recurrence of impish birds, for instance, suggests that an ornithological version of the story runs alongside the human one.[2] The wicked bag-bird first shows up in the title page of the first adventure, then again in the top left-hand corner of the first framed illustration in the book on p. 3, a gigantic quasi-saurian presence to which Lubin seems oblivious as he sings to his howling nephew in the vain hope of lulling him to sleep. The bird then takes over several pages of framed illustrations and marginal drawings, while also taking over the child and popping him into the bag beneath its beak. This bag, incidentally, makes it the first of many animated objects in the narrative, an airborne version of the capacious carpet bag Lubin carries with him on some of his adventures.

For a while the wicked bag-bird is the only bird in the book. Then abruptly there is another: a crudely fashioned little bird on top of a weathercock surmounting the mast of Uncle Lubin’s ‘beautiful boat’ in the third adventure (p. 25). The bird on the weathercock reappears in adventure number five, now attached incongruously to the mast of Uncle Lubin’s submarine (p. 47). Another living bird, meanwhile – this time (seemingly) a young bag-bird – appears on the title page of the fourth adventure, and again in the marginal drawing that follows, watching with interest as Lubin’s boat gets ‘frozen up’ in the Land of Chilblains (p. 38). The bag-bird itself appears soon after on an elongated iceberg (p. 40), still with little Peter in its beak-bag, and gets the better of Uncle Lubin once again; it seems more at home in the Poles than he is, which is presumably why its young are to be found there. In the sixth adventure Lubin meets a flock of seagulls in his submarine (now bereft of its weathercock) (p. 59), one of which watches him again with interest as he talks to a little mer-boy; again, they are more at home at sea than Lubin is, though his persistence in entering their natural environment seems to intrigue them.

So far, the birds seem to exist alongside Lubin, not interacting with him except when the wicked bag-bird gets involved. Then in the eighth adventure the nature of Lubin’s association with birds begins to change. Caught in a storm, Lubin seeks shelter under a tree and begins to climb it as the flood waters rise. In the first framed illustration of the chapter (p. 75), a tiny featherless chick flies through the rain (despite its lack of feathers) towards the adventurer, and perches in the second framed illustration on the crown of his hat. As the waters continue to rise the chick remains safely on the hat (p. 77), until in one marginal drawing only the crown of Lubin’s hat remains above the surface (p. 78), with the chick still perched on it; Lubin has become the chick’s protector, just as he sought to be the protector of his little nephew. In the final framed illustration of the chapter, Lubin climbs into his battered umbrella and sails safely away through the flooded landscape (p. 81), while the chick crows in triumph from his hat as if in celebration of the old man’s resourcefulness. The final picture in the chapter is a drawing of the chick in the middle of an empty page (p. 82), still crowing, perhaps in gratitude to its rescuer. There is no mention of the chick in the text of the chapter, but one gets a sense from the pictures that some corner has been turned in Lubin’s relationship with the natural world, and with birds in particular.

Sure enough, from this moment on Lubin’s connection to his feathered friends becomes a genial one. In the tenth adventure, three swallows fly around Lubin as he falls asleep in a seaside meadow (p. 93), and the happy dream that follows – in which he sees little Peter crowned King of the Fairies (pp. 94 and 95) – is full of tiny wings, as if inspired by the swallows. And the twelfth and final adventure features another of the recurring trees in the narrative (the first was the one he dozed under in his first adventure), a coconut palm, which drops a shower of coconuts on his head as he walks under it (p. 111). Unmentioned in the text, another little naked chick – larger than the one in the eighth adventure – falls on his head along with the coconuts, and a marginal drawing shows chick and man confronting each other (p. 110); the chick seems to be smiling in delight at being reunited with its elderly friend. The chick appears again, drawn much larger as if to emphasize its rapid maturation, in the following marginal drawing, and the framed illustration opposite shows Uncle Lubin climbing the palm tree to find out (as the text tells us) ‘who it was that could be so rude as to throw cocoa-nuts at him’ (p. 110). But the illustrations suggest he has another motive: he may be looking for the nest from which the chick came, and the bird, perhaps a bag-bird, that built it. He is also making the final gesture of solidarity with the birds; he saved a bird’s life in adventure number eight, and now he is climbing to the bird’s own home, which we might suspect will prove to be somehow Lubin’s home as well as the bag-bird’s.

Sure enough (again), in the final framed illustration of the adventure he finds a nest full of little bag-chicks with Peter in the midst of them, ‘warm and cosy and safe and sound’ (p. 114) – certainly more so than the little lost chicks we have encountered in the rest of the narrative. Lubin takes him home, of course, and the final drawing of the wicked bag-bird – all alone in the middle of an otherwise empty page (p. 116) – shows it weeping, clearly heartbroken at having lost its human protegé. The bag-bird, then, has its own story, one not explicitly told in Heath Robinson’s text. It is no less affectionate than Uncle Lubin, and no less lax in its childminding duties, though it has a ruder sense of humour (it laughs at him when it escapes him, still carrying Peter, on the moon and in the Land of Chilblains). If, then, it is a kind of alternative Lubin – who also has a bag, like the bag-bird, as I pointed out – then this final picture might well imply that it will act on its feelings and pursue little Peter through thick and thin, perhaps even stealing him back so that the story can begin all over again. Heath Robinson tells us at the end of the final adventure that Uncle Lubin and his nephew ‘got home quite safely and lived happily ever after’ (p. 114); but even if the text does not tell us anything about the return of the wicked bag-bird, the recommencement of Uncle Lubin’s adventures can reasonably be anticipated in spite of the apparent closure offered in these final words. After all, birds have been absent from the verbal text throughout the book, with the sole exception of the wicked bag-bird itself, yet we have seen them often in the pictures. Words don’t tell us everything; we need pictures, too, to make sense of the world in which we find ourselves. What the pictures tell us, as the text does not, is that Uncle Lubin and the bag-bird are in the end doubles of each other, which means that the bag-bird is not so wicked after all – unless one considers persistence in rescuing lost young things from perceived danger as a form of wickedness.

As I’ve suggested, other objects besides birds recur in Heath Robinson’s story, often finding their epiphanic moments in the narrative long after we’ve first encountered them. And in many cases, what they do at these moments is very different from what we might have expected (much like the wicked bag-bird, which turns out to be over-affectionate and mischievous rather than malevolent). Uncle Lubin carries a blunderbuss or gun, for instance, in the second adventure (p. 13), but he doesn’t use it in anger until the eleventh, when he shoots at a wasp that has settled on a Rajah’s nose (pp. 102-103); and it’s not the projectiles in his gun that drive off the wasp but the noise it makes when it ‘bursts’ to pieces (p. 104). In the third adventure he has an accordion strapped to his back (p. 25), which gets played for the first time in the ninth adventure, when he uses it to charm a dragon-snake (p. 87); this is a fairly conventional use of a musical instrument, of course, but the usual tool for snake-seduction is a pipe. His umbrella, which first appears in the second adventure as one of the items in his balloon (p. 13), finds its most effective use in the eighth adventure, when he turns it upside down and uses it as a boat to escape a flood, in anticipation of Winnie-the-Pooh. He carries a battered sword in several adventures (p. 39), but it only gets used in a story from Lubin’s past, and then not by Lubin himself. The story involves the boy Lubin’s encounter with a ‘funny little old man’ in an outsized hat, who emerges from the snow wielding a similar blade and threatening in terrible tones to ‘cut you to pieces’ (p. 70), upon which the boy Lubin sensibly runs away. The old man’s hat, slippers and nose resemble Uncle Lubin’s, and this together with his sword suggests that young Lubin has somehow encountered a ferocious alternative version of his future self – a self against which he has gone on to define his gentle adult personality.

Even Lubin’s hat has its own adventures. It becomes a parachute when he needs to escape from the moon after his hot air balloon has been punctured by one of its horns (p. 21), serves as a house in two of the ornamental drawings (p. 1 and two pages earlier), and provides a template for the many other flamboyant hats that feature in the book, such as the feathered cavalier’s hat worn by the swordsman Vammadopper in the third adventure (p. 23), the boy Lubin’s straw hat in the seventh (p. 65) – a smaller, less permanent version of the adult Lubin’s headwear – and the even smaller conical hats worn by two old fairy gentlemen in the double-page framed illustration, ‘Uncle Lubin’s Dream of Little Peter’ (pp. 94-5). Lubin’s footwear, meanwhile, undergoes several adventurous transformations. Sometimes he wears shoes with buckles and bows; sometimes hobnailed boots; but most often slippers, which suffer various travails in the course of his exploits, falling off one by one when he’s on the moon (pp. 17 and 21), lying discarded in the grass when he has his dream (p. 93), and featuring on his coat-of-arms in the final framed illustration of the book, alongside his hat and little Peter’s bottle (p. 117). In that coat-of-arms, objects stand in for the central persons in the narrative, which reinforces our sense that things have an active role to play in shaping Lubin’s fortunes.[3]

The adventures of Uncle Lubin, in other words, are also the adventures of the things and creatures and people he encounters, which sometimes take central stage in a book ostensibly dedicated to Uncle Lubin. Besides the implied stories contained in the pictures, three inset stories get told in both words and images that have nothing at all to do with the central quest: about Vammadopper and the giant (p. 28ff.), the impudent Mer-Boy and his schoolmaster (p. 58ff.) and the boy Lubin and the savage old man (p. 66ff.). There is the potential, then, for an endless series of adventures in Robinson’s little volume: adventures in clothing, adventures in natural history, adventures in the imaginative repurposing of things, and the many random adventures of the strangers one meets from day to day.

Robinson was clearly keenly aware of this potential for an infinite expansion of his picture-book. At the head of the List of Adventures there is a drawing of Uncle Lubin reading a massive tome whose spine gives its title as ‘ADVENTURES VOL. 5,000’. The possibilities for adventure generated by linked words and images are clearly unlimited, never to be contained within the confines of any literary or artistic structure. The mind, after all, continually spins its own narratives out of the ones on offer, both in waking life and in dreams – the life of dreams being duly represented in Robinson’s book by the dream Lubin has about little Peter among the fairies, which opens a door onto other books as well as oneiric states of mind. Lubin’s dream invokes the little kidnapped Indian boy in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, just as the little mer-boy invokes Charles Kingsley’s famous children’s book The Water Babies and the dragon-snake invokes the Arabian Nights, which Heath Robinson was illustrating as he worked on Uncle Lubin (he had already illustrated Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare by the time he published his picture book, and he went on to illustrate Kingsley’s novel in 1915). Uncle Lubin himself is a Don Quixote figure, heroic and absurd in equal measure, reminding us that the artist’s interpretation of Cervantes came out in the same year as his own self-authored book for children. Heath Robinson and his illustrations interact with other authors and their illustrators – Arthur Rackham, Gustave Doré, Walter Crane, Mabel Lucie Atwell and the rest – as well as with the other products of the writer-artist’s own fertile brain. They spiral centrifugally outwards from Uncle Lubin to take in adjacent volumes in Heath Robinson’s imaginative library.

The adventure of the little mer-boy, for instance, which occupies the central pages of the book, finds itself extended in many directions as we read. Lubin meets the mer-boy in one of the eccentric machines – a submarine – which he builds to help him in his quest for his nephew. The child looks very much like his nephew Peter, except that Peter is nearly always crying in the pictures Robinson draws of him, whereas the mer-boy is nearly always laughing or smiling. He first appears on the title page of the Sixth Adventure, along with a decorative capital M (for Mer-boy) that shows a fish with a gaping mouth, and mer-boys and gaping fishes proceed to proliferate through the successive pages: in the decorative capitals (which show more gaping fishes on pp. 56 and 58) and marginal pictures (which show mer-boys on pp. 56, 58 and 62) as well as in the framed illustrations (most of which show both). The first of the framed illustrations for the chapter shows Lubin underwater, trying to drive the mer-boy away from his submarine by waving his umbrella at him (p. 57), watched by several other mer-boys and gaping fishes; there is a crab in the bottom left-hand corner of the illustration (Uncle Lubin’s unwonted crabbiness in this picture aligns him with another famous inventor and submariner, Captain Nemo). In the next framed illustration Lubin’s submarine has surfaced and Lubin has become fascinated by the mer-boy (p. 59), who tells him a story as a passing seabird looks on. The next two pages form a double-page framed illustration, showing a school for mer-boys in which an elderly merman is explaining the properties of a toy, a ‘humming-top’, while the largest fish we have seen so far approaches him from behind (pp. 60-61).[4] In the following framed picture the fish has begun to swallow the unfortunate merman, while the mer-boys do ‘nothing but laugh’, as the mer-boy tells Lubin (p. 63 and p. 62). Opposite the picture of the merman being swallowed, a marginal picture shows a mer-boy being bitten on the tail by a crab exactly like the one we saw in the first framed illustration of the adventure (p. 62); above him, the decorative capital shows a mer-boy emerging from a shell, like a hermit crab looking for a new residence. The final picture of the adventure – an ornament in the middle of a blank page – shows Lubin himself upside down in the hatch of his submarine, his slippered feet waving in the air (p. 64), as if in imitation of the merman, who was swallowed head first by the fish so that his undulating tail, skinny body and splayed hands were all that could be seen of him. What are we to make of this procession of images, and how do they interact with the accompanying text?

The adventure suggests some of the ways in which Heath Robinson’s verbal text and the pictures he draws generate one another, in a mutual process that refuses to prioritise text over pictures or pictures over text. The mer-boy, for instance, with his link to gaping fishes, seems to have had his origin in one of the pictures Heath Robinson drew for the previous adventure, ‘The Sea-Serpent’. A marginal drawing in that adventure shows Little Peter peering out of the mouth of a gaping fish (p. 48); perhaps it represents Uncle Lubin’s hope of finding his little nephew in the depths of the ocean with the help of his submarine. We can tell the child looking out of the fish’s mouth is little Peter, not a mer-boy, because it has clothes on, as the mer-boys never do, and because its hair is arranged with a curl on the forehead – a kiss-curl – whereas the mer-boys’ always stream upwards, like seaweed in water. The first picture of the mer-boy, on the title page of the Sixth Adventure, seems to confirm the link with Peter: it shows him with much shorter hair than in the drawings that follow, and with the distinctive kiss-curl (p. 55). On this title page Peter seems to be mutating into the mer-boy, a process that began in the marginal drawing of the child in the fish’s mouth, which shows Uncle Lubin’s nephew sporting an uncharacteristic smile. Before this, almost every picture of the baby shows him crying, and the smile suggests a new and impish delight at having escaped from adult control, a delight which gets transferred to the mer-boys in the following chapter, who smile and laugh in nearly every situation.[5]

The adventure with the baby mer-boy, then, seems to emerge organically from Uncle Lubin’s quest for his baby nephew, and from his desire to find Peter in the sea despite the fact that there is no evidence he was ever there apart from the marginal drawing (though the wicked bag-bird resembles a pelican, an ocean-going bird, which might have suggested the ocean episodes). Lubin clearly shares Peter’s and the mer-boy’s delight in the sea and its denizens, as the cover drawing for the Fifth Adventure, ‘The Sea Serpent’, shows the old man sitting astride a gaping fish with a grin even broader than his nephew’s (p. 45). One suspects that Lubin went to sea as much for his own gratification as for the quest; he certainly looks delighted with his submarine in every picture showing them together. He looks for his nephew, then, as waywardly as he once looked after him; which means that the supposed real-world distinction in responsibility between a child and its adult minder has little meaning in Heath Robinson’s universe. And the story told by the mer-boy confirms this impression. Unlike the highly moralistic teacher figures in Kingsley’s The Water Babies, the mer-boy’s elderly teacher is as interested in toys as any child could be – his lesson involves an explanation of why a spinning top hums as it spins (p. 62) – and his failure to take things seriously seems to be punished when a passing sea creature swallows him in the middle of the lesson. As he is swallowed the mer-boys laugh at him, and this in turn could be seen as being punished by the fate of the mer-boy in the marginal drawing on the same page, which shows him being pinched by a crab so that he cries, for once, instead of laughing (p. 62). But any moral we may have been intended to deduce from Heath Robinson’s words and images is implicitly contradicted by the last picture in the chapter, which shows Uncle Lubin falling into his submarine head first (p. 64), exactly mirroring the way the teacher fell into the fish’s mouth. If the mer-boy was being punished for his laughter when the crab pinched him, was Lubin being punished for telling the mer-boy it was ‘not nice’ to laugh when his teacher was swallowed (p. 62)? Morally speaking, Heath Robinson’s words and pictures offer their readers mixed messages, in which the usual hierarchy of childhood and adulthood – whereby the adult issues authoritative instruction while the child is expected to listen in passive obedience – no longer applies.

This is confirmed in the following adventure, where Uncle Lubin rewards the mer-boy ‘for telling him such nice stories’ (p. 66) (the contradiction is pointed up by the verbal echo of ‘not nice’) by telling him a story of his own. Lubin’s story concerns the time when he himself was ‘a little boy’, suggesting that the only thing that separates old men from little boys is time. And the old man’s tale has no more moral than the mer-boy’s did. Young Lubin is lost in the snow when he comes across the murderous old man wielding a battered sword, and the conclusion of the story has the little boy running away and finding his way home by sheer good luck so that he ‘was able to sleep in bed that night after all’ (p. 70). Young Lubin’s discovery of the route home has no causal link to his encounter with the murderous old man – it’s a matter of chance; and the old man’s murderous intentions certainly explode the myth that old age brings with it responsibility and accumulated wisdom. In addition, Uncle Lubin’s story is not much ‘nicer’ than the mer-boy’s. No one likes to think that one can come across bloodthirsty killers quite by accident while out for a walk, and some parents might be disturbed to find the fact advertised in a text devised for the nursery. In this way Heath Robinson’s work disrupts the function as well as the format of an illustrated picture book, implying that its author shares Uncle Lubin’s wholehearted dismissal of the usual understanding of the way search and rescue operations, and the adult world in general, is supposed to operate. Lubin’s search for little Peter is random, and ends with the random discovery of him; it is as much a search for himself as it is for his nephew, since he seldom seems to know where he is or why he is there. Like the swordsman Vammerdopper, who got blown onto an uninhabited island by a giant’s breath, he is a feather to each wind that blows, and so it seems is everyone else he comes across.

The absence of hierarchy in Heath Robinson’s book – from the refusal to prioritise either text or image to the close parallels between children and grown ups throughout the narrative – extends to the relationship between text and reader. The book is full of pictures of Uncle Lubin looking out of the page directly at the reader, inviting them to share his delight in extemporary invention, his total disregard for health and safety, and his enthusiastic indulgence in wild adventures. The child reader is the old man’s accomplice, and participates in his adventures by scanning each detailed, eccentric drawing as carefully as any parent might wish a child to scrutinise an instructive text. The close relationship is implied, in fact, by the old man’s quest, which is to find the child with whom he considers himself to have the closest bond; a charming concept, though even this is a little undercut by Peter’s evident distress whenever his uncle is holding him (a distress which would seem well-founded when he slips out of Lubin’s arms as the old man falls asleep [p. 5], so that the bag-bird could be seen as Peter’s rescuer rather than his abductor, since it never drops him).

Lubin’s kindness to everyone he meets could be seen as the moral point of the book, but even this is undercut: on meeting Vammadopper stranded on a rock Lubin never offers to rescue him, merely ‘kissing him kindly’ before sailing off on his quest (p. 38), and he is quite bad tempered with the mer-boy when the child clings to his submarine. There’s an anarchism to Lubin’s adventures, then, which allies them to Barrie’s representation of childhood in the Peter Pan books, or Alice’s adventures in the unstable world of adult humans and creatures in Carroll’s Wonderland, or Captain Nemo’s misanthropic wanderings in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Resist the temptation, these books imply, to accept on trust the moral systems you are offered. Chart your own route through this rapidly-changing modern world and improvise your own practical responses to every eventuality. You may find and make friends and communities as you go, but be aware that these may not last. The wicked bag-bird waits in the wings – though given your distrust of moral systems it may not turn out to be so very wicked after all – and you will need to build wings and fins and sails and propellors of your own if you are to deal with it.

The most convincing reading of Heath Robinson’s book, I think, is ecological. Uncle Lubin finds a way to inhabit the many different landscapes he enters, making himself part of each ecosystem by constructing the various specialist adaptations he needs to negotiate their challenges. He does not bring a fixed perspective to each new context, but improvises his reactions to the dangers they pose, sometimes by behaving as the other inhabitants do, sometimes by inventing appropriate responses or behaviours: flying down from the moon with the help of his hat, in imitation of the wicked bag bird; leaving Vammadopper on the island to which he has been exiled in mute recognition that it’s where he belongs; trudging through the polar snow of the Land of Chilblains in his slippers, wearing his patched coat and carrying a candle to light up the polar night, as if he were wandering through his own house and garden (though his attempt to melt an iceberg with the candle [p. 41] is not so successful in its consequences [p. 43]); responding to the attempts of a sea-serpent and a dragon-snake to kill him by killing them instead, thanks to his intimate knowledge of their habits and tendencies (the sea-serpent can be killed by putting salt on its tail, while a dragon-snake is fatally susceptible to music). With the mer-boy Uncle Lubin becomes, in effect, both the mer-boy and his elderly teacher, while his dream of little Peter among the fairies populates fairyland with old men wearing funny hats, much like himself. His rescue of the rajah from the wasp leads him to be hugged and kissed by the monarch and his cheering people (pp. 104-5), while the final adventure sees Uncle Lubin become one with the bag-bird by finding and entering its nest. All the way through, Lubin presents himself not as an authority or an evangelist but as an interloper who wishes to embrace the circumstances in which he finds himself. Even the bag-bird seems always to consider him less as an enemy than an amusement, who causes it to laugh inordinately – up until the moment when he makes it cry. Lubin is endlessly resourceful and open-minded in his willingness to become part of the places and narratives in which he finds himself, and the objects he brings with him on his adventures seem equally adaptable. His quest for little Peter, in other words, is the very opposite of an imperialist conquest; it’s an opportunity for him to manifest his pleasure in new and unexpected places, people and animals, without violating the conditions under which they live. If the Adventures of Uncle Lubin is an epic, it’s not a nationalist manifesto, like the Aeneid, but something older, a creation myth for a manner of living in which nations and their armies have no purpose.

Early responses to Heath Robinson’s work suggest that his tendency to reject conventional hierarchical relations between text and image, or between people, creatures and places, could disturb his British readers. In his book for A. and C. Black’s Brush, Pen and Pencil series, W. Heath Robinson (1913, reprinted 1930), A. E. Johnson commented on Heath Robinson’s propensity for departing from the texts he illustrated and following his own imaginative trajectory: ‘Where the illustrator fails’, Johnson writes, ‘as usually happens, is in the difficult task of embodying the essential literary motive and idea. […] The defect is one which Heath Robinson shares with most illustrators, whose natural instinct is to concern themselves with the pictorial possibilities afforded by the author’s context, rather than the elucidation of his central (and purely literary) idea’ (pp. 14-15). He also rebukes Heath Robinson for not illustrating the plays of Shakespeare with an eye to their presentation on the stage (pp. 41-2) – something most illustrators have done with Shakespeare, and for good reason, since his most visually striking passages refer to events not taking place in front of the audience, such as Ophelia’s drowning, or Clarence’s dream, or Enobarbus’s account of Cleopatra in her barge. Heath Robinson, Johnson opines, is an artist who

never has been, and does not desire to be, an illustrator in the strict sense of the word. He demands to go his own way too much, unwilling to re-state literal facts pictorially, and providing rather an accompaniment to the author’s text than an exposition of his meaning. One may hazard a guess that the authors for whose writings he has made drawings […] have proved to him, as an artist, a nuisance and a bore. Their writings furnish excuses for his pictures, but, except as pegs upon which to hang the latter, he would much prefer not to be hampered by them. (pp. 18-19)

For Johnson, Uncle Lubin represents Heath Robinson’s solution to his impatience with other authors (pp. 47-50); in it, drawings can give rise to new ideas as readily as words can. In this way the book predicts the rapid rise of the ‘ninth art’ of comics in the twentieth century, where pictures and words are given more or less equal weighting. It also affirms the fantasy creator’s delight in enabling their impossible narrative to transfer itself from one medium to another, or to fuse media together – something that’s effectively built in to comics, with their frequent mimicry of cinema and their seeming readiness to be converted into cinematic terms, or of course into games.

Many of the great fantasy writers have either been writer-artists themselves or have happily worked with visual artists in a collaborative bid to extend their imaginative universe in new directions. Fantasy at its best is not afraid of its own tendency to be transformed as it enters different artistic, theatrical, ludic or musical modes of expression. Its authors are rarely unsettled by the idea that sympathetic adapters might come to think of them as ‘a nuisance and a bore’, or that their texts might become mere ‘pegs’ for more interesting work in another medium. What fills them with the infectious joy of Uncle Lubin is the idea of the infinite universe of imaginative adventure which these transformations confirm and enlarge. This is not a universe with a hierarchy; it’s an anarchic but beautifully patterned universe, whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. One of these centres is Heath Robinson’s little book The Adventures of Uncle Lubin. This book deserves the respect due to an imaginative crossroads or railway junction, from which paths or railroads are always being laid by our eyes and minds to take us in unexpected and often exhilarating new directions…

NOTES

[1] My edition of the book, from which all references are taken, The Adventures of Uncle Lubin, Told and Illustrated by W. Heath Robinson, published by the Minerva Press, London, in 1972.

[2] Heath Robinson had a great propensity for drawing impish or helpless birds. See e.g. his picture of ‘A simple apparatus for rescuing a wounded snipe’, or the picture of a tiny chick trying to hatch a set of ostrich eggs in ‘Thoughtfulness; or taking mother’s place’, or the picture of chicks nesting in an elderly man’s top hat in Bill the Minder. These can be found in A. E. Johnson, Heath Robinson (London: A. and C. Black, 1913, reprinted 1930), in the following places: between pp. 24 and 25, between pp. 16 and 17, and on p. 9.

[3] Objects are also present in the very first ornamental illustration, before even the frontispiece, which shows all the objects I’ve listed bar the slippers – hat, gun, sword, umbrella, accordion – along with a stick and a candle, as if to confirm the centrality of things to the adventures to come.

[4] In some versions of the book the merman is described as the mer-boys’ father, and is balancing an eel rather than a humming-top on his hand. I’d be interested to know more about why and how Heath Robinson ended up producing two versions of the same story, with illustrations to match…

[5] It’s tempting to see a link between the lost Peter, with his increasing taste for adventure, and J. M. Barrie’s more famous Peter, who ran away as a baby in Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens and made friends with the birds in Hyde Park. But Peter’s Kensington adventures were first told in chapters 13 to 18 of Barrie’s novel The Little White Bird, which was published in the same year as Heath Robinson’s (1902). Peter did not meet mermaids until he became the star of Barrie’s play, Peter Pan, in 1904. This makes a direct link between the texts unlikely.